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Page 6
Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quite
in ruin, owed his money to the bequest of a Greek woman whose wealth
had the most impure origin that the possessions of a woman can possibly
have. Is this tradition only the invention of the enemies of the
terrible dictator? In any event, how people of good standing felt in
this matter in normal times is shown by the life of Cicero.
Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable,
and well educated, but not rich. That he was able to pursue his
brilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to his
marriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he,
and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome. But it is well known
that after long living together happily enough, as far as can be
judged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46
B.C. ended by being divorced. The reasons for the divorce are not
exactly clear, but from Cicero's letters it appears that financial
motives and disputes were not wanting. It seems that during the civil
wars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent he
desired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulent
years she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertain
political fortune of her husband.
[Illustration: The so-called bust of Cicero. All but the head is
modern. Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the Palazzo
Barberini.]
Cicero's divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to the
gravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage. He
was the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia,
and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with this
seventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate the
great writer.
This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic,
prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the
Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of
the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even
Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and
combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state
those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times
literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated,
encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life,
should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the
great diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which
modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in
its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that
every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the
opposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal
attraction impels him--these are the supreme blossoms of modern
individualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in the
rich soil of modern civilization.
The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectual
development of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline that
poorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had to
impose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard and
barbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and the
majority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, have
conceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as a
duty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity of
the aged, and these have endeavored to promote the success of marriage
not merely to the satisfaction of a single passion, usually as brief as
it is ardent, but according to a calculated equilibrium of qualities,
tendencies, and material means.
The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variance
with human nature, but they are the principles to which all peoples
wishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion as
mobile as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when the
family was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because it
held within itself many functions, educational, industrial, and
political, now performed by other institutions. But reason itself is
not perfect. Like passion, it has its weakness, and marriage so
conceived by Rome produced grave inconveniences, which one must know in
order to understand the story, in many respects tragic, of the women of
the Caesars.
The first difficulty was the early age at which marriages took place
among the aristocracy. The boys were almost always married at from
eighteen to twenty; the girls, at from thirteen to fifteen. This
disadvantage is to be found in all society in which marriage is
arranged by the parents, because it would be next to impossible to
induce young people to yield to the will of their elders in an affair
in which the passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reach
the age when the passions are strongest and the will has become
independent Hardly out of childhood, the man and the woman are
naturally more tractable. On the other hand, it is easy to see how
many dangers threatened such youthful marriages in a society where
matrimony gave to the woman wide liberty, placing her in contact with
other men, opening to her the doors of theaters and public resorts,
leading her into the midst of all the temptations and illusions of life.
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