A very real customary control, one not actually enjoined by the civil law, but enforced by the powerful sovereign, which the Romans called the custom of their ancestors (_mos majorum_), was the obligation incumbent on the father of consulting a council of relatives (_consilium domesticum_) before taking any extreme step with respect to the members of his family. This was never limited to the agnatic circle; it admitted blood relations and relatives by marriage, while personal friends outside the family might be summoned as well.[90] Any severe punishment of a child and the divorce of a wife had to be submitted to the judgment of this assembly. How strong the sentiment in favour of this procedure was may be judged from the fact that in later times we find the censor (in Republican times the personal exponent of the moral sense of the community) degrading a senator who had divorced his wife without taking advice of the family council.[91] The sentiment was but one expression of the principle which runs through the whole of Roman life, that no man should act in an important matter without taking counsel of those best qualified to give it. Certain extreme abuses of the paternal power were prohibited by religious law (_fas_), which in such cases enjoins _capital_ penalties. By a supposed law of Romulus, a man who sells his wife is to be sacrificed to the infernal gods; if he divorces her without due cause, half of his property is to be confiscated to his wife and half to the goddess Ceres.[92] With the secularisation of Roman law such penalties disappeared, and it is questionable whether they often required enforcement,[93] for such religious bans are mainly the expression of a strong moral sentiment. Lastly, there was the principle that the paternal power cannot interfere with the _jus publicum_. It is a principle that applies both to persons and to property. In its first application it means that the son can exercise his vote independently of the paternal control; that he can fill a magistracy which subjects his father to his command; that, at least in later times, even the function of guardianship (_tutela_) can be exercised without the father’s will; for this, too, is a public duty.[94] With respect to property, public law, though not infringing on the theory that all goods belong to the _paterfamilias_, yet does not regard them as the object of purely individual ownership. The father is rather a trustee than an owner, and even under the Servian constitution, that is, according to tradition, before the close of the monarchy, the value of a freehold is taken to qualify the members of the _familia_, not merely its head, for service to the state, and ultimately for the exercise of political rights.[95]