The Sapindas are also a man's heirs in the absence of closer relations; the group of the Sapindas is thus an exact replica within the _gotra_ of the primitive totem clan which was exogamous and constituted by the tie of living and eating together.

Similarly marriage at Rome was prohibited to seven degrees of relationship through males within the _gens_, [178] and this exogamous group of kinsmen appear to have been the body of agnatic kinsmen within the _gens_ who are referred to by Sir H.Maine as a man's ultimate heirs.

[179] At Athens, when a contest arose upon a question of inheritance, the proper legal evidence to establish kinship was the proof that the alleged ancestor and the alleged heir observed a common worship and shared in the same repast in honour of the dead.

[180] The distant heirs were thus a group within the Athenian g'enoc corresponding to the Sapindas and bound by the same tie of eating together.

Professor Hearn states that there is no certain evidence that the Roman _gens_ and Greek g'enoc were originally exogamous, but we find that of the Roman matrons whose names are known to us none married a husband with her own Gentile name; and further, that Plutarch, in writing of the Romans, says that in former days men did not marry women of their own blood or, as in the preceding sentence he calls them, kinswomen suggen'idac, just as in his own day they did not marry their aunts or sisters; and he adds that it was long before they consented to wed with cousins.