obust progeny, Lycurgus had delayed
the season of marriage: it was fixed by Numa at the tender age of twelve
years, that the Roman husband might educate to his will a pure and
obedient virgin. [115] According to the custom of antiquity, he bought
his bride of her parents, and she fulfilled the coemption by purchasing,
with three pieces of copper, a just introduction to his house and
household deities. A sacrifice of fruits was offered by the pontiffs in
the presence of ten witnesses; the contracting parties were seated on
the same sheep-skin; they tasted a salt cake of far or rice; and this
confarreation, [116] which denoted the ancient food of Italy, served as
an emblem of their mystic union of mind and body. But this union on the
side of the woman was rigorous and unequal; and she renounced the name
and worship of her father's house, to embrace a new servitude, decorated
only by the title of adoption, a fiction of the law, neither rational
nor elegant, bestowed on the mother of a family [117] (her proper
appellation) the strange characters of sister to her own children,
and of daughter to her husband or master, who was invested with the
plenitude of paternal power. By his judgment or caprice her behavior was
approved, or censured, or chastised; he exercised the jurisdiction of
life and death; and it was allowed, that in the cases of adultery
or drunkenness, [118] the sentence might be properly inflicted. She
acquired and inherited for the sole profit of her lord; and so clearly
was woman defined, not as a person, but as a thing, that, if the
original title were deficient, she might be claimed, like other
movables, by the use and possession of an entire year. The inclination
of the Roman husband discharged or withheld the conjugal debt, so
scrupulously exacted by the Athenian and Jewish laws: [119] but as
polygamy was unknown, he could never admit to his bed a fairer or a more
favored partner.

[Footnote 115: Dionys. Hal. l. ii. p. 92, 93. Plutarch, in Numa, p.
140-141.]

[Footnote 116: Among the winter frunenta, the triticum, or bearded
wheat; the siligo, or the unbearded; the far, adorea, oryza, whose
description perfectly tallies with the rice of Spain and Italy. I adopt
this identity on the credit of M. Paucton in his useful and laborious
Metrologie, (p. 517--529.)]

[Footnote 117: Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae, xviii. 6) gives
a ridiculous definition of Aelius Melissus, Matrona, quae semel
materfamilias quae s