She inherited from her husband equally, but only equally, with her children; and as a daughter she shared with her brothers. Unlike the Greek heiress, who, as with the Eastern women, was something that went with the estates rather than the free holder of property -taken over as an obligation integral to the inheritance, like the fixtures in the house or the stock on the farm-the Roman widow inherited on her own account, and the Roman girl endowed the man she married. marriage-" sine conventione❞—grew to be the general law among highlyplaced persons, even so early as the times of Cæsar and Augustus, when divorces were as common as marriages, and no woman was considered damaged by multiplied proprietorship and a different father for each child. The meaner folk, however, still clung to their old customs, and the heart of the nation remained sound long after the head had become corrupt. We need not go strictly into dates, nor make out precisely when this form or that fell into disuse, when the virtuous Roman matron-the" mater-familias"-ceased to be, and her place was taken by the mere uxor'-that legalized light-o'-love who was still under the control of her father, and was never legally incorporated into her husband's family. She-this almost temporary uxor"-might be divorced and remarried at pleasure, if her father gave his consent or a powerful man proposed. A national portrait is like those coalesced photographs which give a generalized type wherein minor individual differences are lost. The Roman Matron, as we know her in her severe majesty and per 66 licentiousness and luxury, bear each a name which conveys its own concrete idea, whether we call to mind Lucretia in the early morning or Helena in the evening twilight-whether she is the Tullia of tradition or the Messalina of history. This legal consideration was the reward of personal merit, and dated back to the foundation of the Empire. By their refusal to leave their Roman husbands when the Sabine army came down to avenge the rape which had made their virgins wives and mothers, the women saved Rome." Romulus rewarded them with honors for themselves and the whole class of matrons. The curies were called by the name of the Sabine wives. All married women were exempted from every kind of household service except spinning and weaving'' :-occupations held in such honor as to be specially mentioned in epitaphs; one who spun and weaved well being entitled to the praise which belongs to virtue. "Who-sonal honor, and the Roman Lady in her ever met a matron was to make way for her. Whoever hurt her modesty by a wanton word or look was guilty of a capital offence. The right of inheriting on the same footing as a child (by the 'Conventio in Manum ') was conferred on wives if they wished it; but if any husband should abuse his parental power and sell his wife, as he might sell his child, he was devoted to the infernal gods. A man might divorce his wedded wife for adultery, for poisoning his children, or for counterfeiting the keys entrusted to her. If he put her away without any of these grounds, half his property was forfeit to the injured woman, the other half to the Temple of Ceres." Again: "When a marriage had been solemnized with the religious sanction of the 'confarreatio,' a divorce was so difficult as scarcely to be possible, but the husband might put his guilty wife to death. When the marriage had not been solemnly contracted, so as to produce a conventio in manum,' the parties were always allowed to separate at discretion." This looser kind of Though the early Romans despised the confessed authority of women in political affairs, as they saw it among the Gauls, and though, as Gibbon says, a female reign would have appeared an inexpiable prodigy" in their eyes, still the women had a hand in some of the most important doings of the infant nation. In the very beginning of things-taking fable for fact-a woman holds the place of honor, for if a god was the father, Rhea Silvia, only a mortal woman, only a human vestal, was the mother of the twins whose birth created a nation and changed the whole current of history. This, indeed, is the general if not quite universal distinction. It is the god who condescends and the woman who is honored. Very rarely indeed does a goddess forget her divine greatness for the sake of a man's love* and a semi-human maternity. To be sure, Thetis was the mother of Achilles, Aphrodite bore Æneas to Anchises, Artemis loved Endymion; but for the most part it is the mother who is the mortal, and it is her son, and a god's, in whom the genera tions of the earth are to be blessed. So it is with Rhea Silvia, the vestal, whom the god Mars made the mother of him who founded the Eternal City destined to be the mistress and lawgiver of the world. In this union of war with religion, the lines of the double supremacy which has been the lot of Rome were indicated with strange clearness. For the universal Conqueror became afterward the universal Pontiff. The imperial crown passed into the triple tiara, the eagles into the keys, the fasces and the sword into the crozier and the cross; and the sacrifices made to the gods were changed indeed, when the monstrance showed the holy wafer which was the very flesh of God, and the cup was filled with wine which was His very blood. The later personation was as omnipotent as the earlier, and as fierce. Rhea Silvia passed into thin air as Madonna materialized. But the wolf remained as the foster-mother whose milk ran in the veins of her Christian children equally with her pagan. Portents and miracles swarmed round the cradle of the infant city, as they accompanied its maturity, and were never wanting when needed. Legend and lay, idyl and epic, are as gold and silver embroideries wrought by poetry over the substance of history. The early history of Rome," says Niebuhr, "is indeed more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War; the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber; the figtree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide; the rape of the Sabines; the death of Tarpeia; the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and husbands; the wrongs of Lucretia; the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scævola; the battle of Regillus, won by the aid of Castor and Pollux; the touching story of Virginia, are among the * See the "Lament of Calypso," in the fifth book of the Odyssey. many instances which will at once suggest themselves.' Add to these the tender legend of Numa and Egeriathat mythic nymph or only loving woman who lived in her grotto beyond the Camena Gate, like another Fair Rosamond in her maze, but whose influence was nobler as her love was happier. Helped by her wholesome counsel, her lover framed the formulas of that sweet and simple faith known as the "religion of Numa"-the sole thing left green and incorrupt when all the rest had fallen into loathsomeness and decay. In this sweet faith the kindly gods were generous benefactors, and men lived with them in a peace that had but little of the element of fear to mar its sense of safety. To work between dawn and dusk, and never to forget the sacrifices, the offerings, the libations, and the prayers which expressed gratitude and claimed protection; to hold his head erect like a freeborn man glad of his birthright of liberty and proud of his Roman citizenship; to abjure the vices which enervated and the luxury that destroyed-this was the pith of that religion of Numa which afterages elaborated into a monstrous system of superstition-which later ages still drowned in a sea of blood and lost forever in the abysses of corruption. The Lays which the people learned by heart and sang at festivals kept alive those glorious memories, those pathetic tragedies which served as holy examples and sacred commandments. Or, as in the stories of Tarpeia and Horatia, they were held as warnings against the sin of vanity and the shame of a love stronger than patriotism—for patriotism was the Roman's central virtue, the clamp which bound him to honor and integrity, the human expression, indeed, of reverence to the gods and all things holy and divine. Without patriotism, no man was worthy to live. these legends were so highly vitalized as to have outlived the faith which gave them birth. Tarpeia la bella" still sits, covered with gold and jewels, in the heart of the Capitoline Hill, bound by a spell that cannot be broken. but none can find her; and only once of late years has she been seen. Poor type of female vanity, crushed by the fatal gold for which she bartered away her faith and country, for near three 66 Some of Many seek 5 thousand years her memory, which is her soul, has lived in this historic purgatory; and the Deliverer who shall show her to have been a Sun myth, and no living woman, has not yet appeared. So, too, lives the sadder and less besmirched memory of Horatia, stabbed by her brother when he returned from his victory over the Curatii. The spot is shown where she fell and was buried, near the Temple of Honor and Virtue, she wildly lamenting the death of her lover, whose embroidered cloak, woven by her own hands, her brother bore aloft in triumph-he, roused to a leonine wrath of sorrow for his brothers' deaths-flushed with his triple victory and the greatness of his revenge-passionately crying that such a sacrilegious wretch should no longer live, and plunging his sword into her white breast as an offering to the infernal deities. And in the Forum, all ruined and dismantled as it is, who cannot conjure up the bleeding figure of that pale Virginia, held against the heart of her father who loved her honor better than her life, bound up as that honor was with freedom and a Roman's rights? A sacrifice as pure as Iphigenia-not held face downward over the altar, bound like a kid in her saffron-colored garments, but lying like a broken flower across her father's arm-she is one of the loveliest of the ghosts that people the dim spaces of the past, one of the most pathetic of the victims which the cruel lust of man has always had power to make. For the sentence of Appius Claudius which denied her freedom, betrothed as she was to the former tribune, Lucius Icilius, meant simply that, being non-free and therefore beyond the pale of the law, she might be wrested from her family and be made his prey, no one opposing and no one able to defend. Her death brought to the State freedom from an intolerable oppression, and the death of the tyrant was the birth-hour of better things for the community. Like some fair Amazon whose soft white flesh belies her armor-some warlike Atalanta passing swiftly across the scene-the name of that impetuously heroic Cloelia leaves a trail of light across the page, and her feat is one of those vivid epics by which Roman romance, rather than sober history, is emphasized. One of the twenty patrician hostages, boys and maidens, demanded by Porsena -for sake of whose safety those troublesome settlers on the Seven Hills that overlooked the Tiber would keep themselves in check-this girlish compatriot of Scævola and Cocles determined to regain her liberty, cost what it might. What cared she for the riches or the luxury of that hostile Etruria where she was engulphed? That Greece should have breathed the spirit of her poetry and art over all that Etruscan life, reproducing in some sort the fair lines of those distant cities lying in the sunlight beyond the seas-those cities where life was beauty, and beauty was but another name for love-made nothing to Clolia, the free-born, fearless Roman maiden. More beautiful to her were the simple beads and brooches, which were all the ornaments she knew, than those chaplets of golden leaves, those necklaces of rare device and perfect workmanship, which gladdened the vanity and enhanced the beauty of the women she was forced to obey, as a captive must obey her mistress. Far dearer to her was the sacred fig-tree which bore witness for her warrior-god than all the bays sacred to the soft-limbed Delian whom she scarcely knew-than all the olives given by that Athene who was not yet her own Mi nerva. One hour of simple Roman life was better than years of these foreign splendors, where the very tombs were monuments and the pottery carried pictures. One deep full breath of Roman air from off the wide Campagna-that air which made men free and women strong-was better than this, rich with the scent of flowers, aromatic with the perfume of fruits still unknown in the city which the son of Mars had made. Captivity was not to the mind of Clolia, well-treated though she and hers were ; and home and freedom were all she longed for. Wherefore, gathering her sisters together, as they bathed in the river unwatched-so much generous trust by the way their hated enemy showed them-this fair daughter of an heroic race urged them to swim across, she herself on horseback at their head. And thus, radiant with delight they fled out of bondage and found themselves once more at the gates of their beloved Rome. Publicola said never a word when these girlish breakers-out-ofbounds appeared. But he sent them back again to keep the Roman word sacred and the Roman name in honor; and mistakenly heroic Cloelia had to submit to practical rebuke when she thought that she had deserved only reward. Near her, like a shadow cast by the substance flickers to and fro the misty form a Valeria, whose special claim to honor lies in the courage with which she broke away from the would-be deliverer of the returned maidens, of her own free will giving herself up once more to Porsena and captivity. But the king, not to be outdone in generosity, sent back the whole convoy, boys and girls together, moreover presenting that arch-rebel Cloelia with a horse, trappings, and armor. And then, seeing that nothing succeeds so well as success, the Senate ordered a statute to be set up in her honor in the Via Sacra, where for many generations the figure of a maiden on horseback commemorated her exploit. Some say it was a statue to Valeria, not to Clolia. Cloelia or Valeria, the one name went as well as the other in the Lays which recorded the deed and honored the doer. But it was Cloelia whom Eneas saw in that famous shield, "wherein the Lord of Fire, not unversed in prophecy nor ignorant of future time, had wrought the fortunes of Italy and the triumphs of Rome-Him (Porsena) you might behold like one in the act of wrath, in the act of menace; because Cocles dared to break away the bridge and Cloelia had burst her fetters and was swimming across the stream." Again, an honorable trait of womanhood, from the Roman standpoint, was handed down in the historic Lays. After that battle of Lake Regillus, where the Dioscuri had fought bodily for the Romans, permission was given to the women who had intermarried with the foe, to leave their husbands and take their daughters with them. All the Roman women left their Latin husbands; all the Latin women, save two, remained at Rome. But then "the proud virtue of the Roman matrons was still blooming in full purity when these lays were composed;" and we are required to believe what we cannot disprove. Nevertheless, that discriminating grain of salt is useful. Is that grain wanted also for the story of how Valeria, the noblest matron in Rome, incited Virgilia and Volumnia, the mother and wife of Coriolanus, to go out to the camp of the Volscians, and do by woman's tears and prayers what no man's words had been able to effect? The temple dedicated to Fortuna Muliebris, raised on the spot where the son had yielded to the mother with that sad cry: O mother! mother! what is it you have done!" crystallized the legend and gave it substance. And that the noble Valeria should be the first high-priestess in the temple of which her patriotic impulse was the foundation, added another link to the chain of facts, which may or may not be only the cloud-wreath of fable. Grand and majestic, like some Scandinavian prophetess, stands Tanaquil, the Etrurian diviner of the future, who reads the secrets lying on the knees of the gods and knows the hidden meaning of all omens. She is a sorceress of very different gifts from those of the Sicilian sorceress who taught Simætha the mystery of the red wool knotted in witchknots against her grievous lover, the spells of wax and fire, of burning bough, and the turning of the magic wheel. They are also different from those of the Assyrian stranger, whose evil medicines could make all souls "beat at the gate of hell." Tanaquil has nothing dark nor guilty about her. Her in-look is pure; her actions are beneficent. is her husband's good genius; and to her is owing all his future fame. She brings him out of her own country, whose narrow conservatism affords no room for a stranger's advancement; and from Lucumo, the obscure sojourner, son of Demaratus the Greek, makes of him Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome.* History gets a little She We *All this is legendary, but, as Mommsen says: "As to the migrations of bodies of Etruscans to Rome, we find an isolated statement drawn from Tuscan annals that a Tuscan band, led by Cælius Vivenna of Volsinii, and after his death by his faithful companion Mastarna, was conducted by the latter to Rome, and settled there on the Cælian Mount. may hold the account to be trustworthy, although the addition that this Mastarna became king in Rome under the name of Servius Tullius is certainly nothing but an improbable conjecture of the archæologists, who busied themselves with legendary parallels. The name of the Tuscan quarter' at the foot of the Palatine points to a similar settlement." ་་ mixed between her and that other wife of Tarquin, Gaia Cecilia, also held as a beneficent enchantress," whose favor Roman brides invoked as able to work them good in their new estate, and from the girdle of whose statue in the temple of the Sabine god Sancus, on the Quirinal, persons in peril took filings as amulets and charms. Cecilia was moreover honored in her memory as a good housewife and "industrious at the loom." But Tanaquil is the person where Gaia Cecilia is only a name. It is Tanaquil who understands the significance of the apparition seen by her captive handmaiden, Ocrisia, as she is bringing cakes to the Household Genius; Tanaquil, who bids the girl dress herself as a bride, then shut herself up in the chapel, waiting on fate and the will of the gods. When the result is one of those mysterious maternities by which the gods exalted and kept touch with humanity, it is Tanaquil who knows the secret. And when the sleeping infant's head is seen to be crowned and garlanded with fire she, in all the bravery of her purple-bordered robe and gold Etrurian ornaments of perfect form and mystic meaning, calmly looking and exultantly understanding, recognizes the Spirit of the Father and forbids the trembling nurse to extinguish the flames which foretell supremacy. Magnificently prosperous in his life, over the last days of this Roman Son of Fire the shadow of a woman is cast, like an evil cloud over the sunset glory. In his youth Fortune herself became his wife, on condition that he should cover his own face and never seek to look at hers. Wiser than poor weak-willed Psyche, Servius Tullius took Fortune at her own price, and she remained his wife to the end. In proof that his marriage was as divine as his birth had been, he built a temple to the goddess, his august spouse, wherein he placed his own statue-the face covered by a golden mask. When the temple was burned the statue remained uninjured; for had not Servius Tullius been born of the flames, and was not fire, therefore, his natural element? But the warning advice of the sage: "Call no man happy till the day of his death," was exemplified in the death of Servius Tullius, perhaps more forcibly than with any other man; for surely the volte face of Fortune, and her impotence to protect her favorite, could go no farther than in the usurpation which preceded parricide, and the parricide which culminated in sacrilege. It was over his bleeding body that his daughter Tullia drove her chariot, when, drunk with pride and exultation, her acclamations revolted even her husband, and he turned her from the assembly. When her servant drew the reins, and her mules shrank back in horror at what was lying there, Tullia drove madly on, and laughed as her father's blood dyed the wheels of her chariot and baptized her as one of the Infamous for all time. No wonder the street was called the Vicus Sceleratus from that day; no wonder, too, that the statue of Fortune hid her face from the wretch who dared to pollute her temple by her presence; showing to the world how the gods resent crime and renounce the criminal. In those old times omens and portents were in the very air, as thick as motes in the sunbeam; and prophecies were as common as daily speech. Two have retained their significance to our own day. When Tarquinius Superbus, the triple murderer and Tullia's husband, first conceived the idea of a grand Triune Temple-a temple to the three great gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to be raised in stately symmetry and golden glory on the Capitoline Hill, the sanction was needed of all the minor gods and deities whose shrines and altars filled the ground. For shrines and altars had to be displaced, and this could only be done by consent. All gave way, save Juventus and Terminus: to "show that Rome would never fade nor retract so long as the pontiff should mount the steps of the Capitol with the silent virgin in honor of the gods." This prophecy continued to justify itself even after the conditions were altered and the Cross had dispersed the Thunderbolt. So, with the bleeding head found when digging the foundation of the temple, and accepted as a sign that the Capitol should be the Head of the World. This omen, too, has been closely fulfilled; as also that of the twelve vultures, which both assigned the sovereignty to Romulus and foreshadowed the length of its duration. The power of old Rome, the strongest and most masculine in history, |