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But, apart from the moral checks on the authority of the father, which the absence of legal restraints made peculiarly strong, the civil law, public opinion, and the positive morality which found expression through certain religious or semi-religious organs, did impose certain restraints on a possible abuse of power. If the father is a lunatic (furiosus) he is, with his property, put under the care of his next of kin;[88] if he is wasteful (prodigus) and is squandering the property, of which (though legally it is his own) he is regarded only as the trustee, he is debarred from all commercial relations (commercium)[89] and prohibited from disposing of goods of which he is an unworthy administrator.

A very real customary control, one not actually enjoined by the civil law, but enforced by the powerful sovereign, which the Romans called the custom of their ancestors (mos majorum), was the obligation incumbent on the father of consulting a council of relatives (consilium domesticum) before taking any extreme step with respect to the members of his family. This was never limited to the agnatic circle; it admitted blood relations and relatives by marriage, while personal friends outside the family might be summoned as well.[90] Any severe punishment of a child and the divorce of a wife had to be submitted to the judgment of this assembly. How strong the sentiment in favour of this procedure was may be judged from the fact that in later times we find the censor (in Republican times the personal exponent of the moral sense of the community) degrading a senator who had divorced his wife without taking advice of the family council.[91] The sentiment was but one expression of the principle which runs through the whole of Roman life, that no man should act in an important matter without taking counsel of those best qualified to give it.