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As others said, this is absolute ignorance of historical realities. Power structure of ancient Rome was more akin to power struggle between huge mafia clans Godfather style. Roman social life revolved around atrium which contained literal altars to ancestors, with portraits and masks of the most important family members who attained some high position or success. Your relation to your clan (gens) was paramount to your identity even as a client of such a powerful clan. Again, if you want some parallel it would be that of huge Scottish clans.
They were not just random men. They were true patriarchs - father figures to extended clans and their clients and vassals, with membership in thousands or even tens of thousands. The most powerful clans such as gens Cornelia which produced numerous consuls and dictators including Sulla were so powerful, that they even had powerful offshoot clans such as Cornelii Scipiones. You have it exactly the other way around. The relationship between strangers mimicked that of the family, with all the subtle status games and structure given. You literally talk about brotherhood and fraternity - which is family related concept. Brotherhoods have older brothers and fathers. If you were accepted into such a fraternity, you had to accept family obligations including being a bitch to your more senior brothers.
This is an interesting analogy. The Scottish clan was a weird kind of mannerbund-family hybrid. There was a lot of fictive kinship involved - the clan included all male-line descendants of the founding chief plus their wives and daughters, but it also included a bunch of people living under the chief's protection who accepted him as a symbolic father-figure. But, significantly, the fictive fatherhood of the chief was primary, not the fictive brotherhood of the warband. Some "septs" (originally recognised families within a clan with their own chieftains in fealty to the clan chief, now just surnames that are entitled to wear the clan tartan) are cadet branches of the chiefly family, others are just semi-prominent families living on the clan lands who swore fealty to the chief. There are even families from contested territory which are recognised as septs of two different clans. But the functioning military clan that made the chief powerful was a mannerbund focussed on livestock rustling and defending against livestock rustling. I think this type of society is normal in mountainous pastoral societies.
Unlike Appalachia, the Scottish Highlands don't feel like they are full of mountain men any more. I think we must have bred the mountain-man tendencies out by sending every violent Highlander out to colonialise some dangerous part of the world - the ones who didn't get killed mostly didn't come back either because living in the Highlands ceased to be fun once cattle rustling was illegal.
Snark: If classical civilisation was based on mannerbunds and not families, we would use a Latin word to refer to the mannerbund. We use a German word because we modern Romans see the mannerbund as barbaric and so use the language of the barbarians to describe it. You can imagine a man called Hermann leading his bros into battle in a manly way, but it is much harder with a man called Arminius.
Not snark: While the Highland clans were a functional social system, there was no doubt that they were barbarians. The romanticisation of Highland tradition by lowland Scots and Scottish-Americans happens 100 years after the real culture had been suppressed by the British authorities. When Ambrose Bierce wrote the Devil's Dictionary in 1906, he correctly described the kilt as "worn by Scots in America and Americans in Scotland"
It is similar with Roman system. Unsurprisingly it really was something like Italian mafia family. The core of the clan was based on blood relation, with some space made for adoption - but even adoption was mostly family related e.g. when Augustus was Caesar's great-nephew (grandson of Caesars sister Julia). Augustus did not even carry the Julia family name, as his father was just plebeian.
Nevertheless Roman society was based on complicated structure of patronage and master/client relationship of various plebeians and freemen around the clan with family at its core. Many of these positions were hereditary, these clients were part of the clan structure for generations and their service was rewarded. They were something like extended family and in many cases they actually were, given the power of exponential growth just in a few generations. I believe that Scottish clans had similar structure and they provided patronage when it came to valuable people with necessary human capital such as blacksmiths, or people who distinguished themselves in some other way.
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