8. _The obligation not to marry in the gens excepting in specified cases._ This obligation may be deduced from the consequences of marriage. The wife by her marriage lost the religious rites of her gens, and acquired those of her husband's gens. The rule is stated as so general as to imply that marriage was usually out of the gens. "The virgin who quits her father's house," Wachsmuth remarks, "is no longer a sharer of the paternal sacrificial hearth, but enters the religious communion of her husband, and this gave sanctity to the marriage tie."[242] The fact of her registration is stated by Hermann as follows: "Every newly married woman, herself a citizen, was on this account enrolled in the phratry of her husband."[243] Special religious rites (_sacra gentilicia_) were common in the Grecian and Latin gens. Whether the wife forfeited her agnatic rights by her marriage, as among the Romans, I am unable to state. It is not probable that marriage severed all connection with her gens, and the wife doubtless still counted herself of the gens of her father.
The prohibition of intermarriage in the gens was fundamental in the archaic period; and it undoubtedly remained after descent was changed to the male line, with the exception of heiresses and female orphans for whose case special provision was made. Although a tendency to free marriage, beyond certain degrees of consanguinity, would follow the complete establishment of the monogamian family, the rule requiring persons to marry out of their own gens would be apt to remain so long as the gens was the basis of the social system. The special provision in respect to heiresses tends to confirm this supposition. Becker remarks upon this question, that "relationship was, with trifling limitations, no hinderance to marriage, which could take place within all degrees of agchisteia, or suggeneia, though naturally not in the genos itself."[244]
9. _The right to adopt strangers into the gens._ This right was practiced at a later day, at least in families; but it was done with public formalities, and was doubtless limited to special cases.[245] Purity of lineage became a matter of high concern in the Attic gentes, interposing no doubt serious obstacles to the use of the right except for weighty reasons.