Review of C. Smith 2009, The Roman Clan.

The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern

One of the leading questions is of the book is do gens predate the state or are they a product of
the state? Smith’s work operates on two fronts:

• The State evidence for the role of the gens in early roman history
• The account of how scholars have interpreted the gens from the early modern period

The patricians were only one social class between other different groups or individuals able to
emerge after the fall of monarchy. Cohesive structures, like curiae and tribal assembly, that
included also the patricians, forced them to participate as citizens, while the gentes did not
include those same structures. Smith starts from this assumption in order to discuss the debate
about how the Republic survived, despite all the social conflicts and beyond the fact that it was,
of course, a challenging phase. He sees cohesion at the bottom of all of this, with the gentes
having a crucial role in distributing political and religious offices. Thank to this, they prevent the
individual from gaining more power as a single, because the tasks were always assigned by the
gentes. One of Smith’s credit is his “new self-contained and self-consistent historiographical
universe” (Terrenato), which is a prerogative of every book about early Roman age, since the
great problem of the sources that we have portrayed in the previous meeting, makes impossible
portraying a sources equipment on which all scholars agree. His innovative methodology, within
what can also be considered ad institutional history of archaic Rome, is the use of later sources
to provide a historiography of scholarship on the Roman gentes, from the Renaissance to the
20th century. The value of Smith approach stands also in that fact that, instead of focusing on
institutions, he focuses on social groups, using the analysis of the gentes as the starting point for
a sociopolitical analysis of early Rome and as dynamic and constantly evolving structures.

One of the main problem in this aspect of Roman history, Smith thinks, is that interpretations of
Roman society and of gens that historians have provided are not based on evidence, but on
assumptions or comparisons derived from other cultures (like the comparison with Greek genos)
than to the ancient evidence. He tries to find links between Greek gene and Roman gens, but
there are few: he finds though new potential approaches to gens studies by examining the gene.
After having displayed the sources about the gentes, Smiths observes that each early reference
to them or their members is about properties and intestate inheritance, which went, when there
were no agnates or surviving familia members, to the gens, not as a corporate body, but divided
in equal parts between members, since there was no hierarchy, as it was between agnates. This
was made in order to preserve the land property when there were no relatives. Indeed, the
familia does not derive from gens but pre-exists to it. The same discourse Smiths adopts for the
relation with ancient private cults: the gentilicial sacra works as the gentilicia inheritance works,
the latter for preserving family property, the former for family cults.

Smith overturns two elements of traditional Roman narrative. Firstly, he is doubtful about the
supposed privilege of patricians, defining it an argument rather that a fact, providing claims of
power that the patricians, and not the plebeians, made after the fall of monarchy. The second is
about archaeological evidence of Latium burials, which in Smith’s point of view speak against the
sources: when sources speak the power of elitarian gentes, according to burials the system
should be the opposite.
The first one, which states that it is not possible to prove that the gentes yielded a large amount
of power as a lobby, disappoints Terrenato, who sees this in contrast with the contextualization
of the gens in time and space in which they arose.
Smith explores modern interpretations of the gens, comparing Vico’s view of the gens as a natural
law and Sigonio’s view of the gens as a political institution and all the later scholars are sorted to
one of these visions. A pioneer of ethnography and anthropology, Morgan, is the starting point
of the display of the lucky concept of the gens as an egalitarian system, proposed by Morgan
himself, and adopted by Marx and Engels. Later on, archaeological evidence from Latium are
provided (cemeteries of Osteria dell’Osa IX-VIII c BC and Satricum VIII-VII c BC,villa dell’Auditorio
of the mid-VI BC) and they tell the opposite of what classical evidence say: they demonstrate the
existence of the idealized egalitarian extended family structure of Morgan.
He finds the origin of the gentes in the expansion of Rome’s territory in second half of 6th century,
in which the gens was a way, for the patricians, to hold the land and not a typical, old feature of
the society. This geographical growth owed a lot to the role of aristocrats and their clientes, who,
in order to maintain their power on a long term prospective, organized between themselves in
gentes, for owning of the land, but also in issues as inheritance, marriage and mutual protection.
Their wealth had its origin when the monarchy ended and their cults were used by population,
so their power grew even in religious aspect.

What emerges from Smith book, in order to answer at the first question if the gens is before or
a consequence of the state, is that the familia exists before the gens, which is invented in the VI
c. by the patriciate, which in the same time was inventing itself, being based on the gens as its
organizing principle. The economic stability of familial property and familial sacra was preserved
by the gens, thanks to the fact that, while families were disappearing, the gentilitial rule of
intestate inheritance beyond the agnatic family to gentiles, was guaranteeing to the patriciate its
continuity. Gentes and patriciate, were both parallelly evolving until the later IV c., when the role
of the gens as distributor of offices was gradually destitute by the new leaders, and then
substitute by laws molded on the new patrician-plebeian senatorial aristocracy.

Despite Smith keeps asserting that he does not find convincing the facts that gentes were only a
patrician institution, as stated by other scholars, his discussion points to the fact that he believes
that. Gardner sees as Smith final assert is that plebeans “originally had no gentes, but operated
through the agnatic family, and later merely mimicked aristocratic institutions.” Smith is not an
expert of Roman law, necessary to settle this issue, and sometimes he goes beyond the evidence.
McDonnell emphasizes the innovation of analyzing earlier scholarship on the gens. He is skeptical
though, about Smith using details, whose reliability he contests, that contradict the model of the
literary tradition (binary struggle of the orders) to propose a more complex historical portray.
McDonnell sees a solution in considering reconstructions of early Rome not as history, but as
informed myth, as he claims Smith has done with his analysis of the nature and content of some
very obscure archaic Roman institutions, so provisional interpretations of the early period could
be accepted.
Terrenato eulogies Smith’s capacity of creating his own, already mentioned, historiographical
universe and of portraying the origins of Roman sociopolitical organization and the role of gentes
in it; however he criticizes the “classical envelope” Smith is apparently using, while not exploring
more the concepts of habitus and agency, with the results of, for Terrenato, a less solid
theoretical base. The most enthusiastic prospective is Rosenstein one, who seems mostly
approving the reasoning and appears convinced by the thesis and analysis proposed by the
author.