In view of the impending handicaps Clodia was especially anxious that a dinner she was to give immediately on her return from Baiae in mid-October should be a conspicuous success.  During her husband’s consulship two years ago she had won great repute for inducing men of all parties, officials, artists and writers, to meet in her house.  Last year, owing to Metellus’s sickness and death, she had not done anything on a large scale.  This autumn she had come back determined to reassume her position.  She was unaffected by the old-fashioned prejudice against widows entertaining and she had nothing to fear from the social skill of this year’s consuls.

Her invitations had been hurried out, and now in her private sitting room, known as the Venus Room from its choicest ornament, a life-sized statue of Venus the Plunderer, she was looking over the answers which had been sorted for her by her secretary.  The Greek, waiting for further orders, looked at her with admiring, if disillusioned, eyes.  Large and robust, her magnificent figure could display no ungraceful lines as she sat on the low carved chair in front of a curtain of golden Chinese silk.  Her dress was of a strange sea-green and emeralds shone in her ears and her heavy, black hair.  An orange-coloured cat with gleaming, yellow eyes curved its tail across her feet.  Above her right shoulder hung a silver cage containing a little bird which chirped and twittered in silly ignorance of its mistress’s mood.  Anger disfigured her beautiful mouth and eyes.  The list of regrets stretched out to sinister length and included such pillars of society as Brutus and Sempronia, Bibulus and Portia.  A cynical smile relieved Clodia’s sullen lips.  Did these braggarts imagine her blind to the fact that if lively Sempronia and stupid Bibulus could conveniently die, Brutus and Portia, who were wiping her off their visiting lists because her feet had strayed beyond the marriage paddock, would make short work of their mourning?

Aurelia’s declination she had expected.  Her inordinate pride in being Caesar’s mother had not modified her arrogant, old-time severity toward the freedom of modern life.  But that Calpurnia should plead her husband’s absence as an excuse was ominous.  Everyone knew that he dictated her social relations.  Terentia had been implacable since that amusing winter when Clodia had spread a net for Cicero.  For her own sex Clodia had the hawk’s contempt for sparrows, but if Caesar as well as Cicero were to withdraw from her arena, she might as well prepare herself for the inverted thumbs of Rome.

On her list of acceptances, outside of her own sisters, who had won intellectual freedom in the divorce courts, she found the names of only two women—­virtuous Hortensia, who was proud of her emancipated ideas, and Marcia, who was enjoying her husband’s Cyprian business as much as the rest of the world.  Men, on the other hand, bachelors and divorces, abounded.  Catullus, luckily, was still in Verona, nursing his