Milphio acts at once on his instructions, and addresses the slave-girl:—
“By Hercules, I beseech you, his pleasure and my hatred, his most dearly beloved friend, my enemy and ill-wisher—his eye, my blear eye, his honey, my vinegar. Don’t be angry with him; or if that can’t be——”
The girl stops him and says:—
“Take a rope and hang yourself with your master and fellow-slaves.
“Mil. It is no go. I’ll have to live on gruel, and now bear a back streaked like an oyster, with marks of the lash, all on account of your love.”
And so poor Milphio gives love-making up as a bad job.
CHAPTER III.
WOMEN IN THE ROMAN PERIOD.
(1) WOMEN IN ASIA MINOR.
The information about these women comes out in the inscriptions which have been collected in the various towns and provinces of Asia Minor. M. P. Paris has brought together the facts that can be obtained from these inscriptions in his thesis “Quatenus feminæ res publicas in Asia Minore, Romanis imperantibus, attigerint, Parisiis, 1891.” M. Paris is inclined to think that the magistracies during the Imperial times had no important duties assigned to them except those of religion, and that therefore women could well perform them. If there were civil duties, he thinks that they were not asked to discharge these. He is guided much in this opinion by his sense of what it becomes a woman to do, but in the end of his thesis he has to acknowledge that women did take part in political and civil matters, though these were not becoming to them. He allows that at least one woman did discharge all the duties of a magistrate. The inscription recording the fact is as follows: “The senate and people honoured Aurelia Harmasta, also called Tertia, the daughter of Medon and chaste wife of Artemas, of the highest birth, who acted as priestess of Hera the Queen, and as demiourgos, and as chief priest, and did all that was usual in such occasions. Aur. Arteimianus Dileitrianus Arteimas, her husband, erected the statue.”[253] The demiourgos was one of the chief magistrates.