Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/365

Rh bosom friends, after the Lesbian fashion, and do find such gratification in female society alone, as that they be convinced and firmly persuaded that with men they would never win such satisfaction. Wherefore they be content to go without these altogether in their joys and toothsome pleasures, without ever a thought of masculine acquaintance or marriage.

Maids and virgins would seem in old days at Rome to have been highly honoured and privileged, so much so that the law had no jurisdiction over them to sentence them to death. Hence the story we read of a Roman Senator in the time of the Triumvirate, which was condemned to die among other victims of the Proscription, and not he alone, but all the offspring of his loins. So when a daughter of his house did appear on the scaffold, a very fair and lovely girl, but of unripe years and yet virgin, 'twas needful for the executioner to deflower her himself and take her maidenhead on the scaffold, and only then when she was so polluted, could he ply his knife upon her. The Emperor Tiberius did delight in having fair virgins thus publicly deflowered, and then put to death,—a right villainous piece of cruelty, pardy!

The Vestal Virgins in like manner were greatly honoured and respected, no less for their virginity than for their religious character; for indeed, an if they did show any the smallest frailty of bodily purity, they were an hundred times more rigorously punished than when they had failed to take good heed of the sacred fire, and were buried alive under the most pitiful and terrible circumstances. 'Tis writ of one Albinus, a Roman gentleman, that having met outside Rome some Vestals that were going somewhither a-foot, he did command his wife and