Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quite in ruin, owed his money to the bequest of a Greek woman whose wealth had the most impure origin that the possessions of a woman can possibly have.  Is this tradition only the invention of the enemies of the terrible dictator?  In any event, how people of good standing felt in this matter in normal times is shown by the life of Cicero.

Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable, and well educated, but not rich.  That he was able to pursue his brilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to his marriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he, and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome.  But it is well known that after long living together happily enough, as far as can be judged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46 B.C. ended by being divorced.  The reasons for the divorce are not exactly clear, but from Cicero’s letters it appears that financial motives and disputes were not wanting.  It seems that during the civil wars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent he desired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulent years she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertain political fortune of her husband.

[Illustration:  The so-called bust of Cicero.  All but the head is modern.  Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the Palazzo Barberini.]

Cicero’s divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to the gravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage.  He was the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia, and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with this seventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate the great writer.

This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic, prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of the human heart.  The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even Romans could love wife and children.  Although they distrusted and combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated, encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life, should we therefore reckon them barbarians?  We must not forget the great diversity between our times and theirs.  The confidence which modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the opposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal attraction impels him—­these are the supreme blossoms of modern individualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in the rich soil of modern civilization.