On the strength of the statements of two satirical writers, Juvenal and Tacitus, it has been supposed by many that Roman women of the late period were given up to license.  It is, however, idle to seek in satirists any balanced picture of a great civilization.  Hobhouse (loc. cit., p. 216) concludes that on the whole, Roman women worthily retained the position of their husbands’ companions, counsellors and friends which they had held when an austere system placed them legally in his power.  Most authorities seem now to be of this opinion, though at an earlier period Friedlaender expressed himself more dubiously.  Thus Dill, in his judicious Roman Society (p. 163), states that the Roman woman’s position, both in law and in fact, rose during the Empire; without being less virtuous or respected, she became far more accomplished and attractive; with fewer restraints she had greater charm and influence, even in public affairs, and was more and more the equal of her husband.  “In the last age of the Western Empire there is no deterioration in the position and influence of women.”  Principal Donaldson, also, in his valuable historical sketch, Woman, considers (p. 113) that there was no degradation of morals in the Roman Empire; “the licentiousness of Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa, Rome, and Gaul, if we can put any reliance on the description of Salvian.”  Salvian’s description of Christendom is probably exaggerated and one-sided, but exactly the same may be said in an even greater degree of the descriptions of ancient Rome left by clever Pagan satirists and ascetic Christian preachers.

It thus becomes necessary to leap over considerably more than a thousand years before we reach a stage of civilization in any degree approaching in height the final stage of Roman society.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at first in France, then in England, we find once more the moral and legal movement tending towards the equalization of women with men.  We find also a long series of pioneers of that movement foreshadowing its developments:  Mary Astor, “Sophia, a Lady of Quality,” Segur, Mrs. Wheeler, and very notably Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women.[289]

The main European stream of influences in this matter within historical times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the disadvantage of women.  The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom associated with the vigorously organized Christian Church.  Notwithstanding that the facts do not all point in the same direction, and that there is consequently some difference of opinion, it seems evident that on the whole both Teutonic custom and