There are authors who think that the celebrated riddle of Coelius in Quintilian: _Clytaemnestram quadrantariam, in triclinio coam, in cubiculo nolam_ (_Instit. Orat._, VIII., 6 p. 747), refers to a woman of the name of Nola, she being a _fellatrix_ after the fashion of the Nolans. But I prefer the interpretation of Alciatus; he believes that the woman in question was Clodia, the notorious sister of Clodius, and wife of Metellus, called _Coa_, because she liked coitus on the open triclinium, and _Nola_ because she refused the same in bed. Spalding evinces surprise at the want of exactitude, which the word _quadrantaria_ would have in that case. To me that appears like looking for knots in a rush. Why should we not suppose Clodia, disgusted, like Messalina, by the facility of her adulteries, to have been drawn into extraordinary excesses[65] to such a point that she would no longer have commerce with men in the dark, but only in the glare of lighted torches, as Martial confesses in speaking of himself (XI., 104): “You love the game in the dark, I like it by lamp-light; my delight is to make my entry with light to see by,”—and in the presence of living witness, that she might be seen, if not actually on her back, at any rate going away for it or just coming back afterwards. Do you think that indecency could not possibly go so far? What did Augustus do, whom Marc Anthony, according to Suetonius, “reproached for having at a festival taken the wife of a Consular from the triclinium to a bedroom, in the presence of her husband, and afterwards conducted her back to the table with her face all on fire and her hair in disorder?” (_Augustus_, ch. 69). And Caligula, according to the same Suetonius, “when a guest at a wedding-feast said to Piso, who was sitting close by him: “Do not push up so close to my wife!” and immediately after made her rise from the table and took her away with him” (_Calig._, ch. 25). The same author, (_Calig._, ch. 36), speaking of the most illustrious Roman ladies, tells us that Caligula “invited them to dinner with their husbands, passing them in review before him, he examined them with the minute attention of a slave dealer, lifting their heads up if any of them bowed them down with shame. As often as he felt inclined, he left the triclinium and took the chosen fair one aside with him; then after returning to the room with the traces of his doing still upon him, he would praise or criticize these ladies openly, speaking of the beauties or blemishes of their bodies, and even how often he had repeated the enjoyment.” Horace again speaks of an adulterous woman (_Odes_, III., vi, 25-32):