This conclusion is confirmed by the customs of the Aryan peoples after the separation. Among the Hellenes at the first dawn of history the family appears as a member of the _gens_, which is held together usually by the ties of blood-relationship. The house-father is lord or monarch of the family. But his authority is tempered in various ways. Originally, as among the primitive Aryans, he may have exercised the power of life and death over his children; but in no case could he "put a child to death without the consent of the collective ancestors," or near kindred.[74] By the Aryans the _jus vitae necisque_ was never looked upon as an arbitrary right of destruction, but merely as a means of domestic discipline.[75] The Greek father might sell his minor sons and unmarried daughters; but "it appears that, even here, merely the labor of the youth and not the person itself was disposed of by sale," and the custom was controlled by the usage of the _gens_.[76] The wife, as among the Hindus, holds a dignified position in the household. She is her husband's partner in the domestic economy and the sacred rites. Equally with him she is "the cause of the son's existence," and in consequence exercises over him conjointly with the father the powers of sale and life and death.[77] Thus Hellenic custom preserves the essential element of the Aryan paternal authority, which signifies a protecting, not an arbitrary or ruthlessly destructive, power. Among the historic Greeks the agnatic principle finds expression especially in the right of guardianship, which is transmitted in the paternal line. Such is the judgment of Leist, whose masterly account of the development of the Aryan agnatic conception proves that here as elsewhere the Roman and the Greek stood upon common ground.[78] The point of divergence is the lifelong continuance of the Roman _potestas_; whereas in Hellas the son was emancipated at maturity.[79]
[74] BOTSFORD, _Athenian Constitution_, 50; LEIST, _Graeco-italische Rechtsgeschichte_, 59 ff. WESTERMARCK, _Human Marriage_, 230, justly observes that the power of the father among the Greeks, Germans, and Celts, "to expose his children when they were very young and to sell his marriageable daughters, does not imply the possession of a sovereignty like that which the Roman house-father exercised over his descendants at all ages."