The citizens were instruments in the hands of the deities to avenge wrongs, to enforce right, and to glorify the city of their birth. The great dramatic bard, in "Coriolanus," makes Volumnia, the mother of Marcius Coriolanus, say: "Hear me profess sincerely. Had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for his country than one voluptously surfeit out of action." She but spoke the spirit of her time; and her language is but the language of Roman matrons of her age. Thus grew and flourished, as by magic forces and divine ordination, the city of Romulus, the world's hope and dread, at once the saviour and destroyer of civilization, whose porous social system absorbed and quickly dissolved the mysteries of Egypt, the classic beauties of Greece, and the wealth of the "exhaustless East." But the great distinguishing trait in the Roman woman, in the days of the republic and under the earlier kings, was her attention to household employments. This the Roman expected of his wife--it was enjoined upon her by the marriage rite. Thus, indeed, it was among most of the more enlightened nations of antiquity. The noble born of both sexes did not disdain to toil in their appropriate spheres; the prince of royal blood was proud of holding the plough and of acting the husbandman, and daughters of princes were not ashamed to ply the needle or tend the distaff. "So it was of old That woman's hand, amid the elements Of patient industry and household good, Reproachless wrought, twining the slender thread From the light distaff; or, in the skilful loom, Weaving rich tissues, or, with glowing tints Of rich embroidery, pleased to decorate The mantle of her lord. And it was well; For in such sheltered and congenial sphere Content with duty dwells." The great veneration for home, and love for its pursuits and associations, grew weaker and weaker as the state exchanged a popular government for the reign of military dictators and kings. In the Augustan age, though instances of female virtue, nobility, and culture are not few, we find from the scanty records of female history of those times extant, which, indeed, are merely incidental, that woman is less often the ideal of self-sacrificing worth and of retiring modesty, less noted for her attachment to her family, her home, and her domestic pursuits, less careful in the training of her children, than formerly. In earlier times, no Roman matron coveted the infamous character of a masculine conspirator; no Roman woman left her quiet hearth disgracefully to insult the remains of a murdered citizen; no Roman woman had instigated a civil war, or proscribed her victims for assassination.