Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/351

 *course. Her name has been preserved to us in the nomenclature of science, and through an astronomical compliment a cluster of stars is still distinguished as the Coma Berenices. From these few examples the reader may derive some notion of the social relations of the ruling families in that extended Greek realm which came into being as the result of the conquests of Alexander. One by one the separate autonomies succumbed to the force of the Latin arms, and before the beginning of the Christian era all of them which lay to the west of the Euphrates had become merged in the provincial system of the Roman Empire.

When we turn our attention to the Roman Republic, we find that the females, although in law subjected absolutely to the will of their male relatives, were virtually as influential in the state as were the women at Sparta. From Cloelia to