One chief cause--perhaps it is more correct to call it an accompaniment--of the breaking-down of the ancient ideals is found in the increasing tendency to deprecate the indissolubleness of marital bonds. Divorce became common and easy, so that the student of Roman biography finds it increasingly difficult to trace his characters through the many involutions of their various matrimonial alliances. Pompey married five times. Concerning his first two wives, Plutarch makes the following comment: "Sylla, admiring the valor and conduct of Pompey, ... sought means to attach him to himself by some personal alliance, and his wife Metella joining in his wishes, they persuaded Pompey to put away Antistia, and marry Æmilia, the stepdaughter of Sylla, she being at that very time the wife of another man, living with him, and with child by him. These were the very tyrannies of marriage, and much more agreeable to the times under Sylla than to the nature and habits of Pompey, that Æmilia, great with child, should be, as it were, ravished from the embraces of another for him, and that Antistia should be divorced with dishonor and misery by him for whose sake she had just before been bereft of her father--for Antistius was murdered in the Senate because he was suspected to be a favorer of Sylla for Pompey's sake. Antistia's mother, likewise, after she had seen all these indignities, made away with herself, a new calamity to be added to the tragic accompaniments of this marriage; and that there might be nothing wanting to complete them, Æmilia herself died, almost immediately after entering Pompey's house, in childbed."