should serve their own political ends.

It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman from
austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how it
was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation,
to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her must
have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoys
today, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as personal
choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages are
nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or,
rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by which
it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man.

In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understand
the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desired
woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of the
family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead,
it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little
danger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for
the family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome
was unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it
did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total
self-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own
aspirations and passions, in behalf of the race.

[Illustration: Julius Caesar]