ircus, the baths, and the places of assembly. Idle and
exceedingly ignorant, they quickly became corrupt. In the nobility,
women of fine character became the exception. The old discipline of
the family fell to the ground. The Roman law made the husband the
master of his wife; but a new form of marriage was invented which left
the woman under the authority of her father and gave no power to her
husband. To make their daughter still more independent, her parents
gave her a dower.

=Divorce.=--Sometimes the husband alone had the right to repudiate his
wife, but the custom was that this right should be exercised only in
the gravest circumstances. The woman gained the right of leaving her
husband, and so it became very easy to break a marriage. There was no
need of a judgment, or even of a motive. It was enough for the
discontented husband or wife to say to the other, "Take what belongs
to you, and return what is mine." After the divorce either could marry
again.

In the aristocracy, marriage came to be regarded as a passing union;
Sulla had five wives, Caesar four, Pompey five, and Antony four. The
daughter of Cicero had three husbands. Hortensius divorced his wife to
give her to a friend. "There are noble women," says Seneca, "who count
their age not by the years of the consuls, but by the husbands they
have had; they divorce to marry again, they marry to divorce again."

But this corruption affected hardly more than the nobles of Rome and
the upstarts. In the families of Italy and the provinces the more
serious manners of the old time still prevailed; but the discipline of
the family gradually slackened and the woman slowly freed herself from
the despotism of her husband.

FOOTNOTES:

[133] Another version is that he was sitting at the hearth roasting
turnips.--ED.

[134] 232 and 234 are both given as the date of Cato's birth. The latter
is the more probable.--ED.

[135] Nearly all Romans of Cato's time were husbandmen, tilling the soil
with their own hands.--ED.

[136] This taste for useless magnificence is exhibited in the stories of
the Thousand and One Nights.

[137] Cato the Elder had a horror of the Greeks. He said to his son: "I
will tell what I have seen in Athens. This race is the most perverse and
intractable. Listen to me as to an oracle: whenever this people teaches
us its arts it will corrupt everything."

[138] "Schola," from which we derive "school," signified leisure.

[139] Also to write