if the law did identify agents with principals, so far as that identification was carried the principal would have the burden and the benefit of his agent's torts, contracts, or possession. So, framing a historical hypothesis, if the starting-point of the modern law is the patria potestas, a little study will show that the fiction of identity is the natural growth from such a germ.
There is an antecedent probability that the patria potestas has exerted an influence at least upon existing rules. I have endeavored to prove elsewhere that the unlimited liability of an owner for the torts of his slave grew out of what had been merely a privilege of buying him off from a surrender to the vengeance of the offended party, in both the early Roman and the early German law. I have shown, also, how the unlimited liability thus established was extended by the prætor in certain cases to the misconduct of free servants.[1] Of course it is unlikely that the doctrines of our two parent systems should have been without effect upon their ofispring, the common law.
The Roman law, it is true, developed no such universal doctrines of agency as have been worked out in England. Only innkeepers and shipowners (nautae, caupones, stabularii) were made answerable for the misconduct of their free servants by the prætor's edict. It was not generally possible to acquire rights or to incur obligations through the acts of free persons.[2] But, so far as rights of property, possession,[3] or contract[4] could be acquired through others not slaves, the law undoubtedly started from slavery and the patria potestas.
It will be easy to see how this tended toward a fictitious identification of agent with principal, although within the limits to which it confined agency the Roman law had little need and made little use of the fiction. Ulpian says that the act of the family cannot be called the act of the paterfamilias unless it is done by his wish.[5] But as all the family rights and obligations were simply attributes of the persona of the family head, the summary expression for the members of the family as means of loss or gain would be that they sustained that persona pro hac vice. For that
