It is true enough, of course, that marriage was usually a matter of contract between the fathers or guardians of the young pair, and not the consequence of affection between the youth and maiden; and this it is which we see in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, who copied Greek originals. Very often the fathers agreed to a marriage between their children; sometimes the arrangements were made by a woman (προμνηστρία) acquainted with the circumstances of the citizens’ families, who made a kind of business of arranging marriages. An important point was equality of fortune; of course, both parties had to be full citizens, but degrees of relationship do not seem to have been any hindrance. The girl’s consent was not asked at all; it was a matter of course that she should accept the husband chosen by her parents, and, as she had no other male acquaintances, objections can very seldom have been made. Generally she was only acquainted with the husband destined for her by seeing him hastily on her walks or at festivals. The destined bridegroom is more likely to have made objections if the appointed bride did not please him; yet here, too, as a rule, the father could have his way, since his son was entirely in his power, unless it so happened that he earned his own living by any profession, which was seldom the case among the better classes. The fathers or guardians then concluded the contract of engagement, in which the bride’s dowry was fixed and special arrangements made for community of goods, return of the dowry in case of a divorce, etc. The Homeric custom, by which it was the bridegroom who brought gifts in order to win a bride, while the father gave his daughter to the one who promised the richest bridal presents, had early fallen into disuse, and probably even in the heroic period it was only customary among noble families. In the historic period a dowry was regarded as an indispensable basis for marriage: so much so that daughters or sisters of poor citizens were often endowed at the expense of generous friends, or poor orphan girls by their guardians; sometimes the State even gave a dowry to the daughters of citizens who had deserved well of their country. The engagement itself was, as a rule, a legal act, which followed the private agreement between the fathers, and was considered an essential preliminary to a legal marriage; it was not, however, a general custom to celebrate this act in a social manner by a banquet. As is usual in southern countries, the girls married very young, sometimes even at the age of fifteen, or earlier; but the period between their sixteenth and twentieth years was probably the usual one for marriage. There seems to have been no distinct limit of age for men, but probably the years between twenty and thirty were those in which most of them entered the married state. We do not know how long a period usually elapsed between the engagement and the marriage; probably there