NO WOOING AND CHOICE
Yet amid all these domestic virtues and family affections we search in vain for the prevalence of Romantic Love. We have already seen that for the growth of this sentiment something more is needed than domestic affection, and that something is comprised in the word Wooing. There was no wooing at Rome. In most cases, the father took his daughter’s heart in his hand, and, treating it as a piece of personal property, bestowed it on the suitor who best “suited” him. “From the earliest times,” says Ploss, “it was customary in Rome to marry girls when they had barely reached their twelfth or thirteenth year; engagements were probably made at a still earlier age. Although legally the daughter’s consent was required, in actual practice she exercised no choice; her extreme youth in itself preventing this. Often a marriage contract was a mere matter of agreement between two families in which love and personal favour were disregarded; nor did even the betrothal bring the future couple into closer intimacy.” With reference to the laws of the Twelve Tablets, M. Legouvé remarks, in his Histoire Morale des Femmes, that “Rome was worthy of Athens. Not only did a Roman father dispose of his daughter against her inclination, but he even had the right to dissolve a marriage into which she had entered, and to take away from his daughter the husband he had given her, whom she loved, and by whom she had children.” In justice, however, it must be added that this latter right was rarely exercised; but the fact that the Romans could tolerate the very notion of such a law shows what little account was made of love.
Another absurd impediment to personal choice was raised by the Theodosian Code, which compelled a girl to marry a man who had the same calling as her father—a custom which, indeed, seems to prevail in parts of Europe to the present day, and which is as incompatible with Love as the ancient Hebrew rule that the oldest daughter must be married first—a rule which compelled Jacob to marry Leah before he could get his beloved Rachel, for whom he had laboured seven years. “First come first served” is a rule which Cupid rarely heeds in the case of several sisters.
In the case of the men it is possible that Sexual Selection occasionally came into play, when early betrothals did not prevent it; for the old Romans were too rational to anticipate the silly and criminal French custom of bargaining for a bride before they had even seen her. In such a case, if the bride was attractive, the suitor’s imagination, dwelling on the fact that this vision of loveliness was to be his own, exclusively, for ever, may have been warmed for a moment with something very like romantic sentiment. But beauty in Rome, Ovid informs us, was very rare—"How few are able to boast it!"—so that even with the men who had a choice, Individual Preference based on Personal Beauty could have been rarely exercised. And as for the women who had no choice, they may have felt a temporary elation on first meeting their destined husbands; but this feeling was merely the manifestation of a vague instinct, comparable to the “love” which a bevy of modern boarding-school “buds” show for the only man they are allowed to see regularly,—their ugly teacher,—and the unreality and silliness of which they laugh at themselves when they are at last allowed to meet the man of their own, individual, free choice, who teaches them the feeling of real Romantic Love.