Before beginning his meal the Roman thanked the god of the hearth, gave him a part of the food, and poured out for him a little wine (this was the libation).  Even the sceptical Horace supped with his slaves before the hearth and offered libation and prayer.

Every Roman family had in its house a sanctuary where were to be found the Lares, the souls of the ancestors, and the altar of the hearth.  Rome also had its sacred hearth, called Vesta, an ancient word signifying the hearth itself.  Four virgins of the noblest families, the Vestals, were charged with keeping the hearth, for it was necessary that the flame should never be extinguished, and the care of it could be confided only to pure beings.  If a Vestal broke her vow, she was buried alive in a cave, for she had committed sacrilege and had endangered the whole Roman people.

THE FAMILY

=Religion of the Family.=—­All the members of a family render worship to the same ancestors and unite about the same hearth.  They have therefore the same gods, and these are their peculiar possession.  The sanctuary where the Lares[115] were kept was concealed in the house and no stranger was to approach it.  Thus the Roman family was a little church; it had its religion and its worship to which no others than its members had access.  The ancient family was very different from the modern, having its basis in the principles of religion.

=Marriage.=—­The first rule of this religion is that one should be the issue of a regular marriage if one is to have the right of adoring the ancestors of the family.  Roman marriage, therefore, is at the start a religious ceremony.  The father of the bride gives her away outside the house when a procession conducts her to the house of the groom chanting an ancient sacred refrain, “Hymen, O Hymen!” The bride is then led before the altar of the husband where water and fire are presented, and there in the presence of the gods of the family the bride and groom divide between them a cake of meal.  Marriage at this period was called confarreatio (communion through the cake).  Later another form of marriage was invented.  A relative of the bride in the presence of witnesses sells her to the husband who declares that he buys her for his wife.  This is marriage by sale (coemptio).

For the Romans as for the Greeks marriage is a religious duty; religion ordains that the family should not become extinct.  The Roman, therefore, declares when he marries that he takes his wife to perpetuate the family through their children.  A noble Roman who sincerely loved his wife repudiated her because she brought him no children.