rights violated, her sympathy despised, her aspirations scorned.
And here I do not allude to great and infamous examples that history has
handed down in the sober pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, or that
unblushing depravity which stands out in the bitter satires of those
times; I speak not of the adultery, the poisoning, the infanticide, the
debauchery, the cruelty of which history accuses the Messalinas and
Agrippinas of imperial Rome; I allude not to the orgies of the Palatine
Hill, or the abominations which are inferred from the paintings of
Pompeii,--I mean the general frivolity and extravagance and
demoralization of the women of the Roman empire. Marriage was considered
inexpedient unless large dowries were brought to the husband. Numerous
were the efforts of Emperors to promote honorable marriages, but the
relation was shunned. Courtesans usurped the privileges of wives, and
with unblushing effrontery. A man was derided who contemplated
matrimony, for there was but little confidence in female virtue or
capacity, and woman lost all her fascination when age had destroyed her
beauty; even her very virtues were distasteful to her self-indulgent
husband. When, as sometimes happened, the wife gained the ascendency by
her charms, she was tyrannical; her relatives incited her to despoil her
husband; she lived amid incessant broils; she had no care for the
future, and exceeded man in prodigality. "The government of her house is
no more merciful," says Juvenal, "than the court of a Sicilian tyrant."
In order to render herself attractive, she exhausted all the arts of
cosmetics and elaborate hair-dressing; she delighted in magical
incantations and love-potions. In the bitter satire of Juvenal we get an
impression most melancholy and loathsome:--

"'T were long to tell what philters they provide,
What drugs to set a son-in-law aside,--
Women, in judgment weak, in feeling strong,
By every gust of passion borne along.
To a fond spouse a wife no mercy shows;
Though warmed with equal fires, she mocks his woes,
And triumphs in his spoils; her wayward will
Defeats his bliss and turns his good to ill.
Women support the bar; they love the law,
And raise litigious questions for a straw.
Nay, more, they fence! who has not marked their oil,
Their purple rigs, for this preposterous toil!
A woman stops at nothing; when she wears
Rich emeralds round her neck, and in h