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Page 7
The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For the
very reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, the
Romans were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble;
indeed, even when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved to
the man the right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely because
that particular marriage did not suit his political interests. And the
marriage could be dissolved by the most expeditious means, without
formality--by a mere letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that love
might outweigh reason and calculation in the young, the law granted to
the father the right to give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law,
instead of leaving it to the son; so that the father was able to make
and unmake the marriages of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting,
without taking their will into account.
The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereign
equality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was,
notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection of
her husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that she
should close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth as
a bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say,
drive her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where her
children were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage.
So it was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics were
much perturbed and shifting, there were not a few women of the
aristocracy who had changed husbands three or four times, and that not
for lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because their
fathers, their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain moment
besought or constrained them to contract some particular marriage that
should serve their own political ends.
It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman from
austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how it
was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation,
to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her must
have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoys
today, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as personal
choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages are
nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or,
rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by which
it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man.
In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understand
the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desired
woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of the
family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead,
it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little
danger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for
the family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome
was unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it
did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total
self-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own
aspirations and passions, in behalf of the race.
[Illustration: Julius Caesar]
This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental
world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping her
ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought to
secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education,
religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste,
faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent
dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the
liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of
such liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.
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