s to be, with a high degree of freedom in the marriage
system. Roman law had no power of intervening in the formation of
marriages and there were no legal forms of marriage. The Romans recognized
that marriage is a fact and not a mere legal form; in marriage by _usus_
there was no ceremony at all; it was constituted by the mere fact of
living together for a whole year; yet such marriage was regarded as just
as legal and complete as if it had been inaugurated by the sacred rite of
_confarreatio_. Marriage was a matter of simple private agreement in which
the man and the woman approached each other on a footing of equality. The
wife retained full control of her own property; the barbarity of admitting
an action for restitution of conjugal rights was impossible, divorce was a
private transaction to which the wife was as fully entitled as the
husband, and it required no inquisitorial intervention of magistrate or
court; Augustus ordained, indeed, that a public declaration was necessary,
but the divorce itself was a private legal act of the two persons
concerned.[316] It is interesting to note this enlightened conception of
marriage prevailing in the greatest and most masterful Empire which has
ever dominated the world, at the period not indeed of its greatest
force,--for the maximum of force and the maximum of expansion, the bud and
the full flower, are necessarily incompatible,--but at the period of its
fullest development. In the chaos that followed the dissolution of the
Empire Roman law remained as a precious legacy to the new developing
nations, but its influence was inextricably mingled with that of
Christianity, which, though not at the first anxious to set up marriage
laws of its own, gradually revealed a growing ascetic feeling hostile
alike to the dignity of the married woman and the freedom of marriage and
divorce.[317] With that influence was combined the influence, introduced
through the Bible, of the barbaric Jewish marriage-system conferring on
the husband rights in marriage and divorce which were totally denied to
the wife; this was an influence which gained still greater force at the
Reformation when the authority once accorded to the Church was largely
transformed to the Bible. Finally, there was in a great part of Europe,
including the most energetic and expansive parts, the influence of the
Germans, an influence still more primitive than that of the Jews,
involving the conception of the wife as almost her h