In all that concerns marriage ancient Rome singularly resembles ancient Greece.[710] Her customs and regulations regarding the wife were at first of a savage atrocity. The term adulterer begins by being applied to the woman alone, and the law of the Ten Tables arraigned the guilty wife before the domestic tribunal; she was condemned and executed by the relatives themselves--_Cognati necanto uti volent_. Family tribunals continued to exist during the whole period of the republic, and even later, concurrently with the law _Julia_; but customs softened, and death was commuted to banishment to two hundred miles from Rome at the least, with the obligation of wearing the toga of the courtesan. The _flagrante delicto_ naturally authorised the husband to kill the wife on the spot;[711] as for the lover, he could keep him, torture him, mutilate him, _raffanise_ him (I dare not give the sense of this picturesque word), and deliver him to the ferocious lubricity of his slaves. Law and public opinion authorised the husband to fleece the surprised lover, and thus torture could be made a means of extorting money from him. The _Lex Julia_, enacted either by Julius Cæsar or Augustus, attempted a reform of morals. By the terms of this law, which was in force till the time of Justinian, the husband could not kill his wife, taken in adultery, without being punished as a murderer. Neither could he put the lover to death unless he were a slave, a go-between (_leno_), a comedian, or a freed man of the husband or of the family. But the husband could hold him prisoner twenty hours in order to procure witnesses. The father had more extensive rights than the husband; he was authorised, in case of _flagrante delicto_, to kill his daughter and her lover, but he was to kill them both, and immediately. However, to enable him to act thus as justiciary, he must have the _potestas_ still, and the crime must have been committed in his house, or in that of his son-in-law. The _Lex Julia_ punishes the adulterous man by the confiscation of the half of his goods; it decrees the same punishment for the woman, and, besides, forbids her to marry after the repudiation, which was obligatory for the husband. The latter was obliged even to drive away his wife at once for fear of being called a go-between. This same _Lex Julia_ made adultery a public crime which every citizen could bring before the tribunals, and it punished with the sword the adulterous man.[712] By degrees, and towards the Christian epoch, the legislation relative to adultery was amended.