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  • In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.

    Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman, Guizot (M., François), Sir William Smith (1862). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.298