=47.= Only a few points in this celebrated work of legislation can here be noticed. The laws of Rome gave to a father absolute right of property in his family. He might sell his son, his daughter, or even his wife. The latter act, indeed, was denounced as impious by the religious law, but no penalty was attached to it; the curse of the chief pontiff merely marked the guilty person for the wrathful judgments of Heaven. If a father desired to make his son free, the process was more difficult than the emancipation of a slave. The latter, if sold to another master, could be liberated at once, but a son thus sold and liberated returned to the possession of his father. This subjection could only end with the death of the parent, though the son himself might then be an old man. The Twelve Tables enacted that, if a father had three times sold his son, he lost all further control over him; but a son thus emancipated was considered as severed from all relationship with his father, and could no longer inherit his property. Women were all their lives considered as minors and wards. If their father died, they passed under the control of their brothers; or, if they married, they became the absolute property of their husbands. A widow might become the ward of her own son. Marriages between patricians and plebeians were declared unlawful, and children born in such had no claim upon their fathers’ possessions. =48.= The ten Law-givers visited with their heaviest penalties the defamation of character; and so stringent was their definition of libel, that neither poets nor historians dared even name the living except in terms of praise. It is much more difficult, therefore, to gain a true idea of public men in the history of Rome than of Greece, whose historians spoke with grand impartiality of men and measures, and the license of whose comic poets, though often used with insolent injustice, yet shows us all the weak points of character, and reveals the man as his contemporaries really saw him. The Roman historians, even when writing of the past, could often draw their materials only from funeral orations, or from the flattering verses of dependent poets, laid up among the records of great families. =49.= The decemvirs, during their appointed year of office, completed ten tables of laws; and these, according to Roman ideas, were so just and so acceptable, that the assemblies willingly consented to renew the same form of government for another term, especially as the work of legislation was not quite complete. In the new decemvirate, Appius Claudius was re-elected, and his unscrupulous character now made itself felt in the tyrannical nature of the government. The people found that they had ten consuls instead of two, and the power of the Ten was unchecked by any popular tribune.