On the day of the marriage he is supposed to have replied to one of these, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be a grown-up woman [mulier] tomorrow’. The ancient critic who quoted this response thought that it was a brilliantly witty way of deflecting criticism and held it up for admiration. We are likely to put it somewhere on the spectrum between uncomfortably coarse and painfully bleak – one powerful marker of the distance between the Roman world and our own.
