=Marriage.=--The first rule of this religion is that one should be the issue of a regular marriage if one is to have the right of adoring the ancestors of the family. Roman marriage, therefore, is at the start a religious ceremony. The father of the bride gives her away outside the house when a procession conducts her to the house of the groom chanting an ancient sacred refrain, "Hymen, O Hymen!" The bride is then led before the altar of the husband where water and fire are presented, and there in the presence of the gods of the family the bride and groom divide between them a cake of meal. Marriage at this period was called confarreatio (communion through the cake). Later another form of marriage was invented. A relative of the bride in the presence of witnesses sells her to the husband who declares that he buys her for his wife. This is marriage by sale (coemptio). For the Romans as for the Greeks marriage is a religious duty; religion ordains that the family should not become extinct. The Roman, therefore, declares when he marries that he takes his wife to perpetuate the family through their children. A noble Roman who sincerely loved his wife repudiated her because she brought him no children. =The Roman Woman.=--The Roman woman is never free. As a young girl, she belongs to her father who chooses her husband for her; married, she comes under the power of her husband--the jurisconsults say she is under his "manus," _i.e._, she is in the same position as his daughter. The woman always has a master who has the right of life and death over her. And yet, she is never treated like a slave. She is the equal in dignity of her husband; she is called the mother of the family (materfamilias) just as her husband is called the father of the family (paterfamilias). She is the mistress in the house, as he is the master. She gives orders to the slaves whom she charges with all the heavy tasks--the grinding of the grain, the making of bread, and the cooking. She sits in the seat of honor (the atrium), spins and weaves, apportions work to the slaves, watches the children, and directs the house. She is not excluded from association with the men, like the Greek woman; she eats at the table with her husband, receives visitors, goes into town to dinner, appears at the public ceremonies, at the theatre, and even at the courts. And still she is ordinarily uncultured; the Romans do not care to instruct their daughters; the quality which they most admire in woman is gravity, and on her tomb they write by way of eulogy, "She kept the house and spun linen."