Sexual penalties for women are always found under a strict patriarchal regime. The white flower of chastity, when enforced upon one sex by the other sex, has its roots in the degradation of marriage. Men find a way of escape; women, bound in the coils, stay and waste. There is no escaping from the truth--wherever women are in subjection it is there that the idols of purity and chastity are set up for worship. The fact that Greek poets and philosophers speak so often of an ideal relationship between the wife and the husband proves how greatly the failure of the accepted marriage was understood and depreciated by the noblest of the Athenians. The bonds of the patriarchal system must always tend to break down as civilisation advances, and men come to think and to understand the real needs and dependence of the sexes upon each other. Aristotle says that marriage besides the propagation of the human race, has another aim, namely, "community of the entire life." He describes marriage as "a species of friendship," one, moreover, which "is most in accordance with Nature, as husband and wife mutually supply what is lacking in the other." Here is the ideal marriage, the relationship between one woman and the one man that to-day we are striving to attain. To gain it the wife must become the free companion of her husband. It is Euripides who voices the sorrows of women. He also foreshadows their coming triumph. "Back streams the waves of the ever running river, Life, life is changed and the laws of it o'ertrod. * * * * * * * And woman, yea, woman shall be terrible in story; The tales too meseemeth shall be other than of yore; For a fear there is that cometh out of woman and a glory, And the hard hating voices shall encompass her no more."[290] IV.--_In Rome_ "The character of a people is only an eternal becoming.... They are born and are modified under the influence of innumerable causes."--JEAN FINOT. Of the position of women in Rome in the pre-historic period we know almost nothing. We can accept that there was once a period of mother-rule.[291] Very little evidence, however, is forthcoming; still, what does exist points clearly to the view that woman's actions in the earliest times were entirely unfettered. Probably we may accept as near to reality the picture Virgil gives to us of Camilla fighting and dying on the field of battle. In the ancient necropolis of Belmonte, dating from the iron age, Professor d'Allosso has recently discovered two very rich tombs of women warriors with war chariots over their remains. "The importance of this discovery is exceptional, as it shows that the existence of the Amazon heroines, leaders of armies, sung by the ancient poets, is not a poetic fiction, but an historic reality." Professor d'Allosso states that several details given by Virgil coincide with the details of these tombs.[292]