Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

Matrimony, as it was in Rome, will serve to give a clear idea of the ancient world’s conception of the family. In Rome, fathers often betrothed their sons when they were still children. They made them marry when they were still quite young, the males before they were twenty, the girls at about sixteen; and they had the right to oblige them at any moment to divorce each other, without being forced to give any reason or explanation. A man might be an exemplary husband, might live with his wife in the most perfect bliss. If the son’s wife, for one reason or another, did not suit the fancy of his father, the son might be obliged any day to put her away. Amongst others to whom this happened was no less a person than Tiberius, at a time when he had already become one of the first figures in the Empire, and had commanded armies in battle. He had married a daughter of Agrippa, and loved her devotedly. The couple were considered in Rome a model of affection and faithfulness. But, at a certain moment, Augustus, who was the adoptive father of Tiberius, judged that for political motives another marriage might have suited Tiberius better; and he, accordingly, obliged Tiberius to divorce her. Tiberius was so much upset, that—as Suetonius tells us—every time he met his first wife in society, he burst into tears—he, who was one of the most formidable generals of his time; so that Augustus had to take measures to prevent their meeting each other. And yet Tiberius had to give way; for his father, in the eyes of the law and in accordance with the ideas current in his time, was absolute arbiter in these matters! Not even a man in the circumstances of Tiberius, who had already been consul, could think of rebelling against the paternal authority.

These few facts suffice to prove how often the ideas which to one epoch and to one civilisation seem the most natural, the most evident, and the most simple, are, on the contrary, complex and difficult ideas, at which mankind has arrived only after a long effort, and weary struggles. Is there anything which seems to us more reasonable than to leave to young people, who wish to found a family, ample liberty of judgment and of choice in the matter of the person with whom they will have to pass their lives? Fathers, it is true, often help their sons by giving advice. They readily place at the disposal of their children their own experience. But it is only in very rare instances that they maintain a struggle à outrance, to withhold their children from a marriage on which their hearts are set, or to force on them a repugnant alliance. We consider that the individual’s happiness may depend to some extent on his marriage. It is, therefore, just that everybody should have ample liberty of choice. If the law purported to restore to fathers the right to make or unmake their sons’ marriages, we are convinced that at the present day the vast majority of fathers would refuse to assume such a responsibility, and would consider such a power unjust, excessive, and tyrannical. There is not a father to-day who, however averse he may be to a marriage desired by his son or daughter, does not end by telling him or her, provided a little firmness is shown in resisting his arguments, that after all it is not he, but his son or daughter who has to take the husband or wife in question. Indeed, this inclination to pliability on the part of fathers towards their sons is increasing every day. Every day sees a growing disinclination on the part of fathers to fetter, in a matter of such delicacy and of such importance to the personal happiness of the young, the freedom of the latter’s inclinations, the spontaneous rush of their feelings. Besides, what would be the use of having conquered liberty in so many other spheres, if it were withheld in this which, especially to the young, seems the most important of all: the liberty of yielding to the impulse of that passion which at a certain moment of life is the strongest of all, love?

And yet no idea would have appeared more absurd and scandalous to the men of the ancient world, the contemporaries of Pericles and Cæsar. The difference is so radical and profound that it must arise from important reasons. In fact, whoever compares ancient with modern times easily recognises that the rights of sentiment and the principles of liberty have been able to triumph in modern society only by virtue of a complete transformation in social customs and ordinances, which has stripped the family in our times of much of its social importance. To-day the family is purely and simply a form of social life in common. Man and woman cannot live solitary lives. A powerful instinct impels them towards each other. Even when the instinct is not felt, or is spent, the man needs to live in the company of other human beings, to have round him a circle of persons with whom he may find himself in relations of the closest intimacy. To-day the family performs this profoundly human office—this office and practically no other. Nowadays, man and woman study, work, take part in government, compete for the conquest of wealth and power, and exercise an influence on society—engage in all these activities quite outside the family.

But it was not so in ancient times. The family was then an independent economic organisation, in which the woman had a predominant part. She wove and spun, providing every member of the family with clothes. She made bread, she dried the fruits for the winter, she seized the right moment for laying in the necessary supplies of provisions—a most important task, in times in which commerce was much less developed than it is now. In poor or moderately wealthy families, the women wove and performed similar tasks with their own hands. Rich women learned to do these tasks as children, but later contented themselves with superintending their performance by women slaves or freedwomen. But, especially in the rich families, the woman could contribute a great deal to the prosperity or the ruin of the house, according as she was or was not active in the performance of her work, zealous in her surveillance, energetic and shrewd in giving her orders, moderate in her expenditure. Even to-day the woman can contribute a great deal, in the wealthy classes, to the prosperity of the family. But for this she requires only one negative virtue, for all that this virtue is not too common or easily acquired: to know how to confine her expenses within reasonable limits, and not to be too ready to gratify her whims. In ancient times, on the contrary, if a woman was to be useful to her family she needed as well a positive virtue: to know how to produce much and well. This explains how we come to know that certain emperors’ wives, Livia for instance, directed the weaving operations in their homes personally and with great zeal, and that Augustus was particular not to wear any togas but those woven in his house under the eyes of his wife. The Emperor and his wife by their example meant to recall to all the Roman women the duty of attending with zeal and alacrity to their domestic duties.

The ancient family, especially among the upper classes, was also a school. The ancient world had few institutions of public education; and private instruction did not reach a high level of development, except in the closing years of the Empire. Though Rome was the greatest military power in the world, the family took the place of military schools, which were then non-existent. The officers, who all belonged to the nobility, were prepared in the family. The father was the first military instructor of his sons, and on him fell the duty of making good soldiers of them. This, indeed, was one of the reasons why the aristocracy became indispensable to the Roman Empire; because it alone could prepare the officers and generals in the family.

In short, the ancient family was a sort of political society. Its members were bound to support and help each other in difficult and dangerous contingencies, to a much greater extent than they are nowadays. In political struggles, for instance, they were all of one colour. It was the most difficult and unheard of thing, if indeed not impossible, for a son or a son-in-law to attach himself to a different political party from that of his father or his father-in-law. If a member of the family was implicated in a lawsuit, or financially embarrassed, the family was bound to help him much more energetically, and at much greater risk, than in our day. We see this phenomenon most clearly in Roman history. After the aristocracy split into two opposing parties,—the conservative and the popular, to borrow modern expressions,—a man’s position in one or the other party was determined, almost always, by his birth. He belonged to one party or the other, according as his own family belonged to one or the other. Take Cæsar, for example. Why was Cæsar always a member of the democratic party, and bound to follow its vicissitudes, to the extent of becoming its leader and occasioning a civil war, overturning the ancient government, and establishing a dictatorship which, reviving as it did the saddest memories of Sulla’s reaction, could not fail to be odious to the majority, and which was the cause of Cæsar’s death? It was not the result of any special inclination or ambition of his own. Several times he tried to cross over to the other party, which had much more power and authority; or at any rate, to reach an understanding with it. But his effort was of no avail. He was the nephew of Marius, the most celebrated among the leaders of the popular party, and the one whom the other party most detested. The first impulse towards the whole of the great dictator’s extraordinary career was given by this relationship; he had in the end to bring about a second revolution, because his uncle had already caused one.

It is easy then to understand for what reason, in times in which the family performed so many social offices and was the pivot of so many interests, marriage was not considered as an act to be left to the full discretion of the young and to their love, and why the fathers were conceded the right to decide for themselves in such matters. A marriage involved grave political, economic, and moral responsibilities for the members of both clans. Therefore the young people were required to sacrifice to the common interests of their clan some part of their personal inclinations. In compensation, they had the advantage, in case of danger and of need, of being able to count on the family much more than they can nowadays; the family arrogated to itself, it is true, certain rights in connection with their choice, but in return did not abandon them to their fate in the hour of need.

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In short, the ancient marriage, organised though it was on lines which appear to us tyrannical, presented certain advantages which, if considered carefully, will be seen to compensate, at least in part, for the restricted liberty of choice. In the great transformation of civilisation of which the modern marriage is the product, men have, it is true, gained, on the one hand, greater liberty, but have lost, on the other, certain advantages which, in the ancient world, were guaranteed to them by the closer and more vigorous solidarity of the family. Women, on the contrary, have gained much more in the passage from the ancient to the modern world, because in exchange for what they have gained, they have lost practically nothing. The organisation of the modern family is distinguished from that of the ancient especially by the much greater concessions it makes to the woman. Feminists complain loudly of the present condition of woman. It is certain, however, at least to anyone with any knowledge of the history of the past, that at no epoch have women been so little oppressed by men and at no epoch have they enjoyed so many advantages as at present.

In fact, if in the ancient marriage so little liberty of choice was reserved to the man, it is easy to understand that not a ghost of it was conceded to the woman. The man had in addition one advantage. Constrained to submit to the will of the father as long as the latter was alive, he became, when the father died, absolute master of his wife, because he could then repudiate her and marry another, how and when he chose. The almost unfettered liberty of divorce, without any motive, or for the most futile motives, might well be some compensation to the man for the subjection in which the father, while alive, kept him. For the woman, there was no compensation at all. As long as her father lived, she had to obey the man to whom her father gave her. When the father was no more, she still remained in the power of her husband, who could not only repudiate her without any motive, but even marry her to another. In the history of Rome, especially, the men used and abused this privilege in a way, which to us seems sometimes ridiculous, sometimes revolting, and always extravagant. Especially in the last century of the republic, when the struggles between the parties became intense, the most eminent statesmen adopted the habit of consolidating their alliances with marriages. Therefore, we see every political vicissitude of importance shrouded in a curious web of divorces and marriages. Now one great man hands his wife over to another, now he marries the other’s daughter, now gives him his sister to wife. The poor women wander from one house to the other, change husbands from one year to another, with the same facility with which, nowadays, a traveller changes his inn. For all these marriages lasted only as long as the political combination on account of which they were entered into. When the combination was dissolved, divorce broke up all or most of these families, and the husbands set themselves to contract new marriages. It was so easy for the husband to get a divorce. He needed only to write his wife a letter announcing his intention!