The Ten Commandments represented the covenant between man and God. A covenant was a promise, or a series of promises. In the Basilica of Eudoxia stood a statue of Moses carved by Michelangelo, and within it were enshrined the chains Peter had worn in Jerusalem.
These chains had been retrieved from Jerusalem by Valentinian's empress. When the pope compared them with the chains that had bound St. Peter in Rome's Mamertine Prison, the two sets of chains fitted together perfectly.
Thus, the chains were placed inside a reliquary at the feet of the prophet Moses.
A covenant was a form of constraint. Moses had led the Hebrew people from Egypt to Palestine, freeing them from their lives as slaves.
With God's power, he had performed many miracles. In return, the Jews had to obey the Ten Commandments. What happened if they violated the covenant between man and God?
A man and a woman swore before God to remain faithful to one another, while French aristocrats simply played their own games.
Some men kept mistresses; others sought high-class courtesans like the one in Alexandre Dumas's La Traviata. A man had to bring her gifts to see her. Every gift she accepted formed an unwritten covenant. Some paid with money, while she had to pay with her body.
The courtesan could have chosen another way of life, but she had not restrained her desire for material things. In the end, she died of tuberculosis.
That disease was still preferable—at least more respectable than syphilis. Polygamy harmed a wife's private ownership, while men could not accept polyandry either, since that harmed a man's private ownership of his wife. Under monogamy, no one's rights were violated. The next thing to guard against was fraud.
If a woman controlled a man's property, he would have