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.[1]
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.[2]
The study of the transformations that Roman marriage underwent from the time of Numa to that of the emperors
