[1177] Justin, xxxix, 1, 2.
[1178] Ibid., 4. These queens flourished c. 100 B.C.
[1179] Justin, xxvi, 3. He was called Demetrius the Handsome, son of the D. above-named, but not by Phila. She stood at the door of the chamber, while the ministers of her vengeance were operating within, calling out to them to spare her mother (c. 250 B.C.). Her own fate was to be put to death by her son, Ptolemy IV of Egypt, in 221 B.C.
[1180] That is, her hair cut off and suspended in the temple of Aphrodite to propitiate divine favour for her husband (Ptolemy III), during his Syrian war, c. 245 B.C. It became a constellation according to the adulators of the day, as is shown in the poem of Catullus, a translation from the Greek of Callimachus.
[1181] The constitution of the Roman family can be apprehended readily by running through the consecutive expositions in Muirhead’s Private Law of Rome, Edin., 1886, pp. 24, 64, 115, 248, 345, 514. In law the mother and children were practically the slaves of the paterfamilias: he could divorce his wife at pleasure, and yet 500 years elapsed before a husband made use of this power, so potent was the high ethical code which sustained the Republic.
[1182] The story or legend of Cloelia used to be well known. Being delivered as a hostage, with a number of other maidens, to Porsena, she encouraged them to escape, and headed the band in swimming across the Tiber. But they were all punctiliously returned (c. 508 B.C.); Livy, ii, 13; Plutarch, Publicola, etc.
[1183] Portia, daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, aspired to be the confidante of her husband, but, distrusting her feminine nature, she refrained from soliciting him to trust her, until, by stabbing herself in the thigh, she felt satisfied of possessing sufficient masculine strength of mind to become the repository of state secrets (44 B.C.); Plutarch, Brutus, etc. See Shakespeare’s delineation of her in Julius Caesar, where she recounts her action to Brutus.
[1184] The accomplishments of Cornelia, the fifth wife of Pompey, are given in detail by Plutarch. She was well read in literature, played the lyre, had made progress in geometry, and fortified herself by the study of philosophy. Julia, the mother of Mark Antony, is called “a most learned woman” by Cicero, Catiline, iv, 6. Greek culture was fashionable at this time among the Romans. But an earlier Cornelia (c. 330 B.C.) became famous in infamy as the centre of a female society for poisoning men of note; Livy, viii, 18.
[1185] Tacitus, Ann., xiii, 5.
[1186] Hist. Aug. Heliogabalus, 2, et seq. She “lived the life of a prostitute,” and she also instituted a “petty senate” of females, which prescribed the fashions of the day to women. Manners, dress, jewellery, style of carriages, choice of draught-animals, horses, asses, or oxen, etc., were the subject of their jurisdiction.