Yet amid all these domestic virtues and family affections we search in
vain for the prevalence of Romantic Love. We have already seen that for
the growth of this sentiment something more is needed than domestic
affection, and that something is comprised in the word WOOING. There was
no wooing at Rome. In most cases, the father took his daughter’s heart
in his hand, and, treating it as a piece of personal property, bestowed
it on the suitor who best “suited” him. “From the earliest times,” says
Ploss, “it was customary in Rome to marry girls when they had barely
reached their twelfth or thirteenth year; engagements were probably made
at a still earlier age. Although legally the daughter’s consent was
required, in actual practice _she exercised no choice_; her extreme
youth in itself preventing this. Often a marriage contract was a mere
matter of agreement between two families in which love and personal
favour were disregarded; nor did even the betrothal bring the future
couple into closer intimacy.” With reference to the laws of the Twelve
Tablets, M. Legouvé remarks, in his _Histoire Morale des Femmes_, that
“Rome was worthy of Athens. Not only did a Roman father dispose of his
daughter against her inclination, but he even had the right to dissolve
a marriage into which she had entered, and to take away from his
daughter the husband he had given her, whom she loved, and by whom she
had children.” In justice, however, it must be added that this latter
right was rarely exercised; but the fact that the Romans could tolerate
the very notion of such a law shows what little account was made of
love.
Another absurd impediment to personal choice was raised by the
Theodosian Code, which compelled a girl to marry a man who had the same
calling as her father—a custom which, indeed, seems to prevail in parts
of Europe to the present day, and which is as incompatible with Love as
the ancient Hebrew rule that the oldest daughter must be married first—a
rule which compelled Jacob to marry Leah before he could get his beloved
Rachel, for whom he had laboured seven years. “First come first served”
is a rule which Cupid rarely heeds in the case of several sisters.
In the case of the men it is possible that Sexual Selection occasionally
came into play, when early betrothals did not prevent it; for the old
Romans were too rational to anticipate the silly and criminal French
custom of bargaining for a bride before they had even seen her. In such
a case, if the bride was attractive, the suitor’s imagination, dwelling
on the fact that this vision of loveliness was to be his own,
exclusively, for ever, may have been warmed for a moment with something
very like romantic sentiment. But beauty in Rome, Ovid informs us, was
very rare—"How few are able to boast it!"—so that even with the men who
had a choice, Individual Preference based on Personal Beauty could have
been rarely exercised. And as for the women who had no choice, they may
have felt a temporary elation on first meeting their destined husbands;
but this feeling was merely the manifestation of a vague instinct,
comparable to the “love” which a bevy of modern boarding-school “buds”
show for the only man they are allowed to see regularly,—their ugly
teacher,—and the unreality and silliness of which they laugh at
themselves when they are at last allowed to meet the man of their own,
individual, free choice, who teaches them the feeling of real Romantic
Love.