ering his brother, Polynices, that Antigonus, that model of fraternal piety, buried the corpse in face of the orders of Creon, King of Thebes, and was condemned to be buried alive. The parricide was quite as severely pun ished at Rome, but the law of the Twelve Tables had a special and particularly severe sentence for the one qui parcntem nccaverit by limiting in the sense of the law the word parcntem to the father or the mother. The criminal had his eyes bound, and after hav ing been sewn into a sack made of leather, was thrown into the Tiber or the sea. At a later date, the law Pompeia increased the severity of the sentence in cases of par ricide. The criminal, after having been beaten until blood flowed, was placed in a sack, and with him a dog, monkey, rooster and a viper, and he was then thrown into the Tiber or into the sea. Corvin, an old author ity, has attributed a symbolic signification to the choice of these animals. For, according to him, the dog was the symbol of rage, the monkey represented man deprived of reason, the rooster was the symbol of wickedness be cause he often beats his mother, and the vi per represented cruelty because when born it rends asunder the belly from which it is born. In whatever way one may accept this interpretation, it is none the less true that this punishment was both unique and excep tional. It was exclusively reserved for the parricide, and for a long time such criminals knew no other kind of death, but after a time they were condemned to be turned over to the beasts or burned at- the stake so that these three kinds of punishment co-existed, and it would appear that they were the only ones employed during the early part of the Christian era. During the Middle Ages, the horror in spired by the parricide did not diminish and the punishments inflicted were not lessened. Generally speaking, all the Latin countries used the same punishment as employed at
Rome; the laws transported into the pro vinces of the empire by the Romans were preserved by tradition and custom governed the law. Other races, who were more fortu nate, had their own codes, but regarding the punishment of the parricide, these codes generally copied the Roman law. Thus, in Spain, the Partidas, which date back to the ißth Century, simply reproduced the law of the Twelve Tables. In Italy the same an cient penalties were applied. However, at this time, they began to torture the guilty at the wheel and by fire. In Germany, the parricide was punished according to the Roman custom. In Saxony especially, the ancient Germanic custom of delivering the parricide to his relations for the application of justice finally put took the place of Roman tradition. The criminal tied in a leather sack was thrown into a deep bog, which, according to an old journal, signifies that this custom was a symbolic one, namely, that the body of a parricide should not soil the sight of man, nor that of the sun. moon, the day or the night. In France, as in Judea and in Athens, the ancient laws were silent regarding the parri cide. The Capitularies of Charlemagne do not mention it, and a contemporary of Feu dal France has said that there was no law which expressly mentions the crime of par ricide, so that there were no other rules to follow than those established by the juris prudence of decisions. As to the decisions, they closely followed the Roman tradition. It is probable that this was also the condition of the law in France in the I5th Century. We have more precise and complete notions relative to the matter given us by Damhouder in the work already alluded to, where it will be found that even at the end of the loth Century nothing had been changed rela tive to the punishment of parricides either in France or in Holland. The applications of the law Pompeia and of Canon law, which was only a reproduction of the former as re
