But in those ages, and especially in such a matter as the winning of wives, diplomacy was a resource not wholly depended upon. Among the marriage ceremonies of later times, there was a custom of parting the hair of the Roman bride with a spear. In this we find a reminiscence of the period when marriage by capture was resorted to when there seemed urgent necessity. Thus Romulus determined that what could not be gained by fair means should be obtained by the best method which came to hand. At the festival of the god Consus, appropriately the deity who presided over hidden deliberations, the seizure of the Sabine maidens was planned and carried out; and thus the Romans took to themselves wives. How closely this well-known story corresponds with facts, of course, cannot be determined. Possibly many of its details are attempts of later ages to account for wedding customs, the origin of which had been forgotten. But it is very probable that marriage by capture was common in the embryonic civilization of early Rome. And there may have been one occasion when this rude method of wooing was adopted in so flagrant and wholesale a manner that it led to a war with the Sabines, by which the remembrance of the event was perpetuated in the traditions of the people. Michelet, commenting on this story in his brilliant manner, says: "The progress of humanity is striking. Springing in India from mystical love, the ideal of woman assumes in Germany the features of savage virginity and gigantic force; in Greece, those of grace and stratagem, to arrive among the Romans at the highest pagan morality, to virgin and conjugal dignity. The Sabines only follow their ravishers on compulsion, but, become Roman matrons, they refuse to return to the paternal mansion, disarm their fathers and their husbands, and unite them in one city." Plutarch says that it was in order to obtain forgiveness that the Romans assured certain privileges to their wives. No labor other than spinning should be demanded of them; they should take the inside of the path; nothing indecent should be done or said in their presence; they should not be summoned before the criminal judges; and their children should wear the _pretexta_ and the _bulla_. Thus in the time of the Greek historian the barbarism of the old times was forgotten, and to the primitive constitution was attributed all the civilization which it required centuries to bring about.