The aim of education in the family and in public life was to repress the freedom of the individual in the interest of the state, to make a nation of brave warriors and of dutiful citizens. The highest results of this stern training were reached in the Samnite wars,--a period known thereafter as the golden age of virtue and of heroism. A citizen of this time was, in the highest degree, obedient to authority, pious, frugal, and generally honest. But though he was willing to sacrifice his life for the good of the state, he was equally ready to enrich himself at the expense of his neighbours; the wealthy did not hesitate to sell the poor into slavery for debt, till they were forbidden to do so by law. Their hard, stern souls knew neither generosity nor mercy. Severe toward the members of their family, cruel in the treatment of slaves, and in their business transactions shrewd and grasping, the Romans of the time, however admirable for their heroic virtues, were narrow, harsh, and unlovable. Greed was one of their strongest motives for conquest. Not for glory,--much less for the good of their neighbours,--did they extend their power over Italy; it was rather that more of the peasants might be supplied with farms and that the nobles might be given larger tracts of the public land and a greater number of places of honour and of profit to use and to enjoy. As long as they remained poor and under strict discipline, they were moral. In the following period they were to gain greater freedom from the control of their magistrates and, at the same time, power and wealth. These new conditions were to put their virtue and even their government to the severest test.[i] MORALS AND POLITICS OF THE AGE It is difficult to form a clear idea of the moral character of the Roman people under its kings, because we cannot be sure that the pictures handed down to us of that period were not copied from the manners of a later time, and thus represent in fact the state of the Commonwealth rather than that of the Monarchy. Thus the simple habits of Lucretia seem copied from the matrons of the republic in the time of its early poverty, and cannot safely be ascribed to the princesses of the magnificent house of the Tarquinii. Again, we can scarcely tell how far we may carry back the origin of those characteristic points in the later Roman manners, the absolute authority possessed by the head of a family over his wife and children. But it is probable that they are of great antiquity; for the absolute power of a father over his sons extended only to those who were born in that peculiar form of marriage called connubium, a connection which anciently could only subsist between persons of the same order, and which was solemnised by a peculiar ceremony called _confarreatio_; a ceremony so sacred, that a marriage thus contracted could only be dissolved by certain unwonted and horrible rites, purposely ordered as it seems to discourage the practice of divorce.