rn checks and balances, such as personal
choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages are
nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or,
rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by which
it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man.

In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understand
the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desired
woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of the
family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead,
it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little
danger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for
the family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome
was unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it
did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total
self-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own
aspirations and passions, in behalf of the race.

[Illustration: Julius Caesar]

This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental
world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping her
ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought to
secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education,
religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste,
faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticem