The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

The latter centuries of the Roman commonwealth are filled with the domestic struggles occasioned by the obstinacy with which political restrictions were maintained upon the most sensitive of the social relations. Beginning with wild and romantic legends, the account of these troubles becomes in the end an important feature in history. As early as the year 330 B.C., it is said, a great number of Roman matrons attempted the lives of their husbands by poison. They were dragged before the tribunals, probably domestic, and adjudged to death. As many as 170 are said to have suffered. In the following century, after the promulgation of the Oppian law, which forbade women to keep more than half an ounce of gold, to wear robes of various colours, and to ride in the carpentum, they formed a new conspiracy—such at least was the story—not to destroy their husbands, but to refuse conversation with them and frustrate their hopes of progeny. This was followed at the distance of half a century by the lex Voconia, “the most unjust of laws,” in the judgment of the Christian Augustine, which excluded women from the right of inheriting. Of these laws, however, the first was speedily abrogated, the other was evaded, and, by underhand and circuitous means, women came to receive inheritances, to the great scandal, as afterward appeared, of the reformers under the empire. But the continued quarrel of the sexes was exaggerated by mutual jealousy, and at the outbreak of the Catilinarian conspiracy, it was currently reported among the men that the traitors obtained money for their enterprise from a multitude of matrons, who longed for a bloody revolution to exterminate their husbands.

In the primitive ages the state had not only regulated the forms of marriage, but had undertaken to enforce it. Among the duties of the censors was that of levying fines upon the citizen who persisted in remaining single to the detriment of the public weal. The censure of Camillus and Postumius, 403 B.C., was celebrated for the patriotic vigour with which this inquisition was made. In process of time the milder method of encouraging marriage by rewards was introduced, the earliest mention of which, perhaps, is in a speech of Scipio, censor in the year 199 B.C. At this time it appears, certain immunities were already granted to the fathers of legitimate, and even of adopted, children, which last the censor denounced as an abuse. But neither rewards nor penalties proved effectual to check the increasing tendency to celibacy, and at the period of the Gracchi an alarm was sounded that the old Roman race was becoming rapidly extinguished. The censor of the year 131 B.C., Metellus Macedonicus, expounded the evil to the senate in a speech which seems to have been among the most curious productions of antiquity. “Could we exist without wives at all,” it began, “doubtless we should all rid ourselves of the plague they are to us; since, however, nature has decreed that we cannot dispense with the infliction, it is best to bear it manfully, and rather look to the permanent conservation of the state than to our own transient satisfaction.” It is still more curious, perhaps, that above a hundred years afterwards Augustus should have ventured to recite in the polished senate of his own generation the cynical invective of a ruder age. But, so it was, that when the legislation of Julius Cæsar was found ineffectual for controlling the still growing evil, it was reinforced by his successor with an enhancement both of penalties and rewards, and the bitter measure recommended by the arguments and even the language of the ancient censor.