Divorce in ancient Rome was fairly straight forward and not uncommon. Either party could divorce although discretion was left generaly to the pater familias of either spouse. Divorce could come from many reasons from infedelitity to political. Lower classes still divorced but for far different reasons. Generaly infedility would be driving factor or for child bearing purposes( if a woman couldnt get knicned up or the dude was unablw to perform) In Roman law a wifes property was divided from the husbands so divorce left property pretty straight forward, and the

Was divorce easily availaince women could, during some periods, initiate divorce, how often did they, and did their families usually take them back or could they strike out on their own? What happened to children?

Often women would be the ones to start divorce, in which case the pater familias of here family would handle it and they would be married again quite rapidly. There is a law case where a man went to war and his wife remarried inmediately because she assumed he would die then he returned and she was arrested for adultery Finally, the husband essentially always got the children unless special cause was given to wife.

Source: roman family law and cases Forget the author but it has a blue cover

Edit: sorry for shitty grammar, I am on mobile, will fix up later

I took a course on Roman Law and was surprised by how easy it was to get a divorce. "An Introduction to Roman Law" by Barry Nicholas has some good information on the topic.

Roman marriage was essentially based on living together with the intent to be married. There are several formalities that parties would go through in a marriage, but these formal ceremonies were not legally required for marriage. Really, all that was necessary to begin a marriage was to live together and utter a formulaic phrase that boiled down to "I intend to live with you as a spouse."

Divorce was similarly accessible. Since marriage was almost solely based on intent, so was divorce. A spouse simply had to demonstrate the intent to no longer be married. I can't find the phrase now, but there was also a formulaic phrase to initiate divorce which boiled down to "Take the things that belong to you and leave." This was essentially invoking their right to no longer share their property interests.

The property interests in divorce were based upon a few facts, but weren't difficult to sort out. If there are no children, then normally the husband must return the dowery to his wife's family. If there are children, they legally belong to the father thus stay with the father, so therefore he can retain some of the dowery for the children.

These property interests could be big considerations before a husband/wife initiated a divorce. A wife might not leave if she has several children so that she might not forfeit her dowery. Similarly a husband might not leave his wife if he can't get afford to pay back the dowery. These considerations normally didn't have an effect if they had a wealthy mistress/suitor lined up.

With response to what the parties could do after the divorce, in Roman Law there is something called manus which essentially means the power of the pater familias over someone. In cases of divorce, the woman would return under the manus of her father (or other pater familias) and quickly betrothed to another man.