rival.  On an occasion when matrons had been burdened with heavy taxes and none of their husbands would fight the measure, Hortensia pleaded the case publicly with great success.  All writers speak of her action and the eloquence of her speech with great admiration.[144] We hear also of a certain Gaia Afrania, wife of a Senator; she always conducted her case herself before the supreme judge, “not because there was any lack of lawyers,” adds her respectable and scandalised historian,[145] “but because she had more than enough of impudence.”

Quintilian mentions several cases of women being sued[146]; Pliny tells how he acted as attorney for some[147]; and the Law Books will supply any one curious in the matter with abundant examples.[148] A quotation from Pliny[149] will give an idea of the kind of suit a woman might bring, and the great interest aroused thereby:  “Attia Viriola, a woman of illustrious birth and married to a former supreme judge, was disinherited by her eighty-year-old father within eleven days after he had brought Attia a stepmother.  Attia was trying to regain her share of her father’s estate.  One hundred and eighty jurors sat in judgment.  The tribunal was crowded, and from the higher part of the court both men and women strained over the railings in their eagerness to hear (which was difficult), and to see (which was easy).”

[Sidenote:  Partiality of the law to women.]

There were many legal qualifications designed to help women evade the strict letter of the law when this, if enforced absolutely, would work injustice.  Ignorance of the law, if there was no criminal offence involving good morals, was particularly accepted in the case of women “on account of the weakness of the sex."[150] A typical instance of the growth of the desire to help women, protect them as much as possible, and stretch the laws in their favour, may be taken from the senatorial decree known as the Senatus Consultum Velleianum.[151] This was an order forbidding females to become sureties or defendants for any one in a contract.  But at the end of the first century of our era the Senate voted that the law be emended to help women and to give them special privileges in every class of contract.  “We must praise the farsightedness of that illustrious order,” comments the great jurist Ulpian,[152] “because it brought aid to women on account of the weakness of the sex, exposed, as it is, to many mishaps of this sort.”

[Sidenote:  Rights of women to inherit.]

The rights of women to inherit under Roman law deserve some mention.  Here again we may note a steady growth of justice.  Some general examples will make this clearer, before I treat of the specific powers of inheritance.  I.—­In the year 169 B.C. the Tribune Quintus Voconius Saxa had a law passed which restricted greatly the rights of women to inherit.[153] According to Dio[154] no woman was, by this statute, permitted to receive more than 25,000 sesterces—­1250