ities the careful discharge of the duties
of wife and mother,"[231]--such ladies must have been rare, and in
Cicero's time hardly to be found. More and more the notion gained
ground that a clever woman who wished to make a figure in society, to
be the centre of her own _monde_, could not well realise her ambition
simply as a married woman. She would probably marry, play fast and
loose with the married state, neglect her children if she had any, and
after one or two divorces, die or disappear. So powerfully did this
idea of the incompatibility of culture and wifehood gain possession
of the Roman mind in the last century B.C., that Augustus found his
struggle with it the most difficult task he had to face; in vain he
exiled Ovid for publishing a work in which married women are most
frankly and explicitly left out of account, while all that is
attractive in the other sex to a man of taste and education is assumed
to be found only among those who have, so far at least, eschewed the
duties and burdens of married life. The culta puella and the cultus
puer of Ovid's fascinating yet repulsive poem[232] are the products of
a society which looks on pleasure, not reason or duty, as the main
end of life,--not indeed pleasure simply of the grosser type, but the
gratification of one's own wish for enjoyment and excitement, without
a thought of the misery all around, or any sense of the self-respect
that comes of active well-doing.

The most notable example of a woman of _cultus_ in Cicero's day was
the famous Clodia, the Lesbia (as we may now almost assume) who
fascinated Catullus and then threw him over. She had been married to a
man of family and high station, Metellus Celer, who had died, strange
to say, without divorcing her. She must have been a woman of great
beauty and charm, for she seems to have attracted round her a little
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 crue