The Roman family had been subjected to many modifications since we last considered it.[559] The _patria potestas_, indeed, existed in all its old rigour, and the power of life and death over the children still found occasional expression; but the unity of the family had been largely dissolved by the laxity of the marriage tie. A modification of the _usus_ marriage had come into vogue, which recognised the consent of the parties, without the prescriptive tenure by which the _potestas_ was asserted, as the only bond—one, therefore, dissoluble at any moment by rejection on the part of the husband or by mutual consent. The wife remained a member of her father’s _familia_, and if she was _sui juris_, retained her own property; for the tutelage of women was out of accordance with the spirit of the age, and, though not abolished, was evaded by cunningly contrived legal fictions.[560] Never, perhaps, have women been freer from social trammels and legal bonds than they were in the last century and a half of the Republic, and one of the features of their independence was an indirect, but very powerful, influence on politics. But the greatest change in Roman society was due to the growth of a slave population, which, in the city and that part of Italy which formed the Roman domain, reduced the free citizens to a minority. The rules of the _jus gentium_—which in this instance, as in many others, is pure international law—permitted the captive to be enslaved until such time as he set foot again in his native land, if this country of his were an independent state.[561] This principle, applied to the victorious wars of Rome, had flooded Italy with specimens of various nationalities which were applied to various uses. These prisoners of war were, as a rule, immediately transferred from the ownership of the state to that of private individuals. They were sold by the quaestors,[562] often in the camp,[563] and the slave-dealer tracked the footsteps of a successful general.[564] War alone might have provided all that were needed for the most luxurious community, if we may judge from the result of the second conquest of Macedon, which swept 150,000 Epirot captives into Italy,[565] and from the consequences of the campaigns of Caesar and Lucullus. But it was supplemented by a brisk slave trade, which after the fall of Corinth and Carthage (146 B.C.) centred at Delos, and which at the close of the Republic had reached such dimensions that, during the reign of the Cilician pirates, 10,000 slaves are said to have been imported and sold there in the course of a single day.[566] It was chiefly from the latter source that the versatile natives of the East were brought, Phrygians, Mysians, Lydians, Lycians, Paphlagonians, the Hellenised members of the “nations born to slavery,” who, while professing to interpret, often guided and controlled, the wills of their slower Roman masters.