- out the least prejudice, from the strict point of view
of social utility. Solon imitates Lycurgus on this point, but with one restriction which recalls the Code of Manu, that the wife of an impotent husband should, with his permission of course, choose a lover from among the nearest relatives of the said husband.[1]
Custom sometimes went further than the laws, and Plutarch relates that Cimon of Athens, who was a model of goodness and greatness of soul, lent his wife to the rich Callias.[2] But that did not prevent the laws of Solon from authorising the husband to kill the adulterer.[3] Further, the law punished with civil degradation the too indulgent husband, and authorised the family tribunals to condemn to death the guilty woman, whom the husband himself executed before witnesses.[4] Lastly, a law of Draco, which was never abrogated, delivered the adulterous lover to the discretion of the husband.[5] After all, save for the good of the state, before which everything had to bend, this Greek legislation only consecrates the old primitive right by which the wife was the property of her husband.
In all that concerns marriage ancient Rome singularly resembles ancient Greece.[6] Her customs and regulations regarding the wife were at first of a savage atrocity. The term adulterer begins by being applied to the woman alone, and the law of the Ten Tables arraigned the guilty wife before the domestic tribunal; she was condemned and executed by the relatives themselves—Cognati necanto uti volent. Family tribunals continued to exist during the whole period of the republic, and even later, concurrently with the law Julia; but customs softened, and death was commuted to banishment to two hundred miles from Rome at the least, with the obligation of wearing the toga of the courtesan. The flagrante delicto naturally authorised the husband to kill the wife on the spot;[7] as for the lover, he could keep him, torture him, mutilate him, raffanise him
