CHAPTER XII.
HEBREW AND ARYAN MONOGAMY.
I. Monogamy of the Races called Superior.—The monogamic ideal and the monogamic reality.
II. Hebrew Marriage.—Monogamy and concubinage—Position of the wife—The virtuous woman of the Book of Proverbs—Obligatory virginity—The levirate.
III. Marriage in Persia and Ancient India.—Marriage in the Avesta—Marriage in India—General monogamy—Extreme subjection of the wife—Purchase of the wife—Matrimonial prohibitions—The ideal spouse—Marriage in modern India.
IV. Marriage in Ancient Greece.—Wives and concubines—Low position of the wife—Marriage in Sparta—Celibacy chastised—The young Greek girl assimilated to a thing—Dowry—The wife emancipated by money.
V. Marriage in Ancient Rome.—Marriages of children—Relative liberty of the Roman woman—The Patria potestas—The Manus—Three kinds of marriage—The rights of the husband—The case of Cato the Elder—The jus connubii—The dowry and its effects.
VI. Barbarous Marriage and Christian Marriage.—Marriage among the Germans in the Middle Ages, among the Saxons of England—Marriage according to Christianity.
I. Monogamy of the Races called Superior.
After a long journey of exploration through the inferior forms of the sexual union amongst mankind, we have in the preceding chapter begun the study of monogamy, which all the superior races have more or less adopted in their legislation.
It is impossible to deny that monogamy is theoretically nobler than the other matrimonial forms. Nothing can be more beautiful than the union of two intelligent and refined beings freely associating their lives after ripe reflection “for better, for worse,” as the marriage service of England has it. But the reality is often very different from this poetic ideal. Even amongst the most highly civilised peoples, this spontaneous, disinterested, devoted union, based on moral and intellectual sympathies, is very rare; it does not exist in civilisations still partly barbarous, whose monogamy easily accommodates itself to the subjection of women, however extreme. We shall see that it is so, in studying this matrimonial type amongst the Hebrews at first, and afterwards amongst the Aryan races, that is to say, amongst the human types which are reputed par excellence Superior.
The Hebrews seem to have been alone among the Semites in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Moreover, the Bible tells us that concubinage was not forbidden to God’s chosen people. In speaking of the daughter sold by her father to a rich man, the book of Exodus used language sufficiently explicit on this point—“If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. But if he take to him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.”[560] The book of Genesis indeed tells us that “a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh;”[561] but this famous verse seems to indicate the violence of the love rather than monogamic and indissoluble marriage.
Doubtless the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme, as it is in Kabyle; it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage was necessary, it is true, when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold to her husband. We must note, nevertheless, that she had a recognised right of ownership, and that the property of the husband was security for that of the wife and for her dowry; but the husband none the less held the wife in strict dependence. The song of the virtuous woman at the end of Proverbs is generally quoted as a sublime portrait of the Jewish wife by all those who are still hypnotised by the prestige of the so-called holy books. However, in reading these celebrated verses with an unprejudiced mind, we hardly find more than the portrait of a laborious servant, busy and grasping—“She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.... She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.... Her candle goeth not out by night.... She eateth not the bread of idleness.” We shall see later that the wife, though she might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the Hebrew husband according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her. Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be able to prove, cloths in hand, that she was a virgin at the moment of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned. Let us listen to the sacred book—“If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her ...” and seeking a pretext to repudiate her, he imputes to her a shameful crime, saying, “I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid ... her father and mother shall take her and shall represent to the elders of the city in the gate the tokens of the damsel’s virginity.” Of what kind were these proofs? The following verses tell us, “They shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him, and they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel.... But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel, then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die; because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house; so shalt thou put evil away from among you.”[562] If we add to the preceding, that by the law of levirate, the childless widow, whether she wished or not, was awarded to her brother-in-law, we shall be enlightened as to the unenviable position of the married woman under the Hebrew law.
III. Marriage in Persia and Ancient India.
Of the conjugal customs of the ancient Persians we know little. The only formal prescription that we find in the Avesta is a strict prohibition against marrying an infidel. The Mazdean who commits such a crime troubles the whole universe: “he changes to mud a third of the rivers that rush down the mountain sides; he withers a third of the growth of trees and of herbs which cover the earth; he takes from pure men a third of their good thoughts, of their good words, of their good actions; he is more noxious than serpents and wolves.”[563]
On Indian marriage we are better informed, at first by the Code of Manu, and then by modern travellers. India has early practised mitigated monogamy. Polygamy and concubinage were the privilege of the Brahmins and rich Kchatriyas; but the mass of the nation generally lived in monogamy, though nevertheless imposing on the married woman a most humiliating position. Manu proclaims aloud the necessary dependence and incurable inferiority of the weaker sex: “If women were not guarded, they would bring misfortune to two families.” “Manu has bestowed on women the love of their bed, of their seat, and of adornment, concupiscence, anger, bad inclinations, the desire to do evil, perversity.”[564] “A little girl, a young woman, and an old woman ought never to do anything of their own will, even in their own house.” “During her childhood a woman depends on her father; during her youth, on her husband; her husband being dead, on her sons; if she has no sons, on the near relatives of her husband; or in default of them, on those of her father; if she has no paternal relatives, on the sovereign. A woman ought never to have her own way.”[565]
Given such an utter subordination of woman, it is self-evident that there would be no question of her choosing a husband. It is the father’s duty to marry his daughter; and he need not wait till she has reached puberty: “A father must give his daughter in marriage to a young man of agreeable appearance, and of the same rank, according to the law, although she may not have attained the age of eight years, at which he ought to marry her.”[566] However, if the father neglects the prime duty of marrying his daughter, the law ordains that the latter shall proceed to do it. Marriage is a sacred duty: “Let a girl, although adult, wait three years; but after that period, let her choose a husband of the same rank as herself.”[567] The girl is then free, and her husband in marrying her owes no payment to the father: “The father has lost all authority over his daughter in delaying for her the time of becoming a mother.”[568] Girls cannot be married too soon; at eight years old they are given a husband of twenty-eight; at twelve years, a man of thirty.[569] Some verses, in contradiction to that which I have just now quoted, forbid the father from receiving any gratuity whatever in marrying his daughter, not even a cow or a bull: “All gratuity, small or large, constitutes a sale.”[570] But the prohibition to sell his daughter, though still very little observed, is evidently of posterior date; and in India, as in all other countries, the daughter has been esteemed at first as merchandise. The law imposes at times very curious restrictions on a man who is intending to marry. He must not take a girl with red hair, or bearing the name of a constellation, of a river, a bird, or a serpent.[571] He must not, under pain of hell, marry before his elder brother.[572] Above all, he must not marry below his rank. To marry a woman belonging to the servile class is, for the Brahmin or the Kchatriya, an enormous crime, which lowers him to the rank of the Soudras.[573] It is an unpardonable sin: “For him who drinks the foam of the lips of a Soudra, or who has a child by her, there is no expiation declared by the law.”[574] He descends to the infernal abode, and his son loses caste. As for the son of a Brahmanic woman and a Soudra, he is a Tchandala, the vilest of mortals.[575] The young Brahmin, after having received the authorisation of his spiritual director, and having purified himself by a bath, must marry a woman of his own class, who is well made, who has a fine down over her body, fine hair, small teeth, limbs of a charming sweetness, and the graceful movement of a swan or a young elephant.[576] But, however the wife may be chosen, she is held in a state of servile submission. “A wife,” says the Code, “can never be set free from the authority of her husband; neither by sale nor by desertion.” “Once only a young girl is given in marriage; once only the father says, I give her.”[577]
Taken as a whole, these antique precepts are still observed in India. In general, monogamy prevails, but the married woman is none the less kept in a state of abject subjection. It is shameful, says Somerset, for a virtuous woman to know how to read and dance; these futile accomplishments are left to the bayadere. “Servant, slave,” are the habitual appellations used by the husband in addressing his wife, who replies by saying “Master, lord,” who must take care not to call her husband by his name,[578] and has not the right to sit at his table.[579] It is the parents who negotiate the marriage, without any regard to the tastes of the future husband and wife, and thinking only of rank and fortune.[580] A daughter is always married, or rather sold, in infancy, often to a sexagenarian Brahmin, and before she is of age to manifest any preference.[581]
These accounts, which are as authentic as possible, enable us to estimate the Hindoo marriage. However monogamic it may generally be, it is very inferior from a moral point of view. The tyrannical right left to the husband, his unlimited power, the servitude of the wife, yielded or negotiated in infancy, the pride of caste and the care for wealth outweighing all other considerations, proclaim loudly enough that matrimonial legislation in India has been the regulation, for the man’s profit only, of instincts of a very low order.
IV. Marriage in Ancient Greece.
In primitive Greece the position of woman was little better. On one hand, the Iliad tells us that the epithet “woman” thrown at a man was the most contemptuous insult;[582] on the other hand, we have seen that the girl was purchased by the husband, either by presents or by services rendered to the father;[583] in short, that the husband might have domestic concubines with the sole reservation that their children did not inherit from him.[584] In the first chant of the Odyssey the severe apostrophe of Telemachus to his mother proves also that in the absence of the husband the wife was humbly submissive to her sons. “Go to thy chamber; attend to thy work; turn the spinning wheel; weave the linen; see that thy servants do their tasks. Speech belongs to men, and especially to me, who am the master here.”[585] Penelope, like a well-trained woman, meekly allows herself to be silenced and obeys, “bearing in her mind the sage discourse of her son.”
In later times the virtuous woman was shut up in the gyneceum, where she could only receive her parents or the friends authorised by her husband.[586] She was not even admitted to festivities. But, while the wife was semi-cloistered in the conjugal house, the husband could at will frequent and court the hetaïræ (ἑταίραι), and the strangers (ξέναι) with whom the citizens of Athens had not the jus connubii, and who were not admitted like the well-born or native Athenian woman (ελευθέρα) to the thesmophors.[587]
It is evident that at Athens primitive marriage was regulated by the man with very little heed to the tastes or preferences of the woman. At Sparta it was the sentiment of strict and zealous patriotism which inspired Lycurgus in all his regulations regarding marriage. The obligation of marriage was legal, like the military service. The young men were attracted to it by making them assist at the gymnastic exercises of naked young girls. “This was an incentive to marriage, and, to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises.”[588] In the supreme interest of population, love was forced on young men, but it was for the sake of fertility. The young married couple were not allowed to meet except in secret until the first pregnancy.[589] It was praiseworthy for an old husband to lend his young wife to a handsome young man, by whom she might have a child.
In our own day it is not very rare, particularly in France, to see poor young men marry rich old women. Solon did not permit this conjugal prostitution of man at Athens. “A censor,” says Plutarch, “finding a young man in the house of a rich old woman, fattening as they say a partridge fattens by his services to the female, would remove him to some young girl who wanted a husband.”[590] At Sparta Lycurgus went as far as to put hardened celibates under the ban of society. In the first place, they were not permitted to see these exercises of the naked virgins; and the magistrates commanded them to march naked round the market-place in winter, and to sing a song composed against themselves.... They were also deprived of that honour and respect which the young pay to the old.[591]
The young Greek girl could not dispose of her person any more than the Chinese or Hindoo woman could. She was married by her father; in default of her father, by her brother of the same blood; in default of a brother, by a paternal grandfather.[592] The right of brothers who were heirs to their father to marry their sister was not even exhausted by a first marriage.[593] The father of the family had the power either to marry his daughter during his lifetime, or to bequeath her by will, as well as her mother, who was assimilated, like her, to chattels or property. “Demosthenes, my father, bequeathed his fortune, which was fourteen talents, myself, aged seven years, my sister, aged five years, and our mother. At the moment of dying, when asked what he would have done with us, he bequeathed all these things to this Aphobus and to Demophontes, his nephews; he married my sister to Demophontes, and gave at once two talents.”[594] “In the same way,” says Demosthenes again, “Pasion dying, bequeathed his wife to Phormion.”[595] It might happen that the daughter or the wife were by law one body with the estate. Thus a daughter, in default of male heirs, belonged to the relation who would have inherited in her stead and place, if she had not lived.
If there were several relatives in the same degree of succession, the daughter was to marry the eldest of them. Further still, she was obliged in this case to quit her husband, if previously, and even with paternal authorisation, she had contracted marriage.[596] In Greece, to safeguard or conquer her independence, a woman had no other resources than the seduction of her sex and the love she could inspire. She had early recourse to these defensive weapons, for Aristotle thinks it his duty to put young men on guard against the excess of conjugal tenderness and feminine tyranny, the habit which enchains the man to his wife.[597] At length in Greece, as it had happened in Egypt, money finished by protecting the woman much more efficaciously, and even by giving her sometimes the advantage on the conjugal field of battle. Solon, who knew Egypt, began by decreeing the absolute poverty of the married woman. “The bride was to bring with her only three suits of clothes, and some household stuff of small value, for he wished marriages to be made without mercenary or venal views, and would have that union cemented by love and friendship, and not by money.”[598] But this primitive legislation could not stand against the combined action of the affection of the girl’s parents, her own desire of independence, and lastly, the cupidity of the husband, and thus the practice of the dowry became general. This dowry was constituted before marriage by a public act.[599] Securities and bonds were given to assure the dowry and the conditions of marriage. The dowry was mortgaged on the husband’s property, and returned to the wife on the dissolution of the marriage. When the woman could shelter herself behind the shield of the dowry she was much more respected, and she even sometimes tyrannised in her turn. Aristophanes, Menander, Lucian, etc., pour out endless bitter criticisms on the haughty and extravagant rich woman.
In the comedy of The Clouds the good Strepsiades cries: “I led so happily in the country a good simple life, without vexation or care, rich in bees, in sheep, and in olives! Then I married the niece of Megacles, son of Megacles. I was of the country, she of the town; she was a haughty, extravagant woman, a true Cesyra. The wedding day, when I lay down by her, I smelt the wine, the cheese, and the wool; she cares for perfumes, saffron, tender kisses, expense, good cheer, and wanton transports. I will not say that she was idle—no—she worked hard at ruining me.” According to Menander, religion served as an excuse to women for enormous expenses. Under the pretext of piety they ruined their husbands by religious sacrifices accompanied with perfumes, with golden clasps for the sandals, and female slaves ceremoniously ranged in a circle.[600]
One poor hen-pecked husband groans in these terms: “Cursed be the first man who invented marriage, and then the second, and the third, and the fourth, and all those who imitated them.” One old husband laments: “I have married a witch with a dowry. I took her, to have her fields and house, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils.”[601] Listen again to this one: “If being poor, you marry a rich woman, you give yourself a mistress and not a wife; you reduce yourself to be at the same time a slave and poor”—(Anaxandrides).[602]
To sum up, in ancient Greece marriage implied at first the complete slavery of the wife, who was treated as a thing; then by degrees conjugal customs were mitigated, and the wife became a person, and even a proprietor, whom her dowry or personal fortune could protect. Thenceforward money produced its usual effect on inferior characters: it debased or infatuated individuals who were without moral nobility; cupidity blinded certain men; the insolence of money intoxicated certain women. But this only occurred among the ruling classes, and the fate of husbands reduced to conjugal servitude by love of a large dowry does not concern us here.
The important feature in Greek marriage is, that the first legislators regarded it solely from the point of view of increase of population, and held individual liberty, especially that of the woman, very cheaply. Whatever we may think of this legal tyranny, it attained its end perfectly. The small republics of ancient Greece overflowed with men; thus Attica had four thousand one hundred and sixty-six inhabitants to the square league—that is to say, the population was three times more dense than that of France at present.
In its general features Roman marriage does not greatly differ from Greek, but its evolution has been more complete, and the legislation on the subject is better known to us. Marriages of children, especially of little girls, were the rule at Rome, since the nuptial majority of girls was fixed at twelve years. But they were often betrothed, and even married, before that age. Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa and of Pomponia, was promised to Tiberius from her first year.[603] The Digest authorised betrothal at the age of seven.[604]
In betrothing his daughter the father contracted a civil obligation, sanctioned at first by an action for damages, and later by infamy. Every woman of twenty, if she was neither married nor a mother, incurred the punishment decreed by Augustus against celibacy and childlessness.[605] We are indeed told in Roman legislation that the consent of the girl was necessary before passing finally to betrothal and marriage. But it is evident that the consent of a child of twelve years, or even less, was illusory; in reality, the young Roman girl was married by her parents.[606] The young wife was still such a child, that on the day of her wedding she took a ceremonious leave of her playthings and dolls, offering them up to the gods. In reality, it was not the wife who made the engagement, but the persons in whose power she found herself.[607]
Nevertheless, Roman customs conceded to women a certain liberty of manners which the Greeks would not have tolerated. The Roman woman walked in the streets, went to the theatre with the men, shared in banquets, etc.; yet she was, especially in primitive Rome, subjected first to her father and then to her husband. And, besides, public opinion obliged the woman to use in great moderation the practical liberty that was left to her. The famous epitaph of the Roman matron—domum mansit; lanam fecit—is well known. This epitaph may perhaps exaggerate, but it does not lie. Thus Suetonius tells us that the daughters and grand-daughters of Augustus were compelled to weave and spin, and that the Emperor usually wore no other garments but those made by the hands of his wife and sister.[608]
Legally, the Roman wife was the property of her husband, who treated her, not as his equal, but as his child. At Rome, also, conjugal union had been looked at chiefly from the point of view of procreation (Liberorum quærendorum causâ). The wife who was the mother of three children acquired a certain independence; she could make a will even during the lifetime of her husband, and did not need to have recourse to a trustee.[609] But the subjection of woman was very great. The father, invested with the potestas, could sell his child to a third party, in mancipium. The mancipium, which was almost a right of propriety, passed afterwards to the heirs of the owner.
We have seen that the pater familias had the right to marry his daughter without consulting her, but he enjoyed a right more excessive still, that of re-marrying her when his son-in-law had been absent for three years.[610] It was Antoninus only who thought of depriving the father of his right to annul the marriage of his daughter. To the potestas of the father succeeded the manus of the husband. The woman in manu was considered legally as the daughter of her husband, and therefore as the sister of her children. If the husband was himself the son of a family, the wife in manu was held as grand-daughter of the father of the family. This entailed for her the extinction of paternal power (on her own side), and of guardianship and the rights of relationship with the male members of her father’s family. In the marriage with manus the husband became the proprietor of all the dowry of his wife. The father, however, could stipulate that the dowry should be returned to him if his daughter died without children or was repudiated. The leges Julia and Papia had, in fact, imposed on the father the obligation of giving a dowry to his daughter; but the dowry could be appointed by third parties or by the woman herself, if she was sui juris, and then also she had the right to stipulate for some reservations.
This terrible right of manus was acquired by the husband with every form of marriage, even the grossest of all, the usus, or simple cohabitation during one year; but the wife could avoid the conventio in manum by passing three nights in the year out of the conjugal domicile. The manus invested the husband with a large right of correction over his wife, though in very grave cases he was to assemble the family tribunal, which included the children of cousins-german. These family tribunals took cognisance even of murder committed by the wife, and they were still in use under the emperors.[611] On the other hand, the Roman husbands did not let their legal right of beating their wives fall into desuetude, for Saint Monica consoled the wives of her acquaintance whose faces showed marks of marital brutality, by saying to them: “Take care to control your tongues.... It is the duty of servants to obey their masters.... You have made a contract of servitude.”[612]
There were at Rome three kinds of marriages, which I have already named—1st, The usus, resulting from a simple continuous cohabitation, without contract or ceremony, a sort of Tahitian marriage; 2nd, the coemptio or purchase, of which I have spoken at length—that is to say, the legal regulation of the primitive marriage by purchase, in use all over the world at the origin of civilisations. Coemption, without any palliatives, delivered the wife’s body and goods to her husband; 3rd, the confarreatio, or aristocratic marriage, in which the high Pontiff of Jupiter gave, in the presence of ten witnesses, a cake made of flour, water, and salt to the bride and bridegroom, who ate it between them. The manus was conferred on the husband in the marriage by confarreation, the same as in the marriage by usus and coemptio. We must note that at Rome, as in Greece, the religious ceremony was in no way essential to the marriage, which was a laic and civil institution in the first place.[613]
These three forms of marriage very probably represent the evolution of the conjugal union in ancient Rome. The usus, or free cohabitation, must have been the commencement; then came the purchase of the wife, the coemptio, and at length the solemn marriage or confarreatio of the patricians. But marriage with the husband’s right of manus subsisted for a long time, and it conferred on him all the customary licence of savages of every country, notably that of lending the wife, and this exorbitant right endured till the best days of Rome, since the virtuous Cato of Utica used it still in lending his wife Martia to his friend Hortensius.
This fact is curious, and deserves attention. Hortensius began by asking for the loan of Cato’s daughter, Portia, already married to Bibulus, and the mother of two children. It was, says Plutarch, with the object of selection, that he might have a child of good race; he promised to return her afterwards to her husband. On the refusal of Cato, Hortensius fell back on Martia, Cato’s own wife, who was at the time enceinte. Cato was not at all shocked at the proposition, but referred it, however, to Philip, his father-in-law, who also saw no harm in it. A contract was therefore concluded between Cato, Hortensius, and Philip; and Martia, whom no one thought of consulting, was yielded to Hortensius, and afterwards taken back, at the death of the latter, by Cato. She was then the heir of Hortensius, and Cato had not the least scruple in receiving her back with her money at the same time.[614]
To any one not versed in ethnographical sociology these customs seem improbable. Doubt has been cast on this story of Hortensius and Cato, though it is attested by the Anti-Cato of Julius Cæsar, on which Plutarch relies; but it has nothing extraordinary for us. We know that at first woman was everywhere the absolute property of the man. The manus of the Roman husband was in the main only an attenuated form of primitive conjugal right, which we know included the power to lend, barter, or cede the wife without consulting her. The case of Cato is then only a survival of preceding ages.
Necessarily brief and incomplete as the résumé must be that I can here give of conjugal legislation at Rome, it will suffice, I hope, to give a clear idea of what Roman marriage was. I should add that the law, inspired by the old patriotic spirit and the prejudices of caste, limited the right of marriage, the jus connubii. The justes noces were at first an aristocratic privilege. The plebeians coupled more ferarum. At length the jus connubii extended to marriages between Latin and Roman, Latin and Latin, and even foreigner and foreigner. The child followed the condition of the mother, which seems to be a survival of the ancient maternal family. Another vestige of the same kind is found in the legal position of spurii—that is to say, of children born of a marriage which is either prohibited or incestuous or bigamous. These children, irregularly conceived, have a mother, but no legal father; they do not come under the paternal power of the father, like the child of lawful marriage, and cannot be legitimated.[615]
The study of the transformations that Roman marriage underwent from the time of Numa to that of the emperors is most interesting; for we can follow a complete evolution in regard to it which has never been so complete in any other country. At first we find conjugal anarchy, the capricious union or usus, which could be, and which was in fact, often polygamous, as the ulterior persistence of the concubinate proves; then the marriage by capture, of which the trace remained in the marriage ceremony; then the marriage by purchase, the coemptio, with its ordinary consequence, the servitude of the wife, which even the solemn marriage or confarreation did not abolish. At length this brutal law of the primitive ages relaxes. The law which holds the woman under paternal power (patria potestas) is turned round. The father himself gives his daughter in mancipium to a third party, who afterwards enfranchises her. Sometimes it is the patria potestas which is a check to the manus of the husband. The wife, in marrying, without being subject to the manus, remains subject to her father, who can even claim her again.
But the institution of the dowry as obligatory and inalienable by the husband, the power of the woman to marry while remaining in the paternal family, to have her paraphernalia, to inherit property of her father, to control both of these, and also the great facility of divorce, ended by rendering the Roman, or at least the patrician matron, almost independent. Under the empire Roman marriage had become in fact a sort of free union, in which money considerations played the predominant part. Plautus already speaks of the dotal-slave, a creature of the wife’s, managing her property and ruling the husband—
“Argentum accepi, dote imperium vendidi.”[616]
Horace mentions the wife ruling by means of her dowry—“dotata regit virum conjux” (Od. iii. 18). Martial declares that he wishes no rich marriage; it does not suit him, he says, to be married by his wife—“uxori nubere nolo meae” (Epig. viii. 12). From Seneca to Saint Jerome, who both speak of it, the dotal-slave is advantageously replaced by the frizzed steward (Procurator calamistratus) managing the affairs of my lady.[617] They went further still, and as it happens in Russia at the present day, they concluded fictitious marriages; but at Rome, these false marriages, contracted for ready money, had no other object than to elude the laws against celibacy.[618]
VI. Barbarous Marriage and Christian Marriage.
In order to avoid being too incomplete in this rapid survey of marriage among all races, I will say a few words on barbarous marriage outside the Greco-Roman world.
The barbarians of ancient Europe, more or less monogamous, have differed little from any others. Their marriage resembles that of their fellows of all races and all times; that which chiefly characterises it is the subjection of woman.
Barbarous women, says Plutarch, neither ate nor drank with their husbands, and never called them by their name.[619] Among the Germans, who were more often monogamous, as Tacitus says,[620] the wife was purchased; then the purchase-money was transformed into a dower accorded to the bride under the name of morgengabe or oscle (osculum), the price of the first kiss.
German betrothals, which could only be annulled for a serious reason, strongly resembled Latin ones—that is, they were a sale of the girl in anticipation by her legal owners. It was necessary for the girl to have the consent of her father, or her nearest relative, for her marriage. As widow, having been purchased, she belonged to the relatives of her dead husband, and could not marry again without their leave.[621] The feudalism of the Middle Ages was careful not to emancipate the woman, and she remained a minor, or even less, since the Code of Beaumanoir says (titre lvii.)—“Every husband can beat his wife when she will not obey his commands, or when she curses him or contradicts him, provided that he does it moderately, and that death does not follow in consequence.” Among the Saxons, the Burgundians, and the Germans in general, the widow was subjected to the rule of her eldest son as soon as he had attained the age of fifteen.
In the Middle Ages the woman surprised in committing adultery might be executed by her husband, who even had the right to call in the aid of her son.[622] In the ninth and tenth centuries, however, among the Saxons in England, an advance that was quite exceptional took place. The young girl could marry herself, was not repudiable at will, had her own property and her keys, and the penal law of her husband ceased to weigh upon her.[623] This progress was quite local, and operated spontaneously, quite independently of Christian influence. In fact, Christianity has only emancipated women spiritually, and its real influence on marriage has been injurious. Doubtless the Christian wife might hope to become a seraph in the next world, but in this she was only a servant or a slave. In Greco-Roman antiquity marriage had been considered, as it ought to be, a civil institution. Legislation, more or less sensible and intelligent, regarded it simply from the point of view of population.
Christianity, which taught that the earthly country was of no account, and taxed with impurity all that related to sexual union, made marriage a sacrament, and consequently an institution quite apart from humble considerations of social utility. All sexual union outside marriage was reputed criminal; the ideal preached to women was the mystic marriage with God. The pious Constantine increased all the penalties against sexual crimes. Adultery became again a capital offence; the woman guilty of marrying a slave was condemned to death;[624] marriage was declared indissoluble; second marriages were blameworthy. At the same time the fathers of the Church and the preachers did not cease to utter their thunders against woman, disparaging her, and abusing her as an impure creature, almost devilish. This encouraged the severe legislation of the barbarians in conjugal matters. I have previously mentioned some traits of these brutal laws. I shall return to them in speaking of questions connected with marriage, which remain still to be treated of—adultery, divorce, and widowhood. We shall then see how hurtful the influence of Christianity has been on marriage, and we shall come to the conclusion that in order to manage earthly affairs well, it is not good to keep our looks constantly raised to the skies.