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The tenacity of the Romans in maintaining this relic of their most ancient condition is in itself remarkable, but it is less remarkable than the diffusion of the Potestas over the whole of a civilisation from which it had once disappeared.
"I am pleased," said Michael, "to tell you why it is usual to paint that which was never seen in the world, and how right such licence is, and how true it is, for some who do not understand him are accustomed to say that Horace, a lyric poet, wrote this verse in abuse of painters: Pictoribus adque poetis Quidlibet audendi semper fuit acqua potestas.
As a man I have very decided views on these subjects, but as a judge I feel it is not for me further to debate them. I expressly retired from doing so on the 27th of October, 1879, although I thought it necessary in March last to comment on what I thought to be an erroneous view of the patria potestas."
Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor and our national character. We, who here appear representing the Commons of England, are not wild enough not to tremble both for ourselves and for our constituents at the effect of riches. Opum metuenda potestas. We dread the operation of money.
First, the nation must possess the PATRIA POTESTAS in some form so marked as to give family life distinctness and precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline probable and possible. While descent is traced only through the mother, and while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high polity is possible.
The reason why the death of the father delivered the son from the bondage of the family was the son's capacity for becoming himself the head of a new family and the founder of a new Patria Potestas; no such capacity was possessed by the woman and therefore she was never enfranchised.
On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father or other ancestor over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas.
The Patria Potestas of the Romans, which is necessarily our type of the primeval paternal authority, is equally difficult to understand as an institution of civilised life, whether we consider its incidence on the person or its effects on property. It is to be regretted that a chasm which exists in its history cannot be more completely filled. So far as regards the person, the parent, when our information commences, has over his children the jus vitæ necisque, the power of life and death, and
In truth, in the primitive view, Relationship is exactly limited by Patria Potestas. Where the Potestas begins, Kinship begins; and therefore adoptive relatives are among the kindred. Where the Potestas ends, Kinship ends; so that a son emancipated by his father loses all rights of Agnation. And here we have the reason why the descendants of females are outside the limits of archaic kinship.
Postremò quoscunque scirent in posterum communitati nocivos tollerent de terrâ suâ, sic demum et pacem sibimet parerent et securitatem in futurum. Si sublatis majoribus esset inter eos æqua libertas, eadem nobilitas, par dignitas, similisque potestas."
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