The woman, without contracting
matrimony, gave herself by _coemptio_ (purchase) into the _manus_ of a
person of her trust, on the agreement that the _coemptionator_ would
free her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.

[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the bride
entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]

There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal
condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost
complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social
equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundus
muliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig
ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never
willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them
the ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society
were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover,
the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and
Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as
desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor
yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the
comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We
know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not
only learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies,
these,--but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in
philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers
of the Orient.

Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on
equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves
that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received and
enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals
and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly
relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man,
recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In
short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable
prisoner.

She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was
never excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as
best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for
spectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and have
r