rpetual
dominion of the father over his children, is peculiar to the Roman
jurisprudence, and seems to be coeval with the foundation of the city.
The paternal power was instituted or confirmed by Romulus himself; and,
after the practice of three centuries, it was inscribed on the fourth
table of the Decemvirs. In the forum, the senate, or the camp, the
adult son of a Roman citizen enjoyed the public and private rights of a
_person_: in his father's house he was a mere _thing_; confounded by the
laws with the movables, the cattle, and the slaves, whom the capricious
master might alienate or destroy, without being responsible to any
earthly tribunal. The hand which bestowed the daily sustenance might
resume the voluntary gift, and whatever was acquired by the labor or
fortune of the son was immediately lost in the property of the father.
His stolen goods (his oxen or his children) might be recovered by the
same action of theft; and if either had been guilty of a trespass, it
was in his own option to compensate the damage, or resign to the injured
party the obnoxious animal. At the call of indigence or avarice, the
master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the
condition of the slave was far more advantageous, since he regained, by
the first manumission, his alienated freedom: the son was again restored
to his unnatural father; he might be condemned to servitude a second and
a third time, and it was not till after the third sale and deliverance,
that he was enfranchised from the domestic power which had been so
repeatedly abused. According to his discretion, a father might
chastise the real or imaginary faults of his children, by stripes, by
imprisonment, by exile, by sending them to the country to work in chains
among the meanest of his servants. The majesty of a parent was armed
with the power of life and death; and the examples of such bloody
executions, which were sometimes praised and never punished, may be
traced in the annals of Rome beyond the times of Pompey and Augustus.
Neither age, nor rank, nor the consular office, nor the honors of a
triumph, could exempt the most illustrious citizen from the bonds of
filial subjection: his own descendants were included in the family of
their common ancestor; and the claims of adoption were not less sacred
or less rigorous than those of nature. Without fear, though not
without danger of abuse, the Roman legislators had reposed an unbounded
confidence i