In primitive Greece the daughter was purchased either by presents to the father or by services rendered to him.[335] The father could marry his daughter as he thought well, and in default of a son could leave her by will, with the heritage of which she formed a part, to a stranger.[336]
At Rome also the daughter was the property of her father, and until the time of Antoninus the father had the right to re-marry her when the husband had been absent three years.[337] Marriage by purchase had certainly been the primitive form of the conjugal contract. In reality the confarreatio, a solemn and religious union in the presence of ten witnesses, was a patrician marriage. The usus, or the consecration of a free union after a year of cohabitation, strongly resembles the Polynesian marriage. But the most common conjugal form, the one which succeeded the usus, and surely preceded the confarreatio, was marriage by purchase, the coemptio.
Coemption ended in time by becoming purely symbolic; the wife was delivered to the husband, who, as a formality, gave her a few pieces of money; but the ceremony is none the less eloquent, and it proves clearly that in principle the woman had been, at Rome as elsewhere, assimilated by the parents to a thing, to a venal property. When at Athens and at Rome an effort was made to give the married woman a less subordinate position, nothing more was done than opposing money to money by inventing the dowry marriage; and hence resulted other inconveniences, on which Latin writers have largely dilated, and which we can easily study to-day from life. But for the present I must not speak of them. It suffices to have proved that all over the earth, in all times and among all races, marriage by purchase has been widely practised.
Now, the custom of marriage by purchase has a very clear and very important signification from a moral and social point of view. It implies a profound contempt for woman, and her complete assimilation to chattels, to cattle, and to things in general. On this point the Roman law leaves no room for ambiguity, since it makes no essential difference between the marital law and the law of property. In regard to the woman, as in regard to goods, possession or use, continued for a year, gave a right of ownership. When applied to things, this possession is called usucapion; applied to the woman, it is called usus.[338] The difference between the terms is slight; between the facts there is none. In reality the wife and the child, especially the female child, have been the first property possessed by man, which has even implanted in the savage mind the taste for possession, and the pretension to use and abuse the things left entirely to his mercy. At Rome this became by the jus quiritium, for the woman the manus of the husband, and for property the jus utendi et abutendi of the proprietor. But this abuse, and this use, nearly always equally an abuse also, have contributed not a little to deprave man and to render him, from the origin of societies until our own day, refractory to ideas of equity and justice, especially in what relates to the condition of woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[267] Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. i. p. 156.
[268] Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, etc., p. 371.
[269] De Rochas, Nouv. Calédonie, p. 231.
[270] Burchell, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xxvi. p. 330.
[271] Bowdich, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xxviii. p. 430.