ons, and as its further object the providing of persons legally
qualified to perform the most important sacra of the state; so
marriage, in whatever form, had as its object at once the maintenance
of the family and its sacra and the production of men able to serve
the State in peace and war. To be a Roman citizen you must be the
product of a iustum matrimonium. From this initial fact flow all the
_iura_ or rights which together make up citizenship; whether the
private rights, which enable you to hold and transfer and to inherit
property under the shelter of the Roman law,[209] or the public
rights, which protect your person against violence and murder, and
enable you to give your vote in the public assembly and to seek
election to magistracies.[210]

Marriage then was a matter of the utmost importance in Roman life, and
in all the forms of it we find this importance marked by due solemnity
of ritual. In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride could
be brought under the hand of her husband, viz., _coemptio_ and _usus_,
with which we are not here specially concerned; for long before the
last century of the Republic all three methods had become practically
obsolete, or were only occasionally used for particular purposes. In
the course of time it had been found more convenient for a woman to
remain after her marriage in the hand of her father, or if he were
dead, in the "tutela" of a guardian (tutor), than to pass into that
of her husband; for in the latter case her property became absolutely
his. The natural tendency to escape from the restrictions of marital
_manus_ may be illustrated by a case such as the following: a woman
under the _tutela_ of a guardian wishes to marry; if she does so, and
passes under the _manus_ of her husband, her _tutor_ loses all control
over her property, which may probably be of great importance for
the family she is leaving; he therefore naturally objects to such a
marriage, and urges that she should be married without _manus_.[211]
In fact the interests of her own family would often clash with those
of the one she was about to enter, and a compromise could be effected
by the abandonment of marriage _cum manu_.

Now this, the abandonment of marriage _cum manu_, means simply that
certain legal consequences of the marriage ceremony were dropped,
and with them just those parts of the ceremony which produced these
consequences. Otherwise the marriage was absolutely as valid for all
purp