But the most famous, or infamous, of all the class is Aristides, usually called, but on very little evidence, ‘of Miletus,’ who lived perhaps in the second century before Christ. Of the man and his book we have little direct knowledge, but he was translated into Latin by Sisenna, the companion of Sulla in his voluptuous debauchery, and copies of this version were found by the Parthians in the tents of the Roman officers after the battle of Carrhæ. Even the Parthians, as Plutarch tells us, were disgusted by Aristides, and Ovid tries to use him as a shelter for himself against the charge of immoral writing. The Roman poet who, though a libertine, was at least free from some of the grosser vices of his age, complains bitterly in his exile of the difference in treatment meted out to Aristides and himself. ‘_Aristides was not banished_,’ he cries, ‘_and yet he fathered all the scandalous stories of Miletus: the authors amongst us who now put together Sybaritic stories go unpunished_.’ Sybaritic and Milesian were the descriptive adjectives used even in Ovid’s time for this kind of writing, and we can trace its popularity and influence in Rome. Quotations are obviously impossible, and indeed the _genre_ does not depend on literary grace. One author alone, Petronius, possesses sufficient skill to make it tolerable, and the viler portions of the ‘Satyricon’ are the most real examples of the literature that was inspired by Miletus, and by Milesian ideas of womankind. The natural coarseness of the Roman mind gave this sort of story a greater prominence than the Greeks ever allowed, but it will probably be correct to trace its first origin to the coast of Ionia in the seventh century and especially to the metropolis of the Ionian States. From the beginning at Miletus the relations between men and women were notoriously bad, and, as Herodotus tells us, they had some historical justification. ‘The first settlers at Miletus,’ he says, ‘having no wives of their own, killed the men and seized the women of the country.’ On account of this massacre, the women established the law and imposed upon themselves an oath, which they handed down to their daughters, to this effect: They should never eat at the same table with their husbands, nor should any woman ever call her husband by his name. For they had killed their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and after so doing had forced them to become their wives.