The Women of the Caesars | Page 6

times literature,
music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated, encouraged,
and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life, should we
therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the great

diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which modern
men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in its
beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that every
man has the right to choose for himself the person of the opposite sex
toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal attraction impels
him--these are the supreme blossoms of modern individualism, the
roots of which have been able to fasten only in the rich soil of modern
civilization.
The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectual
development of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline that
poorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had to
impose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard and
barbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and the
majority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, have
conceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as a
duty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity of the
aged, and these have endeavored to promote the success of marriage
not merely to the satisfaction of a single passion, usually as brief as it is
ardent, but according to a calculated equilibrium of qualities,
tendencies, and material means.
The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variance
with human nature, but they are the principles to which all peoples
wishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion as mobile
as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when the family
was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because it held
within itself many functions, educational, industrial, and political, now
performed by other institutions. But reason itself is not perfect. Like
passion, it has its weakness, and marriage so conceived by Rome
produced grave inconveniences, which one must know in order to
understand the story, in many respects tragic, of the women of the
Caesars.
The first difficulty was the early age at which marriages took place
among the aristocracy. The boys were almost always married at from
eighteen to twenty; the girls, at from thirteen to fifteen. This

disadvantage is to be found in all society in which marriage is arranged
by the parents, because it would be next to impossible to induce young
people to yield to the will of their elders in an affair in which the
passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reach the age when
the passions are strongest and the will has become independent Hardly
out of childhood, the man and the woman are naturally more tractable.
On the other hand, it is easy to see how many dangers threatened such
youthful marriages in a society where matrimony gave to the woman
wide liberty, placing her in contact with other men, opening to her the
doors of theaters and public resorts, leading her into the midst of all the
temptations and illusions of life.
The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For the very
reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, the Romans
were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble; indeed, even
when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved to the man the
right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely because that particular
marriage did not suit his political interests. And the marriage could be
dissolved by the most expeditious means, without formality--by a mere
letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that love might outweigh reason
and calculation in the young, the law granted to the father the right to
give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law, instead of leaving it to
the son; so that the father was able to make and unmake the marriages
of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting, without taking their will
into account.
The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereign
equality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was,
notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection of her
husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that she should
close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth as a
bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say, drive
her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where her children
were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage. So it
was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics were much
perturbed