incurred severe punishment, to dissolve the marriage quietly. And it seems to us that women would prefer divorce to death, and that, instead of a degeneracy, the altered state of matters implies a softening of manners and an advance in civilization.[89] It cannot be denied that divorces became frequent after women attained freedom, but much exaggeration prevails in regard to this matter. It is only about the men and women who occupied a prominent position in society that we get information, and their political interests often led to marriages and divorces. To form an estimate of general society from these would be as erroneous as to form an estimate of English and French society from Henry VIII. and the Napoleonic family. Marquardt[90] notes the cases of frequent marriages. “Ovid,” he says, “and the younger Pliny married three times, Cæsar and Antony four times, Sulla and Pompey five times, Cicero’s daughter Tullia three times.” It is needless to say that there is nothing wonderful in this. Many men and women in modern times marry three times, and there are some who have married four and five times, and one Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had seven wives.[91] Yet these cases have not been deemed indicative of an exceptional state of low morality. The satirists and moralists are fond of employing exaggerated language in regard to women in this connexion. Juvenal talks of a woman having eight husbands in five years, and Martial of a woman being married to her tenth husband. Seneca describes some noble women as reckoning their years, not by the names of the Consuls, but by the names of their husbands. And it is possible that a few women may have become notorious in this way. The Augustan marriage laws offered strong temptations to go through the form of marriage, when there was no real union, and thereby elude the penalties inflicted on the unmarried state. But there are no clear instances recorded. Some suppose that in the inscription on the tomb of a woman it is affirmed that she had seven husbands; but the interpretation is incorrect, as Wilmanns has conclusively shown. The authentic case of the largest number of husbands is that of the woman of Samaria, who had five husbands, and was living with one who was not her husband. But her case may have been quite peculiar; and, strangely enough, it is to this notorious woman to whom the grandest revelation of universal worship ever made to mortal was vouchsafed. There is no good reason to suppose that divorces were very frequent in ordinary society. There were not the same causes at work as prevailed in the circles in which political power was the predominant motive of action. From the earliest times of subjection came down, the idea that, while the man might marry frequently, the woman ought to marry only once, and this idea had its influence even to the last period of Paganism. In the later period the woman was not forced into marriage, and if her first marriage,