But though she smiled but rarely, the beauty of Pomponia was exquisite from her look of serenity and contentment. She was unlike the other ladies of Roman society. She never tinged her face with walnut juice, or painted it with rouge and cerussa, or reared her tresses into an elaborate edifice of curls, or sprinkled them with gold dust, or breathed of Assyrian odours. Her life and her dress were exquisitely simple. She wore no ornaments, or few. She rarely appeared at any banquet, and then only with her husband at the houses of the graver and more virtuous senators. Vice was involuntarily abashed at her presence. The talk which Roman matrons sometimes did not blush to hear was felt to be impossible where Pomponia was present, nor would any one have dreamed of introducing loose gymnasts or Gaditanian dancers as the amusement of any guests of whom she was one. Hence she was more and more neglected by the jewelled dandies and divorced ladies, who fluttered amid the follies of a heartless aristocracy, and gradually the gossiping pleasure-hunters of Rome came to hate her because her whole life was a rebuke of the degradation of a corrupt society. Hatred soon took the form of whispered accusations. The suspicion was first broached by Calvia Crispinilla, a lady whose notoriously evil character elevated her high in the confidence of Nero, and who, in spite of her rank, was afterwards proud of the infamy of being appointed keeper of the wardrobe of his favourite Sporus. Talking one day to Ælia Petina, a divorced wife of Claudius and mother of his daughter Antonia, she expressed her dislike of Pomponia, and said, ‘It is impossible that any worshipper of our gods should live a life so austere as Pomponia’s. Hark, in your ears, Petina. She must be’--and sinking her voice to a tragic whisper she said--‘she must be a secret Christian.’ ‘Well,’ said Petina, ‘what does it matter? Nero himself worships the Syrian goddess, and they say that the lovely Poppæa Sabina, the wife of Otho, is a Jewess.’ ‘A Jewess! oh, that is comparatively respectable,’ said Crispinilla. ‘Why, Berenice, the charming sister--ahem! the very deeply attached sister--of Agrippa, you know, is a Jewess; and what diamonds that woman has! But a Christian! Why, the very word has a taint of vulgarity about it, and leaves a bad flavour in the mouth! None but unspeakable slaves and cobblers and Phrygian runaways belong to those worshippers of the god Onokoites and the head of an ass.’[18]