The Private Life of the Romans. Harold Whetstone Johnston
same story: a glance at the table of cognates will show how strong the Latin is here, how weak the English. We have "uncle," "aunt," and "cousin," but between avunculus and patruus, mātertera and amita, patruēlis and cōnsōbrīnus, we can distinguish only by descriptive phrases. For atavus and tritavus we have merely the indefinite "forefathers." In the same way the language testifies to the headship of the father. We speak of the "mother country" and "mother tongue," but to the Roman these were patria and sermō patrius. As the pater stood to the fīlius, so stood the patrōnus to the cliēns, the patriciī to the plēbēiī, the patrēs (=senators) to the rest of the citizens, and Iūpiter (Jove the Father) to the other gods of Olympus.
27 The Family Cult.—It has been said (§23) that agnātiō was the closest tie known to the Romans. The importance they attached to the agnatic family is largely explained by their ideas of the future life. They believed that the souls of men had an existence apart from the body, but not in a separate spirit-land. They conceived of the soul as hovering around the place of burial and requiring for its peace and happiness that offerings of food and drink should be made to it regularly. Should these offerings be discontinued, the soul would cease to be happy itself, and might become perhaps a spirit of evil. The maintenance of these rites and ceremonies devolved naturally upon the descendants from generation to generation, whom the spirits in turn would guide and guard.
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| FIGURE 2. LUCIUS JUNIUS BRUTUS |
28 The Roman was bound, therefore, to perform these acts of affection and piety so long as he lived himself, and bound no less to provide for their performance after his death by perpetuating his race and the family cult. A curse was believed to rest upon the childless man. Marriage was, therefore, a solemn religious duty, entered into only with the approval of the gods ascertained by the auspices. In taking a wife to himself the Roman made her a partaker of his family mysteries, a service that brooked no divided allegiance. He therefore separated her entirely from her father's family, and was ready in turn to surrender his daughter without reserve to the husband with whom she was to minister at another altar. The pater familiās was the priest of the household, and those subject to his potestās assisted in the prayers and offerings, the sacra familiāria.
29 But it might be that a marriage was fruitless, or that the Head of the House saw his sons die before him. In this case he had to face the prospect of the extinction of his family, and his own descent to the grave with no posterity to make him blessed. One of two alternatives was open to him to avert such a calamity. He might give himself in adoption and pass into another family in which the perpetuation of the family cult seemed certain, or he might adopt a son and thus perpetuate his own. He usually followed the latter course, because it secured peace for the souls of his ancestors no less than for his own.
30 Adoption.—The person adopted might be either a pater familiās himself or, more usually, a fīlius familiās. In the case of the latter the process was called adoptiō and was a somewhat complicated proceeding by which the natural parent conveyed his son to the other, the effect being to transfer the adopted person from one family to the other. The adoption of a pater familiās was a much more serious matter, for it involved the extinction of one family (§29) in order to prevent the extinction of another. It was called adrogātiō and was an affair of state. It had to be sanctioned by the pontificēs, the highest officers of religion, who had probably to make sure that the adrogātus had brothers enough to attend to the interests of the ancestors whose cult he was renouncing. If the pontificēs gave their consent, it had still to be sanctioned by the comitia curiata, as the adrogation might deprive the gēns of its succession to the property of the childless man (§22). If the comitia gave consent, the adrogātus sank from the position of Head of a House to that of a fīlius familiās in the household of his adoptive father. If he had wife and children, they passed with him into the new family, and so did all his property. Over him the adoptive father had potestās as over a son of his own, and looked upon him as flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. We can have at best only a feeble and inadequate notion of what adoption meant to the Romans.
31 The Patria Potestas.—The authority of the pater familiās over his descendants was called usually the patria potestās, but also the patria maiestās, the patrium iūs, and the imperium paternum. It was carried to a greater length by the Romans than by any other people, a length that seems to us excessive and cruel. As they understood it, the pater familiās had absolute power over his children and other agnatic descendants. He decided whether or not the newborn child should be reared; he punished what he regarded as misconduct with penalties as severe as banishment, slavery, and death; he alone could own and exchange property—all that his descendants earned or acquired in any way was his: according to the letter of the law they were little better than his chattels. If his right to one of them was disputed, he vindicated it by the same form of action that he used to maintain his right to a house or a horse; if one was stolen, he proceeded against the abductor by the ordinary action for theft; if for any reason he wished to transfer one of them to a third person, it was done by the same form of conveyance that he employed to transfer inanimate things. The jurists boasted that these powers were enjoyed by Roman citizens only.
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| FIGURE 3. PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO AFRICANUS |
32 Limitations.—But however stern this authority was theoretically, it was greatly modified in practice, under the Republic by custom, under the Empire by law. King Romulus was said to have ordained that all sons should be reared and also all firstborn daughters; furthermore that no child should be put to death until its third year, unless it was grievously deformed. This at least secured life for the child, though the pater familiās still decided whether it should be admitted to his household, with the implied social and religious privileges, or be disowned and become an outcast. King Numa was said to have forbidden the sale into slavery of a son who had married with the consent of his father. But of much greater importance was the check put upon arbitrary and cruel punishments by custom. Custom, not law, obliged the pater familiās to call a council of relatives and friends (iūdicium domesticum) when he contemplated inflicting severe punishment upon his children, and public opinion obliged him to abide by their verdict. Even in the comparatively few cases where tradition tells us that the death penalty was actually inflicted, we usually find that the father acted in the capacity of a magistrate happening to be in office when the offense was committed, or that the penalties of the ordinary law were merely anticipated, perhaps to avoid the disgrace of a public trial and execution.
33 So, too, in regard to the ownership of property the conditions were not really so hard as the strict letter of the law makes them appear to us. It was customary for the Head of the House to assign to his children property, pecūlia ("cattle of their own"), for them to manage for their own benefit. And more than this, although the pater familiās held legal title to all their acquisitions, yet practically all property was acquired for and belonged to the household as a whole, and he was in effect little more than a trustee to hold and administer it for the common benefit. This is shown by the fact that there was no graver offense against public morals, no fouler blot on private character, than to prove untrue to this trust, patrimōnium prōfundere. Besides this, the long continuance of the potestās is in itself a proof that its rigor was more apparent than real.