Note 250-3 — Chapter II

Seneca, de Benef., III, 16—a frightful chapter. Also, I, 9. Juvenal speaks of ladies who in five years had married eight men (IV, 229, seq.), and Jerome saw a woman buried by her 23d husband, who himself had had 21 wives, one after another, (ad. Ageruch, I, 908.) The first instance of a formal divorce diffareatio is said to have occurred in the year 523, after the building of the city (Gellius, IV, 3), a clear proof that the Romulian description of marriage, as κοινωνία ἁπάντων ἱερῶν καὶ χρημάτων[TN 93] (Dionys., A. R. II., 25), was long a true one. The old manus-marriage certainly supposes great confidence of the wife and her parents in the fidelity of the husband, while the marriage law of the time of the emperors relating to estates never lost sight of the possibility of divorce. The facility of obtaining amicable divorces (the most dangerous of all) appears from the gifts allowed, divorti causa, in L., 11, 12, 13, 60, 61, 62; Dig., XXIV, 1. In Greece, we meet with the characteristic contrast, that, in earlier times, wives were bought, but that later, large dowries had to be insured to them or the risk of divorce at pleasure be assumed. (Hermann, Privataltherthümer, § 30.) How women themselves married again, even on the day of their divorce, see Demosth., adv. Onet., 873; adv. Eubul., 1311. On Palestine, see Gospel of John, 4, 17 ff. Concerning present Egypt, where prostitution is carried on especially by cast-off wives, see Wachenhusen, vom ägypt, armen Mann, II, 139. During the great French revolution, divorces were so easily obtained that but little was wanted to make a community of wives. (Vierzig Bücher, IV, 205; Handbuch des französischen[TN 94] Civilrechts, § 450.) The more divorces there are in a Prussian province, the more illegitimate births also. Thus, for instance, Brandenburg, 1860-64, had 1,721 divorces, and one illegitimate birth for every 7.8 legitimate (max.). Rhenish Prussia, four divorces and one illegitimate birth for every 25.4 legitimate (min.). In the cities of Saxony, it is estimated there are, for every 10,000 inhabitants, 36 divorced persons; in the country, only 19 (Haushofer, Statistik, 487 seq.); in Württemberg, 20; Thuringia, 33; all Prussia, 19; Berlin, 83. (Schwabe, Volkszählung von, 1867 p. XLV.)