ia, daughter of Augustus. Because of
her eyes, more exactly because of her father's, Ovid was banished among
barbarian brutes. It was rather a frightful penalty for participating in
the indiscretions of a woman who had always been the reverse of discreet.
Corinna, as described by Ovid, was a monster of perversity. Julia, as
described by Tacitus, yielded to her nothing in that respect.

The epoch itself was strange, curiously fecund in curious things that
became more curious still. Rome then, thoroughly Hellenized, had become
very fair. There were green terraces and porphyry porticoes that leaned to
a river on which red galleys passed, there were bronze doors and garden
roofs, glancing villas and temples more brilliant still. There were
spacious streets, a Forum curtained with silk, the glint and evocations of
triumphal war. There were theatres in which a multitude could jeer at an
emperor, and arenas in which an emperor could watch a multitude die. On
the stage, there were tragedies, pantomime, farce. There were races in the
circus and in the sacred groves, girls with the Orient in their eyes and
slim waists that swayed to the crotals. Into the arenas patricians
descended, in the amphitheatre were criminals from Gaul, in the Forum,
philosophers from Greece. For Rome's entertainment the mountains sent
lions; the deserts giraffes; there were boas from the jungles, bulls from
the plains, hippopotami from the rushes of the Nile, and, above them,
beasts greater than they--the Caesars.

There had been the first, memory of whose grandiose figure lingered still.
Rome recalled the unforgettable, and recalled, too, his face which
incessant debauches had blanched. After him had come Augustus, a pigmy by
comparison, yet otherwise more depraved. He gone, there was the spectacle
of Tiberius devising infamies so monstrous that to describe them new words
were coined. That being insufficient, there followed Caligula, without
whom Nero, Claud, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus could
never have been. It was he who gave them both inspiration and incentive.
It was he who built the Cloacus Maximus in which all Rome rolled.

Augustus had done a little digging for it himself, but hypocritically as
he did everything, devising ethical laws as a cloak for turpitudes of his
own. Mecaenas, his minister and lackey, divorced and remarried twenty
times. Augustus repudiated his own marriages, those of his kin as well.
Suetonius said of C