Parricide.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 957, 4 July 1890, Page 8

Parricide.

(Globe). Tn "-uch of the ancient systems of law as have c me down to us, or the tradition of which s'-iU survives, we find that in the list of criminal offences which they contain—almost all crimes of violence, by the way—parricide is conspicuous by its absence. It was ommited simply because it never occurred to the early legislator that members of a family, the little kingdom over which the patriarch or father reigned supreme, could ever dare to lift impious hands against the man who filled as regards them the combined offices of parent, priest and ruler. His own authority was unlimited ; he had the jus necis vitaeque, the power of life and death. It is undeniable that this power was often used harshly and arbitrarily, and if the slaying of the father was not even contemplated in such laws, it wa« because it was forbidden, not so much by thd ties of natural affection, as by the sense of over-mastering reverence with which those but newly emerged from barbarism regarded their blood ancestor. For in fact the position of the son was then as hard a one as can well be conceived. Though in time he would be lord of all yet while his father lived he was in every respect, as the meanest bondsman. He might legally b*> scourged or killed at the mere caprice of his parent, or sold into foreign slavery, and it is a remarkable proof of the hold which this idea of the father’s power exercised even upon so civilized a people as the Homans that, although the technical definition of parricide Included the murder of first cousins, the father who killed his son was not liable to its penalties until the time of Constantine.

The archaic code attributed to Solon, the Jewish dispensation, and the customs of the Persians, that law which, once given forth, was never to be altered, provide no special punishment for the moat awful and revolting crime that early soclty could imagine, Solon does not allude to it at all, nor does the Old

Testament in so _ many words, though it punished with terrible severity a less heinous revolt against the paternal rule ' whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death.' ■ It is probable that among the Persians such cases had arisen, though it was sought to veil their enormity so far os might be. 'No man, Henodotus makes the law givers say, could be found wicked enough to kill his own father. Therefore, all those guilty of parricide must be baseborn and not true sons.

The same view prevailed also among the Homans, and it was not until 500 years after the fabled Numa, 8.0. 172, that the Lex Pompeia de Parricidiis wa= passed to meet the crime of L. Ostius, who had murdered his father. The punishment was a nova poena, one strange and hitherto unheard of, for it was not thought fit that a man guilty of an offense so dreadful and uunatural should die like any other malefactor, still less like a Homan citizen. He was first scourged till the blood ran, sewn up in an air-tight leathern sack together with a viper, a dog, a cock, and perhaps also with an ape, creatures whose natures were deemed akin to his own, and then flung into the Tiber, in order that * the sky might.be denied to him while he lived, and a grave in the earth when he died.’ Such always remained the manner of death under the Lex Pompeia de Parricidiis, and, as it formed part of the law of Britain under the Romans, it is possible that its provisions may have been enforced here, as they have been on the Continent until comparatively recent times. As morals grew lax, and the old conception of family life .decayed in the Mistress of the World, parricide became a crime <f terrible frequency, despite the Lex Pompeia. It was against this charge that Cicero successfully defended Rocious, and, though the eloquence of the great advocate procured an acquittal, it is evident that his enemies would never have brought forward such an accusation if it had been one rarely before the tribunals. So common was parricide under the Empire that 1 during the reign of either Claudius or Vespa--1 sian, the Senate found it necessary to pass another Act, supplementary to the Lex Pompeia,. and known as the Senatusconsultum Macedonianum, a name derived from a certain Macedo, who was either a parricide or a notorious usurer. It enacted that all loans of money to sons still under the government of their fathers, of whatever age they might be, were null and void, so that they might no longer be tempted to hasten a parent’s death in order to obtain the inheritance and pay off dunning creditors. Among the tribes of invading Teutons from the north, the sovereignty of the father was every.whit as stern and unyielding as it had been in the early history of Athenian, Jew, Persian, or Roman. But, notwithstanding this, the murder ot a father was considered by them as standing on precisely the same footing a 3 the murder of a stranger. No doubt the crime of parricide . was of infrequent occurrence, but, when it did occur, it was to be compensated for by the payment of ner-gild or blood money, though, perhaps, a larger sum than was ordinarily exacted. It has even been suggested by an acute and learned writer, that the German races, with their innate love of driving a good bargain, looked upon this aggravated form of murder merely as au excellent occasion for increasing the penalty, and allotted no exemplary punishment to it because death would relieve, the culprit from the necessity of paying the fine or being reduced to slavery. Be this as it may, it. is certain that the sentiment of the Teutonic races upon this point differs entirely from that of the Latin. By Article 13 of the French Penal Code, a parricide is to this day condemned to be led to execution barefoot and clad only in his shirt, with his head shrouded in a black veil, and until 1832 his right hand, the hand which had done the deed, was struck off before death. Ou the other hand, German law and the English common law contain no mention of parricide as such. He who wilfully kills his father is a murderer, but yet no more a murderer than if the victim had been a total stranger. If the son happened to be the father’s servant the case was different. He was then guilty of parva-proditio or petit treason, the breach of some civil or ecclesiastical. relation, or semi-feudal in its nature, which the State considered itself specially bound to uphold, and the distinction between which and simple murder was not abolished until 1828. But happily England knows little of the crime of parricide, and from 1688 to 1752 we can find only two cases, those of Philip and Mary Blandy, both of which are in a sorb leading cases.