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,