aligula that it was uncertain which were viler, the
unions he contracted, their brevity, or their cause. With such examples,
it was inevitable that commoner people united but to part, and that,
insensibly, the law annulled as a caprice a clause that defined marriage
as the inseparable life.[22]

Under the Caesars marriage became a temporary arrangement, abandoned and
re-established as often as one liked. Seneca said that women of rank
counted their years by their husbands. Juvenal said that it was in that
fashion that they counted their days. Tertullian added that divorce was
the result of marriage. Divorce, however, was not obligatory. Matrimony
was. According to the Lex Pappea Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was not
married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry, whoso, though
married, was childless, _ipso facto_ became a public enemy, incapable of
inheriting or of serving the State. To this law--an Augustan
hypocrisy--only a technical attention was paid. Men married just enough to
gain a position or inherit a legacy. The next day they got a divorce. At
the moment of need a child was adopted. The moment passed the brat was
disowned. As with men so with women. The univira became the many-husbanded
wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all, one who, to escape the
consequences of the lex Pappea Poppoea, hired a man to loan her his
name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she
liked, to imitate men at their worst, to fight like them and with them
for power, to dabble in the bloody dramas of State, to climb on the throne
and kill there or be killed; perhaps, less ambitiously, whipping her
slaves, summoning the headsman to them, quieting her nerves with drink,
appearing on the stage, in the arena even, contending as a gladiator
there, and remaining a patrician meanwhile.

In those days a sin was a prayer, and a prayer, Perseus said, was an
invocation at which a meretrix would blush to hear pronounced aloud.
Religion sanctioned anything. The primal gods, supplemented with the lords
and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every
superstition, the temple of every crime. Asiatic monsters, which Hellenic
poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native
hideousness unchanged. It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome
transformed. Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he
tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind t