characteristic of the Latin race was its sense of the importance of discipline, and the homage it paid to power and might; that of the Sabines, their religious feeling and their reverence for the gods; that of the Etruscans, their subservience to forms and ceremonies in matters both divine and human. Corresponding influences are very manifest in the growth of Rome's early public institutions, civil, military, and religious. It does not seem too much to say that they are traceable also in the institutions of the private law. The patria potestas, with the father's power of life and death over his children; the manus and the husband's power over his wife; the doctrine that those things chiefly was a man entitled to call his own which he had taken by the strength of his arm;[1] the right which a creditor had of apprehending and imprisoning his defaulting debtor, and, if need were, reducing him to slavery,—all these seem to point to a persuasion that might made right. The religious marriage ceremony, and the recognition of the wife as mistress of the household and participant in its sacred offices as well as its domestic cares; the family council of kinsmen, maternal as well as paternal, who advised the paterfamilias in the exercise of the domestic jurisdiction; the practice of adoption, on purpose to prevent the extinction of a family and deprivation of its deceased members of the prayers and sacrifices necessary for the repose of their souls,—these seem to have flowed from a different order of ideas, and to bear evidence of Sabine descent. Etruscan influence could make itself felt only at a later date; but to it may possibly be attributed the strict regard that came to be required to the observance of ceremonials and words of style in the more important transactions both of public and private life.
While the result of the union of Latins and Sabines was
- ↑ "Maxima sua esse credebant quae ex hostibus cepissent" (Gai, iv. 16),—a doctrine rather pre-Roman than Roman.
