Terentia and Pomponia and their kind seem to have had nothing in the way of “higher education,” nor do their husbands seem to have expected from them any desire to share in their own intellectual interests.  Not once does Cicero allude to any pleasant social intercourse in which his wife took part; and, to say the truth, he would probably have avoided marriage with a woman of taste and knowledge.  There were such women, as we shall see, probably many of them; ever since the incoming of wealth and of Greek education, of theatres and amusements and all the pleasant out-of-door life of the city, what was now coming to be called cultus had occupied the minds and affected the habits of Roman ladies as well as men.  Unfortunately it was seldom that it was found compatible with the old Roman ideal of the materfamilias and her duties.  The invasion of new manners was too sudden, as was the corresponding invasion of wealth; such a lady as Cornelia, the famous mother of the Gracchi, “who knew what education really meant, who had learned men about her and could write well herself, and yet could combine with these qualities the careful discharge of the duties of wife and mother,"[231]—­such ladies must have been rare, and in Cicero’s time hardly to be found.  More and more the notion gained ground that a clever woman who wished to make a figure in society, to be the centre of her own monde, could not well realise her ambition simply as a married woman.  She would probably marry, play fast and loose with the married state, neglect her children if she had any, and after one or two divorces, die or disappear.  So powerfully did this idea of the incompatibility of culture and wifehood gain possession of the Roman mind in the last century B.C., that Augustus found his struggle with it the most difficult task he had to face; in vain he exiled Ovid for publishing a work in which married women are most frankly and explicitly left out of account, while all that is attractive in the other sex to a man of taste and education is assumed to be found only among those who have, so far at least, eschewed the duties and burdens of married life.  The culta puella and the cultus puer of Ovid’s fascinating yet repulsive poem[232] are the products of a society which looks on pleasure, not reason or duty, as the main end of life,—­not indeed pleasure simply of the grosser type, but the gratification of one’s own wish for enjoyment and excitement, without a thought of the misery all around, or any sense of the self-respect that comes of active well-doing.

The most notable example of a woman of cultus in Cicero’s day was the famous Clodia, the Lesbia (as we may now almost assume) who fascinated Catullus and then threw him over.  She had been married to a man of family and high station, Metellus Celer, who had died, strange to say, without divorcing her.  She must have been a woman of great beauty and charm, for she seems to have attracted round her a little