28 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



Seven Hills that every woman who pretended to culture 

 was obliged to be familiar with the Greek as well as with 

 the Latin authors, that her education was deemed incom- 

 plete without a knowledge of Greek poetry, oratory, his- 

 tory and philosophy, but the fact is indisputable that 

 Roman women were not producers like their Greek sisters, 

 and that in no instance did their productions reach any- 

 thing like the supreme excellence of the creations of a 

 Corinna or a Sappho. There was, it is true, Sulpicia, of 

 whom Martial writes: "Let every girl, whose wish it is to 

 please a single man, read Sulpicia; let every man, whose 

 wish it is to please a single maid, read Sulpicia ;" but, if 

 the few amatory verses that are credited to her represent 

 the highest flights of the Roman women in the domain of 

 poetry, then, indeed, were they far behind not only Sap- 

 pho and Corinna, but also far behind scores of their pupils. 

 Martial does indeed speak of a young maiden in whom 

 were combined the eloquence of Plato with the austere 

 philosophy of the Porch, and who wrote verses worthy 

 of a chaste Sappho; but this was evidently a great exag- 

 geration, for we have no other evidence of her existence. 



The creative work of Roman women was, so far as we 

 are able to judge, quite as limited in prose as it was in 

 poetry. Agrippina, the mother of Nero, was one of the 

 few prose writers whose name has come down to us. From 

 her memoirs it was that Tacitus received much of the 

 material incorporated in his Annals. 



That some of the women had literary ability of a high 

 order is indicated by a letter of Pliny to one of his cor- 

 respondents, in which occurs the following passage : 



"Pomponius Saturninus recently read me some letters 

 which he averred had been written by his wife. I believed 

 that Plautus or Terence was being read in prose. Whether 

 they were really his wife's, as he maintains, or his own, 

 which he denies, he deserves equal honor, either because he 



