Although the seed, sown in Greece during the Periclean age when conveyed to Rome, produced a golden harvest, the fact will doubtless be remembered that the Roman lawyers had but just completed their work of establishing the legal equality of the sexes when the agencies which for years had been at work to destroy the Empire culminated; and finally, when Christianity, in the person of Constantine ascended the throne, the results of four centuries of civilization were destroyed, or for more than sixteen hundred years were practically annulled. Regarding the changes which had been wrought in the legal status of women in the age of the Antonine Cæsars, we are informed that whereas under the older Roman law a woman at marriage came under the Patria Potestas of her husband, under the later law, as influenced by the principles involved in the Stoic philosophy, she remained as a member of her own family, or was placed under the protection of a guardian appointed by her parents, whose jurisdiction over her, although superior to that of her husband, was not such as to interfere with her personal liberty; thus, the same as under matriarchal usages, the situation of the Roman woman, whether married or single, was one of great influence. Of this freedom exercised by women in the time of the Antonine Cæsars, Mr. Maine remarks: But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty.... The latest Roman Law, so far as it is touched by the Constitutions of the Christian Emperors, bears some marks of a reaction against the liberal doctrines of the great Antonine jurisconsults. And the prevalent state of religious sentiment may explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the furnace of barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman jurisprudence with patriarchal usage, has absorbed, among its rudiments, much more than usual of those rules concerning the position of women which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization.[258] [258] _Ancient Law_, p. 150. Concerning the influence of ecclesiasticism on that portion of Roman jurisprudence relating particularly to women, Mr. Lecky observes: Wherever the canon law has been the basis of legislation, we find laws of succession sacrificing the interests of daughters and of wives, and a state of public opinion which has been formulated and regulated by these laws. By means of a formulated ecclesiastical jurisprudence the complete inferiority of the sex was maintained, and that generous public opinion, which in Rome had frequently rebelled against the injustice done to girls in depriving them of the greater portion of the inheritance of their fathers, totally disappeared.