ABSTRACT
I Divorce in classical law Classical Rome had a very liberal divorce policy (as did Greco-Roman Egypt; see Part III). By the first century B.C.E., women who were not married with manus [see Chapter 1, Part II.B.] had the right to divorce their husbands unilaterally, and eventually the same right was enjoyed by women married with manus. Husbands had been able to divorce their wives unilaterally, particularly for adultery or other misbehavior, from a very early period [Treggiari 1991a, 441-6, 459]. Whether unilateral or by mutual agreement, divorce was an accepted fact of Roman life, and was subject to very few restrictions until the fourth century C.E. How frequent divorce actually was, and what percentage of divorces was initiated by wives rather than husbands, are unanswerable questions. Indeed, there is little information on Roman divorce apart from the legal sources, except for literature which focuses on the Roman elite in the late Republic and early Empire [Treggiari 1991b].
