Syrian wantons, but without the appearance of refinement which they
always contrived to give to every caress of passion or avarice. They
wooed fortune with an abandon that soon made them the objects of contempt
in the eyes of their lords and masters. "She is chaste whom no man has
solicited," said Ovid (Amor. i, 8, line 43). Martial, writing about
ninety years later says: "Sophronius Rufus, long have I been searching
the city through to find if there is ever a maid to say 'No'; there is
not one." (Ep. iv, 71.) In point of time, a century separates Ovid and
Martial; from a moral standpoint, they are as far apart as the poles.
The revenge, then, taken by Asia, gives a startling insight into the real
meaning of Kipling's poem, "The female of the species is more deadly than
the male." In Livy (xxxiv, 4) we read: (Cato is speaking), "All these
changes, as day by day the fortune of the state is higher and more
prosperous and her empire grows greater, and our conquests extend over
Greece and Asia, lands replete with every allurement of the senses, and
we appropriate treasures that may well be called royal,--all this I dread
the more from my fear that such high fortune may rather master us, than
we master it." Within twelve years of the time when this speech was
delivered, we read in the same author (xxxix, 6), "for the beginnings of
foreign luxury were brought into the city by the Asiatic army"; and
Juvenal (Sat. iii, 6), "Quirites, I cannot bear to see Rome a Greek city,
yet how small a fraction of the whole corruption is found in these dregs
of Achaea? Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber and
brought along with it the Syrian tongue and manners and cross-stringed
harp and harper and exotic timbrels and girls bidden stand for hire at
the circus." Still, from the facts which have come down to us, we cannot
arrive at any definite date at which houses of ill fame and women of the
town came into vogue at Rome. That they had long been under police
regulation, and compelled to register with the aedile, is evident from a
passage in Tacitus: "for Visitilia, born of a family of praetorian rank,