Among the Romans, a grave and austere people, who, during five hundred years, were unacquainted with the elegancies and the pleasures of life, and who, in the middle of furrows and fields of battle, were employed in tillage or in war, the manners of the women were a long time as solemn and severe as those of the men, and without the smallest mixture of corruption, or of weakness. The time when the Roman women began to appear in public, marks a particular era in history. The Roman women, for many ages, were respected over the whole world. Their victorious husbands re-visited them with transport, at their return from battle. They laid at their feet the spoils of the enemy, and endeared themselves in their eyes by the wounds which they had received for them and for the state. Those warriors often came from imposing commands upon kings, and in their own houses accounted it an honor to obey. In vain the too rigid laws made them the arbiters of life and death. More powerful than the laws, the women ruled their judges. In vain the legislature, foreseeing the wants which exist only among a corrupt people, permitted divorce. The indulgence of the polity was proscribed by the manners. Such was the influence of beauty at Rome before the licentious intercourse of the sexes had corrupted both. The Roman matrons do not seem to have possessed that military courage which Plutarch has praised in certain Greek and barbarian women; they partook more of the nature of their sex; or, at least, they departed less from its character. Their first quality was decency. Every one knows the story of Cato the censor, _who stabbed a Roman Senator for kissing his own wife in the presence of his daughter_. To these austere manners, the Roman women joined an enthusiastic love of their country, which discovered itself upon many great occasions. On the death of Brutus, they all clothed themselves in mourning. In the time of Coriolanus they saved the city. That incensed warrior who had insulted the senate and priests, and who was superior even to the pride of pardoning, could not resist the tears and entreaties of the women. _They_ melted his obdurate heart. The senate decreed them public thanks, ordered the men to give place to them upon all occasions, caused an altar to be erected for them on the spot where the mother had softened her son, and the wife her husband; and the sex were permitted to add another ornament to their head-dress. The Roman women saved the city a second time, when besieged by Brennus. They gave up all their gold as its ransom. For that instance of their generosity, the senate granted them the honor of having funeral orations pronounced in the rostrum, in common with patriots and heroes. After the battle of Cannae, when Rome had no other treasures but the virtues of her citizens, the women sacrificed both their jewels and their gold. A new decree rewarded their zeal.