the duty of a woman, especially if she was nobly born, to know all the
arts of good housewifery, and especially, as most important, spinning
and weaving. The reason for this lay in the fact that for the
aristocratic families, who were in possession of vast lands and many
flocks, it was easy to provide themselves from their own estates with
the wool necessary to clothe all their household, from masters to the
numerous retinue of slaves. If the _materfamilias_ knew sufficiently
well the arts of spinning and weaving to be able to organize in the
home a small "factory" of slaves engaged in such tasks, and knew how to
direct and survey them, to make them work with zeal and without theft,
she could provide the clothing for the whole household, thus saving the
heavy expense of buying the stuffs from a merchant--notable economy in
times when money was scarce and every family tried to make as little
use of it as possible. The _materfamilias_ held, then, in every home,
a prime industrial office, that of clothing the entire household, and
in proportion to her usefulness in this office was she able to aid or
injure the family.

More important still were the woman's dower and her personal fortune.
The Romans not only considered it perfectly honorable, sagacious, and
praiseworthy for a member of the political aristocracy to marry a rich
woman for her wealth, the better to maintain the luster of his rank, or
the more easily to fulfil his particular political and social duties,
but they also believed there could be no better luck or greater honor
for a rich woman than for this reason to marry a prominent man. They
exacted only that she be of respectable habits, and even in this regard
it appears that, during certain tumultuous periods, they sometimes shut
one eye.

Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quite