So far as the question concerns the emperors, there is but one answer: it is found in their unbounded power, in which, their will being responsible to no one, they were absolutely at liberty to indulge caprice or lustful impulse to the extent of their personal capabilities. When, as was natural in the circumstances, the characters of these potentates were warped in the wrong direction, their influence, not to speak of their tyrannical power, was incalculably detrimental to female virtue. But the real underlying cause for the sensuality of the women whom we have brought into review was the utter purposelessness of their lives, joined to an entire lack of all spiritual impulses in the direction of self-respect. The Roman woman's life during the period under discussion was one of absolute ease and unbounded luxury, although the possibility of abject physical misery, in the form of banishment or a violent death, always hovered near. Luxury is always conducive to sexual incontinence; and, as is well known, customary peril engenders recklessness. The minds of the Roman women were not fortified by adequate spiritual impressions to offset these impulses. Such ideas of chastity as were inherited from the ancient customs were not founded on a belief in the dignity of womanhood, but rather on the conception of marriage as a property right held by the husband in the person of the wife. Adultery was the infringement of the husband's property rights, rather than an injury to a woman's personal worth to herself. When divorce for political reasons became common, the sense of the validity of those rights grew correspondingly dim. A woman, seeing that she was married not for her person, but for the sake of her friends, came herself to set little store by that which to her husband was not the chief item in the contract. The arid formalism of her religion also gave but little support to any restraining instincts of self-respect. It needed a new religion to enable woman to rediscover in herself a spiritual nature, which could be tainted and injured by the abuse of the body.