The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

662

662 CONCERNING HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

band, and when he died, a guardian was appointed for her.
The Roman husband possessed almost unlimited power of
divorce from his wife. But it was the boast of the early
Roman republic, which gave freedom to the few, and
enslaved the overwhelming majority, that not one divorce
was obtained in Rome, during the first five hundred and
twenty years of its history, so great was the purity of the
family life.
That women suffered from the tyranny of Roman husbands is evident from the fact that a temple was dedicated
to the goddess Viriplaca, in the city of Rome, whose mission
was to appease angry husbands, and Roman wives thronged
her courts in supplication, and to worship her. Livy tells
us that during the boasted Republic of Rome, a vast conspiracy was discovered among Roman wives, to poison their
husbands, which certainly does not speak favorably of the
love inspired by them. Pliny informs us that it was contrary to Roman law for women to drink wine, and that the
penalty of the violated law was death. And we read of
noble Roman men who scourged, and starved, and tortured
to death the women whom they even suspected of tasting
wine. Cato says that Roman men only kissed women to
ascertain if they smelled of wine.
The closing years of the Roman Republic, and the dawn
of the Roman Empire, were marked by great decline in
morals. Rome had become the mistress of the world. The
intoxication of wealth, acquired by universal conquest of the
richest provinces of the Orient, the presence of vast multitudes of imported slaves who relieved the Romans of all
labor, and an inundation of Eastern luxury, and Eastern