It is stated that once, because a woman pleaded her
own cause in the Forum, the Senate sent to ask the oracle what this
strange event might portend for the state.
A great proof of the obedience and modesty of the most part of them is
the way in which the names of those who did any wrong is remembered.
For, just as in Greece, historians record the names of those who first
made war against their own kindred or murdered their parents, so the
Romans tell us that the first man who put away his wife was Spurius
Carvilius, nothing of the kind having happened in Rome for two hundred
and thirty years from its foundation; and that the wife of Pinarius,
Thalaea by name, was the first to quarrel with her mother-in-law Gegania
in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus--so well and orderly were marriages
arranged by this lawgiver.
IV. The rest of their laws for the training and marriage of maidens
agree with one another, although Lykurgus put off the time of marriage
till they were full-grown, in order that their intercourse, demanded as
it was by nature, might produce love and friendship in the married pair
rather than the dislike often experienced by an immature child towards
her husband, and also that their bodies might be better able to support
the trials of child-bearing, which he regarded as the sole object of
marriage; whereas the Romans gave their daughters in marriage at the age
of twelve years or even younger, thinking thus to hand over a girl to
her husband pure and uncorrupt both in body and mind.
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