ry"
(Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, vii, 11). It was about this time that
the Oppian law came up for repeal. The stipulations of this law were as
follows: No woman should have in her dress above half an ounce of gold,
nor wear a garment of different colors, nor ride in a carriage in the
city or in any town, or within a mile of it, unless upon occasion of a
public sacrifice. This sumptuary law was passed during the public
distress consequent upon Hannibal's invasion of Italy. It was repealed
eighteen years afterward, upon petition of the Roman ladies, though
strenuously opposed by Cato (Livy 34, 1; Tacitus, Annales, 3, 33). The
increase of wealth among the Romans, the spoils wrung from their victims
as a portion of the price of defeat, the contact of the legions with the
softer, more civilized, more sensuous races of Greece and Asia Minor,
laid the foundations upon which the social evil was to rise above the
city of the seven hills, and finally crush her. In the character of the
Roman there was but little of tenderness. The well-being of the state
caused him his keenest anxiety. One of the laws of the twelve tables,
the "Coelebes Prohibito," compelled the citizen of manly vigor to satisfy
the promptings of nature in the arms of a lawful wife, and the tax on
bachelors is as ancient as the times of Furius Camillus. "There was an
ancient law among the Romans," says Dion Cassius, lib. xliii, "which
forbade bachelors, after the age of twenty-five, to enjoy equal political
rights with married men. The old Romans had passed this law in hope
that, in this way, the city of Rome, and the Provinces of the Roman
Empire as well, might be insured an abundant population." The increase,
under the Emperors, of the number of laws dealing with sex is an accurate
mirror of conditions as they altered and grew worse. The "Jus Trium
Librorum," under the empire, a privilege enjoyed by those who had three
legitimate children, consisting, as it did, of permission to fill
a public office before the twenty-fifth year of one's age, and in
freedom from personal burdens, must have had its origin in the grave
apprehensions for the future, felt by those in power. The fact that this
right was sometimes conferred upon those who were not legally entitled
to benefit by it, makes no difference in this inference. Scions of
patrician families imbibed their lessons from the skilled voluptuaries
of Greece and the Levant and in their intrigues with th