And this being so, we are not surprised to find that men are already beginning to dislike and avoid marriage; a most dangerous symptom, with which a century later Augustus found it impossible to cope.

In the year 131, just after Tiberius Gracchus had been trying to revive the population of Italy by his agrarian law, Metellus Macedonicus the censor did what he could to induce men to marry "liberorum creandorum causa"; and a fragment of a speech of his on this subject became famous afterwards, as quoted by Augustus with the same object.

It is equally characteristic of Roman humour and Roman hardness.

"If we could do without wives," he said to the people, "we should be rid of that nuisance: but since nature has decreed that we can neither live comfortably with them nor live at all without them, we must e'en look rather to our permanent interests than to a passing pleasure."[228] Now if we take into account these tendencies, on the part both of men and women in the married state, and further consider the stormy and revolutionary character of the half century that succeeded the Gracchi,--the Social and Civil Wars, the proscriptions of Marius and Sulla,--we shall be prepared to find the ladies of Cicero's time by no means simply feminine in charm or homely in disposition.

Most of them are indeed mere names to us, and we have to be careful in weighing what is said of them by later writers.