In the days of Saturn [1] I believe, Chastity still lingered on the earth, and was to be seen for a time--days when men were poorly housed in chilly caves, which under one common shelter enclosed hearth and household gods, herds and their owners; when the hill-bred wife spread her silvan bed with leaves and straw and the skins of her neighbours the wild beasts --a wife not like thee, O Cynthia [2], nor to thee, Lesbia [3], whose bright eyes were clouded by a sparrow's death, but one whose breasts gave suck to lusty babes, often more unkempt herself than her acorn-belching husband. For in those days, when the world was young and the skies were new, men born of the riven oak,[4] or formed of dust, lived differently from now, and had no parents of their own. Under Jupiter, perchance, some few traces of ancient modesty may have survived; but that was before he had grown his beard, before the Greeks had learned to swear by someone else's head, when men feared not thieves for their cabbages or fruits, and lived with unwalled gardens. After that Astraea [5] withdrew by degrees to heaven,with Chastity as her comrade, the two sisters taking flight together.

To set your neighbour's bed a-shaking, Postumus, and to flout the Genius of the sacred couch,[6] is now an ancient and long-established practice. All other sins came later, the products of the age of Iron; but it was the silver age that saw the first adulterers. Nevertheless, in these days of ours, you are preparing for a covenant, a marriage-contract and a betrothal; you are by now getting your hair combed by a master barber; you have also perhaps given a pledge to her finger. What! Postumus, are you, you who once had your wits, taking to yourself a wife? Tell me what Tisiphone, what snakes are driving you mad? Can you submit to a she-tyrant when there is so much rope to be had, so many dizzy heights of windows standing open, and when the Aemilian bridge offers itself to your hand? Or if none of all these modes of exit hit your fancy, how much better to take some boy-bedfellow, who would never wrangle with you o' nights, never ask presents of you when in bed, and never complain that you took your ease and were indifferent to his solicitations!

But Ursidius approves of the Julian Law. [7] He purposes to bring up a dear little heir, though he will thereby have to do without the fine turtle-doves, the bearded mullets, and all the legacy-hunting delicacies of the meat-market. What can you think impossible if Ursidius takes to himself a wife? if he, who has long been the most notorious of gallants, who has so often found safety in the corn-bin of the luckless Latinus,[8] puts his silly head into the connubial noose? And what think you of his searching for a wife of the good old virtuous sort? O doctors, lance his over-blooded veins. A pretty fellow you! Why, if you have the good luck to find a modest spouse, you should prostrate yourself before the Tarpeian threshold, and sacrifice a heifer with gilded horns to Juno; so few are the wives worthy to handle the fillets of Ceres, or from whose kisses their own father would not shrink! Weave a garland for thy doorposts, and set up wreaths of ivy over thy lintel! But will Hiberina be satisfied with one man? Sooner compel her to be satisfied with one eye! You tell me of the high repute of some maiden, who lives on her paternal farm: well, let her live at Gabii, at Fidenae, as she lived in her own country, and I will believe in your little paternal farm. But will anyone tell me that nothing ever took place on a mountain side or in a cave? Have Jupiter and Mars become so senile? Can our arcades show you one woman worthy of your vows? Do all the tiers in all our theatres hold one whom you may love without misgiving, and pick out thence? When the soft Bathyllus dances the part of the gesticulating Leda, Tuccia cannot contain herself; your Apulian maiden heaves a sudden and longing yelp of ecstasy, as though she were in a man's arms; the rustic Thymele is all attention, it is then that she learns her lesson.

Others again, when the stage draperies have been put away; when the empty theatres are closed, and all is silent save in the courts, and the Megalesian games are far off from the Plebeian,[9] ease their dullness by taking to the mask, the thyrsus and the tights of Accius. Urbicus, in an Atellane after-piece, raises a laugh by the gestures of Autonoe; the penniless Aelia is in love with him. Other women pay great prices for the favours of a comedian; some will not allow Chrysogonus [10] to sing. Hispulla has a fancy for tragedians; but do you suppose that any will be found to love Quintilian?[11] If you marry a wife, it will be that the lyrist Echion or Glaphyrus, or the flute player Ambrosius, may become a father. Then up with a long dais in the narrow street! Adorn your doors and doorposts with wreaths of laurel, that your highborn son, O Lentulus, may exhibit, in his tortoiseshell cradle,[12] the lineaments of Euryalus[13], or of a murmillo! [14]

When Eppia, the senator's wife, ran off with a gladiator [15] to Pharos and the Nile and the ill-famed city of Lagus, Canopus itself cried shame upon the monstrous morals of our town. Forgetful of home, of husband and of sister, without thought of her country, she shamelessly abandoned her weeping children; and--more marvellous still--deserted Paris and the games. Though born in wealth, though as a babe she had slept in a bedizened cradle on the paternal down, she made light of the sea, just as she had long made light of her good name---a loss but little accounted of among our soft litter-riding dames. And so with stout heart she endured the tossing and the roaring of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, and all the many seas she had to cross. For when danger comes in a right and honourable way, a woman's heart grows chill with fear and dread, she cannot stand upon her trembling feet: but if she be doing a bold, bad thing, her courage fails not. For a husband to order his wife on board ship is cruelty: the bilge-water then sickens her, the heavens go round and round. But if she is running away with a lover, she feels no qualms: then she vomits over her husband; now she messes with the sailors, she roams about the deck, and delights in hauling at hard ropes.

And what were the youthful charms which captivated Eppia? What did she see in him to allow herself to be called "a she-Gladiator"? Her dear Sergius had already begun to shave; a wounded arm gave promise of a discharge, and there were sundry deformities in his face: a scar caused by the helmet, a huge wen upon his nose, a nasty humour always trickling from his eye. But then he was a gladiator! It is this that transforms these fellows into Hyacinthuses! it was this that she preferred to children and to country, to sister and to husband. What these women love is the sword: had this same Sergius received his discharge, he would have been no better than a Veiento. [16]

Do the concerns of a private household and the doings of Eppia affect you? Then look at those who rival the Gods, [17] and hear what Claudius endured. As soon as his wife perceived that her husband was asleep, this august harlot was shameless enough to prefer a common mat to the imperial couch. Assuming night-cowl, and attended by a single maid, she issued forth; then, having concealed her raven locks under a light-coloured peruque, she took her place in a brothel reeking with long-used coverlets. Entering an empty cell reserved for herself, she there took her stand, under the feigned name of Lycisca, her nipples bare and gilded, and exposed to view the womb that bore thee, O nobly-born Britannicus! [18] Here she graciously received all comers, asking from each his fee; and when at length the keeper dismissed his girls, she remained to the very last before closing her cell, and with passion still raging hot within her went sorrowfully away. Then exhausted by men but unsatisfied, with soiled cheeks, and begrimed with the smoke of lamps, she took back to the imperial pillow all the odours of the stews.

Why tell of love potions and incantations, of poisons brewed and administered to a stepson, or of the grosser crimes to which women are driven by the imperious power of sex? Their sins of lust are the least of all their sins. "But tell me why is Censennia, on her husband's testimony, the best of wives?" She brought him a million sesterces; that is the price at which he calls her chaste. He has not pined under the arrows of Venus' quiver; he was never burnt by her torch. It was the dowry that lighted his fires, the dowry that shot those arrows! That dowry bought liberty for her: she may make what signals, and write what love letters she pleases, before her husband's face; the rich woman who marries a money-loving husband is as good as unmarried.

"Why does Sertorius burn with love for Bibula?" If you shake out the truth, it is the face that he loves, not the wife. Let three wrinkles make their appearance; let her skin become dry and flabby ; let her teeth turn black, and her eyes lose their lustre: then will his freedman give her the order, "Pack up your traps and be off! you've become a nuisance; you are for ever blowing your nose; be off, and quick about it! There's another wife coming who will not sniffle." But till that day comes, the lady rules the roast, asking her husand for shepherds and Canusian sheep, and elms for her Falernian vines. But that's a mere nothing: she asks for all his slave-boys, all his prison-gangs; everything that her neighbour possesses, and that she does not possess, must be bought. Then in the winter time, when the merchant Jason is shut out from view, and his armed sailors are blocked out by the white booths, [19] she will carry off huge crystal vases, vases bigger still of agate, and finally a diamond of great renown, made precious by the finger of Berenice.[20] It was given as a present long ago by the barbarian Agrippa to his incestuous sister, in that country where kings celebrate festal sabbaths with bare feet,[21] and where a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age.[22]

"Do you say no worthy wife is to be found among all these crowds?" Well, let her be handsome, charming, rich and fertile; let her have ancient ancestors ranged about her halls; let her be more chaste than all the dishevelled Sabine maidens who stopped the war--a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan! yet who could endure a wife that possessed all perfections? I would rather have a Venusian wench for my wife than you, O Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, if, with all your virtues, you bring me a hanghty brow, and reckon up Triumphs as part of your marriage portion. Away with your Hannibal, I beseech you! Away with Syphax overpowered in his camp! Take yourself off, Carthage and all!

"Be merciful, I pray, O Apollo! and thou, O goddess, lay down thine arrows. These babes have done naught: shoot down their mother!" Thus prayed Amphion; [23] but Apollo bends his bow, and Niobe [24] led forth to the grave her troop of sons, and their father to boot, because she deemed herself nobler in her offspring than Latona was in hers, and more prolific than the white sow of Alba. For is any dignity in a wife, any beauty, worth the cost, if she is for ever reckoning up her merits against you? These high and transcendent qualities lose all their charm when spoilt by a pride that savours more of aloes than of honey. And who was ever so enamoured as not to shrink from the woman whom he praises to the skies, and to hate her for seven hours out of every twelve?

Some small faults are intolerable to husbands.What can be more offensive than this, that no woman believes in her own beauty unless she has converted herself from a Tuscan into a Greekling, or from a maid of Sulmo [25] into a true maid of Athens? They talk nothing but Greek, though it is a greater shame for our people to be ignorant of Latin. Their fears and their wrath, their joys and their troubles--all the secrets of their souls--are poured forth in Greek; their very loves are carried on in Greek fashion. All this might be pardoned in a girl; but will you, who are hard on your eighty-sixth year, still talk in Greek? That tongue is not decent in an old woman's mouth. When you come out with the wanton words [Greek], you are using in public the language of the bed-chamber. Carressing and naughty words like these incite to love; but though you say them more tenderly than a Haemus or a Carpophorus, [26] they will cause no fluttering of the heart--your years are counted upon your face!

If you are not to love the woman betrothed and united to you in due form, what reason have you for marrying? Why waste the supper, and the wedding cakes to be given to the well-filled guests when the company is slipping away--to say nothing of the first night's gift of a salver rich with glittering gold inscribed with Dacian or Germanic victories? [27] If you are honestly uxorious, and devoted to one woman, then bow your head and submit your neck ready to bear the yoke. Never will you find a woman who spares the man who loves her; for though she be herself aflame, she delights to torment and plunder him. So the better the man, the more desirable he be as a husband, the less good by far will he get out of his wife. No present will you ever make if your wife forbids; nothing will you ever sell if she objects; nothing will you buy without her consent. She will arrange your friendships for you; she will turn your now-aged friend from the door which saw the beginnings of his beard. Panders and trainers can make their wills as they please, as also can the gentlemen of the arena; but you will have to write down among your heirs more than one rival of your own.

"Crucify that slave!" says the wife. "But what crime worthy of death has he committed?" asks the husband; "where are the witnesses? who informed against him? Give him a hearing at least; no delay can be too long when a man's life is at stake!" "What, you numskull? you call a slave a man, do you? He has done no wrong, you say? Be it so; this is my will and my command: let my will be the voucher for the deed." Thus does she lord it over her husband. But before long she vacates her kingdom; she flits from one home to another, wearing out her bridal veil; then back she flies again and returns to her own imprints in the bed that she has abandoned, leaving behind her the newly decorated door, the festal hangings on the walls, and the branches green still over the threshold. Thus does the tale of her husbands grow; there will be eight of them in the course of five autumns--a fact worthy of commemoration on her tomb!

Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive. It is she that teaches her daughter to revel in stripping and despoiling her husband; it is she that teaches her to reply to a seducer's love-letters in no unskilled and innocent fashion; she eludes or bribes your guards; it is she that calls in Archigenes [28] when your daughter has nothing the matter with her, and tosses about the heavy blankets; the lover meanwhile is in secret and silent hiding, trembling with impatience and expectation. Do you really expect the mother to teach her daughter honest ways--ways different from her own? Nay, the vile old woman finds a profit in bringing up her daughter to be vile.

There never was a case in court in which the quarrel was not started by a woman. If Manilia is not a defendant, she'll be the plaintiff; she will herself frame and adjust the pleadings; she will be ready to instruct Celsus [29] himself how to open his case, and how to urge his points.

Why need I tell of the purple wraps [30] and the wrestling-oils used by women? Who has not seen one of them smiting a stump, piercing it through and through with a foil, lunging at it with a shield, and going through all the proper motions?--a matron truly qualified to blow a trumpet at the Floralia! [31] Unless, indeed, she is nursing some further ambition in her bosom, and is practising for the real arena. What modesty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength? Yet she would not choose to be a man, knowing the superior joys of womanhood. What a fine thing for a husband, at an auction of his wife's effects, to see her belt and armlets and plumes put up for sale, with a gaiter that covers half the left leg; or if she fight another sort [32] of battle, how charmed you will be to see your young wife disposing of her greaves! Yet these are the women who find the thinnest of thin robes too hot for them; whose delicate flesh is chafed by the finest of silk tissue. See how she pants as she goes through her prescribed exercises; how she bends under the weight of her helmet; how big and coarse are the bandages which enclose her haunches; and then laugh when she lays down her arms and shows herself to be a woman! Tell us, ye grand-daughters of Lepidus, or of the blind Metellus, or of Fabius Gurges, what gladiator's wife ever assumed accoutrements like these? When did the wife of Asylus [33] ever gasp against a stump?

The bed that holds a wife is never free from wrangling and mutual bickerings; no sleep is to be got there! It is there that she sets upon her husband, more savage than a tigress that has lost her cubs; conscious of her own secret slips, she affects a grievance, abusing his boys, or weeping over some imagined mistress. She has an abundant supply of tears always ready in their place, awaiting her command in which fashion they should flow. You, poor worm, are delighted, believing them to be tears of love, and kiss them away; but what notes, what love-letters would you find if you opened the desk of your green-eyed adulterous wife! If you find her in the arms of a slave or of a knight, "Speak, speak, Quintilian, [34] give me one of your colours, [35]" she will say. But Quintilian says "I'm stuck. Find it yourself," says he. "We agreed long ago," says the lady, "that you were to go your way, and I mine. You may confound sea and sky with your bellowing, I am a human being after all." There's no effrontery like that of a woman caught in the act; her very guilt inspires her wrath and insolence.

But whence come these monstrosities? you ask; from what fountain do they flow? In days of old, the wives of Latium were kept chase by their humble fortunes. It was toil and brief slumbers that kept vice from polluting their modest homes; hands chafed and hardened by Tuscan fleeces, Hannibal nearing the city, and husbands standing to arms at the Colline tower.[36] We are now suffering the calamities of long peace. Luxury, more deadly than any foe, has laid her hand upon us, and avenges a conquered world. Since the day when Roman poverty perished, no deed of crime or lust has been wanting to us; from that moment Sybaris and Rhodes and Miletus have poured in upon our hills with the begarlanded and drunken and unabashed Tarentum.[37] Filthy lucre first brought in amongst us foreign ways; wealth enervated and corrupted the ages with foul indulgences. What decency does Venus observe when she is drunken? when she knows not head from tail, eats giant oysters at midnight, pours foaming unguents into her unmixed Falerian, and drinks out of perfume-flasks, while the roof spins dizzily around, the table dances, and every light shows double!

Go to now and wonder what means the sneer with which Tullia snuffs the air, or what Maura whispers to her ill-famed foster-sister, when she passes by the altar of Chastity? [38] It is there that they set down their litters at night, and befoul the image of the Goddess, playing their filthy pranks for the moon to witness. Thence home they go; while you, when daylight comes, and you are on your way to salute your mighty friends, will trend upon the traces of your wife's abominations.

Well known to all are the mysteries of the Good Goddess, when the flute stirs the loins and the Maenads of Priapus sweep along, frenzied alike by the horn-blowing and the wine, whirling their locks and howling. What foul longings burn within their breasts! What cries they utter as the passion palpitates within! How drenched their limbs in torrents of old wine! Saufeia challenges the slave-girls to a contest. Her agility wins the prize, but she has herself in turn to bow the knee to Medullina. And so the palm remains with the mistress, whose exploits match her birth! There is no pretence as in a game; all is enacted to the life in a manner that warm the cold blood of a Priam or a Nestor. And now impatient nature can wait no longer: woman shows herself as she is, and the cry comes from every corner of the den, "Now we can act! Let in the men!" If one favoured youth is asleep, another is bidden to put on his cowl and hurry along; if better cannot be got, a run is made upon the slaves; if they too fail, the water-carrier will be paid to come in. . . . O would that our ancient practices, or at least our public rites, were not polluted by scenes like these! But every Moor and Indian knows who was the she-lutist who brought a yard bigger than the two Anticatos of Caesar into a place whence every buckmouse scuttles away conscious of his virility, and in which every picture of the male form must be veiled. Who ever sneered at the Gods in the days of old? Who would have dared to laugh at the earthen-ware bowls or black pots of Numa, or the brittle plates made out of Vatican clay? But nowadays at what altar will you not find a Clodius? [39]

I hear all this time the advice of my old friends--"Put on a lock and keep your wife indoors." Yes, but who will ward the warders? The wife arranges accordingly and begins with them. High or low their passions are all the same. She who wears out the black cobble-stones with her bare feet is no better then she who rides upon the necks of eight stalwart Syrians.

Notes

1.   i.e. in the golden days of innocence.

2.  The Cynthia of Propertius.

3.  The Lesbia of Catullus.

4.  There was a legend that men had been born from oak-trees.

5.  Astraea, daughter of Zeus and Themis, was the last mortal to leave the earth when the Golden Age came to an end; she was placed among the stars as Virgo.

6.  The fulcrum was the head of the couch, often ornamented with the figure of the Genius in bronze.

7.  A law to encourage marriage.

8.  An actor who played the part of a lover in hiding.

9.  The Megalesian games began on the 4th of April and lasted for six days; the Plebeian games took place early in November.

10.  A famous singer.

11.  M. Fabius Quintilianus, the famous Roman rhetorician, A.D. 40-100. No grave and learned man like Quintilian will attrack them.

12.  The conopeum was properly a mosquito-net; here it seems to be used for a bassinette or cradle.

13.  A gladiator.

14.  A murmillo was a gladiator equipped as a Gaulish warrior in heavy armor. He carried the image of a fish on his crest, whence the name [Greek] or [Greek].

15.  Ludus is properly a gladiatorial school, or a troop of gladiators. Lagus' city [next line] = Alexandria.

16.  Probably the husband.

17.  In allusion to the deification of the emperors.

18.  Messalina [Claudius' wife] was the mother of Britannicus, b. A. D. 42.

19.  This passage is thus explained: The lady buys various articles at the feast of the Sigillaria (December 17-20), so called from the statuettes which were then on sale. These and other articles were set out in canvas booths, which were built up against certain public buildings so as to screen them from view. One of these was the Portico of Agrippa on which there were paintings of the Argonauts. Thus "the merchant" Jason and his armed sailors were shut out and could not be seen.

20.  Sister to King Agrippa II. (Acts, xxv. 23).

21.  Josephus relates that Berenice sacrificed at Jerusalem with dishevelled hair and bare feet.

22.  For Jewish abstinence from pork see Tac. Hist. v. 4.

23.  Husband of Niobe.

24.  Wife of Amphion, king of Thebes. Proud of her six sons and six daughters, she boasted herself against Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Indignant at her presumption, they slew all her children with arrows.

25.  Sulmo, in the Pelignian country, was the birthplace of Ovid. ["Greekling" and "Greek" are probably comparable to saying French woman and French 1600 years later.]

26.  Names of actors.

27.  Alluding to the gold coins (aurei) minted by Trajan in honour of his victories. The aureus was about equal in metal value to our guinea

28.  A fashionable doctor of the day.

29.  Either a jurist or rhetorician.

30.  The endromis was a coarse, woolen cloak in which athletes wrapped themselves after their excercises.

31.  Games in honour of Flora (April 28-May 3), at which much female license was allowed...

32.  i.e. a gladitorial contest.

33.  Supposed to be a gladiator.

34.  The famous Roman rhetorician, b. A.D. 44, author of the Institutiones Oratoriae. Cp. p.88. n.3.

35. Color is a technical term in rhetoric, denoting an argument which puts a favourable or palliative light on some act.

36.  For Hannibal at the Colline Gate, B. C. 213, see Liv. xxvi. 10.

37.  Duff explains this of a scene in the theatre in Tarentum when the people, garlanded in honor of Dionysus, insulted the Roman ambassador (Dio. Cass. fragm. 145).

38.  The ancient Temple Of Pudicitia was in the Forum Boarium.

39.  Alluding to the profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea [meant for women only] by Clodius, in B.C. 62, by appearing in the disguise of a female lutist.

http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~paz/roman/juv6.html