Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/81

Rh towards their children wore fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation; and it was reckoned a heinous offence if a father neglected or corrupted his child, or if he even squandered his property to his child's disadvantage.

In a legal point of view, however, the family was absolutely guided and governed by the single, all powerful will of the "father of the household" (pater familias). In relation to him all in the household were destitute of legal rights—the wife and the child no less than the bullock or the slave. As it was by the free choice of her husband that the virgin became his wedded wife, so it rested with his own free will to rear or not to rear the child which she bore to him. This maxim was not suggested by indifference to the having a family; on the contrary, the conviction that the founding of a house and the begetting of children were a moral necessity and a duty of the citizen, had a deep and earnest hold of the Roman mind. Perhaps the only instance of a support accorded on the part of the community in Rome, is the enactment that aid should be given to the father who had three children presented to him at a birth; while their views regarding exposure are indicated by its religious prohibition, so far as concerned all the sons—deformed births excepted—and at least the first daughter. Censurable, however, and injurious to the public weal as exposure might be, a father could not be divested of his right to resort to it; for he was, above all, thoroughly and absolutely master in his household, and it was intended that such he should remain. The father of the household not only maintained the strictest discipline over its members, but he had the right and duty of exercising over them judicial powers, and of punishing them, as he deemed fit, in life and limb. A grown-up son might establish a separate household, or maintain, as the Romans expressed it, his "own cattle" (peculium) assigned to him by his father; but, legally, all that the son acquired, whether by his own labour or by gift from a