 According to Cato (2nd century BC), a husband had an ancient right "(ius)" to kill his wife if he caught her in the act of adultery.The existence of this "right" has been questioned; if it did exist, it was a matter of custom and not statute law, and probably only applied to those in the "manus" form of marriage, which had become vanishingly rare by the Late Republic (147–27 BC), when a married woman always remained legally a part of her own family.No source records the justified killing of a woman for adultery by either a father or husband during the Republic.