arrangement abandoned and re-established at will. Seneca said that women of rank counted their years by their husbands; Juvenal, that it was in such fashion they counted their days. Paul, in a letter whose verbosity apes philosophical phraseology, regarded the privileges of divorce as inherent in the patriarchal theories of family life. Tertullian added, somewhat sapiently, that divorce was the result of matrimony.
Divorce, however, was never obligatory, matrimony was. According to the Lex Papia Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was unmarried; whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry; whoso, though married, was childless became ipso facto a public enemy.
To this law, as was obviously necessary, only a technical attention was paid. Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy; the next day they got a divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted; the moment passed, the child was disowned. As with men, so with women. The Univira became the many-husbanded wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all; one who, to escape the consequences of the Lex Papia Poppoea, hired a man to lend her his name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she liked; to imitate men at their worst; to fight like them and with them for power; to dabble in the bloody drama of state; to climb on the throne and kill there or be killed. The Empire had liberated women from domestic tyranny, just as it had liberated men from that of the state.
