I do not need to dwell, therefore, on the few known cases of slave-torture, on the one or two noble women slinking down to the reeking _insulæ_ in the Subura, and the few other extraordinary misdeeds that have puffed out the popular calumny. For the general character of the age one need only recall London under the Stuarts, or under the Georges. It was an age of great luxury (falling short, however, of the same class in modern New York) and great laxity, and the blame must be laid on the rigorous and tyrannical old idea of marriage, as well as on the familiar causes. But the idea that this condition of Roman society continued to the end of the Pagan Empire is grotesquely untrue. Before the end of the first century, under Stoic influence, the standard of character rose once more, Roman society was purged, and in the last phase of the feminist movement at Rome a general level of morality and philanthropy was reached that will bear comparison with modern times. Both the historians of the time, Tacitus and Suetonius, expressly describe the reform, and every historian knows that Rome went on to a greater height (apart from letters) than it had done before. Lecky, in particular, has done justice to the way in which the Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of men found expression in the condemnation of slavery, the imperial abolition of most of the old abuses, the care of the aged and ailing, and a hundred works of justice and mercy. In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage. The Stoics--philosophers, lawyers, and emperors--believed in the equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius, severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with man and woman, and "scouted the popular apology for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex," says Sir Henry Maine.[9] Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution. Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a level of legal and social equality to man, and their world included--as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny show--a large number of women of equal culture and character.