Another and a still more important consequence resulted from the changed form of marriage. Being looked upon merely as a civil contract, entered into for the happiness of the contracting parties, its continuance depended upon mutual consent. Either party might dissolve it at will, and the dissolution gave both parties a right to remarry. There can be no question that under this system the obligations of marriage were treated with extreme levity. We find Cicero repudiating his wife Terentia, because he desired a new dowry;(614) Augustus compelling the husband of Livia to repudiate her when she was already pregnant, that he might marry her himself;(615) Cato ceding his wife, with the consent of her father, to his friend Hortensius, and resuming her after his death;(616) Mæcenas continually changing his wife;(617) Sempronius Sophus repudiating his wife, because she had once been to the public games without his knowledge;(618) 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.”(619) Nor did women show less alacrity in repudiating their husbands. Seneca denounced this evil with especial vehemence, declaring that divorce in Rome no longer brought with it any shame, and that there were women who reckoned their years rather by their husbands than by the consuls.(620) Christians and Pagans echoed the same complaint. According to Tertullian, “divorce is the fruit of marriage.”(621) Martial speaks of a woman who had already arrived at her tenth husband;(622) Juvenal, of a woman having eight husbands in five years.(623) 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.(624)