of “good counsellor good manager, and good worker in wool.”  She walks or is carried abroad at her pleasure, attends the public games in the Circus, and goes with her husband to dinner-parties, where she reclines at the meal just as he does.  When her tutelage is past she can take actions in the law-courts, or appear as witness or surety.  Her property is at her own disposal, and she instructs her own agent or attorney.  It is only necessary that she should guard the honour of her husband.  So long as he trusts her he will not interfere.  It is only a very tyrannical spouse who will insist that her litter or sedan-chair shall have the curtains drawn when in the streets.  We will assume that Marcia is a lady of the true Roman self-respect and dignity, and that Silius and she live a life of reasonable harmony.

But though there were many such Marcias, there were other women of a very different character.  There is, for instance, Flavia, who has a perfect frenzy for “manly” sports, and practises all manner of athletic exercises, wrestling and fencing like any man, and perhaps becoming infatuated and practically running away with some brawny but hideous gladiator.  She also indulges frankly in mixed bathing.  There is Domitia, who is too fond Of promenading in the colonnades and temples, where a cavaliere servente, ostensibly her business man—­though he does not look like it—­may regularly be seen carrying her parasol.  When at home, she neglects her attire and plasters her face with dough in order to smooth out the wrinkles, so that she may give to anybody but her own family the benefit of her beauty.  There is the ruinously extravagant Pollia, whose passion for jewels and fine clothes runs her deeply into debt, for which, fortunately, her husband is not responsible.  There is Canidia, who is shrewdly suspected of having poisoned more than one husband and who has either divorced or been divorced by so many that she has had eight of them in five years, and dates events by them instead of in the regular way by the consulships:  “Let me see.  That was in the year in which I was married to So-and-So.”  There is Asinia, whose selfishness is so great, and her affection so frivolous, that she will weep over a sparrow and “let her husband die to save her lap-dog’s life.”  All these women are most likely childless, and many a noble Roman house threatens to become extinct.

There are others, again, whose foibles are more innocent.  Baebia, for example, is merely a victim to superstition.  She is always consulting the astrologers, the witches, and the dream-readers; she is devoted to the mystic worship of the Egyptian Isis, with its secret rites of purification, or she is a proselyte to the pestilent notions of the Jews.  She is too much under the influence of some squalid Oriental who carries his pedlar’s basket, or whose business is to buy broken glass for sulphur matches Meanwhile Corellia is a blue-stocking, as bad as a precieuse with