family of the husband; and if begotten out of
wedlock, they had no place in a family at all. To the Roman citizen
a house of his own and the blessing of children appeared the end
and essence of life. The death of the individual was not an evil,
for it was a matter of necessity; but the extinction of a household
or of a clan was injurious to the community itself, which in the
earliest times therefore opened up to the childless the means of
avoiding such a fatality by their adopting the children of others
as their own.

The Roman family from the first contained within it the conditions
of a higher culture in the moral adjustment of the mutual relations of
its members. Man alone could be head of a family. Woman did not
indeed occupy a position inferior to man in the acquiring of property
and money; on the contrary the daughter inherited an equal share
with her brother, and the mother an equal share with her children.
But woman always and necessarily belonged to the household, not
to the community; and in the household itself she necessarily held
a position of domestic subjection--the daughter to her father,
the wife to her husband,(1) the fatherless unmarried woman to her
nearest male relatives; it was by these, and not by the king, that
in case of need woman was called to account. Within the house,
however, woman was not servant but mistress. Exempted from the
tasks of corn-grinding and cooking which according to Roman ideas
belonged to the menials, the Roman housewife devoted herself in
the main to the superintendence of her maid-servants, and to the
accompanying labours of the distaff, which was to woman what the
plough was to man.(2) In like manner, the moral obligations of
parents towards their children were 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 the virgin became by the
free choice of her husband 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