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Juvenal (first-second century CE)
Sixth Satire


...most serious of all is that woman, who when she begins to recline at dinner, praises Vergil, pardons the dying Dido, draws up and compares the bards, then weighs Vergil against Homer; grammarians give way, rhetoricians are vanquished, the entire crowd is silent; neither the lawyer nor herald may speak, not even another woman.... A philosopher, she fixes the goals of life and the honorable means.... Let not the matron, who reclines in company with you, have her own style of speaking; let her not twist the enthymeme curved by circular speech; let her not know all histories, and let her not understand certain things from books. (ll. 434-51).

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