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A strict matrimony, as it is called, was then in earlier 

 times, we are told, concluded by the Plebeians in two 

 ways, of which at least the first was not denuded of all 

 solemnities — by coemptio and usus. The coemptio was a kind 

 of sale in presence of five persons, Avho were to be Roman 

 citizens and of age. The coemptio seems originally to 

 have formed a part of the confarreatio, and to have become 

 an independent ceremony through King Servius, whose 

 endeavour it was to set aside the old religions forms of 

 the law, and to replace them by monetary transactions. 

 By the coemptio the wife became mater-familias. The 

 civil effects of such a marriage were the same as those of 

 the confarreatio, as far as regards the manus and the patria 

 potestas ; the difference was, that a marriage by coemptio 

 could be dissolved. The third, the most unceremonious 

 way of getting married, was that by usus. By usus the 

 man acquired his wife, so to say, by prescription. If a 

 w^oman w^ent to the house of a man and lived there with 

 him for a full year, the man acquired the rights of a hus- 

 band over her, especially the manus ; but it is understood 

 that she came to him and he received her with conjugal 

 affection. It was a principal feature in the strict matri- 

 mony — and the other matrimony, the matrimonium juris 

 gentium, was not known in the earliest days of Rome — 

 that the wife was held in tutela by the husband. She 

 had no civil rights, no property ; she was in fact, like 

 the Ji I ia-faviilias, a part of the family luider the imrestricted 

 dominion of the husband, subjected to any treatment or 

 punishment he liked to inflict upon her, capital punish- 

 ment excepted. A family was an empire in itself, in 

 which the pater-familias was the despot, and might be 

 the tyrant, secluded from any interference of the state. 

 A woman who came once in manum of a Roman hu.sband, 

 had no other weapons to defend her rights as a human 

 being than those female ai-ms, by means of Avhich she 



