Nor can the number of divorces be placed to the account of women. When a Julius Cæsar takes his tenderly loved daughter from her husband and marries her to another man in the interest of his own ambitions; when an Augustus makes laws against immorality, yet divorces an innocent wife who objects to his own infidelities, and puts in her place a beautiful woman of unsullied fame, whom he has taken from a worthy man; when both of these rulers of the world compel good citizens to divorce the consorts they possibly love, in order to dispose of one or the other for personal ends or the good of the State--it is hardly worth while to hold helpless women responsible for conditions made and enforced by men in power, who are called wise and think themselves passably good. The most that can be said is that women of knowledge and character are less likely to bear wrong and abuse silently, but they are more likely to uphold the dignity of the family and to ignore the petty vanities and jealousies which are among the most prolific causes of divorce. A cultivated intellect does not necessarily imply good morals, but, other things being equal, an educated woman is less easily led into wrong, as she has more resources and is better fitted to stand on her own feet; unfortunately, this is precisely what her critics in the past have not wished her to do. With so many conspicuous examples in high places, it is hardly strange that divorces became deplorably common. “Does anybody blush at a divorce,” says one, “since illustrious and noble women compute their years, not by the number of consuls, but by the number of husbands they have had?” We hear of a woman who was the twenty-first wife of her twenty-third husband. The pretexts were often slight. It was said of Mæcenas that he had been divorced a thousand times, though he had but one wife, as he loved her and always married her over again. The woman who had been but once married was honored as a _univira_. She was too often, however, like a goddess worshiped from afar by men who found both interest and pleasure in the number of their wives. Much of the trouble was due to the fortune-hunters, who did not scruple to use any means to get rid of a wife and retain her dowry, at the expense of her fair name. Even good women were so wholly at the mercy of false charges that Antoninus made a law that no man could bring suit against his wife for immorality unless he could prove his own fidelity. We know that wise and virtuous women were often forced to seclude themselves from the aggressions of wicked men against whose machinations they were unable to find protection.