Patria Potestas
idea · 4 works · 18 mentions · 32 anchored passages
paternal power · patria potestas · Paternal Power · patriarchal power · Patriarchal Power · Paternal authority · agnatic relationship · family bondage · father's power · in potestate patris
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
The patriarchal power of the father over children in Roman law, which impeded full recognition of individual rights but was gradually lessened.
It was impeded by the Patria Potestas—the life-long power of the father over the son.
et in filio quidem, si in adoptionem datur, tres mancipationes et duae, &c.
Coemptione autem facta mulieres omni modo potestate parentis liberantur.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The Roman legal concept of paternal power invoked to describe Gallic household authority.
He, a Roman, familiar with a Patria Potestas as yet undecayed, thinks it worthy of remark that the head of a Gallic household had the power of life and death over his wives as well as his children, and notices with astonishment that, when a husband died under suspicious circumstances, his wives were treated with the same cruelty as a body of household slaves at Rome whose master had been killed by an unknown hand.
Whitley Stokes be correct, we must suppose that, at the time at which the Brehon tracts were thrown into their present form, the Patria Potestas of the ancient Irish, though frequently referred to in the tracts as the father’s power of ‘judgment, proof, and witness’ over his sons, had nevertheless considerably decayed, as it is apt to do in all societies under unfavourable circumstances, and that …
Nevertheless there are hints on all sides that, as a general rule, sons as they advanced in years were enfranchished from Paternal Power, and no doubt this practice supplies a partial explanation of the durability of the Patria Potestas as a Roman institution.
Ancient Law
The life-long paternal authority of a Roman father over his descendants' person and property.
On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father or other ancestor over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas.
The Patria Potestas of the Romans, which is necessarily our type of the primeval paternal authority, is equally difficult to understand as an institution of civilized life, whether we consider its incidence on the person or its effects on property.
While the Castrense Peculium constituted as yet the sole exception to the father’s power over property, and while his power over his children’s persons was still extensive, the Roman citizenship, and with it the Patria Potestas, were spreading into every corner of the Empire.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The legal concept of paternal power, invoked comparatively across Irish and Hindu custom.
It is expressly laid down that it created the same Patria Potestas as actual paternity;
The Patria Potestas, which is witnessed to by the ancient law or custom of so many communities, was founded on power quite as much as on parentage;
Now the recognition of agnatic relationship is good evidence that patriarchal power either exists or has once existed in a community;