Roman women are, indeed, excluded from seats in the Senate and from the long-defunct right to vote in the public assemblies.[25] They cannot command armies nor receive governorships, although every now and then an angry senator vainly proposes a resolution that governors shall not take their wives along with them to their provinces, lest the latter constitute themselves the real rulers of the district. Women do not act as judges or jurors. Nay more: legally they are under legal disabilities calculated to stir the rage of their “equal suffrage” sisters of a later day. They have always the status of minors, and are subject to the legal control of either father, guardian, or husband to their dying hour. All this is true, yet, what of it? The jurists have long ago devised fictions of the law whereby the women have practically as complete control of their property as have their brothers; and the government of the Empire is peculiarly a government of backstairs intrigues and of secret influence. What chance have mere men against women in such warfare? Custom also assigns to women an amount of freedom in most social matters which makes Imperial Rome a feminine paradise that can only be matched by Twentieth Century America. =48. Men Reluctant to Marry.=--Long since leaders of the bolder sex have had to reason with their fellow citizens on the necessity of marriage as a patriotic duty. The pragmatic old censor Quintus Metellus in 102 B.C. delivered a kind of a lay sermon: “If we could get along without wives, fellow citizens (_Quirites_) we should all spare ourselves the _tedium_ of marriage, but nature has ordained that we can neither live pleasantly with wives, nor exist at all without them--therefore let us sacrifice our personal interests to those of society.” After him Emperor Augustus enacted stiff laws to decrease the alarming number of bachelors, and to give special privileges to the parents of three children. This does not prevent many prominent Romans from looking upon a wife as a kind of expensive bondage often to be shunned altogether.