Still more revealing with regard to the spirit of the Roman family are its religious and political aspects.  The Romans too worshipped ancestral spirits—the lares.  In conjunction with the penates—the spirits of the household—the lares protected the life and continuity of the family, thus holding a place dear to the Roman heart.  These spirits, however, were never given ascendancy over the deities of the national cult.  The Roman family never had nor claimed the kind of omnipotence which fell to the Chinese family.  In sharp contrast to the latter, the Roman family, from its first appearance in history, aimed at something more general and greater than itself, something whose superiority it never questioned.  Hence it was that the virtues cultivated within the Roman family were easily transformed into civic and political virtues, while those of the Chinese family remained distinctly social.

[...]

Wherever it appears, the patriarchal family is a natural phenomenon.  [...]

Neither the Chinese nor the Roman state grew out of the patriarchal family.  The Chinese state was a phenomenon in its own right with its own implementation.  A psychological and ideological rivalry resulted between it and the family.  It is perfectly compatible with these conditions that the state in China should have been regarded as a kind of national family, a view which did not contribute to the state’s strength.  On the other hand, the Roman family went a long way toward meeting the prerequisites of the state.  The rising state had only to take and shape what was offered it by the family to strengthen its own political virtues.  This of course did not make the Roman family a state, any more than the reverse conditions made of the Chinese state a family.  Yet the fundamental difference remains that the Roman family was oriented to something beyond itself of a higher order.

Hence we arrive at this seemingly paradoxical fact.  The Roman state attained the power of its inner organization and outward force because of its deep psychological relation with the family.  This relation, however, in no way obliterated the boundary line between the two institutions.  In China, the state and the family faced each other as strangers.  But this separation, far from shaping the idea of state in the Chinese mind and strengthening its factual position, tended to make it difficult for the state to assert its full authority.  In Rome, despite the difference between family and state, a certain organic link between the two was achieved.  These two widely different relations between state and family apply not only to China and Rome, but with few exceptions and in varying degrees to the East and to the West in general.