Anything assailed by countless desires is insecure. And the young and even more mature matrons, descendants of distinguished figures in the tumultuous sequence of Roman history, were exposed to every kind of inducement to laxity, every urgent temptation, domestically, publicly, and politically. There was a vogue of indiscriminate flirtation, highly skilled, ingeniously practiced, that led into violent passion and into adultery, into incest and multiple perversions. Lust became the primary satisfaction, and its consummation was the most common, the most clamant factor in the social frame. Even the earlier days of the Roman Republic were, as the poet Horace declares—and he was the Augustan Poet Laureate—‘rich in sin.’ Propertius too confirms this view, and goes one step further. The sea, he suggests, will be dried up and the stars torn from heaven before women reform their immoral ways. The entire nation, rich and prosperous, masters of the universe, overwhelmed and sated with exotic luxuries, attended, for their every whim, by hordes of slaves, had lost all human modesty, all human virtues. Yet all was not entirely lost, for voices cried out, however feebly and helplessly, in the midst of their successions of wantonness and orgies. The poet Ovid wryly says: Only those women are chaste who are unsolicited, and a man who is enraged at his wife’s amours is merely a boor. Seneca says again, in respect of married women: A woman who is content to have two lovers only is a paragon. For adultery and divorce were the usual recreations of many Roman matrons in Imperial times. Marriage itself was often a mere formality, and it implied no loyalties, no honor. Some women, declares Seneca, counted the years not by the consuls, but by the number of husbands they had. And the Church Father, Tertullian, added later, in the same vein: Women marry, only to divorce. Ovid himself, the archpoet of love, was married three times. Caesar had four wives in succession. Mark Antony also had four. Sulla the statesman and Pompey each had five wives. Pliny the Younger had three wives. Martial the epigrammatist mentions a certain Phileros who had seven wives. Women were no better, no less restless. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter, had three husbands. The Emperor Nero was the third husband of Poppaea, and the fifth of Messalina. The poet Martial refers to a woman who had eight husbands, and to another who was suspected of murdering her seven husbands, one after the other. Every passion, every illicit amour, was a provocation to the Roman women. They had intrigues with their slaves, with actors and pantomimists, with jockeys, charioteers, gladiators, and flute-players.