the power of life and
death, and _a fortiori_ of uncontrolled corporal chastisement; he can
modify their personal condition at pleasure; he can give a wife to his
son; he can give his daughter in marriage; he can divorce his children
of either sex; he can transfer them to another family by adoption; and
he can sell them. Late in the Imperial period we find vestiges of all
these powers, but they are reduced within very narrow limits. The
unqualified right of domestic chastisement has become a right of
bringing domestic offences under the cognisance of the civil
magistrate; the privilege of dictating marriage has declined into a
conditional veto; the liberty of selling has been virtually abolished,
and adoption itself, destined to lose almost all its ancient
importance in the reformed system of Justinian, can no longer be
effected without the assent of the child transferred to the adoptive
parentage. In short, we are brought very close to the verge of the
ideas which have at length prevailed in the modern world. But between
these widely distant epochs there is an interval of obscurity, and we
can only guess at the causes which permitted the Patria Potestas to
last as long as it did by rendering it more tolerable than it appears.
The active discharge of the most important among the duties which the
son owed to the state must have tempered the authority of his parent
if they did not annul it. We can readily persuade ourselves that the
paternal despotism could not be brought into play without great
scandal against a man of full age occupying a high civil office.
During the earlier history, however, such cases of practical
emancipation would be rare compared with those which must have been
created by the constant wars of the Roman republic. The military
tribune and the private soldier who were in the field three-quarters
of a year during the earlier contests, at a later period the proconsul
in charge of a province, and the legionaries who occupied it, cannot
have had practical reason to regard themselves as the slaves of a
despotic master; and all these avenues of escape tended constantly to
multiply themselves. Victories led to conquests, conquests to
occupations; the mode of occupation by colonies was exchanged for the
system of occupying provinces by standing armies. Each step in advance
was a call for the expatriation of more Roman citizens and a fresh
draft on the blood of the failing Latin race. We may infer, I think,
t