482
THE DECLINE AND FALL
biguous word, which contains the precept of Christ, is flexible to any interpretation that the wisdom of a legislator can demand.
Incest, concubines and bastards The freedom of love and marriage was restrained among the Romans by natural and civil impediments. An instinct, almost innate and universal, appears to prohibit the incestuous commerce[1] of parents and children in the infinite series of ascending and descending generations. Concerning the oblique and collateral branches, nature is indifferent, reason mute, and custom various and arbitrary. In Egypt, the marriage of brothers and sisters was admitted without scruple or exception; a Spartan might espouse the daughter of his father, an Athenian that of his mother; and the nuptials of an uncle with his niece were applauded at Athens as a happy union of the dearest relations. The profane lawgivers of Rome were never tempted by interest or superstition to multiply the forbidden degrees; but they inflexibly condemned the marriage of sisters and brothers, hesitated whether first-cousins should be touched by the same interdict, revered the paternal character of aunts and uncles, and treated affinity and adoption as a just imitation of the ties of blood. According to the proud maxims of the republic, a legal marriage could only be contracted by free citizens; an honourable, at least an ingenuous, birth was required for the spouse of a senator; but the blood of kings could never mingle in legitimate nuptials with the blood of a Roman; and the name of Stranger degraded Cleopatra and Berenice[2] to live the concubines of Mark Antony and Titus.[3] This appellation, indeed, so injurious to the majesty, cannot without indulgence be applied to the manners, of these Oriental queens. A concubine, in the strict sense of the civilians, was a woman of servile or plebeian extraction, the sole and faithful companion of a Roman citizen, who continued in a state of celibacy. Her modest station below the honours of a wife, above the infamy of a prostitute, was acknowledged- ↑ The principles of the Roman jurisprudence are exposed by Justinian (Institut. l. i. tit. x.); and the laws and manners of the different nations of antiquity concerning forbidden degrees, &c. are copiously explained by Dr. Taylor in his Elements of Civil Law (p. 108, 314-339), a work of amusing, though various, reading; but which cannot be praised for philosophical precision.
- ↑ When her father Agrippa died (A.D. 44), Berenice was sixteen years of age (Joseph, tom. i. Antiquit. Judaic. l. xix. c. 9, p. 952, edit. Havercamp). She was therefore above fifty years old when Titus (A.D. 79) invitus invitam invisit. This date would not have adorned the tragedy or pastoral of the tender Racine.
- ↑ The Ægyptia conjunx of Virgil (Æneid, viii. 688) seems to be numbered among the monsters who warred with Mark Antony against Augustus, the senate, and the gods of Italy.
