Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,(489) as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.(490) The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.(491) Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.(492) The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.(493) In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as “mothers of the camp,” or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations.(494) They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.(495) And on one of these tablets we read of a _Curia mulierum_ at Lanuvium.(496) We are reminded of the “chapter of matrons” who visited Agrippina with their censure,(497) and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.(498) On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.(499) Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.