1890-91.] CHRISTIANITY ON LEGISLATION. 161 



superior to the Roman Law, which, after the lapse of many ages still 

 continues to guide legislators and jurists of nations that have arisen and 

 flourished since the Roman power has passed away. 



One of the institutions that Justinian considered peculiar to the 

 Romans, though in this he appears to have been mistaken, as the 

 Galatians seem also to have possessed it, was the Patria Potestas, the 

 exclusive, absolute, and perpetual dominion of the father over his 

 children by a lawful marriage. It is said to have had its origin in the 

 barbarous customs of the earliest Romans, and from them to have 

 passed into their laws, and to have been sanctioned by the laws of their 

 kings long anterior to the XII tables. And this Royal law of the 

 Paternal authority was transferred by the Decemvirs into the 4th of the 

 XII tables, as Dionysius relates, who sums up the particulars of this 

 authority as permitting fathers to beat their children with whips, to 

 confine them in prison, to make them work in chains in the fields, to sell 

 them, and in fine to kill them. The Romans were not allowed to 

 disown or deny their children, but only to order them out of their 

 presence, and thus dismissed from home they did not lose their right to 

 their father's property, unless they were disinherited. Armed with 

 these rights the paternal authority was deservedly deemed peculiar to 

 the Romans, and a part of the civil law, since elsewhere it had never 

 attained such a height. The father v/as appointed as it were a family 

 magistrate with the power of the sword. Only Roman citizens could 

 exercise it ; and if the citizenship were lost so was this authority, as in 

 the case of those to whom fire and water were interdicted. Livy terms 

 it Patria Majestas. For the father could treat his sons as he did his 

 slaves ; who in this respect were better off than sons that by one sale 

 and manumission they attained their liberty, while sons were only 

 liberated by a third manumission. Sons had this advantage however 

 that while by manumission slaves only acquired the condition of 

 freedmen (still owing certain duties to their former master and patron) 

 sons reached the condition of their original free birth ; which was so 

 highly esteemed that it was not lost by the sale, but rather covered ; and 

 when manumitted this innate condition was recovered as if by bursting its 

 bonds. Hence it was said that fathers could not take liberty from their 

 sons. And by fictitious sales and manumissions a mode of liberating 

 the son from the operation of the paternal authority was devised, and 

 thus acquiring irrevocable liberty. A father could not sell his son if he 

 married with his father's consent. The Romans began to modify the 

 atrocity of the paternal power after acquaintance with humaner studies, 

 and intercourse with more polished nations had rubbed off the original 

 rust of their manners. In later times the supreme authority was rarely 



