Plutarch, in
his essay on the "Virtues of Women,"--moralizing on the
well-known story of the young women of Milesia, among whom an
epidemic of suicide was only brought to an end by the decree that
in future women who hanged themselves should be carried naked
through the market-places,--observes: "They, who had no dread of
the most terrible things in the world, death and pain, could not
abide the imagination of dishonor, and exposure to shame, even
after death."
In the second century the physician Aretaeus, writing at Rome,
remarks: "In many cases, owing to involuntary restraint from
modesty at assemblies, and at banquets, the bladder becomes
distended, and from the consequent loss of its contractile power,
it no longer evacuates the urine." (_On the Causes and Symptoms
of Acute Diseases_, Book II, Chapter X.)
Apuleius, writing in the second century, says: "Most women, in
order to exhibit their native gracefulness and allurements,
divest themselves of all their garments, and long to show their
naked beauty, being conscious that they shall please more by the
rosy redness of their skin than by the golden splendor of their
robes." (Thomas Taylor's translation of _Metamorphosis_, p. 28.)
Christianity seems to have profoundly affected habits of thought
and feeling by uniting together the merely natural emotion of
sexual reserve with, on the one hand, the masculine virtue of
modesty--_modestia_--and, on the other, the prescription of
sexual abstinence.
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