There still stands the little temple where the white-robed Vestals watched over the holy Palladium and took care that the sacred fire should never go out for eleven hundred years. Men on the heights of power bowed to the authority of these consecrated women, who occupied everywhere the place of honor, settled disputes, testified without oath, and brought pardon even to a criminal who met them by accident. All this, whether fact or legend, was a tacit recognition of the judgment, purity, and insight of woman. It might not be desirable to give her any rights civil or social, but, as a sort of compensation, men quieted their consciences and gave themselves a comfortable feeling of being just, if indeed they ever had any doubt on that point, by offering her more or less theoretical honor, and a shadowy place near the gods, where they could avail themselves of her wisdom without any personal inconvenience. In addition to this, they built her a little temple dedicated to the goddess Viriplaca, Appeaser of Husbands, where she could solace her bruised heart by confiding her wrongs and sorrows to this conciliatory divinity, who seems to have been useful mainly as a repository of tears, though her office was to compose differences. It has long since vanished, but it speaks volumes for the helplessness of women that it ever existed at all. It told the tragedy of many a Roman matron’s life. II We have seen a little of what these women were and what they did. What they suffered can be better gathered from a glance at their position and the share they had in the liberties they had done so much to foster and save. Of freedom the Roman woman of earlier times had none at all, though she was not secluded like her Athenian sisters, and her place in the family was a better one. Her character was formed, like that of our Puritan mothers, in times of toil and danger, when she worked side by side with men for a common end, and, in both, their strength of purpose and spirit of heroic sacrifice lasted long after the hard conditions of primitive life had passed. Besides, the natural talent for administration which shone through all her limitations was to a certain degree recognized by her husband, and she was often his counselor, as well as the instructor of his children, even beyond the seven years prescribed. But all this did not suffice to give her any liberty of thought or action, and she was to all intents and purposes a slave, subject to the caprices of a master who might choose to be kind, though, in case he did not, she had no protection either in law or custom; and we all know how soon the consciousness of absolute power warps the sensibilities of even the gentlest. “Created to please and obey,” says Gibbon, “she was never supposed to have reached the age of reason and experience.” She was under guardianship all her life, first of her father, then of her husband, and, at his death, of her nearest male relative.