evous weight of having
tried but failed to govern mankind. But to have clung to high places; to
have sat in the highest seat of all with infinite honor; to have been
called by others, and, worse still, to have called myself, the savior of
my country; to have believed in myself that I was sufficient, that I
alone could do it, that I could bring back, by my own justice and
integrity, my erring countrymen to their former simplicity--and then to
have found myself fixed in a little town, just in Italy, waiting for the
great conqueror, who though my friend in things social was opposed to me
body and soul as to rules of life--that, I say, must have been beyond
the bitterness of death.

During this year he had made himself acquainted with the details of that
affair, whatever it might be, which led to his divorce soon after his
return to Rome. He had lived about thirty years with his wife, and the
matter could not but have been to him the cause of great unhappiness.
Terentia was not only the mother of his children, but she had been to
him also the witness of his rise in life and the companion of his fall.
He was one who would naturally learn to love those with whom he was
conversant. He seems to have projected himself out of his own time into
those modes of thought which have come to us with Christianity, and such
a separation from this woman after an intercourse of so many years must
have been very grievous to him. All married Romans underwent divorce
quite as a matter of course. There were many reasons. A young wife is
more agreeable to the man's taste than one who is old. A rich wife is
more serviceable than a poor. A new wife is a novelty. A strange wife is
an excitement. A little wife is a relief to one overburdened with the
flesh; a buxom wife to him who has become tired of the pure spirit.
Xanthippe asks too much, while Griselda is too tranquil. And then, as a
man came up in the world, causes for divorce grew without even the
trouble of having to search for faults. Caesar required that his wife
should not be ill spoken of, and therefore divorced her. Pompey cemented
the Triumvirate with a divorce. We cannot but imagine that, when men had
so much the best of it in the affairs of life, a woman had always the
worst of it in these enforced separations. But as the wind is tempered
to the shorn lamb, so were divorces made acceptable to Roman ladies. No
woman was disgraced by a divorce, and they who gave over their husbands
at t