30 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



have so little of the literary remains of Greece and Rome, 

 but rather that we have anything at all. 



As one might expect, the literary women of Rome, as 

 well as those who ventured to take part in public affairs, 

 had their critics. The satirists of the time were as un- 

 sparing of their ridicule as they were long afterward when 

 Moliere wrote his Femmes Savantes and his Precieuses 

 Ridicules. And as for men of the old conservative type, a 

 learned woman was as much an object of horror as is a 

 militant suffragette in conservative England to-day. "No 

 learned wife for me," exclaims Martial, "but rather a well- 

 fed slave." 1 



And Juvenal had no more love for educated women than 

 have some of our contemporaries for a blue-stocking house- 

 keeper. He gives his opinion of them in the following 

 characteristic fashion : 



"That woman is a worse nuisance than usual who, as 

 soon as she reclines on her couch, praises Virgil; makes 

 excuses for doomed Dido; pits bards against one another 

 and compares them, and weighs Homer and Mars in the 

 balance. Teachers of literature give way, professors are 

 vanquished, the whole mob is hushed, and so great is the 

 torrent of words that no lawyer or auctioneer may speak, 

 nor any other woman." 2 



But if learned women had their enemies and detractors 

 they also had friends and defenders. Among these was 

 the Stoic philosopher, C. Musonius Rufus, who lived in the 

 time of Nero. Like Plato, he contended that women should 

 have the same training as men and that the faculties of 



*Sit mihi verna satur, sit non doctissima conjux. Epigrammata, 

 Lib. II, 90. 



Martial's taste in this respect was the same as that of Heine, 

 who said of the woman he loved: "She has never read a line of 

 my writings and does not even know what a poet is," and the same 

 as that of Eousseau, who declared that his last flame, Therese Lavas- 

 seur, could not tell the time of day. 



2 Satire VI, 434-440. 



