All this is our invention! and Satire is borrowing the tragic buskin, forsooth; and transgressing the limits prescribed by those who trod the path before us, we are wildly declaiming in the deep-mouthed tones of Sophocles[323] a strain of awful grandeur, unknown to the Rutulian hills and Latin sky. Would that it were but fable! But Pontia[324] with loud voice exclaims, "I did the deed. I avow it! and prepared for my own children the aconite, which bears palpable evidence against me. Still[325] the act was mine!" "What, cruelest of vipers! didst thou kill two at one meal! Two, didst thou slay?" "Ay, seven, had there haply been seven!" Then let us believe to be true all that tragedians say of the fierce Colchian or of Progne. I attempt not to gainsay it. Yet they perpetrated atrocities that were monstrous even in their days--but not for the sake of money. Less amazement is excited even by the greatest enormities, whenever rage incites this sex to crime, and with fury burning up their very liver, they are carried away headlong; like rocks torn away from cliffs, from which the mountain-height is reft away, and the side recedes from the impending mass. I can not endure the woman that makes her calculations, and in cold blood perpetrates a heinous crime. They sit and see Alcestis[326] on the stage encountering death for her husband, and were a similar exchange allowed to them, would gladly purchase a lapdog's life by the sacrifice of their husband's! You will meet any morning with Danaides and Eriphylæ in plenty; not a street but will possess its Clytæmnestra. This is the only difference, that that famed daughter of Tyndarus grasped in both hands a bungling, senseless axe.[327] But now the business is dispatched with the insinuating venom of a toad. But yet with the steel too; if her Atrides has been cautious enough to fortify himself with the Pontic antidotes of the thrice-conquered[328] king. FOOTNOTES: [237] _Cynthia_ is Propertius' mistress; the other is Lesbia, the mistress of Catullus. V. Catull., Carm. iii. "Lugete O Veneres," etc. [238] _Conventum._ Three law terms. Conventum, "the first overture." Pactum, "the contract." Sponsalia, "the betrothing." Hence virgins were said to be speratæ; pactæ; sponsæ. [239] _Lex Julia_, against adultery, recently revived by Domitian. [240] _Jubis._ Mullets being a bearded fish. Plin., ix., 17. [241] _Testudineo._ Cf. xi., 94. The allusion is to the story told by Pliny, vii., 12, of the consuls Lentulus and Metellus, who were observed by all present to be wonderfully like two gladiators then exhibiting before them. Cf. Val. Max., ix., 14. [242] _Lagi._ Alexandria, the royal city of Ptolemy, son of Lagos, and his successors. [243] _Imperio Sexûs._ Cf. xv., 138, Naturæ imperio.