Satire 6
The Ways of Women
... Better, however, that your wife should be musical than that she should be rushing boldly about the entire city, attending men's meetings,
talking with unflinching face and hard breasts to Generals in their military cloaks, with her husband looking on! This same woman knows
what is going on all over the world: what the Thracians and Chinese are after, what has passed between the stepmother and the stepson;
she knows who loves whom, what gallant is the rage; she will tell you who got the widow with child, and in what month; how every woman
behaves to her lovers, and what she says to them. She is the first to notice the comet threatening the kings of Armenia and Parthia;
she picks up the latest rumours at the city gates, and invents some herself: how the
Niphates17 has burst out upon the nations, and is inundating entire districts;
how cities are tottering and lands subsiding, she tells to every one she meets at every street crossing.
Footnotes
17 Properly a mountain; here meant for a river.
