desperation drove her to attempt to outdo her foreign rivals; her native modesty became a thing of the past, her Roman initiative, unadorned by sophistication, was often but too successful in outdoing the Greek and Syrian wantons, but without the appearance of refinement which they always contrived to give to every caress of passion or avarice. They wooed fortune with an abandon that soon made them the objects of contempt in the eyes of their lords and masters. “She is chaste whom no man has solicited,” said Ovid (Amor. i, 8, line 43). Martial, writing about ninety years later says: “Sophronius Rufus, long have I been searching the city through to find if there is ever a maid to say ‘No’; there is not one.” (Ep. iv, 71.) In point of time, a century separates Ovid and Martial; from a moral standpoint, they are as far apart as the poles. The revenge, then, taken by Asia, gives a startling insight into the real meaning of Kipling’s poem, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” In Livy (xxxiv, 4) we read: (Cato is speaking), “All these changes, as day by day the fortune of the state is higher and more prosperous and her empire grows greater, and our conquests extend over Greece and Asia, lands replete with every allurement of the senses, and we appropriate treasures that may well be called royal,--all this I dread the more from my fear that such high fortune may rather master us, than we master it.” Within twelve years of the time when this speech was delivered, we read in the same author (xxxix, 6), “for the beginnings of foreign luxury were brought into the city by the Asiatic army”; and Juvenal (Sat. iii, 6), “Quirites, I cannot bear to see Rome a Greek city, yet how small a fraction of the whole corruption is found in these dregs of Achaea? Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber and brought along with it the Syrian tongue and manners and cross-stringed harp and harper and exotic timbrels and girls bidden stand for hire at the circus.” Still, from the facts which have come down to us, we cannot arrive at any definite date at which houses of ill fame and women of the town came into vogue at Rome. That they had long been under police regulation, and compelled to register with the aedile, is evident from a passage in Tacitus: “for Visitilia, born of a family of praetorian rank, had publicly notified before the aediles, a permit for fornication, according to the usage that prevailed among our fathers, who supposed that sufficient punishment for unchaste women resided in the very nature of their calling.” No penalty attached to illicit intercourse or to prostitution in general, and the reason appears in the passage from Tacitus, quoted above. In the case of married women, however, who contravened the marriage vow there were several penalties. Among them, one was of exceptional severity, and was not repealed until the time of Theodosius: “again he repealed another regulation of the following