When this laxity came to be the prevailing rule, the wife who was rich and, moreover, inclined to be in any way disagreeable held her husband at her mercy. If he divorced her without any considerable fault of hers, or if they parted by mutual consent, she took her dowry and left him with the children. If, as was very likely to be the case, he had married her for her property, he was obliged to be submissive. Plautus says: "The portionless wife is subject to her husband's will; wives with dowries are as executioners for their husbands." Martial, inveighing against a miserly woman who will not furnish her husband with a new cloak as a New Year's gift, says: "Why, Proculeia, do you cast off your husband in the month of January? This is not in your case a divorce; it is a good stroke of business." During the worst times, the law restricted the number of divorces obtainable by an individual to eight. If we are to believe Juvenal, there were women who were sufficiently enterprising to reach the limit in five years. The satirist describes them as leaving the doors only recently adorned, the tapestry used for the marriage festival still hanging on the house, and the branches still green upon the threshold. Seneca says that in his time it had come to such a pass that women reckoned the years, not by the names of the consuls, but by the husbands they had divorced. Yet, notwithstanding--perhaps it would be more correct to say, on account of--this excessive willingness on the part of the women to enter into contracts of marriage, it became necessary in the time of the first empire to decree severe penalties against celibacy; and bonuses were awarded to those in whose families children were born. Even as early as B.C. 121, Metellus the Censor, complaining in the Senate of the increasing tendency to avoid the responsibilities of matrimony, said: "Could we exist without wives at all, doubtless we should rid ourselves of the plague they are to us; since, however, nature has decreed that we cannot dispense with the infliction, it is best to bear it manfully, and rather look to the permanent conservation of the State than to our own passing comfort."