Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/237

 slept with her slaves, and took charge of things in her house.

Circe gave herself to Ulysses who desired to slay her, and Calypso, full blown goddess as she was, was obliged to make his advances for him. The fine sentiments that Virgil puts into the mouth of the shade of Creusa, content with having died while serving against the Greeks, “she was a Trojan, and she wedded the son of Venus”; the confession with which Andromache, confronted by the murderer of her first husband, responds to the question of Æneas; these ideas, I say, and these sentiments, appertained to the polished century of Augustus and not to the epoch or scene of the Trojan War. Virgil, in his Æneid, had never subscribed to the precepts of Horace, and of common sense

From this manner of dealing with women arose another reason for the possession of beauty by the valiant. One coveted a woman much as one would covet a fine flock of sheep, and, in the absence of laws, the one in possession of either the one or the other of these desirable objects would soon be dispossessed of Rh