Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/82

62 stranger, whether in his father's household or in his own, remained the father's property. So long as the father lived the persons legally subject to him could never hold property of their own, and could not therefore alienate, unless by him so empowered, or bequeath. In this respect wife and child stood quite on the same level with the slave, who was not unfrequently allowed to manage a house of his own, and who was likewise entitled to alienate when commissioned by his master. Indeed, a father might convey his son as well as his slave in property to a third person: if the purchaser was a foreigner, the son became his slave; if he was a Roman, the son, while as a Roman he could not become a Roman's slave, stood at least to his purchaser in a slave's stead (in mancipii causâ).

In reality the paternal and marital power was subject to no legal restrictions at all. Religion, indeed, pronounced its anathema on some of the worst cases of abuse. For example, besides the already-mentioned restriction of the right of exposure, whoever sold his wife or married son was declared accursed; and in a similar spirit it was enacted, that in the exercise of domestic jurisdiction the father, and still more the husband, should not pronounce sentence on child or wife without having previously consulted the nearest blood-relations, his wife's as well as his own. But even such provisions involved no diminution, legally, of his powers, for the execution of the anathemas was the province of the gods, not of earthly justice, and the blood-relations called in to the domestic judgment were present, not to judge, but simply to advise the father of the household in his judicial office.

But not only was the power of the master of the house unlimited, and responsible to no one on earth; it was also, as long as he lived, unchangeable and indestructible. According to Greek as well as Germanic law, the grown-up son, who was practically independent of his father, was also independent legally; but the power of the Roman father could not be dissolved during his life, either by age or by insanity, or even by his own free will, except where a daughter passed by lawful marriage out of the hand of her father into the hand of her husband, and leaving her own gens and the protection of her own gods to enter into the gens of her husband and the protection of his gods, became thenceforth subject to him as she had hitherto been to her