The account here given applies particularly only to Athens, for our efforts to discover anything more precise as to brothels and courtesans in the remaining States and Cities of Greece have not so far been crowned with success.
With the Roman, who could spare hardly a thought to any other feeling than his pride, love played but an insignificant rôle in his existence. Even the deference he showed towards marriage and the married woman was not really so much the outcome of a pure morality as of the interest that the State must of necessity feel in the nursing-mothers of each succeeding generation; in fact it can scarcely be regarded as much more than a mere measure of policy. When a Censor like _Metellus_ in a public Speech intended to encourage matrimony could say[164]: Si sine uxore possemus, Quirites, esse, omnes ea molestia careremus: sed quoniam ita natura tradidit, ut nec cum illis satis commode, nec sine illis ullo modo vivi possit, saluti perpetuae potius quam brevi voluptati consulendum. (If we could live without a wife, Quirites, we should all be free from such inconvenience; but since nature has arranged it in this wise that neither with women in any real comfort, nor without them at all, can existence be carried on, we ought to think of our life-long well-being rather than of a momentary gratification),—and when even the strict _Cato_ declared[165]: In adulterio uxorem tuam si deprehendisses, sine iudicio impune necares: illa te, si adulterares, digito non auderet contingere, _neque ius est_. (If you should have detected your wife in adultery, you might kill her without trial and be scatheless; but she, if _you_ were the adulterer, would not dare to lay a finger upon you, _nor is it lawful_ she should),—it can hardly surprise us to find a complete lack of the ideal or intellectual element in the relations of the sexes. These never really rose among the Romans much above the level of the bestial; and harlots are found already in evidence at the very threshold of Roman history[166], whilst association with them far from ever being a subject of blame, is rather represented as being a custom sanctified by immemorial usage that had never been forbidden[167].