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The Death Row Baseball Team and Other Odd Episodes in History

Khalid Elhassan May 18, 2020 34 min

Death Row All Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder - State Penitentiary — Alston's All Stars. Daily Mail

20. Ancient Roman Law Gave Fathers Extraordinary Powers Over Their Kids

An ancient Roman pater familias. Pintrest

The patriarchy today just isn’t what it used to be. Whatever complaints might be made about it today, it was nothing like the patriarchy back in the days of ancient Rome. There, the degree of authority that a Roman head of the household, or pater familias, exercised over the family would shock modern sensibilities.

At the lower end of the spectrum, Roman law and tradition granted the family patriarch the power to reject or approve the marriages of his sons and daughters. On the more extreme end, those laws and traditions granted patriarchs a literal power of life and death over their family. Indeed, in some instances, such as when it came to deformed babies, Roman law mandated that the patriarch kill infants with obvious deformities.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.