Professor Dill is inclined to discount the testimony of Jerome respecting the morals of Roman society.  He thinks Jerome exaggerated the perils surrounding women.  He says:  “The truth is Jerome is not only a monk but an artist in words; and his horror of evil, his vivid imagination, and his passion for literary effect, occasionally carry him beyond the region of sober fact.  There was much to amend in the morals of the Roman world.  But we must not take the leader of a great moral reformation as a cool and dispassionate observer.”  But this observation amounts to nothing more than a cautionary word against mistaking evils common to all times for special symptoms of excessive immorality.  Professor Dill practically concedes the truthfulness of contemporary witnesses, including Jerome, when he says:  “Yet, after all allowances, the picture is not a pleasant one.  We feel that we are far away from the simple, unworldly devotion of the freedmen and obscure toilers whose existence was hardly known to the great world before the age of the Antonines, and who lived in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and in constant expectation of the coming of their Lord.  The triumphant Church, which has brought Paganism to its knees, is very different from the Church of the catacombs and the persecutions.”  The picture which Jerome draws of the Roman women is indeed repulsive, and Professor Dill would gladly believe it to be exaggerated, but, nevertheless, he thinks that “if the priesthood, with its enormous influence, was so corrupt, it is only probable that it debased the sex which is always most under clerical influence.”

But far graver charges cling to the memories of the Roman women.  Crime darkened every household.  The Roman lady was cruel and impure.  She delighted in the blood of gladiators and in illicit love.  Roman law at this time permitted women to hold and to control large estates, and it became a fad for these patrician ladies to marry poor men, so that they might have their husbands within their power.  All sorts of alliances could then be formed, and if their husbands remonstrated, they, holding the purse strings, were able to say:  “If you don’t like it you can leave.”  A profligate himself, the husband usually kept his counsel, and as a reward, dwelt in a palace.  “When the Roman matrons became the equal and voluntary companions of their lords,” says Gibbon, “a new jurisprudence was introduced, that marriage, like other partnerships, might be dissolved by the abdication of one of the associates.”  I have but touched the fringe of a veil I will not lift; but it is easy to understand why those women who cherished noble sentiments welcomed the monastic life as a pathway of escape from scenes and customs from which their better natures recoiled in horror.