But the character of the law was very far from being its sole, or even its primary, cause. "In a purer state of public opinion," well observes Lecky, "a very wide latitude of divorce might probably have been allowed to both parties, without any serious consequences. The right of repudiation which the husband had always possessed was, as we have seen, in the Republic never or very rarely exercised. Of those who scandalised good men by the rapid recurrence of their marriages, probably most, if marriage had been indissoluble, would have refrained from entering into it.... A vast wave of corruption had flowed in upon Rome, and under any system of law it would have penetrated into domestic life. Laws prohibiting all divorce have never secured the purity of married life in ages of great corruption, nor did the latitude which was accorded in imperial Rome prevent the existence of a very large amount of female virtue."[28] Nor, it may be added, does it appear that the family life of the people at large, notably that of the middle classes in the provinces, was seriously tainted by the social corruption of the capital, where all the causes of moral degeneration were especially active. [Footnote 22: GLASSON, _op. cit._, 176, 178. Poisoning became a frequent substitute for divorce, especially where marriage by _confarreatio_ had been contracted: _ibid._, 177; WOOLSEY, _op. cit._, 42, 43.] [Footnote 23: AULUS GELLIUS, _Noctes atticae_, I, 6.] [Footnote 24: "We find Cicero repudiating his wife Terentia, because he desired a new dowry; Augustus compelling the husband of Livia to repudiate her when she was already pregnant, that he might marry her himself; Cato ceding his wife, with the consent of her father, to his friend Hortensius, and resuming her after his death; Mæcenas continually changing his wife; Sempronius Sophus repudiating his wife, because she had once been to the public games without his knowledge; Paulus Æmilius taking the same step without assigning any reason, and defending himself by saying, 'My shoes are new and well made, but no one knows where they pinch me.'... Christians and Pagans echoed the same complaint. According to Tertullian 'divorce is the fruit of marriage.' Martial speaks of a woman who had already arrived at her tenth husband; Juvenal, of a woman having eight husbands in five years. But the most extraordinary recorded instance of this kind is related by St. Jerome, who assures us that there existed at Rome a wife who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being his twenty-first wife."--LECKY, _Hist. of European Morals_, II, 306, 307, who cites the authorities in the margin. For other illustrations see WOOLSEY, _op. cit._, 39-49; THWING, _The Family_, 36 ff.]