Cato the Censor, "in an act of
infidelity, you would kill her with impunity without a trial; but if
she were to catch you she would not venture to touch you with a
finger, and, indeed, she has no right." It is true that divorce was
not frequent.[296] Monogamy was strictly enforced. At no period of
Roman history are there any traces of polygamy or concubinage.[297]
But such strictness of the moral code seems to have been barren in its
benefit to women. The terrible right of _manus_ was vested in the
husband and gave him complete power of correction over the wife. In
grave cases the family tribunal had to be consulted. "Slaves and
women," says Mommsen, "were not reckoned as being properly members of
the community," and for this reason any criminal act committed by them
was judged not openly by the State, but by the male members of the
woman's family. The legal right of the husband to beat his wife was
openly recognised. Thus Egnatius was praised when, surprising his wife
in the act of tasting wine,[298] he beat her to death. And St. Monica
consoles certain wives, whose faces bore the mark of marital
brutality, by saying to them: "Take care to control your tongues....
It is the duty of servants to obey their masters ... you have made a
contract of servitude."[299] Such was the marriage law in the early
days of Rome's history.

Now it followed almost necessarily that under such arbitrary
regulations of the sexual relationship some way of escape should be
sought. We have seen how the Athenian husbands found relief from the
restrictions of legal marriage with the free _hetairae_. But in Rome
the development of the freedom of love, with the corresponding
advancement of the position of woman, followed a different course. The
stranger-woman never attained a prominent place in Roman society. It
is the citizen-women alone who are conspicuous in history. Here,
relief was gained for the Roman wives as well as for the husbands, by
what we may call a clever escape from marriage under the right of the
husband's _manus_. This is so important that I must ask the reader
deeply to consider it. The ideal of equality and fellowship between
women and men in marriage can be realised only among a people who are
sufficiently civilised to understand the necessity for the development
and modification of legal restrictions that have become outworn and
useless. Wherever the laws relating to marriage and divorce are
arbitrary and unchanging there wo