During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions, this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according to ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian, either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in default of such selection.  To get around this difficulty, the fertile and subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the tutor optivus, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter’s guardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian or several, according to the business in hand, or even to change that official as many times as she wished.

To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure, if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the tutor cessicius, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship.  However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one limitation continued in force—­she could not make a will.  Yet even this was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the invention of the tutor fiduciarius.  The woman, without contracting matrimony, gave herself by coemptio (purchase) into the manus of a person of her trust, on the agreement that the coemptionator would free her:  he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.

[Illustration:  A Roman marriage custom.  The picture shows the bride entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]

There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal condition between the man and the woman.  As is natural, to this almost complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social equality.  The Romans never had the idea that between the mundus muliebris (woman’s world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral.  They never willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them the ditch of ignorance.  To be sure, the Roman dames of high society were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture.  When literature, science, and Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies.  We know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not only learned to dance and to sing,—­common feminine studies, these,—­but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers of the Orient.

Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on equality with her husband.  The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman:  she received and enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man, recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table.  In short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable prisoner.