mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden,
though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller than
that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to supplant
her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman in the days
of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functions and bore the
whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia, the great Roman
dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep into the night, and
whose personal dignity was so dear to her that, violated, she sought only
death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi, one of the last of the great
line, we find everywhere, erect, labouring, and resolute, the Roman woman
who gave birth to the men who built up Roman greatness. A few centuries
later, and Rome also had reached that dangerous spot in the order of social
change which Greece had reached centuries before her. Slave labour and the
enjoyment of the unlimited spoils of subject races had done away for ever
with the demand for physical labour on the part of the members of the
dominant race. Then came the period when the male still occupied himself
with the duties of war and government, of legislation and self-culture; but
the Roman matron had already ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in
jewels and fine clothing, brought at the cost of infinite human labour from
the ends of the earth, nourished on delicate victuals, prepared by others'
hands, she sought now only with amusement to pass away a life that no
longer offered her the excitement and joy of active productive exertion.
She frequented theatres or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove in her
chariot; and like more modern counterparts, painted herself, wore patches,
affected an artistic walk, and a handshake with the elbow raised and the
fingers hanging down. Her children were reared by dependents; and in the
intellectual labour and government of her age she took small part, and was
fit to take none. There were not wanting writers and thinkers who saw
clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who
were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman