marriages, but the relation was shunned.  Courtesans usurped the privileges of wives, and with unblushing effrontery.  A man was derided who contemplated matrimony, for there was but little confidence in female virtue or capacity, and woman lost all her fascination when age had destroyed her beauty; even her very virtues were distasteful to her self-indulgent husband.  When, as sometimes happened, the wife gained the ascendency by her charms, she was tyrannical; her relatives incited her to despoil her husband; she lived amid incessant broils; she had no care for the future, and exceeded man in prodigality.  “The government of her house is no more merciful,” says Juvenal, “than the court of a Sicilian tyrant.”  In order to render herself attractive, she exhausted all the arts of cosmetics and elaborate hair-dressing; she delighted in magical incantations and love-potions.  In the bitter satire of Juvenal we get an impression most melancholy and loathsome:—­

     “’T were long to tell what philters they provide,
     What drugs to set a son-in-law aside,—­
     Women, in judgment weak, in feeling strong,
     By every gust of passion borne along. 
     To a fond spouse a wife no mercy shows;
     Though warmed with equal fires, she mocks his woes,
     And triumphs in his spoils; her wayward will
     Defeats his bliss and turns his good to ill. 
     Women support the bar; they love the law,
     And raise litigious questions for a straw. 
     Nay, more, they fence! who has not marked their oil,
     Their purple rigs, for this preposterous toil! 
     A woman stops at nothing; when she wears
     Rich emeralds round her neck, and in her ears
     Pearls of enormous size,—­these justify
     Her faults, and make all lawful in her eye. 
     More shame to Rome! in every street are found
     The essenced Lypanti, with roses crowned;
     The gay Miletan and the Tarentine,
     Lewd, petulant, and reeling ripe with wine!”

In the sixth satire of Juvenal is found the most severe delineation of woman that ever mortal penned.  Doubtless he is libellous and extravagant, for only infamous women can stoop to such arts and degradations as would seem to have been common in his time.  But with all his probable exaggeration, we are forced to feel that but few women, even in the highest class, except those converted to Christianity, showed the virtues of a Lucretia, a Volumnia, a Cornelia, or an Octavia.  The lofty virtues of a Perpetua, a Felicitas, an Agnes, a Paula, a Blessilla, a Fabiola, would have adorned any civilization; but the great mass were, what they were in Greece even in the days of Pericles, what they have ever been under the influence of Paganism, what they ever will be without Christianity to guide them,—­victims or slaves of man, revenging themselves by squandering his wealth, stealing his secrets, betraying his interests, and deserting his home.