The Historians' History of the World 05

It is sufficient to remember these two fundamental principles, which are as old as Rome—namely, monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage—to show the value of the vulgar opinion which represents marital power in ancient Rome as the most odious of all tyrannies. It is difficult to believe that the husband was a despot and the wife a slave, where an inviolable fidelity was the reciprocal duty of the two; and a closer study will convince us that a Roman marriage was a real union in which the husband’s authority did not exclude the independence of the wife. But to be certain in what this independence consisted, two kinds of marriage must be distinguished. Sometimes the wife, though married, lived at home under the authority of her father, or the guardianship of her agnates; sometimes these ties were broken by marriage and the wife went, according to the technical expression, in manum mariti, and had no other family than her husband’s. This last kind of marriage is without doubt the more ancient. The antiquity of its origin is revealed in the particular customs that went with it, and which are found, almost identically the same, in the most ancient legislations. It is then most probable that during the first centuries of Rome, the manus mariti

was the inevitable result of marriage. From the day the newly married couple had offered a joint sacrifice to the divinities in the nuptial chamber, the wife had no other family agnates or heirs than her husband and his relatives. What became of the wife’s former family ties, the rights of the agnates to her guardianship and to her inheritance? Marriage had destroyed them forever. But in this there was a danger to which the legislators had soon to give their attention. The guardians of the wife cannot have been very ready to consent to a marriage which deprived them of all their rights, and without their consent marriage was impossible. Could they have been compelled to give up their rights? But these rights were sacred to the guardians of the family interest; for them it was a duty to prevent the patrimony of their ancestors from passing into the hands of strangers. To satisfy all conflicting claims, the ancient principle had to be entirely altered. Two things had to be separated which until then had seemed inseparable—marriage and the manus

, that is to say, the change of family. Side by side with the ancient marriage accompanied by the regular formalities, a new marriage was devised which was contracted simply by consent and left the wife in her family under the guardianship of her agnates. The consent of the guardians was always necessary for the ancient marriage with manus; but it was not required for the marriage pure and simple, which left the rights of the agnates

intact. This revolution in the family usage was already accomplished, or nearly so, at the time of the laws of the Twelve Tables.

For the rest, the introduction of a new form of marriage did not insure the abandonment of the old, for both could in diverse cases in turn satisfy the same need. If the wife, at the time of her marriage, was not under a guardian, but under the parental authority, that is to say without patrimony, the conventio in manum could only benefit the agnates; for it was equivalent to the compact of renunciation, which, in ancient French law, so often accompanied marriage contracts. Thus, the same interest, that of preserving the patrimonial wealth, caused the introduction for the heiress of the marriage without manus

, and maintained the marriage with manus for the daughter who had not already inherited.d

RELIGION

The religion of Rome was, as the legends show, of Sabine origin. Much of its ceremonial, the names of many of its gods, were Etruscan; and Hellenic mythology began, at an early time, to mingle itself in the simple religious faith of the Sabine countrymen. The important question in the history of all religions is, how far they exert power over the lives of their professors. That the old faith of Rome was not without such power in the times of which we speak is unquestionable. The simple Roman husbandman lived and died, like his Sabine ancestors, in the fear of the gods; he believed that there was something in the universe higher and better than himself; that by these higher powers his life and actions were watched; that to these powers good deeds and an honest life were pleasing, evil deeds and bad faith hateful. The principles thus established remained, as is confirmed by the weighty testimony of Polybius, delivered in a later and more corrupt age. “If,” says he, “you lend a single talent to a Greek, binding him by all possible securities, yet he will break faith. But Roman magistrates, accustomed to have immense sums of money pass through their hands, are restrained from fraud simply by respect for the sanctity of an oath.”b