frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:
there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is
related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house
which is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives are
admitted."

This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of
Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked
distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among
ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among
the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the
greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached
that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his
comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization
sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.

The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military
peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical régime of domestic servitude,
is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time
when the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under the
authority of man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of the
father, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that time
belongs to remote antiquity.

When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, and
especially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from a
few slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had already
acquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary for
social and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could at
that time choose between two different legal family régimes: marriage