a salon.  As soon as you sit down to table she begins to quote Homer and Virgil and to compare their respective merits.  She cultivates bright conversation in both Greek and Latin, and her tongue goes loudly and incessantly like a bell or gong.  Her poor husband is never permitted to indulge in an expression which is not strictly grammatical.  Worse still, she probably even writes little poems of her own.  She may keep a tame tutor in philosophy, but she makes no scruple about interrupting his lesson on morals while she writes a little billet-doux.  Pomponia is an ambitious woman, whose mania is to interfere in elections by bringing to bear upon the senators what has been called in recent times the “duchesses’” influence.  If her husband becomes governor of a province, she will endeavour to be the power behind the throne, and her meddling will in any case prove harmful to the strict administration of justice.

The remedy in such cases was divorce.  In the lower orders of society a mild personal castigation was quite legal and probably not uncommon; but then in these lower orders divorce was by no means so convenient.  Among the upper classes its frequency made it scarcely a matter of remark.  Nothing like it has been seen until modern America.  There was no need of an appeal to the courts or of a decree nisi; there was not even need of a specific plea, although naturally one would be offered in most cases.  The husband or wife (or the wife’s father, if she had one), might send a formal and witnessed notice declaring the marriage dissolved, or, as it was called, “breaking the marriage lines.”  The man had only to take this step and say with due deliberation “Take your own property”—­or, as the satirist puts it, “pack up your traps”—­“give up the keys, and begone.”  The woman on her side need only give similar notice and “take her departure.”  The only check lay in family considerations, in public opinion, which was extremely lenient, in financial convenience, or in the possibility of particularly wanton conduct being so disapproved in high quarters that a senator or a knight might perhaps find his name missing from the list of his order at the next revision.

It has appeared necessary to give this darker side of the social picture, for, though assuredly not so lurid as might be gathered from the moralists, it was dark enough.  For obvious reasons it is desirable not to elaborate.  It is perhaps more profitable, as well as refreshing, to consider the brighter side.  That there were noble women and good wives, and that the froth and scum and dregs of idle town-life did not make up the existence of the contemporary Roman world, may be seen from passages like the following, which are either quoted or condensed from a letter of Pliny concerning a lady named Arria.  The events belong to the reign of Nero’s predecessor Claudius.  Pliny writes:  “Her husband, Caecina Paetus, was ill; so also was her son; and it was expected