Yet it must not be imagined that all the new impulses which came from victorious contact with foreign lands had no other than a detrimental effect upon the life of the women of Rome. The changes which were taking place provided a door to liberty, though to very many it meant nothing else but an egress to unrestrained license. In any case, the horizon of the Roman woman's outlook became greatly extended; her mind expanded as it busied itself about an increasing number of subjects, and the range of her activities was materially widened. As her husband now had other interests besides those of the warrior, the citizen, and the agriculturist, in the last of which she had alone been allowed a recognized part, a larger field was now provided in which she might be his companion; henceforward she became less an appendage and more an equal. Not, however, because new laws were passed in her favor; indeed, the laws were framed rather with the purpose of overcoming the results of those circumstances which were effecting her emancipation. But it is impossible to overcome a development which is the natural result of conditions that are welcomed by the people; so, in the new society by which the old order was superseded in Italy, women soon learned how, by means of legal fictions, they might accomplish ends which were still illegal. It is altogether a new woman that we find in the last century of the Republic, taking the place of the old-time matron. She drives about the city in an equipage befitting her wealth and position; she entertains in her sumptuous home learned men, with whom she studies the Greek authors; she brings such influence to bear on the Senate as to cause laws to be passed in her favor; she frequently intrigues in matters political; she is not unaccustomed to divorce and remarriage; and, thus engaged, she leaves the spinning of wool, the occupation from time immemorial esteemed honorable by matrons, entirely to her domestics and her slaves.
These great changes in the status of woman did not take place without a protest. They were the occasion of serious contentions in the Senate and of bitter reproaches on the part of the lovers of the old-fashioned ways, Hellenism being blamed for the mischief, on one occasion all Greek philosophers were driven from the city; but that was like removing the old seed after the well-matured plant had grown to depend upon its own roots. The people of Rome were in reality divided into three classes in respect to the new order of things. There were the younger men and women of the nobility, who welcomed the change, but who were intoxicated with the novel pleasures to which wealth gave them access, and into which they rushed with an utter disregard of propriety. Among them, however, were some thoughtful souls,--a class of a better character,--who, while they most cordially entertained that which Hellenism had to teach them in regard to a broader style of life, knew how to winnow the chaff from the grain and to feed their minds with the latter. These found their best representatives in the Scipio family, all of whom were zealous patrons of Greek learning. As we have noticed in a previous chapter, Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus, maintained her house at Misenum in a most liberal manner, making it a centre of erudition and gathering around her many of the learned men of her time. In opposition to both these classes were men whose type may be found in all ages, who were uncompromising in their conservatism and who could see nothing but a presage of national disaster in every change from the old methods of life. Their complete idea of what a woman should be and do was expressed in the formula: "She is virtuous; she stays at home; she spins wool." This party was ably headed by Cato the Censor, who was entirely incapable of understanding why the women of his day should desire anything other than that which satisfied their feminine antecedents in the poverty-pinched times of the early Republic.