the woman wide liberty, placing her in contact with
other men, opening to her the doors of theaters and public resorts,
leading her into the midst of all the temptations and illusions of life.

The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For the
very reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, the
Romans were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble;
indeed, even when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved to
the man the right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely because
that particular marriage did not suit his political interests. And the
marriage could be dissolved by the most expeditious means, without
formality--by a mere letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that love
might outweigh reason and calculation in the young, the law granted to
the father the right to give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law,
instead of leaving it to the son; so that the father was able to make
and unmake the marriages of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting,
without taking their will into account.

The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereign
equality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was,
notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection of
her husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that she
should close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth as
a bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say,
drive her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where her
children were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage.
So it was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics were
much perturbed and shifting, there were not a few women of the
aristocracy who had changed husbands three or four times, and that not
for lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because their
fathers, their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain moment
besought or constrained them to contract some particular marriage that
should serve their own political ends.

It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman from
austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how it
was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation,
to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her must
have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoys
today, since it lacked its mode