III.  With regard to a community of wives and children, each took a wise and statesman-like course to prevent jealousy, although the means employed by each were different.  A Roman who possessed a sufficient family of his own might be prevailed upon by a friend who had no children to transfer his wife to him, being fully empowered to give her away, by divorce, for this purpose; but a Lacedaemonian was accustomed to lend his wife for intercourse with a friend, while she remained living in his house, and without the marriage being thereby dissolved.  Many, we are told, even invited those who, they thought, would beget fine and noble children, to converse with their wives.  The distinction between the two customs seems to be this:  the Spartans affected an unconcern and insensibility about a matter which excites most men to violent rage and jealousy; the Romans modestly veiled it by a legal contract which seems to admit how hard it is for a man to give up his wife to another.  Moreover Numa’s regulations about young girls were of a much more feminine and orderly nature, while those of Lykurgus were so highflown and unbecoming to women, as to have been the subject of notice by the poets, who call them Phainomerides, that is with bare thighs, as Ibykus says; and they accuse them of lust, as Euripides says—­

    “They stay not, as befits a maid, at home,
    But with young men in shameless dresses roam.”

For in truth the sides of the maiden’s tunic were not fastened together at the skirt, and so flew open and exposed the thigh as they walked, which is most clearly alluded to in the lines of Sophokles—­

    “She that wanders nigh,
    With scanty skirt that shows the thigh,
    A Spartan maiden fair and free,
    Hermione.”

On this account they are said to have become bolder than they should be, and to have first shown this spirit towards their husbands, ruling uncontrolled over their households, and afterwards in public matters, where they freely expressed their opinions upon the most important subjects.  On the other hand, Numa preserved that respect and honour due from men to matrons which they had met with under Romulus, who paid them these honours to atone for having carried them off by force, but he implanted in them habits of modesty, sobriety, and silence, forbidding them even to touch wine, or to speak even when necessary except in their husbands’ presence.  It is stated that once, because a woman pleaded her own cause in the Forum, the Senate sent to ask the oracle what this strange event might portend for the state.

A great proof of the obedience and modesty of the most part of them is the way in which the names of those who did any wrong is remembered.  For, just as in Greece, historians record the names of those who first made war against their own kindred or murdered their parents, so the Romans tell us that the first man who put away his wife was Spurius Carvilius, nothing of the kind having happened in Rome for two hundred and thirty years from its foundation; and that the wife of Pinarius, Thalaea by name, was the first to quarrel with her mother-in-law Gegania in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus—­so well and orderly were marriages arranged by this lawgiver.