In the absence of all true religious feeling, the possession of children was the surest pledge to the state of the public morality of her citizens. By the renunciation of marriage, which it became the fashion to avow and boast, public confidence was shaken to its centre. On the other hand, the women themselves, insulted by the neglect of the other sex, and exasperated at the inferiority of their position, revenged themselves by holding the institution of legitimate marriage with almost equal aversion. They were indignant at the servitude to which it bound them, the state of dependence and legal incapacity in which it kept them; for it left them without rights, and without the enjoyment of their own property; it reduced them to the status of mere children, or rather transferred them from the power of their parent to that of their husband. They continued through life, in spite of the mockery of respect with which the laws surrounded them, things rather than persons; things that could be sold, transferred backwards and forwards, from one master to another, for the sake of their dowry or even their powers of child-bearing. For the smallest fault they might be placed on trial before their husbands, or if one were more than usually considerate in judging upon his own case, before a council of their relations. They might be beaten with rods, even to death itself, for adultery or any other heinous crime; while they might suffer divorce from the merest caprice, and simply for the alleged departure of their youth or beauty.
The latter centuries of the Roman commonwealth are filled with the domestic struggles occasioned by the obstinacy with which political restrictions were maintained upon the most sensitive of the social relations. Beginning with wild and romantic legends, the account of these troubles becomes in the end an important feature in history. As early as the year 330 B.C., it is said, a great number of Roman matrons attempted the lives of their husbands by poison. They were dragged before the tribunals, probably domestic, and adjudged to death. As many as 170 are said to have suffered. In the following century, after the promulgation of the Oppian law, which forbade women to keep more than half an ounce of gold, to wear robes of various colours, and to ride in the carpentum, they formed a new conspiracy—such at least was the story—not to destroy their husbands, but to refuse conversation with them and frustrate their hopes of progeny. This was followed at the distance of half a century by the lex Voconia, “the most unjust of laws,” in the judgment of the Christian Augustine, which excluded women from the right of inheriting. Of these laws, however, the first was speedily abrogated, the other was evaded, and, by underhand and circuitous means, women came to receive inheritances, to the great scandal, as afterward appeared, of the reformers under the empire. But the continued quarrel of the sexes was exaggerated by mutual jealousy, and at the outbreak of the Catilinarian conspiracy, it was currently reported among the men that the traitors obtained money for their enterprise from a multitude of matrons, who longed for a bloody revolution to exterminate their husbands.
In the primitive ages the state had not only regulated the forms of marriage, but had undertaken to enforce it. Among the duties of the censors was that of levying fines upon the citizen who persisted in remaining single to the detriment of the public weal. The censure of Camillus and Postumius, 403 B.C., was celebrated for the patriotic vigour with which this inquisition was made. In process of time the milder method of encouraging marriage by rewards was introduced, the earliest mention of which, perhaps, is in a speech of Scipio, censor in the year 199 B.C. At this time it appears, certain immunities were already granted to the fathers of legitimate, and even of adopted, children, which last the censor denounced as an abuse. But neither rewards nor penalties proved effectual to check the increasing tendency to celibacy, and at the period of the Gracchi an alarm was sounded that the old Roman race was becoming rapidly extinguished. The censor of the year 131 B.C., Metellus Macedonicus, expounded the evil to the senate in a speech which seems to have been among the most curious productions of antiquity. “Could we exist without wives at all,” it began, “doubtless we should all rid ourselves of the plague they are to us; since, however, nature has decreed that we cannot dispense with the infliction, it is best to bear it manfully, and rather look to the permanent conservation of the state than to our own transient satisfaction.” It is still more curious, perhaps, that above a hundred years afterwards Augustus should have ventured to recite in the polished senate of his own generation the cynical invective of a ruder age. But, so it was, that when the legislation of Julius Cæsar was found ineffectual for controlling the still growing evil, it was reinforced by his successor with an enhancement both of penalties and rewards, and the bitter measure recommended by the arguments and even the language of the ancient censor.
The importance attached by the emperor to this fruitless legislation appears from his turning his efforts in this direction from the first year of his return to Rome. When he took the census with Agrippa in 28 B.C., he insisted on carrying into execution the regulations of the dictator, which had been neglected during the interval of anarchy, and were destined speedily to fall into similar neglect again. Upon this one point the master of the Romans could make no impression upon the dogged disobedience of his subjects. Both the men and the women preferred the loose terms of union upon which they had consented to cohabit to the harsh provisions of antiquity. They despised rewards, and penalties they audaciously defied. Eleven years later Augustus caused the senate to pass a new law of increased stringency, by which the marriage of citizens of competent age was positively required. Three years grace was allowed for making a choice and settling preliminaries; but when the allotted interval was expired, it was found expedient to prolong it for two years more; from time to time a further respite seems to have been conceded, and we find the emperor still struggling almost to the close of his life to impose this intolerable restraint upon the liberty or licence of the times.
The consent of the fathers themselves, subservient as they generally were, was given with murmurs of reluctance, the more so, perhaps, as they alone were excepted from the indulgence, which was now prudently extended to every lower order of citizens, of permission to form a legitimate marriage with a freed woman. The measure was received indeed with outward deference, but an inward determination to evade or overthrow it. Even the poets, who were instructed to sing its praises, renounced the obligation to fulfil its conditions; while others, whose voices were generally tuned to accents of adulation, exulted openly in its relaxation or postponement.
The nature of the penalties and rewards assigned by this law shows that the views of Augustus were for the most part confined to the rehabilitation of marriage in the higher classes, and the restoration of the purest blood of Rome. On the one hand, celibacy was punished by incapacity to receive bequests, and even the married man who happened to be childless was regarded with suspicion, and mulcted of one-half of every legacy. On the other, the father of a family enjoyed a place of distinction in the theatres, and preference in competition for public office. He was relieved from the responsibilities of a tutor or a judex, and, as by the earlier measure of the dictator, was excused from a portion of the public burdens, if father of three children at Rome, of four in Italy, or of five in the provinces. Of the two consuls, precedence was given, not to the senior in age, according to ancient usage, but to the husband and the father of the most numerous offspring. It is clear that such provisions as these could have had little application to the great mass of the citizens, who lived on the favour of their noble patrons or the bounty of the treasury, and bred up a horde of paupers to eat into the vitals of the state.
Roman Terra-cotta Toy
(Naples Museum)