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476
THE DECLINE AND FALL
motives of economy and compassion.[1] If the father could subdue his own feelings, he might escape, though not the censure, at least the chastisement, of the laws; and the Roman empire was stained with the blood of infants, till such murders were included, by Valentinian and his colleagues, in the letter and spirit of the Cornelian law. The lessons of jurisprudence[2] and Christianity had been insufficient to eradicate this inhuman practice, till their gentle influence was fortified by the terrors of capital punishment.[3]
Husbands and wives Experience has proved that savages are the tyrants of the female sex, and that the condition of women is usually softened by the refinements of social life. In the hope of a robust progeny, Lycurgus had delayed the season of marriage; it was fixed by Numa at the tender age of twelve years, that the Roman husband might educate to his will a pure and obedient virgin.[4] The religious rites of marriage According to the custom of antiquity, he bought his bride of her parents, and she fulfilled the coemption by purchasing, with three pieces of copper, a just introduction to his house and household deities. A sacrifice of fruits was offered by the pontiffs in the presence of ten witnesses; the contracting parties were seated on the same sheepskin; they tasted a salt cake of far or rice; and this confarreation,[5] which denoted the ancient food of Italy, served as an emblem of their mystic union of mind and body. But this union on the side of the woman- ↑ When the Chremes of Terence reproaches his wife for not obeying his orders and exposing their infant, he speaks like a father and a master, and silences the scruples of a foolish woman. See Apuleius (Metamorph. l. x. p. 337, edit. Delphin.).
- ↑ The opinion of the lawyers and the discretion of the magistrates had introduced in the time of Tacitus some legal restraints, which might support his contrast of the boni mores of the Germans to the bonæ leges alibi — that is to say, at Rome (de Moribus Germanorum, c. 19). Tertullian (ad Nationes, l. i. c. 15) refutes his own charges, and those of his brethren, against the heathen jurisprudence.
- ↑ The wise and humane sentence of the civilian Paul (l. ii. Sententiarum in Pandect. l. xxv. tit. iii. leg. 4) is represented as a mere moral precept by Gerard Noodt (Opp. tom. i. in Julius Paulus, p. 567-588, and Amica Responsio, p. 591-606), who maintains the opinion of Justus Lipsius (Opp. tom. ii. p. 409, ad Belgas, cent. i. epist. 85), and as a positive binding law by Bynkershoek (de Jure occidendi Liberos, Opp. tom. i. p. 318-340. Curæ Secundæ, p. 391-427). In a learned but angry controversy the two friends deviated into the opposite extremes.
- ↑ Dionys. Hal. l. ii. p. 92, 93; Plutarch, in Numa, p. 140, 141. Τὸ σω̂μα καὶ το ἠθος καθαρὸν καὶ δθικτον ὲπὶ τῷ γαμον̂ντι γενέσθαι.
- ↑ Among the winter frumenta, the triticum, or bearded wheat; the siligo, or the unbearded; the far, adorea, oryza, whose description perfectly tallies with the rice of Spain and Italy. I adopt this identity on the credit of M. Paucton in his useful and laborious Métrologie (p. 517-529).
