th Bonosus, led the unsuccessful
rebellion in Gaul against Emperor Probus. Even so keen a commentator as
Cotton has failed to note the error.

The empress (Montaigne does not say "his empress") was Messalina, third
wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was uncle of Caligula and foster-father
to Nero. Furthermore, in her case the charge is that she copulated with
twenty-five in a single night, and not twenty-two, as appears in the
text. Montaigne is right in his statistics, if original sources are
correct, whereas the author erred in transcribing the incident.

As for Proculus, it has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus,
who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of
Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). The feat of
Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246)
where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and
unmaidened ten of them in one night, together with the happenings
subsequent thereto.

Concerning Messalina, there appears to be no question but that she was a
nymphomaniac, and that, while Empress of Rome, she participated in some
fearful debaucheries. The question is what to believe, for much that we
have heard about her is almost certainly apocryphal.

The author from whom Montaigne took his facts is the elder Pliny, who,
in his Natural History, Book X, Chapter 83, says, "Other animals become
sated with veneral pleasures; man hardly knows any satiety. Messalina,
the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an
empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the
most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute;
and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day,
at the twenty-fifth embrace."

But Pliny, notwithstanding his great attainments, was often a retailer of
stale gossip, and in like case was Aurelius Victor, another writer who
heaped much odium on her name. Again, there is a great hiatus in the
Annals of Tacitus, a true historian, at the period covering the earlier
days of the Empress; while Suetonius, bitter as he may be, is little more
than an anecdotist. Juvenal, another of her detractors, is a prejudiced
witness, for he started out to satirize female vice, and naturally aimed
at high places. Dio also tells of Messalina's misdeeds, but his work is
under the same limitations as that of Suetonius. Furthermore, none bu