The fourth book of poems published under his name was probably not written by Tibullus. Eleven of these poems relate to the love of Sulpicia, a Roman lady of high station, and the daughter of Valeria, the sister of Messala. She had fallen in love with a youth named Cerinthus, and these poems tell the story. It is thought by many that Sulpicia was the author of them and that, in fact, some of them are nothing other than her own letters to her lover. These "letters" are very short; but, if this supposition is correct, they are the only love poems by a Roman woman that have survived. Thus she writes to Cerinthus from her couch, to which she is confined by a racking fever: "On my account, to grief a ceaseless prey, Dost thou a sympathetic anguish prove? I would not wish to live another day, If my recovery did not charm my love; For what were life, and health, and bloom to me, Wore they displeasing, beauteous youth! to thee?" There is another Roman woman who may be counted on the list of authors, and whose writings, had they only been preserved, would have proved of exceeding interest. This was the brilliant and accomplished Agrippina the Younger; a woman who was as finished a scholar as she was an experienced and successful politician. She wrote her _Memoirs_, not so much from a desire to make a contribution to history as to use them to blacken the character of the enemies of her house. She dipped her pen in the venom of hate and envy, and she found her material in the scandalous stories which floated about Rome, growing daily more exaggerated from an origin which no one knew. From this work of Agrippina, Suetonius and Tacitus doubtless drew much of the information which in their more serious productions blackens the character of Tiberius. It is also likely that, if it had not been for the facile and unrestrained pen of her successor, Messalina would have been known to us as a far less disreputable woman than she is made to appear.