In ancient Rome, The Emperor Augustus introduced marriage legislation, the Lex Papia Poppaea, which rewarded marriage and childbearing. The legislation also imposed penalties on young persons who failed to marry and on those who committed adultery. Therefore, marriage and childbearing was made law between the ages of twenty-five and sixty for men, and twenty and fifty for women. Women who were Vestals Virgins, were selected between the ages of 6 and 10 to serve as priestesses in the temple of goddess Vesta in the Roman Forum for 30 years after which time they could marry. Noble women were known to marry as young as 12 years of age, whereas women in the lower classes were more likely to marry slightly further into their teenage years. Ancient Roman law required brides to be at least 12 years old, a standard adopted by Roman Catholic canon law. In ancient Roman law, first marriages to brides aged 12–25 required the consent of the bride and her father, but by the late antique period Roman law permitted women over 25 to marry without parental consent. The father had the right and duty to seek a good and useful match for his children, and might arrange a child's betrothal long before he or she came of age. To further the interests of their birth families, daughters of the elite would marry into respectable families. If a daughter could prove the proposed husband to be of bad character, she could legitimately refuse the match. The age of lawful consent to a marriage was 12 for maidens and 14 for youths. In late antiquity, Most Roman women seem to have married in their late teens to early twenties, but noble women married younger than those of the lower classes, and an aristocratic maiden was expected to be virgin until her first marriage. In late antiquity, under Roman law, daughters inherited equally from their parents if no will was produced. In addition, Roman law recognized wives' property as legally separate from husbands's property, as did some legal systems in parts of Europe and colonial Latin America.