coterie of clever young men and poets, to whom she could lend money or accord praise as suited the moment.  Whether Cicero himself had once come within reach of her attractions, and perhaps suffered by them, is an open question, and depends chiefly on statements of Plutarch which may (as has been said above) have no better foundation than the gossip of society.  But we know how two typical young men of the time, Caelius and Catullus, flew into the candle and were singed; we know how fiercely she turned on Caelius, exposing herself and him without a moment’s hesitation in a public court; and we know how cruelly she treated the poet, who hated her for it even while he still loved her:[233]

  Odi et amo.  Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris;
  Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

CATULL. 85.

She was, as M. Boissier has well said,[234] the exact counterpart of her still more famous brother:  “Elle apportait dans sa conduite privee, dans ses engagements d’affection, les memes emportements et les memes ardeurs que son frere dans la vie publique.  Prompte a tous les exces et ne rougissant pas de les avouer, aimant et haissant avec fureur, incapable de se gouverner et detestant toute contrainte, elle ne dementait pas cette grande et fiere famille dont elle descendait.”  All this is true; we need not go beyond it and believe the worst that has been said of her.

We have just a glimpse of another lady of cultus, but only a glimpse.  This was Sempronia, the wife of an honest man and the mother of another;[235] but according to Sallust, who introduces her to us as a principal in the conspiracy of Catiline, she was one of those who found steady married life incompatible with literary and artistic tastes.  “She could play and dance more elegantly than an honest woman should ... she played fast and loose with her money, and equally so with her good fame."[236] She had no scruples, he says, in denying a debt, or in helping in a murder:  yet she had plenty of esprit, could write verses and talk brilliantly, and she knew too how to assume an air of modesty on occasion.  Sallust loved to colour his portraits highly, and in painting this woman he saw no doubt a chance of literary effect; but that she was really in the conspiracy we cannot doubt, and that she had private ends to gain by it is also probable.  She seems to be the first of a series of ladies who during the next century and later were to be a power in politics, and most of whom were at least capable of crime, public and private.  There is indeed one instance a few years earlier of a woman exercising an almost supreme influence in the State, and a woman too of the worst kind.  Plutarch tells us in the most explicit way that when Lucullus in 75 B.C. was trying to secure for himself the command against Mithridates, he found himself compelled to apply to a woman named Praecia, whose social gifts and good nature gave her immense influence, which she used with the pertinacity peculiar