MARRIAGE IN OLD ROME the continuance of our race than of our brief enjoyment." Augustus, too, tried to arrest this movement by rewards and pun ishments. He passed the Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea, a voluminous matrimonial code which for two or three centuries exercised such an influence as to be regarded as one of the sources of Roman law almost as much as the XII Tables, or Julian's con solidated Edict. It was sometimes called the Lex Caducaria, because one of its most remarkable provisions was that unmarried persons (within certain ages and under cer tain qualifications) should entirely forfeit, on account of their celibacy, anything to which they were entitled under a will, and that married but childless persons should forfeit one-half; the part forfeited (the lapsed provision, caduca) going to other persons named in the will who were qualified under the law, and if there was none such then to the fisc. Other impor tant provisions of the lav were intended to prevent misalliances — marriages between men of rank and women of low degree, or immoral character (concubinage, however, being expressly sanctioned); to reward fruit ful marriages, by relieving women who had borne a certain number of children from the tutorship of their agnates, and conced ing various privileges alike to fathers and mothers of children born in wedlock; and to regulate divorce by requiring express and formal repudiation, and fixing by stat ute the consequences of it so far as the interests of the parties in the nuptial pro visions were concerned. However well intended this law was, some remarks by Juvenal and others sug gest doubts as to whether it did not really do more harm than good. The portion of the law referring to improper marriages was repealed by the emperor Justin because his nephew Justinian was anxious to marry Theodora, a lady of very doubtful virtue, "whom after she had ministered to the licentious pleasures of the populace as a courtesan, and as an actress in the most
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immodest exhibitions, in defiance of de cency, of honor, of the remonstrance of friends, and of all religion," the long-re nowned legislator made the partner of his throne. (Milman's Latin Christianity, Vol. I, p. 420.) Justinian, by the way, was a curious mix ture of vices; as Milman puts it, he united in himself insatiable rapacity and lavish prodigality, intense pride and contemptible weakness, unmeasured ambition and das tardly cowardice. The uxorious slave of his empress, yet he aspired to be the legis lator of the world, and his name as the centuries roll on is still associated with a vast system of jurisprudence which bids fair to exercise an unrepealed authority to the latest ages. The upper classes did not approve of the efforts of Augustus to encourage matri mony. Deliberate interchange of nuptial consent was still the only thing necessary to make husband and wife, although for a few pur poses the bride's home-coming to the hus band's house was regarded as the criterion of completed marriage. Manus was become unfashionable. So repugnant was such subjection to patrician ladies that they declined to submit to the ceremony of confarreate nuptials; and consequently the per sons qualified by confarreate birth to fill the higher offices of the priesthood became so few that early in the days of the empire it was decreed that that form of marriage should be productive of manus, only so far as to entitle the offspring to hold these sacred offices, and should not make the wife a member of the husband's family. Manus by a year's uninterrupted cohabitation was already out of date in the time of Gaius, and although that by coemption was still in use in his days it was probably quite un known by the time of Diocletian. Under the Christian emperors this power of the husband over the wife and her be longings '(manus) was a thing of the past; man and woman stood on an equal footing
