A woman guilty of incest received no punishment, but the guilty man was deported to an island.[94] If the incest involved adultery, the woman was of course held on that charge.

[Sidenote:  Divorce]

We come now to a matter where the growing freedom of women reached its highest point—­the matter of divorce.  Here again we have to note the progress of toleration and humanitarianism.  In the early days of the Republic the family tie was rarely severed.  Valerius Maximus tells us[95] of a quaint custom of the olden days, to the effect that “whenever any quarrel arose between husband and wife, they would proceed to the chapel of the goddess Viriplaca ["Reconciler of Husbands"], which is on the Palatine, and there they would mutually express their feelings; then, laying aside their anger, they returned home reconciled.”  During these days a woman could never herself take the initiative in divorce; the husband was all-powerful.  The first divorce of which we have any record took place in the year 231 B.C., when Spurius Carvilius Ruga put away his wife for sterility.  Public opinion censured him severely for it “because people thought that not even the desire for children ought to have been preferred to conjugal fidelity and affection."[96] As the Empire extended and Rome became more worldly and corrupt, the reasons for divorce became more trivial.  Sempronius Sophus divorced his wife because she had attended some public games without his knowledge.[97] Cicero, who was a lofty moralist—­on paper,—­put away his wife Terentia in order to marry a rich young ward and get her money if he could.  Maecenas, the great prime-minister of Augustus, sent away and took back his wife repeatedly at caprice—­perhaps he believed that variety is the spice of life.  But during all this time the husband alone could annul marriage.[98]

Gradually, however, the status of women changed and they were given greater and greater liberty.  Inasmuch as Roman marriage was a civil contract based on consent, strict justice had to allow that on this basis either party to the contract might annul the marriage at his or her pleasure.  The result was that during the first three centuries after Christ the wife had absolute freedom to take the initiative and send her husband a divorce whenever and for whatever reason she wished.  The proof of this fact is positively established not only from the statements of the jurists, but also from numberless accounts in the other writers of the day.[99] Divorce became, at least among the higher strata of society, extraordinarily frequent.  That a lady of the Upper Four Hundred should have been content with only one husband was deemed worthy of special mention on her tomb; the word univira (a woman of one husband) may still be read on certain inscriptions.  The satirists are fond of dwelling on the license allowed to women in the case of divorce.  Martial, for instance,[100] says that one Theselina married ten husbands in one