Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/166

154 —it was labour lost in the poet to preach to one, who weighed her lovers by their purses, of Romulean simplicity, or to sigh—

Yet he could not forbear to address her ever and anon in verses, now complimentary, now spiteful, and not seldom a mixture of both in pretty equal proportions. One of his complaints against her is that she dyes her hair and paints her face; for which causes, in an exaggerated strain of fault-finding, he likens her to the "woad-stained Britons." Where in the same passage he vows vengeance against those "who dye their own or wear another's hair," he testifies to the prevalence of a mistaken resort to hair-dyes on the part of the fair sex in all ages, as well as, we may add, to the consensus of the lords of the creation against such disfigurement of nature's gifts; yet it is just possible, from several hints here and there in the Elegies, that Cynthia was driven by the inroads of time to these resorts. According to one reading of El. xxiv. 6 in the third book, her poet represents her as "treading with aging foot the Appian Way;" and there are several other passages which render it probable that she was older than Propertius, whom we know that she predeceased: if so, it was in