=49. Rights and Privileges of Married Women.=--The great majority of all Romans are married. Even the slaves are allowed to join in a kind of unofficial wedlock known as _contubernium_, which only a very harsh master will dissolve. As for the free married women they go everywhere and do almost everything. No husband’s permission is needed when they visit the Forum or theater. They can sue and be sued or give testimony in the courts without his intervention. They manage their own property. Gratia, for example, is well off in her own right. Her estates are in charge of a dapper young freedman Ephorus, who is incessantly visiting her, and who never dreams of taking orders from her husband. So long as Gratia is barely faithful to Calvus he has no right to complain. He thanks his “Good Genius,” therefore, that things are not as in his friend Probus’s house, where the mistress’s factotum is suspected of being on altogether too familiar terms with his fair employer. [Illustration: A ROMAN MATRON.] Nevertheless, this freedom is supposed to carry with it corresponding responsibilities. Every Roman woman theoretically is responsible for her husband’s good name and for the wise ordering of his family. No right-minded woman dismisses the hope that at the end they will put the great words on her tombstone: “_She counselled well. She managed well. She spun wool._” The control of the vast _familia_ of slaves is usually in a matron’s hands, a duty calculated to bring out every executive quality within her. She largely conducts the education of her sons, no less than of her daughters. No Roman is ashamed to admit (as an Athenian in Pericles’s day might have been ashamed) that in the great crises of life he took the authoritative advice of his mother.[26] Roman civilization is, therefore, for better or worse, a civilization to which women no less than men have been suffered to apply the full powers of their genius. _It is a “hundred per cent civilization”_; whereas, that of Athens, considering the manner in which Athenian women were confined and ignored, was hardly more than a “fifty per cent civilization.” =50. Selection of Husbands for Young Girls.=--It is a fact, however, that in one great and vital matter Roman women are not free agents. They usually have their husbands, at least their first husbands, chosen for them by their parents. This comes to pass largely because usage requires that girls should be married so young that no rational romance on their part is really possible.