ntiquity, and the choice of
matrimonial laws in the Code and Pandects, is directed by the earthly
motives of justice, policy, and the natural freedom of both sexes. [122]

[Footnote 120: On the Oppian law we may hear the mitigating speech of
Vaerius Flaccus, and the severe censorial oration of the elder Cato,
(Liv. xxxiv. l--8.) But we shall rather hear the polished historian of
the eighth, than the rough orators of the sixth, century of Rome. The
principles, and even the style, of Cato are more accurately preserved by
Aulus Gellius, (x. 23.)]

[Footnote 121: For the system of Jewish and Catholic matrimony, see
Selden, (Uxor Ebraica, Opp. vol. ii. p. 529--860,) Bingham, (Christian
Antiquities, l. xxii.,) and Chardon, (Hist. des Sacremens, tom. vi.)]

[Footnote 122: The civil laws of marriage are exposed in the Institutes,
(l. i. tit. x.,) the Pandects, (l. xxiii. xxiv. xxv.,) and the Code, (l.
v.;) but as the title de ritu nuptiarum is yet imperfect, we are obliged
to explore the fragments of Ulpian (tit. ix. p. 590, 591,) and the
Collatio Legum Mosaicarum, (tit. xvi. p. 790, 791,) with the notes of
Pithaeus and Schulting. They find in the Commentary of Servius (on the
1st Georgia and the 4th Aeneid) two curious passages.]

Besides the agreement of the parties, the essence of every rational
contract, the Roman marriage required the previous approbation of the
parents. A father might be forced by some recent laws to supply the
wants of a mature daughter; but even his insanity was not gradually
allowed to supersede the necessity of his consent. The causes of the
dissolution of matrimony have varied among the Romans; [123] but the
most solemn sacrament, the confarreation itself, might always be done
away by rites of a contrary tendency. In the first ages, the father of a
family might sell his children, and his wife was reckoned in the number
of his children: the domestic judge might pronounce the death of the
offender, or his mercy might expel her from his bed and house; but the
slavery of the wretched female was hopeless and perpetual, unless he
asserted for his own convenience the manly prerogative of divorce.
[1231] The warmest applause has been lavished on the virtue of the
Romans, who abstained from the exercise of this tempting privilege above
five hundred years: [124] but the same fact evinces the unequal terms of
a connection in which the slave was unable to renounce her tyrant, and
the tyrant was unwilling to r