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The father might scourge or imprison his child,[82] even put him to death. The formula employed in adrogation (the procedure by which a man puts himself into the paternal power of another) shows that the jus vitae necisque was the most distinctive aspect of the patria potestas.[83] It was a power never questioned throughout the whole of Republican history, and which received no legal limitations until the time of the Middle Empire.[84] Sometimes it was employed as a means of saving the honour of the family, and there are instances of the son guilty of theft, the daughter of unchastity, being thus put to death;[85] sometimes it was enforced in the interest of the state to punish a public crime.[86]

Although law is in a sense an outline of life, it would be very misleading to fill up the content of Roman private life by analogy with this harsh outline. Like most of the theory of Roman law it had little correspondence with the facts; and this non-correspondence of fact and theory is the source of the strength and the beauty of Roman family life. If legal obligations do not exist between husband and wife, father and child, their place, in a civilised community, must be taken by moral obligations; and the very absence of legal sanctions will make these moral bonds peculiarly strong. It was so with the Roman family. It was an isolated, self-existent unit. The members clung closely to one another and to their head. The power of the father—the source of the unity of the household—fostered the devotion to the hearth, the love of home, which is such a distinctive attribute of the Roman. It created the belief that the members of the household, owing allegiance to a common chief, should act loyally by one another in all the relations of life, and loyalty to a living head begat loyalty to his predecessors; traditions of this union as persisting under the rule of a long line of deceased ancestors, account for the hereditary policy of Roman houses—the championship of principles advocated for centuries by such clans as the Valerii, the Porcii, and the Claudii.