This illustrates the easy morality of the olden times, so contrary to our present standards, touching the marital relation, yet this case is not a parallel to many which could be cited in the golden days of Greece and Rome. So little sanctity was attached to the marital relation in Greece, even in the days of Pericles, that men were accustomed to loan their wives to their friends and the literature of the period made poetry of marital infidelity and fornication and adultery seemed about the commonest employment of both individuals and gods and goddesses. The Romans had more of the religious tendencies than the Greeks, but it is said that the Younger Cato loaned his wife, Marcia, to the orator Hortensius and took her back again, after his death.[54] Such conduct seems almost unbelievable, because so contrary to the natural moral instincts, yet the natural selection between two adults of the opposite sexes, although in derogation of the rights of the life-partner of either, seems hardly so depraved as the consent by the natural parents, to the marriage of infants of tender years, which custom was so prevalent in England and France in the past centuries. During the middle ages, in England, the marriages of little children were frequently arranged by their parents, for the purpose of avoiding wardship and to prevent the children from forming improper attachments, or to effect advantageous family connections for the parents. History records that Thomas, Lord Berkeley, was contracted to Margaret, daughter of Gerald Warren, Lord Lisle, in the forty-first year of Edward III., when the girl was only seven years old, and because of her tender years, it was stipulated that she should remain with her father for four years, but on account of sickness in the family, they were married when she was eight years old.[55] Maurice, fourth Lord Berkeley, was knighted at seven years of age, to prevent his wardship, and he was married at the age of eight, to Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Spencer, when the bride was also but eight years old.[56] Hundreds of similar cases could be mentioned in France and England, and in tropical countries, where the women develop at an earlier age, the marriages occur at a corresponding earlier age. In Brazil, in the past century parents married their children when still in years of infancy and the case of a Brazilian traveler, enroute to England, who demanded a half-fare ticket for his wife, who was under twelve years of age, occurred in the year 1853.[57] We are also told that the Hungarians of the seventeenth century often betrothed their children while still in their cradles, and the marriages were celebrated at the earliest possible age.[58]