The first divorce mentioned in Roman history was in 231 B.C. when a certain Ruga put away a truly beloved wife, out of a high sense of public duty--because she bore him no children. The public was shocked at such action then, but soon it was shocked no longer. Under the later Republic lucky was the nobleman or noblewoman who was not divorced at least once. Cicero divorced Terentia after a long wedded life seemingly because he wanted a new marriage portion; Cato the Younger (immaculate Stoic) repudiated his wife to please a friend, then calmly took her back again at the friend’s death. Under the Empire things hardly seem to have become any better. “Trial marriages” are not a recognized institution; but surely they exist. It is direfully easy for either a man or woman to take the initiative. No court proceedings are necessary. “Take away your property!” spoken formally and before witnesses is sufficient to break up the household, although the more usual method is to “_send a messenger_”; _i.e._ dispatch a delegation of friends to the other party to break the news. Vainly did Augustus try by legislation to make divorces less prompt and convenient. The whole proceeding is still grievously popular and simple. Of course, divorced persons are under no stigma in the fashionable set. Many a time a couple has separated, married elsewhere, separated again, and then resumed the old wedlock. Women are charged with “flitting from one home to another, wearing out the bridal veil”; and indeed, spicy instances are cited of ladies who boasted “eight husbands in five autumns, a fact worthy of commemoration on their tombs”; or of reckoning the years not by the annual consuls but by their annual husbands. =61. Celibacy Common: Old Families Dying Out.=--Under such conditions what wonder many a rich Roman prefers celibacy! They often proclaim the “advantages of childlessness.” Old men of property without children are fawned upon with offers of every kind of service. Social and even public honors are thrust upon them. Their atria are crowded every morning with genteel visitors; their least wishes anticipated--all in the desperate hopes that “when their tablets are opened” they will have remembered the swarm of lackeys in their wills. Indeed, adventurers have been known to go far in Rome by making a false show of wealth, concealing the fact they actually have children, and “seeming bilious and complaining of indigestion.” Everybody apparently will give them favor or credit. It is a familiar scandal. Under such circumstances what wonder most of the old Republican families have died out by the age of Hadrian, that the Calvi feel very isolated; and that of the strictly patrician families only the famous Cornelii appear now to survive.