but for all the women who were discovered among the guilty, it was necessary that the Senate should address itself to the fathers of families, and it was these who condemned to death their wives or their daughters.  “The husband,” said the elder Cato, “is the judge of the wife, he can do with her as he will; if she has committed any fault, he chastises her; if she has drunk wine, he condemns her; if she has been unfaithful to him, he kills her.”  When Catiline conspired against the Senate, a senator perceived that his own son had taken part in the conspiracy; he had him arrested, judged him, and condemned him to death.

The power of the father of the family endured as long as life; the son was never freed from it.  Even if he became consul, he remained subject to the power of his father.  When the father died, the sons became in turn fathers of families.  As for the wife, she could never attain freedom; she fell under the power of the heir of her husband; she could, then, become subject to her own son.

FOOTNOTES: 

[110] A legend represents King Numa debating with Jupiter the terms of a contract:  “You will sacrifice a head to me?” says Jupiter.  “Very well,” says Numa, “the head of an onion that I shall take in my garden.”  “No,” replies Jupiter, “but I want something that pertains to a man.”  “We will give you then the tip of the hair.”  “But it must be alive.”  “Then we will add to this a little fish.”  Jupiter laughed and consented to this.

[111] In Rome, as in Greece, the temple was called a house.

[112] The remark is Cicero’s.

[113] Pliny, Epistles, vii, 27.  See another story in Plautus’s Mostellaria.

[114] The letters D.M. found on Roman tombs are the initials of Dei Manes.

[115] They were called the Penates, that is to say, the gods of the interior.

[116] In the language of the Roman law the wife, children, and slaves “are not their own masters.”

CHAPTER XIX

THE ROMAN CITY

FORMATION OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE

=The Kings.=—­Tradition relates that Rome for two centuries and a half was governed by kings.  They told not only the names of these kings and the date of their death, but the life of each.

They said there were seven kings.  Romulus, the first king, came from the Latin city of Alba, founded the hamlet on the Palatine, and killed his brother who committed the sacrilege of leaping over the sacred furrow encircling the settlement; he then allied himself with Tatius, a Sabine king. (A legend of later origin added that he had founded at the foot of the hill-city a quarter surrounded with a palisade where he received all the adventurers who wished to come to him.)

Numa Pompilius, the second king, was a Sabine.  It was he who organized the Roman religion, taking counsel with a goddess, the nymph Egeria who dwelt in a wood.