hat a strong sentiment in favour of the relaxation of the Patria
Potestas had become fixed by the time that the pacification of the
world commenced on the establishment of the Empire. The first serious
blows at the ancient institution are attributed to the earlier Caesars,
and some isolated interferences of Trajan and Hadrian seem to have
prepared the ground for a series of express enactments which, though
we cannot always determine their dates, we know to have limited the
father's powers on the one hand, and on the other to have multiplied
facilities for their voluntary surrender. The older mode of getting
rid of the Potestas, by effecting a triple sale of the son's person,
is evidence, I may remark, of a very early feeling against the
unnecessary prolongation of the powers. The rule which declared that
the son should be free after having been three times sold by his
father seems to have been originally meant to entail penal
consequences on a practice which revolted even the imperfect morality
of the primitive Roman. But even before the publication of the Twelve
Tables it had been turned, by the ingenuity of the jurisconsults, into
an expedient for destroying the parental authority wherever the father
desired that it should cease.

Many of the causes which helped to mitigate the stringency of the
father's power over the persons of his children are doubtless among
those which do not lie upon the face of history. We cannot tell how
far public opinion may have paralysed an authority which the law
conferred, or how far natural affection may have rendered it
endurable. But though the powers over the _person_ may have been
latterly nominal, the whole tenour of the extant Roman jurisprudence
suggests that the father's rights over the son's _property_ were
always exercised without scruple to the full extent to which they were
sanctioned by law. There is nothing to astonish us in the latitude of
these rights when they first show themselves. The ancient law of Rome
forbade the Children under Power to hold property apart from their
parent, or (we should rather say) never contemplated the possibility
of their claiming a separate ownership. The father was entitled to
take the whole of the son's acquisitions, and to enjoy the benefit of
his contracts without being entangled in any compensating liability.
So much as this we should expect from the constitution of the earliest
Roman society, for we can hardly form a notion of the primi