This power of the Roman father over the very lives of his children was called the _patria potestas_ and nowhere else in a civilized community was there anything like it.[323] He had the power to sell his children, he had the power to mutilate them, he had the power to kill them; and it is because there is evident first, in the laws ascribed to Romulus, an intention to abate that power, not only for military purposes but for what we would now call humane reasons, that I have referred to the first Roman lawmaker as an innovator along lines which have been historically neglected. It matters little whether or not the Romulus of Plutarch and Dionysius existed; it does matter that the human note was in the laws of his time, and that citizens of the new city were enjoined not only to bring up all healthy male children—and at least one female child—but that all children must be allowed to live _until they were three years old_, unless they were lame or monstrous. Surely here was the beginning of some recognition of the rights of children. Even the lame and the monstrous in the eyes of this early lawgiver had some rights, for it was further decreed that parents in doing away with them must act not entirely on their own judgment. “These (the lame and monstrous infants) he allowed their parents to expose, provided they first showed them to five of their neighbours and these also approved of it, and besides other penalties he punished those who disobeyed this law with the confiscation of half their fortunes.”[324] It may be contended perhaps that we are giving high attributes to one who is not much more than a mythical person, but no other explanation of the law of Romulus is offered than that already referred to in Dionysius. Despite the credit given to Numa Pompilius, by both Plutarch and Gibbon, Romulus gains by the comparison, although Numa amended one of the laws of Romulus in the matter of the right of a father to control a son up to the point of being able to sell him as a slave.[325]