Under the Cæsars marriage became a temporary arrangement, abandoned and re-established as often as one liked. Seneca said that women of rank counted their years by their husbands. Juvenal said that it was in that fashion that they counted their days. Tertullian added that divorce was the result of marriage. Divorce, however, was not obligatory. Matrimony was. According to the Lex Pappea Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was not married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry, whoso, though married, was childless, _ipso facto_ became a public enemy, incapable of inheriting or of serving the State. To this law--an Augustan hypocrisy--only a technical attention was paid. Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy. The next day they got a divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted. The moment passed the brat was disowned. As with men so with women. The univira became the many-husbanded wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all, one who, to escape the consequences of the lex Pappea Poppoea, hired a man to loan her his name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she liked, to imitate men at their worst, to fight like them and with them for power, to dabble in the bloody dramas of State, to climb on the throne and kill there or be killed; perhaps, less ambitiously, whipping her slaves, summoning the headsman to them, quieting her nerves with drink, appearing on the stage, in the arena even, contending as a gladiator there, and remaining a patrician meanwhile. In those days a sin was a prayer, and a prayer, Perseus said, was an invocation at which a meretrix would blush to hear pronounced aloud. Religion sanctioned anything. The primal gods, supplemented with the lords and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every superstition, the temple of every crime. Asiatic monsters, which Hellenic poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native hideousness unchanged. It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome transformed. Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind the mask of Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian. Aphrodite, whose eyes had been lifted to the north and south, and who in Attica was draped with light, obtained as Venus the leer of the Lampsacene. Long since from Syria Astarte had arrived, as already, torn by Cilician pirates from Persia, Mithra had come, while, from Egypt, had strayed Apis from whose mouth two phalluses issued horizontally.