The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,061 pages of information about The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5).

The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,061 pages of information about The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5).

1.  This was not merely the case under the old religious marriage (-matrimonium confarreatione-); the civil marriage also (-matrimonium consensu-), although not in itself giving to the husband proprietary power over his wife, opened up the way for his acquiring this proprietary power, inasmuch as the legal ideas of “formal delivery” (-coemptio-), and “prescription” (-usus-), were applied without ceremony to such a marriage.  Till he acquired it, and in particular therefore during the period which elapsed before the completion of the prescription, the wife was (just as in the later marriage by -causae probatio-, until that took place), not -uxor-, but -pro uxore-.  Down to the period when Roman jurisprudence became a completed system the principle maintained its ground, that the wife who was not in her husband’s power was not a married wife, but only passed as such (-uxor tantummodo habetur-.  Cicero, Top. 3, 14).

2.  The following epitaph, although belonging to a much later period, is not unworthy to have a place here.  It is the stone that speaks:—­

-Hospes, quod deico, paullum est.  Asta ac pellige.  Heic est sepulcrum haud pulcrum pulcrai feminae, Nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam, Suom mareitum corde dilexit sovo, Gnatos duos creavit, horunc alterum In terra linquit, alium sub terra locat; Sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo, Domum servavit, lanam fecit.  Dixi.  Abei.-

(Corp.  Inscr.  Lat. 1007.)

Still more characteristic, perhaps, is the introduction of wool-spinning among purely moral qualities; which is no very unusual occurrence in Roman epitaphs.  Orelli, 4639:  -optima et pulcherrima, lanifica pia pudica frugi casta domiseda-.  Orelli, 4861:  -modestia probitate pudicitia obsequio lanificio diligentia fide par similisque cetereis probeis femina fuit-.  Epitaph of Turia, i. 30:  domestica bona pudicitiae, opsequi, comitatis, facilitatis, lanificiis [tuis adsiduitatis, religionis] sine superstitione, ornatus non conspiciendi, cultus modici.

3.  I. III.  Clan-villages

4.  Dionysius affirms (v. 25) that lameness excluded from the supreme magistracy.  That Roman citizenship was a condition for the regal office as well as for the consulate, is so very self-evident as to make it scarcely worth while to repudiate expressly the fictions respecting the burgess of Cures.

5.  I. III.  Clan-villages

6.  Even in Rome, where the simple constitution of ten curies otherwise early disappeared, we still discover one practical application of it, and that singularly enough in the very same formality which we have other reasons for regarding as the oldest of all those that are mentioned in our legal traditions, the -confarreatio-.  It seems scarcely doubtful that the ten witnesses in that ceremony had the same relation to the constitution of ten curies the thirty lictors had to the constitution of thirty curies.

7.  This is implied in their very name.  The “part” (-tribus-) is, as jurists know, simply that which has once been or may hereafter come to be a whole, and so has no real standing of its own in the present.

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The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.