Among the Hebrews, a modification of the patriarchal principle took place as early as the seventh century before the Christian era;[1455] and, according to the Talmudic law, a marriage, to be valid, must be contracted with the voluntary consent of both the parties concerned.[1456] In Arabia, Mohammed limited the paternal power.[1457] According to all the Mohammedan schools, a son is at liberty to contract a marriage without his father’s consent, after he has completed his fifteenth year. The Hanafîs and Shiahs grant the same privilege to a daughter, whereas, according to other schools, a woman is emancipated from paternal control only through marriage.[1458] A Mohammedan father certainly has the right to impose the _status_ of marriage on his children during their minority, sons and daughters alike, but the law takes particular care that this right shall never be exercised to the prejudice of the infant. Any act of the father which is likely to injure the interest of the minor is considered illegal, and entitles the judge to interfere in order to prevent the completion of such act, or, if complete, to annul it.[1459] In the mature Greek jurisprudence the paternal power was more restricted than during the Homeric age;[1460] and the Roman _patria potestas_ gradually became a shadow of what it had been. Under the Republic the abuses of paternal authority were checked by the censors, and in later times the Emperors reduced the father’s power within comparatively narrow limits. Alexander Severus ordained that severe punishments should be inflicted on members of a family only by the magistrate. Diocletian and Maximilian took away the power of selling freeborn children as slaves; and Constantine declared the father who killed his child guilty of murder.[1461] The father’s privilege of dictating marriage for his sons declined into a conditional veto;[1462] and it seems as if daughters also, at length, gained a certain amount of freedom in the choice of a husband. At any rate, a daughter could protest, if the father wished to give her in marriage to a man with a bad reputation.[1463]