But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the men themselves were not equally to blame.  Wives do not poison their husbands without some reason for hating them, and the reason is not difficult to guess.  It is a fact beyond doubt that in spite of the charm of family life as it has been described above, neither law nor custom exacted conjugal faithfulness from a husband.[227] Old Cato represents fairly well the old idea of Roman virtue, yet it is clear enough, both from Plutarch’s Life of him (e.g. ch. xxiv.) and from fragments of his own writings, that his view of the conjugal relation was a coarse one,—­that he looked on the wife rather as a necessary agent for providing the State with children than as a helpmeet to be tended and revered.  And this being so, we are not surprised to find that men are already beginning to dislike and avoid marriage; a most dangerous symptom, with which a century later Augustus found it impossible to cope.  In the year 131, just after Tiberius Gracchus had been trying to revive the population of Italy by his agrarian law, Metellus Macedonicus the censor did what he could to induce men to marry “liberorum creandorum causa”; and a fragment of a speech of his on this subject became famous afterwards, as quoted by Augustus with the same object.  It is equally characteristic of Roman humour and Roman hardness.  “If we could do without wives,” he said to the people, “we should be rid of that nuisance:  but since nature has decreed that we can neither live comfortably with them nor live at all without them, we must e’en look rather to our permanent interests than to a passing pleasure."[228]

Now if we take into account these tendencies, on the part both of men and women in the married state, and further consider the stormy and revolutionary character of the half century that succeeded the Gracchi,—­the Social and Civil Wars, the proscriptions of Marius and Sulla,—­we shall be prepared to find the ladies of Cicero’s time by no means simply feminine in charm or homely in disposition.  Most of them are indeed mere names to us, and we have to be careful in weighing what is said of them by later writers.  But of two or three of them we do in fact know a good deal.

The one of whom we really know most is the wife of Cicero, Terentia:  an ordinary lady, of no particular ability or interest, who may stand as representative of the quieter type of married woman.  She lived with her husband about thirty years, and until towards the end of that period, a long one for the age, we find nothing substantial against her.  If we had nothing but Cicero’s letters to her, more than twenty in number, and his allusions to her in other letters, we should conclude that she was a faithful and on the whole a sensible wife.  But more than once he writes of her delicate health,[229] and as the poor lady had at various times a great deal of trouble to go through, it is quite possible that as she grew older she became short in her temper, or