§93. It must be admitted, too, that a great change took place in the last years of the Republic. With the laxness of the family life, the freedom of divorce, and the inflow of wealth and extravagance, the purity and dignity of the Roman matron declined, as had before declined the manhood and the strength of her father and her husband. It must be remembered, however, that ancient writers did not dwell upon certain subjects that are favorites with our own. The simple joys of childhood and domestic life, home, the praises of sister, wife, and mother may not have been too sacred for the poet and the essayist of Rome, but the essayist and the poet did not make them their themes. The mother of Horace must have been a singularly gifted woman, but she is never mentioned by her son. The descriptions of domestic life, therefore, that have come down to us are either from Greek sources, or are selected from precisely those circles where fashion, profligacy, and impurity made easy the work of the satirist. It is, therefore, safe to say that the pictures painted for us in the verse of Catullus and Juvenal, for example, are not true of Roman women as a class in the times of which they write. The strong, pure woman of the early day must have had many to imitate her virtues in the darkest times of the Empire. There were mothers then, as well as in the times of the Gracchi; there were wives as noble as the wife of Marcus Brutus. CHAPTER IV CHILDREN AND EDUCATION REFERENCES: Marquardt, 80-134; Voigt, 322 f., 397 f., 455 f.; Göll, "Gallus," II, 65-113; Friedländer, I, 456 f., III, 376 f.; Ramsay, 475 f.; Smith, _lūdus litterārius_; Harper, _education_; Baumeister, 237, 1588 f.; Schreiber, Pl. 79, 82, 89, 90; Lübker, _Erziehung_. §94. Legal Status.--The position of the children in the _familia_ has been already explained (§§31, 32). It has been shown that in the eyes of the law they were little better than the chattels of the Head of the House. It rested with him to grant them the right to live; all that they earned was his; they married at his bidding, and either remained under his _potestās_ or passed under another no less severe. It has also been suggested that custom (§32) and _pietās_ (§73) had made this condition less rigorous than it seems to us.