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Page 8
It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of
solving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all
civilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest,
difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the
unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the
modern world. And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all,
in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing
to deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a r�gime of tyranny in
order to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yet
when liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy her
personal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does,
and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race.
She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises a
greater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthier
classes, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities
that bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys,
however vast his egoism, he is always constrained in a certain measure
to check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging,
and defending against rivals his social, economic, and political
situation.
But the woman? If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorized
to live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinion
that imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest,
weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches,
homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instincts
latent in every human being? She runs the mighty danger of changing
into an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courted
and possessed of power--at least as long as her beauty lasts--the more
she ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her own
pleasure.
This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by strong social
discipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesive
forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is
relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and
voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.
[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]
One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to
find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none
other than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profound
in the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for a
discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the
gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured
exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the
European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial
frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the
great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.
We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the
world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the
inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in
life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before
the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose
ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they
tempered their minds.
II
LIVIA AND JULIA
In the year 38 B.C. it suddenly became known at Rome that C. Julius
Caesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of the
triumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus in
the military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, had
sent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religious
authority of the state, a curious question. It was this: Might a
divorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriage
with another man before the birth of her child? The pontifical college
replied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriage
would not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be no
impediment. A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus had
divorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman of
nineteen. Livia's physical condition was precisely that concerning
which the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter into
this marriage she had obtained a divorce from Tiberius Claudius Nero.
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