and ours, that our temples, being more agreeable and precious, may
predispose them to protect us. It being understood and agreed that we
dedicate to them larger altars, grander games."[13]

It was with that formula that Rome conquered the world. She omitted it but
once, at the walls of Jerusalem. The deity whom she forgot there to
invoke, entered her temples and overthrew them.

Meanwhile the flatteries of the formula no known god could resist. In
triumph Rome escorted one after another away, leaving the forsaken but
doorposts to worship, and stimulating in them the desire to become part of
the favored city where their divinities were. But in that city everything
was closed to them. Deserted by their gods, divested, in consequence, of
religion and, therefore, of every right, they could no longer pray, the
significance of signs and omens was lost to them, they were plebs. But the
Romans, who had captivated the divinities, and who, through them, alone
possessed the incommunicable science of augury, were patrician. In that
distinction is the origin of Rome's aristocracy and her might.

The might pre-existed in the despotic organization of the home. There the
slaves and children were but things that could be sold or killed. They
were the chattels of the paterfamilias, whose wife was a being without
influence or initiative, a creature in the hands of a man, unable to leave
him for any cause whatever, a domestic animal over whom he had the right
of life and death, a ward who, regarded as mentally irresponsible--_propter
animi laevitatem_--might not escape his power even though he died, a woman
whom he could repudiate at will and of whom he was owner and judge.[14]

Such was the law and such it remained, a dead letter, nullified by a
reason profoundly human, which the legislature had overlooked, but which
the Asiatics had foreseen and which they combated with the seraglio where
woman, restricted to a fraction of her lord, exhausted herself in
contending even for that. But Rome, in making the paterfamilias despotic,
made him monogamous as well. He was strictly restricted to one wife. As a
consequence, the materfamilias, while theoretically a slave, became
practically what woman with her husband to herself and no rivals to fear
almost inevitably does become--supreme. Legally she was the property of
her husband, actually he was hers. When he returned from forage or from
war, she alone had the right to greet him, she alone might