“If a father gives his son leave to marry a woman who, by law, is to partake of his sacrifices and fortunes, he shall no longer have power of selling his son”—such was the amendment of Numa for which Plutarch commends the Sabine lawmaker; but in amending the law of Romulus permitting a father to sell his children, the second king of Rome was actuated by the idea of making it attractive for the young women to marry; doubtless he was having no easy time in eradicating the differences between the two warlike tribes first brought together under his predecessor. Lessening the power of the parents, as he did in the most material degree,[326] it was for the purpose of general polity and the accomplishment of his own harmonious designs, rather than for what I like to call, even in that early day, humanitarian reasons. There was no consideration of the child, or the female as such in Numa’s amendment. His object was to make marriages more desirable that there might be more _male_ Romans.[327] As a matter of fact, declaration of the power of the father over the women and children of his family was nothing more on the part of Romulus than the codification of the laws of the past, with the softening provisos to which I have already referred. The power of the father to imprison, scourge, or sell his son for a slave, or put him to death, was not lessened even when that son had risen to the highest honours of the State, as we shall see later. Expulsion of the kings and the establishment of the Republic is dated B. C. 509, some two hundred and fifty years after the reputed founding of the city. With this stern period begins a series of thrilling examples of the use made of the _patria potestas_—stories that in themselves show how the power of the father extended over the life of the child, even when the child had become a man, and that man had been honoured by the State as was Cassius Viscellinus. The latter, although a tribune of the people and the author of the first Agrarian Law, was tried in the house of his own father, who, after having him whipped, “commanded him to be put to death and his estate consecrated to Ceres.”[328] That there was little progress made in the next great step in the history of Roman law, by which of course one refers to the adoption of the laws of the Twelve Tables, was because those laws were practically the codification of the ancient customary law of the people, despite the story that the patricians dispatched three commissioners to Athens to bring home a copy of the laws of Solon. Acrid political fights, uncertain and sometimes corrupt administration of the law, led to the commission empowered to draw up what afterward became the Twelve Tables and the foundation of the whole fabric of the Roman law.