Scarcely less distinguished for her taste in literature, and for her talent as a letter writer, was Pliny's wife, Calphurnia, who, at his request, wrote to him in his absence every day and sometimes even twice a day. According to Cicero, his daughter Tulia was "the best and most learned of women"; but her literary work, it is probable, did not extend much beyond her letters to her illustrious father. Nevertheless, what would we not give to possess these letters--to have as complete a collection of them as we have of those of the great orator and philosopher. They would be of inestimable value and would be absolutely beyond compare, except, possibly, with the letters of Mme. du Deffand or of Elizabeth Barrett Browning of a much later age. Considering the number of educated women that lived in the latter days of the Republic and during the earlier part of the Empire, and their well known culture and love of letters, it is reasonable to suppose that they may have written much in both prose and verse of which we have no record. Literary productions must have more than ordinary value to survive two thousand years, and especially two thousand years of such revolutions and upheavals as have convulsed the world since the time of the _Pax Romana_, when all the world was at peace under Augustus. How much of the literary work of the women of to-day will receive recognition twenty centuries hence? Some of it may, it is true, find a place in the fireproof libraries of the time; but who, outside of a few antiquarians, will take the trouble to read it or estimate its value? A few anthologies containing our gems of prose and poetry will probably be all that our fortieth century readers will deem worthy of notice. In view of the chaotic condition of Europe for so many centuries, the wonder is not that we have so little of the literary remains of Greece and Rome, but rather that we have anything at all. As one might expect, the literary women of Rome, as well as those who ventured to take part in public affairs, had their critics. The satirists of the time were as unsparing of their ridicule as they were long afterward when Moliere wrote his _Femmes Savantes_ and his _Precieuses Ridicules_. And as for men of the old conservative type, a learned woman was as much an object of horror as is a militant suffragette in conservative England to-day. "No learned wife for me," exclaims Martial, "but rather a well-fed slave."[24] And Juvenal had no more love for educated women than have some of our contemporaries for a blue-stocking housekeeper. He gives his opinion of them in the following characteristic fashion: