and Roman world were prostitutes, and no stigma was attached to celibates or widowers who kept a concubine. In the last days of the Roman Republic and under the early emperors freedom of divorce was grossly abused both by men and women in high society. The worst offenders were men of political ambitions, who made and unmade marriages with a single eye to their political career, Caesar, who had four wives, and Sulla, who had five, were regarded as somewhat unconventional; but Pompey who also married five times, was considered a model of respectability.45 |
Tolkaappiyam did not prescribe any annual season for these poems, possibly because marital infidelity does not limit itself to seasons. The agricultural region was chosen for this aspect of conjugal life for this reason that the bigger towns and cities were located there, and the occasions for marital infidelity were greater in town and cities than in montane or pastoral villages. Further, the landlord farmer would have several women employed under him, and this might have proved an occasion of lax morals as slavery proved to be an occasion in the Graeco-Roman world. This consideration too may have made the codifiers of poetic convention locate this phase of married life in the marutam region. The marutam poetry contains elaborate indications of the extent to which courtezans entered into the life of towns, and the extent to which they were aided by intermediaries who acted as the messengers between the chiefs and the women. The part of day prescribed for these poems, is the dawn and sunrise. By the two words are meant two separate periods of day, the hour or hours immediately preceding the sunrise when birds and beasts begin to stir and the flowers begin to open, and the hour when the sun actually appears and the earth is clearly lit. According to Naccinaarkiniyar the darkness before the dawn is the time when an unfaithful husband returns to his own home before the people are abroad on the streets. Further, the heroine wounded by his conduct and having passed the entire night in suffering, is in an irritable mood and therefore ready for quarrel. The codifiers are said to have added the first hours of daylight because the dawn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 45 CARY and HAARHOFF, Life and Thought in the Greek and Roman World, p. 144, London, 1942: |