so if considerations of interest had not often hindered the good pleasure of the master. He was obliged, in fact, by the conditions of the law, in repudiating his wife, to restore her dowry, or pay interest at the rate of nine oboles.[1] Moreover, the relatives who were guardians of the woman could claim by law a pension for her maintenance.[2] A personage of Euripides cries mournfully: "The riches that a wife brings only serve to make her divorce more difficult."[3] However, the right of divorce was recognised for women, but custom held the laws in check by rendering it difficult for wives to perform any public action, and by imposing on them the confinement of the gyneceum.[4]
At Rome divorce evolved more rapidly and more completely than in Greece. In primitive Rome we see at first, as usual, the right of repudiation allowed to the husband and forbidden to the wife. "Romulus," says Plutarch, "gave the husband power to divorce his wife in case of her poisoning his children, or counterfeiting his keys, or committing adultery, and if on any other account he put her away she was to have one moiety of his goods, and the other was to be consecrated to Ceres."[5] The Roman husband could also put away his wife for sterility.[6] He was, however, obliged to assemble the family beforehand for consultation. If the marriage had been contracted by confarreation it had to be dissolved by a contradictory ceremony, diffarreation.[7] In the ancient law, when the crime of the woman led to divorce, she lost all her dowry. Later, only a sixth was kept back by adultery, and an eighth for other crimes.[8] At length divorce by consent (bonâ gratiâ) was introduced in spite of the censors; and then both parties had liberty of divorce, only with certain pecuniary disadvantages for the husband whose fault led to the divorce. Thus the adulterous husband lost advantage of the terms which usage accorded for the restitution of the dowry. In the last stage of the law the guilty husband lost the dowry, or the donatio propter nuptias. Inversely, if the
