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504 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xliv injured party trie obnoxious animal. At the call of indigence or avarice, the master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the condition of the slave was far more advan- tageous, since he regained by the first manumission his alienated freedom ; the son was again restored to his unnatural father ; he might be condemned to servitude a second and a third time, and it was not till after the third sale and deliverance 106 that he was enfranchised from the domestic power which had been so re- peatedly abused. According to his discretion, a father might chastise the real or imaginary faults of his children, by stripes, by imprisonment, by exile, by sending them to the country to work in chains among the meanest of his servants. The majesty of a parent was armed with the power of life and death ; 107 and the examples of such bloody executions, which were sometimes praised and never punished, may be traced in the annals of Rome, beyond the times of Pompey and Augustus. Neither age, nor rank, nor the consular office, nor the honours of a triumph, could exempt the most illustrious citizen from the bonds of filial sub- jection ; 108 his own descendants were included in the family of their common ancestor; and the claims of adoption were not less sacred or less rigorous than those of nature. Without fear, though not without danger of abuse, the Roman legislators had reposed an unbounded confidence in the sentiments of paternal love; and the oppression was tempered by the assurance that each generation must succeed in its turn to the awful dignity of parent and master. Limitation The first limitation of paternal power is ascribed to the plternai justice and humanity of Numa ; and the maid who, with his authority f a th er ' s consent, had espoused a freeman was protected from the disgrace of becoming the wife of a slave. In the first ages, 106 The trina manoipatio is most clearly defined by Ulpian (Fragment, x. p. 591, 592, edit. Schulting) ; and best illustrated in the Antiquities of Heineecius. 107 By Justinian, the old law, the jus necis of the Eoman father (Institut. 1. iv. tit. ix. [viii.] No. 7), is reported and reprobated. Some legal vestiges are left in the Pandects (1. xliii. tit. xxix. leg. 3, No. 4) and the Collatio Legum Ronianarum et Mosaicarum (tit. ii. No. 3, p. 189). 108 Except od public oocasions, and in the actual exercise of his office. In publicis locis atque muneribus atque actionibus patrum, jura .cum filiorum qui in magistratu sunt potestatibus collata interquiescere paullulum et connivere, &e. (Aul. Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ii. 2). The lessons of the philosopher Taurus were justified by the old and memorable example of Fabius ; and we may contemplate the same story in the style of Livy (xxiv. 44) and the homely idiom of Claudius Quadrigarius the annalist.