Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/367

 military service. In the first half of the fourth century the right was extended, and the privilege of retaining anything received as pay from the government was bestowed on officials of the civil service. Justinian went a step further and enacted that a son's independent or extraneous earnings should be his own, but yet he permitted the father to have the usufruct of any capital thus acquired. Later (541), he made another concession that a son might inherit anything from a relative, as part of his separate estate, if left to him with a proviso that it should not come under his father's control.

The artificial conception of blood-relationship which prevailed among the Romans, whereby those connected through females were excluded from all legal rights in a family, had been modified in some of its most inequitable features before the sixth century. In the earliest times if a citizen died intestate having no agnates to inherit, that is, persons related to him through males, the property was divided among his gens. The latter consisted of all those of the same stock or name as himself, being the reputed descendants in the male line of some common ancestor. Possibly, however, by this dispensation some of his heirs might not even be of the same blood, owing to adoptive children having conferred upon them all the legal rights of those naturally born to the father by whom they had been assumed. Thus it happened that the children of a married daughter could claim nothing of their maternal grandfather's estate; and, as a rule, their mother would be in the same position. A mother could not inherit from her sons and daughters; whilst emancipated