This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental
world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping her
ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought to
secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education,
religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste,
faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent
dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the
liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of
such liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.

It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of
solving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all
civilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest,
difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the
unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the