could liberate his son if he wished to do so for any reason, but
he had no power to set any of his children free by a mere act of will,
without legal formality. The bare fact that the men of a people should
be not only trusted with such power, but that it should be forcibly
thrust upon them, gives an idea of the Roman character, and it is
natural enough that the condition of family life imposed by such laws
should have had pronounced effects that may still be felt. As the Romans
were a hardy race and long-lived, when they were not killed in battle,
the majority of men were under the absolute control of their fathers
till the age of forty or fifty years, unless they married with their
parents' consent, in which case they advanced one step towards liberty,
and at all events, could not be sold as slaves by their fathers, though
they still had no right to buy or sell property nor to make a will.

There are few instances of the law being abused, even in the most
ferocious times. Brutus had the right to execute his sons, who conspired
for the Tarquins, without any public trial. He preferred the latter.
Titus Manlius caused his son to be publicly beheaded for disobeying a
military order in challenging an enemy to single combat, slaying him,
and bringing back the spoils. He might have cut off his head in private,
so far as the law was concerned, for any reason whatsoever, great or
small.

As for the condition of real slaves, it was not so bad in early times as
it became later, but the master's power was absolute to inflict torture
and death in any shape. In slave-owning communities, barbarity has
always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the
humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be
supposed. A perfectly ignorant labourer of sound body was worth from
eighty to a hundred dollars of our money, which meant much more in those
days, though in later times twice that sum was sometimes paid for a
single fine fish. The money value of the slave was, nevertheless, always
a sort of guarantee of safety to himself; but men who had right of life
and death over their own children, and who occasionally exercised it,
were probably not, as a rule, very considerate to creatures who were
bought and sold like cattle. Nevertheless, the number of slaves who were
freed and enriched by their masters is really surprising.

The point of all this, however, is that the head of a Roman family was,
under pro