I remember once hearing

I remember once hearing two of my mother’s freedwomen discussing modern marriage from the point of view of a woman of family. What did she gain by it? They asked. Morals were so loose now that nobody took marriage seriously any longer. Granted, a few old-fashioned men respected sufficiently to have a prejudice against children being fathered on them by their friends or household servants, and a few old-fashioned women respected their husbands sufficiently to be very careful not to become pregnant to any but them. But as a rule, any good looking woman nowadays could have any man to sleep with whom she chose. If she did marry and then tired of her husband, as usually happened, and wanted someone else to amuse herself with, there might easily be her husband’s pride or jealousy to contend with. Nor in general was she better off financially after marriage. Her dowry passed into the hands of her husband, or her father-in-law as master of the households, if he happened to be alive,; and a husband , or father-in-law, was usually a more difficult person to manage than a father, or elder brother, whose foibles she had long come to understand. Being married just meant vexatious household responsibilities. As for children, who wanted them? They interfered with the lady’s health and amusement for several months before birth and, though she had a foster mother for them immediately. Afterwards. it took time to recover from the wretched business of childbirth, and it often happened that her figure was ruined after having more than a couple. Look wow the beautiful Julia had changed by obediently gratifying Augustus’s desire for descendants. An a lady’s husband, if she was fond of him, could not be expected to keep off other women throughout the time of her pregnancy, and anyway he paid very little attention to the child when it was born. And then, as if all this were not enough, fosters mothers were shockingly careless nowadays, and the child often died. What a blessing it was that those Greeks doctors were so clever, if the thing had not gone too far-they could rid any lady of an unwanted child in two or three days , and nobody be any the worse or wiser. Of course some ladies, even modern ladies, had an old-fashioned hankering for children, but they could always buy a child for adoption into their husband’s family, from some man of decent birth who was hard pressed by his creditors...
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Athenodorus

Athenodorus was a stately old man with dark gentle eyes, a hooked nose and the most wonderful beard that surely ever grew on human chin. . It spreads in waves down to his waist and was as white as a swan's wing. I do not make this as an idle poetical comparison, for Y am not the sort of historian who writes in pseudo epic style. I mean that it was literally as white as a swan 's wing. There were some tame swans on an artificial lake in the Gardens of Sallust, where Athenodorus and I once fed them with bread from a boat, and I remember noticing that his beard and their wings as he leaned over the side were exactly the same colour. Athenodorus used to strike his beard so slowly and rhytthmically as he talked, and told me once that it was this thar made it grow so luxuriantly . He said that invisible seeds of fire streamed off from his fingers , which were food for the hairs. This was a typical Stoic joke at the expense of Epicurean speculative philosophy.
From the book 'I Claudius', by Robert Graves