[522] Coulanges, The Ancient City, ii, 9.
[523] The authority of the father over each and every member of the family was legally absolute, extending to life and death. Not until late in the Empire did the law forbid fathers to kill their grown-up children or to sell them as slaves. Cf. McKenzie, Studies in Roman Law, 6th ed., p. 141; and Sohm, Institutes (1901), p. 53.
[524] Inge, Society in Rome under the Cæsars (1888), p. 8.
[525] This Roman virtue of obedience to the state has been just such an enduring force in the moral life of the Christian world as has the Jewish virtue of obedience to a revealed law (see [Chapter IX]). Historically regarded, the Protestant Church, which makes obedience to a written revealed law a necessary virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical feeling and conviction of ancient Israel; while the Roman Catholic Church, which makes submission to ecclesiastical authority an indispensable virtue, is the inheritor of the ethical tradition and spirit of ancient Rome. See H. M. Gwatkin (co-author), Early Ideals of Righteousness (1910), pp. 71 ff.
[526] Tacitus, Annals, iii. 16, 17.
[527] This legal subjection of the son to the father, while it developed and strengthened the virtue of obedience, seemed to deaden filial affection. “Of all the forms of virtue,” says Lecky, “filial affection is perhaps that which appears most rarely in Roman history” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 299).
[528] De Off. i. 17.
[529] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 177 f.
[530] See [p. 245], on the ethics of persecution.
[531] The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 148.