nymphomaniac, and that, while Empress of Rome, she participated in some
fearful debaucheries. The question is what to believe, for much that we
have heard about her is almost certainly apocryphal.

The author from whom Montaigne took his facts is the elder Pliny, who,
in his Natural History, Book X, Chapter 83, says, "Other animals become
sated with veneral pleasures; man hardly knows any satiety. Messalina,
the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an
empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the
most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute;
and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day,
at the twenty-fifth embrace."

But Pliny, notwithstanding his great attainments, was often a retailer of
stale gossip, and in like case was Aurelius Victor, another writer who
heaped much odium on her name. Again, there is a great hiatus in the
Annals of Tacitus, a true historian, at the period covering the earlier
days of the Empress; while Suetonius, bitter as he may be, is little more
than an anecdotist. Juvenal, another of her detractors, is a prejudiced
witness, for he started out to satirize female vice, and naturally aimed
at high places. Dio also tells of Messalina's misdeeds, but his work is
under the same limitations as that of Suetonius. Furthermore, none but
Pliny mentions the excess under consideration.

However, "where there is much smoke there must be a little fire," and
based upon the superimposed testimony of the writers of the period, there
appears little doubt but that Messalina was a nymphomaniac, that she
prostituted herself in the public stews, naked, and with gilded nipples,
and that she did actually marry her chief adulterer, Silius, while
Claudius was absent at Ostia, and that the wedding was consummated in the