She was gifted, witty, and cultured, we are told; but to be lettered in the age of the Cæsars did not necessarily mean learning or serious tastes. One must dabble a little in philosophy, read the Hellenic poets, patronize famous Roman writers, and be able to talk of the Greek artists who were designing temples and flooding the imperial city with sculpture of various grades. It was even possible to have a long-haired philosopher to dress the intellect, as the maid dressed the person--the one a slave like the other. But all this might end in little more than the trifling of the dilettante, and was quite consistent with very bad morals--as it has always been and is to-day. To discourse of Ovid’s “Art of Love” was agreeable enough, and not mentally exacting. To be sure, the poet did not bring his admirers into very respectable society; indeed, we should think it not only altogether vulgar, but altogether base. But it appealed to the tastes of these spoiled darlings of fortune who had nothing else to do but amuse themselves--it did not matter how, so long as due regard was paid to the so-called elegancies. From love, as the Romans understood it, to unlimited license was but a step. They did not live in the “beyond” of refined sentiment. They mixed very little intellect or imagination with their passions, though they put a certain art into the stimulants of their sensations. When Catullus wished to add a last touch of seriousness to what he called his emotions, he said that he loved Lesbia “not merely as men commonly loved a mistress, but as a father loves his sons and his sons-in-law.” There was little romance in this epicurean life, in spite of a great deal of simple family affection outside of it, which these perfumed sybarites looked upon as _bourgeois_. Splendor and not too decorous pleasure were all-sufficient. Anything else they would have laughed at as moonshine. “When Queen Money gave a dowry,” said Horace, with his inimitable satire, “she gave beauty, nobility, friends, and fidelity.” With the exception of Horace and Vergil, who had already grown too moral for the highest fashion, Roman poetry was incredibly coarse and demoralizing; but this was the literary food of the reckless and dashing group that gravitated from the palace on the Palatine to Baiæ, the Newport of the Roman world, rushing from one novelty to another, from one excess to a deeper and more highly spiced one, until its rapid course was run.