at assemblies, and at banquets, the bladder becomes distended, and from the consequent loss of its contractile power, it no longer evacuates the urine.” (On the Causes and Symptoms of Acute Diseases, Book II, Chapter X.)

Apuleius, writing in the second century, says:  “Most women, in order to exhibit their native gracefulness and allurements, divest themselves of all their garments, and long to show their naked beauty, being conscious that they shall please more by the rosy redness of their skin than by the golden splendor of their robes.” (Thomas Taylor’s translation of Metamorphosis, p. 28.)

Christianity seems to have profoundly affected habits of thought and feeling by uniting together the merely natural emotion of sexual reserve with, on the one hand, the masculine virtue of modesty—­modestia—­and, on the other, the prescription of sexual abstinence.  Tertullian admirably illustrates this confusion, and his treatises De Pudicitia and De Cultu Feminarum are instructive from the present point of view.  In the latter he remarks (Book II, Chapter I):  “Salvation—­and not of women only, but likewise of men—­consists in the exhibition, principally, of modesty.  Since we are all the temple of God, modesty is the sacristan and priestess of that temple, who is to suffer nothing unclean or profane to enter it, for fear that the God who inhabits it should be offended....  Most women, either from simple ignorance or from dissimulation, have the hardihood so to walk as if modesty consisted only in the integrity of the flesh, and in turning away from fornication, and there were no need for anything else,—­in dress and ornament, the studied graces of form,—­wearing in their gait the self-same appearance as the women of the nations from whom the sense of true modesty is absent.”

The earliest Christian ideal of modesty, not long maintained, is well shown in an epistle which, there is some reason to suppose, was written by Clement of Rome.  “And if we see it to be requisite to stand and pray for the sake of the woman, and to speak words of exhortation and edification, we call the brethren and all the holy sisters and maidens, likewise all the other women who are there, with all modesty and becoming behavior, to come and feast on the truth.  And those among us who are skilled in speaking, speak to them, and exhort them in those words which God has given us.  And then we pray, and salute one another, the men the men.  But the women and the maidens will wrap their hands in their garments; we also, with circumspection and with all purity, our eyes looking upward, shall wrap our right hand in our garments; and then they will come and give us the salutation on our right hand, wrapped in our garments.  Then we go where God permits us.” (Two Epistles Concerning Virginity; Second Epistle, Chapter III, vol. xiv.  Ante-Nicene Christian Library, p. 384.)