possession
of a family; on the contrary, the conviction that the founding of
a house and the begetting of children were a moral necessity and a
public duty had a deep and earnest hold of the Roman mind. Perhaps
the only instance of support accorded on the part of the community
in Rome is the enactment that aid should be given to the father who
had three children presented to him at a birth; while their ideas
regarding exposure are indicated by the prohibition of it so far
as concerned all the sons--deformed births excepted--and at least
the first daughter. Injurious, however, to the public weal as
exposure might appear, the prohibition of it soon changed its form
from that of legal punishment into that of religious curse; for
the father was, above all, thoroughly and absolutely master in his
household. The father of the household not only maintained the
strictest discipline over its members, but he had the right and duty
of exercising judicial authority over them and of punishing them as
he deemed fit in life and limb. The grown-up son might establish
a separate household or, as the Romans expressed it, maintain his
"own cattle" (-peculium-) assigned to him by his father; but in
law all that the son acquired, whether by his own labour or by gift
from a stranger, whether in his father's household or in his own,
remained the father's property. So long as the father lived, the
persons legally subject to him could never hold property of their
own, and therefore could not alienate unless by him so empowered,
or yet bequeath. In this respect wife and child stood quite on
the same level with the slave, who was not unfrequently allowed
to manage a household of his own, and who was likewise entitled to
alienate when commissioned by his master. Indeed a father might
convey his son as well as his slave in property to a third person:
if the purchaser was a foreigner, the son became his slave; if
he was a Roman, the son, while as a Roman he could not become a
Roman's slave, stood at least to his purchaser in a slave's stead
(-in mancipii causa-). The paternal and marital power was subject
to a legal restriction, besides the one already mentioned on the
right Of exposure, only in so far as some of the worst abuses were
visited by legal punishment as well as by religious curse. Thus
these penalties fell upon the man who sold his wife or married
son; and it was a matter of family usage that in the exercise of
domestic jurisd