Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/71

CHAP. III. in the same domestic worship, in order to produce from them a third who would be qualified to continue the worship. We see this plainly by the sacramental formula that was pronounced in the act of marriage. Ducere uxorem libermn queer endorum causa was the Roman expression ; was the Greek.

This marriahe having been contracted only to perpetuate the family, it seemed just that it should be broken if the wife was sterile. The right of divorce, in this case, always existed among the ancients; it is even possible that divorce was an obligation. In India religion proscribed that the sterile woman should be replaced by another at the end of eight years. That the duty was the same in Greece and Rome, there is no formal text to prove. Still Herodotus mentions two kings of Sparta who were constrained to repudiate their wives on account of sterility. As to Rome, every one knows the history of Carvilius Ruga, whose divorce is the first of which the Roman annals make mention. "Carvilius Ruga," says Aulus Gellius, "a man of rank, separated from his wife by divorce because he could not have children by her. He loved her tenderly, and had no reason to complain of her conduct; but he sacrificed his love to the sanctity of his oath, because he had sworn (in the formula of marriage) that he took her to wife in order to have children."

Religion demanded that the family should never be-