ork which tends to confine the
Patria Potestas to the cases where its possessor is actually skilful
and strong. When we obtain our first glimpse of organised Hellenic
society, it seems as if supereminent wisdom would keep alive the
father's power in persons whose bodily strength had decayed; but the
relations of Ulysses and Laertes in the _Odyssee_ appear to show that,
where extraordinary valour and sagacity were united in the son, the
father in the decrepitude of age was deposed from the headship of the
family. In the mature Greek jurisprudence, the rule advances a few
steps on the practice hinted at in the Homeric literature; and though
very many traces of stringent family obligation remain, the direct
authority of the parent is limited, as in European codes, to the
nonage or minority of the children, or, in other words, to the period
during which their mental and physical inferiority may always be
presumed. The Roman law, however, with its remarkable tendency to
innovate on ancient usage only just so far as the exigency of the
commonwealth may require, preserves both the primeval institution and
the natural limitation to which I conceive it to have been subject. In
every relation of life in which the collective community might have
occasion to avail itself of his wisdom and strength, for all purposes
of counsel or of war, the filius familias, or Son under Power, was as
free as his father. It was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence that the
Patria Potestas did not extend to the Jus Publicum. Father and son
voted together in the city, and fought side by side in the field;
indeed, the son, as general, might happen to command the father, or,
as magistrate, decide on his contracts and punish his delinquencies.
But in all the relations created by Private Law, the son lived under a
domestic despotism which, considering the severity it retained to the
last, and the number of centuries through which it endured,
constitutes one of the strangest problems in legal history.

The Patria Potestas of the Romans, which is necessarily our type of
the primeval paternal authority, is equally difficult to understand as
an institution of civilised life, whether we consider its incidence on
the person or its effects on property. It is to be regretted that a
chasm which exists in its history cannot be more completely filled. So
far as regards the person, the parent, when our information commences,
has over his children the _jus vitae necisque_,