iend Hortensius, and took her back
after Hortensius's death.[1250] Sempronius Sophus divorced his
wife because she went to the games without his consent.[1251]
Women also divorced their husbands in the first century of the
Christian era. Juvenal mentions a woman who had eight husbands in
five years.[1252] Tertullian, writing from the standpoint of a
Christian ascetic, said that "divorce is the product of
marriage."[1253] Jerome knew of a woman who had married her
twenty-third husband, she being his twenty-first wife.[1254]
Seneca said that the women reckoned the years by their husbands,
not by the consuls.[1255] The women got equality by leveling
downwards. "The new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious
freedom equal to her husband's."[1256] These cases belong to the
degeneration of the mores at the period. As they are astonishing,
we are in danger of giving them too much force in the notion we
form of the mores of that time. All the writers repeat them. "In
the _Agricola_, and in Seneca's letters to Marcia and Helvia, we
can see that, even at the darkest hour, there were homes with an
atmosphere of old Roman self-restraint and sobriety, where good
women wielded a powerful influence over their husbands and sons,
and where the examples of the old republic were used, as Biblical
characters with us, to fortify virtue."[1257]

+392. Rabbis on divorce.+ The school of the Rabbi Shammai said, "A man
must not repudiate his wife unless he find in her actual immodesty."
Rabbi Jochanan said, "Repudiation is an odious thing." Rabbi Eliezer
said, "When a first wife is put away the very altar sheds tears."[1258]

+393.+ The early Roman mores about marriage were very rigid and
pitiless. It was in the family, and therefore under the control of the
head of the family. No law forbade divorce, because such a law would
have been an invasion of the authority of the male head of the family,
but the censors, in the name of public opinion, long prevented any
frivolous dissolution of marriage. Few divorces occurred, and then only
for weighty reason, after the family council had found them sufficient.
There was some stain attaching to a second marriage, after the death of
the first spouse. Even men were subject to this stain.[1259]

+394. Pair marriage and divorce.+ With the rise of pair marriage came
divorce for the woman, upon due reason, as much as for the man. Hence
freer d