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The original capitis deminutio is thus a purely private law conception and implies the distinction between persons sui juris and alieni juris. To the first category belong those who are free from the power of another, to the latter those who are under the potestas, manus, and mancipium; amongst citizens, therefore, the son, the wife, and any one mancipated to another. The person alieni juris is not altogether devoid of private rights, but they are singularly incomplete in their effects. Thus the son under power has the right of marriage (conubium), but the children of the marriage are not in his power but in his father’s; he has (if not in the earliest period, yet throughout the greater part of Roman history) the right of taking part in the legal business of trade (commercium), yet all that he acquires by this business belongs to his father. In his case, however, the condition is transitory, while in the case of the slave and the mancipatus (apart from the possibility of emancipation) it is permanent.