Report books

Divorce
was so common as to be almost inevitable. Husbands divorced
their wives on the smallest pretexts, and wives divorced their
husbands.[238] Even the virtuous Cato seems to have divorced his wife
Marcia in order that Hortensius should marry her, and after some years
to have married her again as the widow of Hortensius, with a large
fortune.[239] Cicero himself writes sometimes in the lightest-hearted
way of conjugal relations which we should think most serious;[240]
and we find him telling Atticus how he had met at dinner the actress
Cytheris, a woman of notoriously bad character. "I did not know she
was going to be there," he says, "but even the Socratic Aristippus
himself did not blush when he was taunted about Lais."[241] Caesar's
reputation in such matters was at all times bad, and though many of
the stories about him are manifestly false, his conquest by Cleopatra
was a fact, and we learn with regret that the Egyptian queen was
living in a villa of his in gardens beyond the Tiber during the year
46, when he was himself in Rome.


Pages:
185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209