We are to consider in this chapter the effect of the marriage arrangements of Rome on the happiness, character, and influence of the Roman women. It is needless to say that it is impossible to reach incontestable conclusions on such a subject. Our evidence cannot but be fragmentary and one-sided, whatever be the nation or period whose happiness or morals we choose for the subject of our investigations. Even in our own day it would be easy, from the reports of the divorce and police courts and newspaper paragraphs, to draw together such materials as might lead one to assert that women were treated with the greatest cruelty, and that the age was one of the most licentious. But the evidence in the case of the Romans is peculiarly fragmentary. Only this has to be said for it: that it is not selected, that the facts which bear on the subject have been recorded for other reasons, and that therefore they may be expected to give a fair average picture of the state of matters into which we are inquiring. It is necessary to deal at the outset with a prejudice which has influenced the views of many modern writers. It is supposed that Christianity must have appeared at a time when the ancient world was falling to pieces; when, therefore, morals were particularly low, society was in an utterly corrupt condition, and licentiousness universally prevailed. There is no sure foundation for this opinion. There is no picture of the last days of the Republic or the first years of the Empire that is so black as that painted by Ammianus Marcellinus[83] of his own times. And the licentiousness of Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa, Rome, and Gaul,[84] if we can put any reliance on the description of Salvian. I may adduce one instance of the effects of this prejudice. Drumann, in his laborious work of six volumes, has collected all the biographical facts that records have sent down to us in connexion with the last period of the Republic. In his index to this book he has a very short list of passages that refer to the virtues of women, and a very long one referring to their degeneracy. We turn to the first of these latter passages, and what do we find? Drumann[85] is describing the proscriptions carried out by the triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, and he narrates how the Roman trembled before his own wife, children, slaves, and freedmen, and adduces instances in which Romans were betrayed by their relatives or slaves. He mentions three instances of the treachery of wives, and we may be sure that these were all the instances with which the records of the period furnished him, for it is not likely that any one has escaped his most diligent search. But he allows that another side of human nature was brought to light, and, in exhibiting it to his readers, he quotes eight instances in which wives saved their husbands at the risk of their lives or followed them into exile. It would be rash to draw an inference from