In return, the German widow, like the Afghan widow, was the property of the parents of her husband, and could not re-marry without their authorisation.[1]
In primitive Greece the daughter was purchased either by presents to the father or by services rendered to him.[2] The father could marry his daughter as he thought well, and in default of a son could leave her by will, with the heritage of which she formed a part, to a stranger.[3]
At Rome also the daughter was the property of her father, and until the time of Antoninus the father had the right to re-marry her when the husband had been absent three years.[4] Marriage by purchase had certainly been the primitive form of the conjugal contract. In reality the confarreatio, a solemn and religious union in the presence of ten witnesses, was a patrician marriage. The usus, or the consecration of a free union after a year of cohabitation, strongly resembles the Polynesian marriage. But the most common conjugal form, the one which succeeded the usus, and surely preceded the confarreatio, was marriage by purchase, the coemptio.
Coemption ended in time by becoming purely symbolic; the wife was delivered to the husband, who, as a formality, gave her a few pieces of money; but the ceremony is none the less eloquent, and it proves clearly that in principle the woman had been, at Rome as elsewhere, assimilated by the parents to a thing, to a venal property. When at Athens and at Rome an effort was made to give the married woman a less subordinate position, nothing more was done than opposing money to money by inventing the dowry marriage; and hence resulted other inconveniences, on which Latin writers have largely dilated, and which we can easily study to-day from life. But for the present I must not speak of them. It suffices to have proved that all over the earth, in all times and among all races, marriage by purchase has been widely practised.
Now, the custom of marriage by purchase has a very clear and very important signification from a moral and social
