was the signal for a retrograde movement. Constantine returned to the old ideas of primitive Rome, and went so far as to inflict on second marriages pecuniary penalties, which were to be paid to the children of the first marriage.[1] In acting thus, the neophyte emperor was acting up to the logic of the Church, in whose eyes marriage itself was an evil rendered necessary by the sin of Adam, and by whom second marriages were emphatically condemned.[2]
From the fusion of Christian doctrines with the gross customs of more or less barbarous European races, on the subject of women and marriage, there resulted for the widow a position of extreme subjection. Among the Germans, as among the Afghans and Kabyles, the widow became again the property of her own family, and in order to marry her, it was necessary to pay a special price, the reipus, which was double the mundium or price of the first purchase.[3] The Salic law decreed that at the age of fifteen the son should be the guardian of his widowed mother. The Lombard law decides also that the widow shall not marry again without the consent of her son (section xxxvii.); and this consent was necessary even for her to enter a convent. Thus Theodoric, adopting with barbarous fury the opinions of the Church on second marriages, promulgated a law interdicting widows from marrying again, and condemning to the flames any man who should be convicted of having had commerce with them.
These objections to second marriage, or at least the blame attached to them by public opinion, are common in many ancient societies. We have found them in India, in ancient Rome, and Greece, etc. We can only attribute this way of thinking, senseless and unjust as it is, to a sort of delirium of proprietorship in the husband, who pretends still to rule over and possess his wife from beyond the tomb, but chiefly to the desire of avoiding disturbances in the transmission of hereditary wealth, when the women were able to have possessions of their own. The levirate, of which I am now going to speak, remedied the latter inconveniences.
