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].The title in the Digest on “Divorce and Repudiatons” (D.24.2, with eleven entries) is very short, especially compared to the title on marriage (D.23.2, with sixty-eight entries). Most of the legal sources we have for the first three centuries come to us filtered through the compilations made in the sixth century under the Christian emperor Justinian (the Digest and the Code of Justinian) which omitted passages that no longer had relevance or legal validity. By Justinian’s day, there were considerable restrictions on the right of either partner, especially the wife, to divorce unilaterally, and on the right to remarry someone else. Thus we can assume that divorce was much more frequently discussed by the classical jurists than the Justinianic corpus suggests.1