"Ladies, when not poets, were critics, and as such, deemed by Juvenal worse than tipplers. Before they had been five minutes at table, they began to discourse æsthetically on Homer and Virgil, monopolizing the conversation, with a hammer and tong-like effect. They paraded their snacks of knowledge, made quotations from forgotten authors; grammar in hand, corrected their friends' slips. A woman, says Juvenal, may have the encyclopædia by heart and yet know nothing. Martial, too, mocks the purist woman, and yearns, as his life-wish, for a not too learned wife."[181] "In the good old days of the legitimate drama under Plautus, Terence, Accius, and Pacuvius, women never appeared upon the stage. Feminine rôles were taken by men in female dress. But, with the appearance of the mime and the farce in the first century before our era, women began to take part in theatrical and musical performances. Their larger participation in such matters under the Empire is proved by the discovery of the burying place of a guild of women mimes, just outside of Rome, along the highways leading from the city. Women took a very active part in public musical performances, if we may draw an inference from the number of epitaphs which we find in honor of women who had been solo singers and flute players."[182] Women entered, also, into the commoner affairs of public life, as costumers, seamstresses, washerwomen, weavers, fishmongers, barmaids, and the like. "If we make a general survey of the facts which have been noted above, it is clear that Roman women took an active part in the literary and religious life of the time, and in many of the cults held priesthoods or officially recognized positions from very early times. Their interest in literature, however, was not serious, and they have produced very little of permanent value. In the practice of law they never succeeded in getting a sure foothold. Women of the lower classes entered freely into the medical profession and the trades, but so far as medicine is concerned women confined their practice to members of their own sex. The principal branches of business which they took up were those connected with the manufacture of wearing apparel. The pursuits of the shopkeeper and the artisan were naturally left to the lower classes, but women of standing in society engaged in industries organized on a large scale, as we can see clearly enough in the case of the brick business."[183] In the early days of Rome, while the people were struggling to maintain themselves and the nation, the virtue of the women stood out strong. But as the days of hardships passed and comfort and ease and luxury came in with the conquests, laxity of morals arose till under the empire, if the writers of the times may be believed, licentiousness and not virtue was the dominant trait of the women as well as the men. Yet there were many good women, as is shown in the quotations a few pages back.