take the pains to seal her letters to him, though they contain what most
women would hesitate to put on paper. They have all the same directness,
which sometimes becomes a splendid simplicity. One note, reproaching him
for a supposed infidelity--

_Si tibi cura togae potior pressumque quasillo
Scortum quam Servi filia Sulpicia--_

has all the noble pride of Shakespeare's Imogen. Of the world and its
ways she has no girlish ignorance; but the talk of the world, as a motive
for reticence, simply does not exist for her.

Where young ladies of the upper classes had such freedom as is shown in
these poems, and used it, the ordinary lines of demarcation between
respectable women and women who are not respectable must have largely
disappeared. It has been much and inconclusively debated whether the
Hostia and Plania, to whom, under assumed names, the amatory poems of
Propertius and Tibullus were addressed, were more or less married women
(for at Rome there were degrees of marriage), or women for whom marriage
was a remote and immaterial event. The same controversy has raged over
Ovid's Corinna, who is variously identified as Julia the daughter of the
Emperor herself, as a figment of the imagination, or as an ordinary
courtesan. The truth is, that in the society so brilliantly drawn in the
_Art of Love_, such distinctions were for the time suspended, and we are
in a world which, though for the time it was living and actual, is as
unreal to us as that of the Restoration dramatists.

The young lawyer and man of fashion, Publius Ovidius Naso, who was the
laureate of this gay society, was a few years younger than Propertius,
with whom he was in close and friendly intimacy. The early death of both