Page:1909historyofdec04gibbuoft.djvu/575

 chap, xliv] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 507 Experience has proved that savages are the tyrants of the Husbanda female sex, and that the condition of women is usually softened by the refinements of social life. In the hope of a robust pro- geny, Lycurgus had delayed the season of marriage; it was fixed by Numa at the tender age of twelve years, that the Eoman husband might educate to his will a pure and obedient virgin. 116 According to the custom of antiquity, he bought his The reiigi- bride of her parents, and she fulfilled the coemption by purchas- marriage ing, with three pieces of copper, a just introduction to his house and household deities. A sacrifice of fruits was offered by the pontiffs in the presence of ten witnesses ; the contracting parties were seated on the same sheepskin ; they tasted a salt cake of far or rice ; and this confarreation, 117 which denoted the ancient food of Italy, served as an emblem of their mystic union of mind and body. But this union on the side of the woman was rigorous and unequal ; and she renounced the name and worship of her father's house to embrace a new servitude decorated only by the title of adoption. A fiction of the law, neither rational (Manus] nor elegant, bestowed on the mother of a family us (her proper appellation) the strange characters of sister to her own children, and of daughter to her husband or master, who was invested with the plenitude of paternal power. By his judgment or 85), and as a positive binding law by Bynkershoek (de Jure occidendi Liberos, Opp. torn. i. p. 318-340. Curee Secundae, p. 391-427). In a learned but angry controversy the two friends deviated into the opposite extremes. 118 Dionys. Hal. 1. ii. p. 92, 93 ; Plutarch, in Numa, p. 140, 141. Tb aS>p.a teal rb ?idos KaOapbv xal &8iktov hrl t$ ya/xovvri yevtcdai. 117 Among the winter frumenta, the triticum, or bearded wheat ; the siligo, or the unbearded ; the far, adorea, oryza, whose description perfectly tallies with the rice of Spain and Italy. I adopt this identity on the credit of M. Paucton in his use- ful and laborious M6trologie (p. 517-529). 118 Aulus Gellius (Noctes Attica, xviii. 6) gives a ridiculous definition of vElius Melissus : Matrona quee semel, materfamilias quae ssepius peperit, as porcetra and aoropha in the sow kind. He then adds the genuine meaning, quae in matrimonium vel in manurn convenerat. [When a woman was married (whether she was under her father's potestas, or not), she passed under the power of her husband, and this power was called manus ; it corresponded, in its scope, to the patria potestas. Manus was not strictly a consequence of marriage ; it was rather the accompaniment of marriage, and was acquired in three ways. (1) By confarreatio, the ceremony described in the text. This ceremony seems to have been used only by Patricians. Certain priest- hoods were confined to men sprung from a marriage contracted with confarreatio. In the last years of the republio, it fell into disuse. (2) By coemptio, which in the text seems to be confounded with confarreatio. The woman was mancipated to her hus- band, by her father if under his potestas, by herself if sui iuris. (3) By usus, or cohabitation for a year. If absent for three nights, the woman did not pass under her husband's manus. From the end of the republic manus had ceased to be the usual relation between husband and wife ; and the decline of this legal institution seems to be parallel to the increase in frequency of divorce.]