To make their daughter still more independent, her parents
gave her a dower.
=Divorce.=--Sometimes the husband alone had the right to repudiate his
wife, but the custom was that this right should be exercised only in
the gravest circumstances. The woman gained the right of leaving her
husband, and so it became very easy to break a marriage. There was no
need of a judgment, or even of a motive. It was enough for the
discontented husband or wife to say to the other, "Take what belongs
to you, and return what is mine." After the divorce either could marry
again.
In the aristocracy, marriage came to be regarded as a passing union;
Sulla had five wives, Caesar four, Pompey five, and Antony four. The
daughter of Cicero had three husbands. Hortensius divorced his wife to
give her to a friend. "There are noble women," says Seneca, "who count
their age not by the years of the consuls, but by the husbands they
have had; they divorce to marry again, they marry to divorce again."
But this corruption affected hardly more than the nobles of Rome and
the upstarts. In the families of Italy and the provinces the more
serious manners of the old time still prevailed; but the discipline of
the family gradually slackened and the woman slowly freed herself from
the despotism of her husband.
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