lly she
treated the poet, who hated her for it even while he still loved
her:[233]

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris;
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

CATULL. 85.

She was, as M. Boissier has well said,[234] the exact counterpart
of her still more famous brother: "Elle apportait dans sa conduite
privee, dans ses engagements d'affection, les memes emportements et
les memes ardeurs que son frere dans la vie publique. Prompte a tous
les exces et ne rougissant pas de les avouer, aimant et haissant avec
fureur, incapable de se gouverner et detestant toute contrainte, elle
ne dementait pas cette grande et fiere famille dont elle descendait."
All this is true; we need not go beyond it and believe the worst that
has been said of her.

We have just a glimpse of another lady of _cultus_, but only a
glimpse. This was Sempronia, the wife of an honest man and the mother
of another;[235] but according to Sallust, who introduces her to us as
a principal in the conspiracy of Catiline, she was one of those who
found steady married life incompatible with literary and artistic
tastes. "She could play and dance more elegantly than an honest woman
should ... she played fast and loose with her money, and equally so
with her good fame."[236] She had no scruples, he says, in denying a
debt, or in helping in a murder: yet she had plenty of _esprit_, could
write verses and talk brilliantly, and she knew too how to assume an
air of modesty on occasion. Sallust loved to colour his portraits
highly, and in painting this woman he saw no doubt a chance of
literary effect; but that she was really in the conspiracy we cannot
doubt, and that she had private ends to gain by it is also probable.
She seems to be the first of a series of ladies who during the next
century and later were to be a power in politics, and most of whom
were at least capable of crime, public and private. There is indeed
one instance a few years earlier of a woman exercising an almost
supreme influence in the State, and a woman too of the worst kind.
Plutarch tells us in the most explicit way that when Lucullus in 75
B.C. was trying to secure for himself the command against Mithridates,
he found himself compelled to apply to a woman named Praecia, whose
social gifts and good nature gave her immense influence, which she
used with the pertinacity peculiar to such ladies. Her reputation,
however, was very bad, and among other lovers she had enslaved
Cet