It was with Agrippina the Second as it had been with Livia, every political aspiration was concentrated upon one object--the elevation of her own son to the imperial rule, and all the activities emanating from her energetic, resourceful nature were employed in hewing a path for Nero's advancement. Woe befell the persons who stood in that path or seemed likely at any time to have it in their power and inclination to impede that advancement. They were ruthlessly cut down in that unrelenting manner of which only an ambitious woman is capable. There were no public works, nothing broad-minded, no thought of the common good: the sole motif of the Roman woman in politics was personal preferment. _VIII_ THE ROMAN WOMAN IN LITERATURE There was in ancient Rome a street called Argiletus, which we learn from Martial was occupied principally by booksellers. Here those works which are cherished not alone for their antiquity, and some others possibly as good but which in the misfortunes of many centuries have disappeared, were bought fresh from their authors' hands and sold to the eager lovers of literature. Here, when a new piece by Virgil or Horace was announced, the reading public would flock, urged by the most commendable form of curiosity known to the cultured human mind. Here hundreds of scribes were employed in the multiplication of copies of those classics over which in later days have labored scores of generations of youthful students, with deep regret that those classics were not written in their own mother tongue. Those shops, or _taberna libraria_, were the lounging places of the famous men who created this literature and of those who did good service to posterity by constituting themselves the patrons of the geniuses of their age, who otherwise would have been as indigent and as barren as are the neglected authors of our own times. The men and women who received an ancient author in the name of a poet are entitled to receive a poet's reward. In the shops of Secundus and the Sosii brothers, the literati of Rome and their admirers gathered to indulge in that most fascinating of all conversational intercourse: book talk. While it is probable that the presence of women was not so marked and frequent in these haunts of the cultured fraternity as it is in the book shops and publishing houses of modern times, this does not signify that the ladies of Rome did not take a deep and influential interest in literature. Did not Augustus dedicate a public library in the name of his sister Octavia? There was in the Roman world a reading public so great as to appear to us nothing less than marvellous in view of the lack of the printing press; but slaves who could be set to copying were plentiful, and if a lady wished a copy of the poems of Propertius or Catullus she could procure it for a small sum in the street Argiletus, or she could borrow it from a friend and have it transcribed at home.