The first occasion when she appeared at a formal banquet in the splendid Apollo dinner hall of the Luculli, where the outlay on the feast was fixed by a regular scale at two hundred thousand sesterces, she gathered no little satisfaction by the consciousness that all the young men were admiring her, and all the women were fuming with jealousy.

But this life was unspeakably wearisome, after the first novelty had worn away.

Cornelia lived in an age when many of the common proprieties and decencies of our present society would have been counted prudish, but she could not close her eyes to the looseness and license that pervaded her mother's world.
Woman had become almost entirely independent of man in social and economic matters, though the law still kept its fictions of tutelage.
Honourable marriages were growing fewer and fewer.

Divorces were multiplying.

The morality of the time can be judged from the fact that the "immaculate" Marcus Cato separated from his wife that a friend might marry her; and when the friend died, married her himself again.
Scandals and love intrigues were common in the highest circles; noble ladies, and not ballet-dancers[86] merely, thought it of little account to have their names besmirched.