Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/427

Rh of Rome to have less than they? and how came the laws incessntly to corrupt their manners?

All that is surprizing in the fact in question, will soon disappear, only by comparing two passages in Plutarch. The regal law permitted a husband to repudiate in the three cases already mentioned, and "it enjoined, says Plutarch, that he who repudiated in any other case, should be obliged to give the half of his substance to his wife, and that the other half should be consecrated to Ceres." They might then repudiate in all cases, if they were but willing to submit to the penalty. No body had done this before Carvilius Ruga ; who, as Plutarch says in another place, "put away his wife for her sterility two hundred and thirty years after Romulus." That is, she was repudiated seventy one years before the law of the twelve tables, which extended both the power and the causes of repudiation.

The authors I have cited say, that Carvilius Ruga loved his wife; but that the censors made him take an oath to put her away, because of her barrenness, to the end that he might give children to the republic; and that this rendered him odious to the people. We must know the genius and temper of the Romans, before we can discover the true cause of the hatred they had conceived for Carvilius. He did not fall into disgrace with the people for repudiating his wife; this was an affair that did not at all concern them. But Rh