willingly have had the sauce-tureen decked with old lace and ostrich feathers, when a servant handed him the letter. He had hardly taken it when he became extremely agitated. "Why should any one send me this thing?" he cried, trembling all over. No one understood what he meant, but they all felt that to finish their meal was impossible. I will not describe the torments that Brjotski suffered on this memorable day. I will only mention one thing, that this man, weak and feeble as he seemed to be, bore like a hero the most terrible tortures, but as to giving up the smallest sum of money, nothing could make him do it. "What I suffer does not matter," he said to his wife in the moments of most acute agony. "Only hold me fast, and if the severity of the pain makes me ask for my cash-box, don't bring it, my love. Let me die first!" However embarrassing a situation may be there is almost always some way out of it, and one was found in this instance. Brjotski luckily remembered an old promise he had made to give something to a charitable institution of which a certain general who was a friend of his had the management. Time had slipped by without his doing so, but now circumstances pointed out to him the most convenient way of fulfilling his obligation. Without delay he cautiously opened the envelope which he had received by post, drew out the enclosure with a pair of pincers, put it into another envelope with bank notes for a hundred roubles, and, sealing it up carefully, went to see the said general. "I wish to help on this good work with a contribution, your Excellency," said he, placing his sealed packet upon the table before the general, whose face expressed his satisfaction. "It is a worthy act, sir," he replied. "Indeed you Here his Excellency stopped in confu After this Brjotski flew rather than walked home, and by evening had quite forgotten his past sufferings and was himself again. He went back to business at once, and spent the night in planning new banking transactions on a colossal scale. The poor conscience lived like this for a long time, and passed through many hands; she was not wanted anywhere. People's only idea was to get rid of her, to pass her on at any price, and at last, weary of this Wandering Jew existence, she said sadly to her last possessor, a certain small tradesman whose business never prospered, "Why do you continually torment me and tread me underfoot?" "What do you want me to do with you, my dear conscience?" he answered; "you are no good at all." "This is what I suggest," replied conscience. "Find me a little Russian baby and lodge me in his pure heart. Perhaps the innocent would receive and cherish me; as he grew up he might become attached to me, and take me with him into the world. Perhaps he would not hate me." The tradesman did as she wished. He found a little Russian child and slipped conscience into his pure heart. As the child grows up conscience will grow with him; one day he will be a great man with a great conscience. In that day all falsehood, crime, and violence will disappear, for conscience, grown bolder, will speak, and will be obeyed. M. WRIGHT. From The Contemporary Review. THE POSITION OF WOMEN IN ANCIENT ROME. I. IN early Rome we find the same state of matters as we have found in Greece. The city is the unit. This city-state consists of citizens who have all equal rights and privileges. All outside of the city have at first no rights within its territories, and if they come within the city, they have no claim to justice or consideration except what they can obtain through a citizen. In all ancient cities there were always a large number of slaves, men or women, who either themselves or whose ancestors had been taken captive in war or stolen from their homes. Thus there were three classes of the population — citizens with full rights and privileges, aliens with no rights of their own, and slaves who were regarded as mere property. But the development of the city of Rome follows a different course from that of the Greek cities. The Romans gradually extended the privileges of citizenship till the unit was no longer a city, but a nation, and finally it became the civilized world. Aliens make no prominent figure in Rome, as they did in Athens, unless we consider the plebeians as aliens, and in the process of time the plebeians became citizens, and every civil distinction between them and the original citizens vanished. Besides, the censor had the right to put the name of an alien on the list of citizens, and no doubt many foreigners became Roman citizens in this way. The slaves also had a more advantageous position in Rome. The road to citizenship was at an early period laid open for them. Their masters manumitted many of them, and they became freedmen. These freedmen came to be numerous and influential, and the censor Appius Claudius in 312 B.C.* admitted them all to the full rights of citizenship. They were not, indeed, allowed to enjoy the honors of the State, but this same Appius Claudius granted to the sons of freedmen admission into the Senate, and his right-hand man, Cn. Flavius, curule ædile of the year 304, was the son of a freedman. Thus, in course of time, the slave became the freedman, the freedman's son became an ingenuus, or freeborn citizen, with all the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship. We have already seen what was the result of this state of matters in Greece. In Rome the result was different. The alien women attained to less prominence even than the alien men, and in this account of the position of women in Roman society we may pass them without notice. A few foreign women appear in the early history of Rome, and play a prominent part; but the tales are borrowed from Greek stories of the times of the tyrants, and do not fit in with strictly Roman ideas. During the best period of Roman history alien women are never mentioned, except in plays borrowed from the Greek, and it is only when we come to the later days of the republic that we begin again to hear the names of a few. But their presence is owing to the prevalence of Greek ideas and Greek customs, and even the few that are mentioned keep in the background. The female slaves also do not demand our attention. The female slave was treated simply as a cow or sheep. If she produced healthy offspring, it was so much gain to her master, and he did not care who was the father. Of course she could not marry, and all her children were the property of her owner. Sometimes a male slave and a female slave were allowed or compelled to live together, and there was something like a marriage. But they had no right to their own children, and no obligations towards them except such as were imposed upon them by their proprietors. At the same time, as their fertility was a source of revenue to their masters, In Roman society there were these same they were often treated very kindly. In three classes of women - the full citizen, olden times, the female slave who had the alien, and the slave. The Roman three children was allowed a dispensation citizen could marry only a woman who was from hard work, and if she had more she the daughter of a Roman citizen. Mar- sometimes obtained her freedom. The riage with any other was impossible. The Romans had a great liking for the slaves very object of marriage was to produce a who were born within their households, race of citizens, and therefore both father and often brought them up along with the and mother must belong to the class of young members of the family, with whom citizens. It was for this reason that such they thus became intimate. This close care was taken of the purity of Roman connection tended to lessen the sense of women, and such a broad distinction was absolute proprietorship in many cases, and drawn between the conduct of the man the slave woman was treated with considand the woman. There must be no sus-eration. It was no doubt through such picion of spuriousness in regard to the Roman citizen. But the offspring of the man with a foreign woman or a slave did not become a citizen, and therefore the State was perfectly indifferent as to what relations might exist between a male citizen and alien women or slaves, and society was equally indifferent. influences that the lot of the slave woman was ameliorated, and when we come to the times of the empire, we see laws made to protect them, and freedom frequently conferred upon them. It is, then, the matrons alone who are conspicuous in Roman history. Every citizen girl married and became a matron, and it is that class exclusively which we • Dionysius makes Servius Tullius admit the freed- shall discuss. man to citizenship: iv. 22. Now, the first remark that has to be made is that Rome gave the same expansion to marriage as to citizenship, and thereby produced a revolution in the position of woman; a revolution, however, gradual in its extension and gradual in its effects, but of most momentous consequence to the world, for it broke down completely the old constitution of citystates, by which their privileges were conferred on men as members of families, and established a new and world-wide constitution by which men obtained their privileges as men. In the earliest stages it is possible that the right of intermarriage may have existed between Roman citizens and citizens of various towns of Latium. Certainly the legends make Roman princes marry into Latin families. But on the establishment of the republic the right of intermarriage existed only between patricians of the city. A patrician man could not marry a plebeian woman, nor a plebeian man a patrician woman. The children of either marriage could not be patricians; they could only be plebeians, and were not under the control of the father. But after various struggles this wall of separation between patrician and plebeian was broken down, and the Lex Canuleia, in 442 B.C., conferred the connubium, or right of intermarriage, on the plebeians. Livy puts speeches into the mouths of the proposers and opposers of this measure. They have no claim to be historical; but they reveal the fact that Livy thought the objections to the extension of the connubium were as much religious as civil. There was a further extension of the connubium when Rome, in the middle of the fourth century before Christ, admitted to its citizenship some of the Italian, especially Latin, towns which it had subdued. The bestowal of the citizenship on the libertini, or freedmen, still further extended the connubium. In 89 B.C. the Italians received the connubium by the Lex Julia and Plautia. During the later days of the republic, and in the time of the empire, the citizenship was conferred on men in various parts of the world, and especially on various towns in the provinces. Soldiers also, who had served for a certain time, and had allied themselves to foreign women, had these alliances converted into legitimate marriages. In fact, the right of intermarriage had become of much less value. In early days the privileges of patricians were great, and it was worth while to take care that these should be secured only to genuine patrician offspring, especially as only genuine patrician offspring could perform due sacrifice and worship to the gods of the family and the State. Even in the days from the Punic wars to the end of the republic, Roman citizenship was at once. valuable and honorable; for the Roman citizen paid no taxes, and in an indirect way might share in the plunder of the world, and he enjoyed peculiar advantages in the eye of the law. But these advantages vanished with the advance of the empire, which reduced all to a dead level of subjection, and at length, in 212 A.D., one of the most hated of tyrants, Caracalla, conferred the citizenship on all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and with it the connubium. After this any man might marry any woman, and the factitious distinctions which had ruled the ancient world vanished forever. The world owes no gratitude to Caracalla for this grand consummation; for his only motive in conferring the citizenship on all was that all might be compelled to pay taxes, and that aliens might not escape, as some of them had hitherto done. The outline of the history of what we may call the external emancipation of woman now given is, we have no doubt, substantially correct and based on trustworthy sources; but when we come to deal with the moral progress of women, and their position in the midst of Roman society, great difficulties meet us, which attach to all early Roman history. Rome, according to the usual account, was founded in 753 B.C. There is no trace of any regular literature between that date and 390 B.C., when the city was burned to the ground. The Romans, no doubt, knew the art of writing at an early period; but any records kept by them were of the most meagre kind, and nearly all of them must have perished in the conflagration of 390. One hundred and seventy years have to pass before regular histories of Rome began to be written, and nearly all the literature and monuments during these one hundred and seventy years have disappeared. We are thus without authentic documents for the mi nute history of the Roman people for five hundred years of their existence. During this period the position of women underwent important changes; but, owing to this absence of documents, we are unable to explain these changes. We have, however, a very definite tradition to start with. This tradition presents itself everywhere in the works of Roman poets and historians, and pervades the ideas even of the late jurists, and we may feel confident that it is substantially correct. This tra dition is to the effect that the position of the Roman matron was quite different from that of the Greek matron in the time of Pericles. The Roman matron was mistress in her own household. As the husband took charge of all external transactions, so the wife was supreme in household arrangements. The marriage was a community in all affairs, and within the home the utmost diligence, reverence, and harmony prevailed. The wife sat in the atrium, or principal hall, dispensing the wool to the maidservants, and herself making the garments of her husband and family. She did not cook or do what was regarded as menial work. She dined with her husband, sitting while he reclined, when they were alone. She received the friends of her husband and dined with them also. She walked in and out with great freedom, and she nursed and brought up her own children. This is a bright and beautiful picture, and some of the traits remained true to the end of Roman history. Many stories are told of the affection of husband for wife, wife for husband, children for parents, and parents for children. Thus we are informed of the father of the Grac chi, that he caught a couple of snakes in his bed, and, on consulting the haruspices, or diviners, he was told that he must not kill or let go both; that if he killed the male, he himself (Tiberius) would die; if he killed the female, his wife Cornelia would die. Tiberius did not hesitate in his choice. He loved Cornelia. He was elderly, she was young. He therefore killed the male snake, and a short time after this occurrence he died. The story is no doubt true, as the authority for it was his famous son Caius. Nothing could be more striking than the affection of Cicero for his daughter. He writes to her in the most endearing terms, cared for her every want, and was inconsolable for her loss when death carried her away. There are numerous instances in which wives resolved to share the ill-fortunes of their husbands, to endure calamity along with them, and to die rather than survive them. history there is reason to believe that the Roman wife was completely under the control of her husband. The Roman idea of a family made the father a despot, with power of life and death over his children, who could do nothing without his consent. This was the case in regard to male children even after they had reached a considerable age. Women, according to the opinion of the early Romans, were always children. They required protection and guidance during their whole life, and could never be freed from despotic control. Accordingly when a Roman girl married, she had to choose whether she would remain under the control of her father, or pass into the control or, as it was called, into the hands of her husband. It is likely that in the early ages of the city she always passed from the power of her father into the hands of her husband, and the position she occupied was that of daughter to her husband. She thus became entirely subject to him, and was at his mercy. Roman history supplies many instances of the despotism which husbands exercised over their wives. The slightest indiscretion was sometimes punished by death, while men might do what they liked without let or hindrance. "If you were to catch your wife," was the law laid down by Cato the censor, "in an act of infidelity, you would kill her with impunity without a trial; but if she were to catch you, she would not venture to touch you with her finger, and indeed she has no right." Wives were prohibited from tasting wine at the risk of the severest penalties. The conduct of Egnatius was praised who, surprising his wife in the act of sipping the forbidden liquid, beat her to death. The same sternness appears in the reasons which induced some of the Romans to dismiss their wives. Sulpicius Gallus dismissed his, because she appeared in the streets without a veil ; Antistius Vetus dismissed his, because he saw her speaking secretly to a freedwoman in public; and P. Sempronius Sophus sent his away because she had ventured to go to the public games without informing him of her movements. This ideal remained with Roman men I think that we may see that the Roman till the end of the empire. It is the stand- matrons did not like this arbitrary treatard by which Juvenal metes out his criti-ment, and that they protested against the cism on the women of his own day, and many of the ill-natured judgments uttered against the sex are based on the old-fashioned conception of a Roman matron's du ties. But there is quite another side to this picture. In the early stages of Roman assumption that they were beings quite different from their husbands, and entitled to no rights and privileges as against them. And the interesting feature in the history The story may not be historical, but the Romans regarded it as such. of the Roman matron is the gradual emancipation which she effected for herself from these fetters of Roman tradition and usage. Unfortunately, we are not able, as I have explained, to trace fully the processes of this emancipation, but we can indicate some influences which worked in this direction. First the Roman records show that it was not safe to trifle with the feelings of Roman women. They were, like Roman men, possessed of great decision of character, and when provoked could do the most daring deeds, reckless of the consequences. If they were treated kindly, and on equal terms, they were the best of wives; and I am convinced that their goodness and firmness were the most ef fectual causes of the freedom which they attained. But if husbands put into force their traditional power, and claimed supreme domination over them, they were exactly the women to resist. And the history of Rome throws a lurid light on this aspect of their character; for occasionally they took stern and wild vengeance, when husbands went too far in their despotic actions. I will adduce one or two instances of this. begged for a few moments of private talk with the rest of their associates, but within sight of the people. Permission was granted, a few words were exchanged, and then all the twenty matrons came back, boldly quaffed the liquor, and died in consequence. Then a search was made for all the matrons who had been engaged in this conspiracy, and one hundred and seventy of them were found guilty. The men explained the occurrence by asserting that the women were infatuated; but probably they knew well why recourse was had to such violent measures, and that Roman matrons were not likely to be subjected to tyranny without making an effort in one way or another to put an end to it. An occurrence of a similar nature took place in 180 B.C. In this case there can scarcely be a doubt that a real plague raged, for it lasted for three years and decimated Italy. But the women were enraged with the men for the harsh measures which had been taken against them in connection with the Bacchanalian mysteries, and they seem to have regarded the plague as affording a favorable opportu nity for the use of poison. In 180 B.C. the prætor, the consul, and many other illusIn the year 331 B.C., many of the Ro- trious men died. A judge was appointed man citizens, and especially many of the to inquire into these deaths, and espeRoman nobles, were attacked by an un- cially to examine if poison had been em. known disease, which showed the same ployed. The historians do not narrate the symptoms in all, and nearly all perished. results of this investigation, but we are The cause was wrapt in obscurity, but at told that the wife of the consul was tried length a maidservant went to a curule and condemned to death. Thirty-six years ædile, and said that she could explain the after this, two men of consular rank were origin of the disease, but would not do so poisoned by their wives. In subsequent unless security were given her that she times the use of poison became frequent ; would suffer no harm in consequence. and particularly in the early days of the The curule ædile brought the matter be- empire, the matrons about the court were fore the consuls, the consuls consulted accused of having constant recourse to it the Senate, and a resolution was passed to get out of the way men whom they did guaranteeing safety to the maidservant not like, husbands, and sons, and others Whereupon she declared that the deaths connected with them, as well as strangers. arose from poison; that the matrons were And one writer remarks that wherever in the habit of compounding drugs, and there were irregularities there were poishe could take the officials to a house, sonings. Some historians have rejected in which they would come upon the ma- these tales of poisoning as the inventions trons while engaged in the operation. of credulous annalists, I think without The officials accepted her offer, followed good reason. But whether the stories are her, and found, as she said, the matrons true or false, the Romans believed them, compounding drugs. About_twenty of and they embody the Roman belief in rethem were conveyed to the Forum, and gard to what women could do. And it were subjected to an examination on their seems to me that we must regard them as doings. Two of them, of noble family, indicating that the Roman matrons felt and with patrician names, Cornelia and sometimes that they were badly treated, Sergia, affirmed that the drugs were per- that they ought not to endure the bad fectly wholesome. That could be easily treatment, and that they ought to take the tested, and the two matrons were re-only means that they possessed of exquested to prove their truthfulness by pressing their feelings and wreaking their drinking the mixture. The two matrons vengeance by employing poison. |