Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/201

Rh of women should expose them to dangers. Their quarrels, indiscretions, repugnances, jealousies, piques, and that art, in fine, which little souls have of interesting great ones, would be attended there with fatal consequences.

Besides, as princes in those countries make a sport of human nature, they allow themselves a multitude of women; and a thousand considerations oblige them to keep them in close confinement.

In republics women are free by the laws, and constrained by manners; luxury is banished from thence, and with it corruption and vice.

In the cities of Greece, where they were not under the restraint of a religion which declares that even amongst men a purity of morals is a part of virtue; where a blind passion triumphed with a boundless insolence, and love appeared only in a shape which we dare not mention, while marriage was considered as nothing more than simple friendship ; such was the virtue, simplicity, and chastity of women in those cities, that in this respect hardly any people were ever known to have had a better and wiser polity.

HE Romans had no particular magistrates, like the Greeks, to inspect the conduct of Rh