Among the Romans, the house-father had, in the earlier time, the _jus vitae necisque_—the power of life and death—over his children. He could imprison, sell, or kill his children under an express law of the Twelve Tables;[1412] and Plutarch says Brutus condemned his sons to death, without judicial forms, not as consul, but as father.[1413] “All in the household,” Mommsen remarks, “were destitute of legal rights—the wife and the child no less than the bullock or the slave.”[1414] Even the full-grown son and his children were subject to the house-father’s will,[1415] and in marriage without _conventio in manum_ a daughter remained in the power of her father or tutor after marriage. The consent of the _paterfamilias_ was indispensable to the marriage of children, sons and daughters alike;[1416] and so strict was this rule originally, that down to the reign of Marcus Aurelius the children of a _mente captus_ could not contract a legal marriage while in the power of their father, the latter being incapable of giving his consent.[1417] The religious character of this unlimited paternal authority has been pointed out by M. Fustel de Coulanges. “In primitive antiquity,” he says, “the father is not only the strong man, the protector who has power to command obedience; he is the priest, he is heir to the hearth, the continuator of the ancestors, the parent stock of the descendants, the depositary of the mysterious rites of worship, and of the sacred formulas of prayer. The whole religion resides in him.”[1418] It has been suggested by Sir Henry Maine and others that the _patria potestas_ of the Romans was a survival of the paternal authority which existed among the primitive Aryans.[1419] But no clear evidence of the general prevalence of such unlimited authority among other Indo-European peoples has been adduced. Justinian justly observed, “The power which we have over our children is peculiar to Roman citizens; for there are no other men possessing such a power over their children as we have.”[1420] That the father, among the Greeks, Germans, and Celts, had the power to expose his children when they were very young and to sell his marriageable daughters, does not imply the possession of a sovereignty like that which the Roman house-father exercised over his descendants at all ages. As, however, the family institution seems to have had a religious basis among the early Aryans, the father probably had a higher authority than he has among any existing uncivilized people.