[124] Urquhart, Spirit of the East, ii. 440 sq.
[125] Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, p. 70. Cf. Pool, Studies in Mohammedanism, p. 171.
[126] Cf. Urquhart, op. cit. ii. 265 sq.
Among the ancient Romans, in relation to the house-father, “all in the household were destitute of legal rights—the wife and the child no less than the bullock or the slave.”[127] The father not only had judicial authority over his children—implying the right of inflicting capital punishment on them[128]—but he could sell them at discretion.[129] Even the grown-up son and his children were subject to the house-father’s authority,[130] and in marriage without conventio in manum a daughter remained in the power of her father or tutor even after marriage.[131] Filial piety, including reverence not only for the father but for the mother also, was regarded as a most sacred duty.[132] To the ancient Roman the parents were hardly less sacred beings than the gods.[133]
[127] Mommsen, History of Rome, i. 74.
[129] Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanæ, ii. 27.
[130] Institutiones, i. 9. 3.
[131] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 230.
[132] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 11 sqq. Idem, Alt-arisches Jus Gentium, p. 185.