Page:Comedies of Publius Terentius Afer (1870).djvu/11



is in accordance with that sentence that I offer Terence in another English garb.

Reader, you have reflected here the manners of the Roman Republic some 150 years before our Saviour. There are startling laws and manners shown forth in slavery and infanticide, but most strange of all the manner in which Roman youth wooed and won their wives. It may have derived from the recorded story of Romulus and the Sabines; but modes of marriage are nothing more than forms and fashions with different nations and people, and varied by circumstances and laws.

We plainly perceive the fact of a paucity of females compared with the males, brought about by the prevailing exposure of the female children, and indisposition of the Greeks and Romans to rear girls. Hence the boys snatched a wife, and there is no sign of repentance or of having made a foolish and hasty match ever expressed through the plays; on the con-