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A faint trace of hereditary clientship, based on a purely moral sanction, and accompanied perhaps by the performance of some of the duties of the old relationship, still exists in the second century. The family of Marius, we are told, had been clients of the plebeian Herennii, and some of the rights of the relationship were held to extend to him. But we are also told that at this period a principle was recognised that this bond was for ever broken by the client’s attainment of curule office,[31] that is, by the ennoblement of him and his family.
§ 3. Roman Family Organisation—The Gens, the Familia, the Bondsman and the Slave—The Disposition of Property—The Conception of “Caput”
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The clan (gens) was an aggregate of individuals supposed to be sprung from a common source, a social union, with common rights in private law, which had as its theoretical basis the notion of descent from a single ancestor. According to the juristic theory of the clan, all its individual members would, if their descent could be traced through every degree, have sprung from two individuals who were within the power of this ultimate ancestor, a sign of this original potestas being the common gentile name.[32]