The history of the marriage-system of modern civilized peoples begins in the later days of the Roman Empire at the time when the foundations were being laid of that Roman law which has exerted so large an influence in Christendom.  Reference has already been made[315] to the significant fact that in late Rome women had acquired a position of nearly complete independence in relation to their husbands, while the patriarchal authority still exerted over them by their fathers had become, for the most part, almost nominal.  This high status of women was associated, as it naturally tends to be, with a high degree of freedom in the marriage system.  Roman law had no power of intervening in the formation of marriages and there were no legal forms of marriage.  The Romans recognized that marriage is a fact and not a mere legal form; in marriage by usus there was no ceremony at all; it was constituted by the mere fact of living together for a whole year; yet such marriage was regarded as just as legal and complete as if it had been inaugurated by the sacred rite of confarreatio.  Marriage was a matter of simple private agreement in which the man and the woman approached each other on a footing of equality.  The wife retained full control of her own property; the barbarity of admitting an action for restitution of conjugal rights was impossible, divorce was a private transaction to which the wife was as fully entitled as the husband, and it required no inquisitorial intervention of magistrate or court; Augustus ordained, indeed, that a public declaration was necessary, but the divorce itself was a private legal act of the two persons concerned.[316] It is interesting to note this enlightened conception of marriage prevailing in the greatest and most masterful Empire which has ever dominated the world, at the period not indeed of its greatest force,—­for the maximum of force and the maximum of expansion, the bud and the full flower, are necessarily incompatible,—­but at the period of its fullest development.  In the chaos that followed the dissolution of the Empire Roman law remained as a precious legacy to the new developing nations, but its influence was inextricably mingled with that of Christianity, which, though not at the first anxious to set up marriage laws of its own, gradually revealed a growing ascetic feeling hostile alike to the dignity of the married woman and the freedom of marriage and divorce.[317] With that influence was combined the influence, introduced through the Bible, of the barbaric Jewish marriage-system conferring on the husband rights in marriage and divorce which were totally denied to the wife; this was an influence which gained still greater force at the Reformation when the authority once accorded to the Church was largely transformed to the Bible.  Finally, there was in a great part of Europe, including the most energetic and expansive parts, the influence of the Germans, an influence still more primitive than that