=The New Education.=—­At the time when Polybius lived in Rome (before 150) the old Romans taught their children nothing else than to read.[139] The new Romans provided Greek instructors for their children.  Some Greeks opened in Rome schools of poesy, rhetoric, and music.  The great families took sides between the old and new systems.  But there always remained a prejudice against music and the dance; they were regarded as arts belonging to the stage, improper for a man of good birth.  Scipio AEmilianus, the protector of the Greeks, speaks with indignation of a dancing-school to which children and young girls of free birth resorted:  “When it was told me, I could not conceive that nobles would teach such things to their children.  But when some one took me to the dancing-school, I saw there more than 500 boys and girls and, among the number a twelve-year-old child, a candidate’s son, who danced to the sound of castanets.”  Sallust, speaking of a Roman woman of little reputation, says, “She played on the lyre and danced better than is proper for an honest woman.”

=The New Status of Women.=—­The Roman women gave themselves with energy to the religions and the luxury of the East.  They flocked in crowds to the Bacchanals and the mysteries of Isis.  Sumptuary laws were made against their fine garments, their litters, and their jewels, but these laws had to be abrogated and the women allowed to follow the example of the men.  Noble women ceased to walk or to remain in their homes; they set out with great equipages, frequented the theatre, the circus, the baths, and the places of assembly.  Idle and exceedingly ignorant, they quickly became corrupt.  In the nobility, women of fine character became the exception.  The old discipline of the family fell to the ground.  The Roman law made the husband the master of his wife; but a new form of marriage was invented which left the woman under the authority of her father and gave no power to her husband.  To make their daughter still more independent, her parents gave her a dower.

=Divorce.=—­Sometimes the husband alone had the right to repudiate his wife, but the custom was that this right should be exercised only in the gravest circumstances.  The woman gained the right of leaving her husband, and so it became very easy to break a marriage.  There was no need of a judgment, or even of a motive.  It was enough for the discontented husband or wife to say to the other, “Take what belongs to you, and return what is mine.”  After the divorce either could marry again.

In the aristocracy, marriage came to be regarded as a passing union; Sulla had five wives, Caesar four, Pompey five, and Antony four.  The daughter of Cicero had three husbands.  Hortensius divorced his wife to give her to a friend.  “There are noble women,” says Seneca, “who count their age not by the years of the consuls, but by the husbands they have had; they divorce to marry again, they marry to divorce again.”