are usually printed after line 345. There is a partial duplication between O30-O34 and 346–348. The themes of the poem The author commences Satire VI by contrasting woman of the distant past with the kind of modern Roman women seen in the poems of Catullus and Propertius: I believe that, when Saturn was king, Chastity lingered on the earth and was seen for a time - when a cold cave provided little homes, and enclosed fire, household gods, cattle, and the masters of the household in common darkness. A mountain wife spread out her woodsy bed with leaves, straw, and skins of local wild animals, - hardly similar to you, Cynthia, nor to you whose wet eye the dead sparrow stirred up - but offering breasts that needed sucking to huge babies, and often hairier than her acorn-burping husband. Credo Pudicitiam Saturno rege moratam in terris uisamque diu, cum frigida paruas praeberet spelunca domos ignemque laremque et pecus et dominos communi clauderet umbra, siluestrem montana torum cum sterneret uxor frondibus et culmo uicinarumque ferarum pellibus, haut similis tibi, Cynthia, nec tibi, cuius turbauit nitidos extinctus passer ocellos, sed potanda ferens infantibus ubera magnis et saepe horridior glandem ructante marito. (6.1-10) Peter Green explains: "'Cynthia' was the pseudonym which Propertius used to indicate his mistress Hostia in his poems; the girl who wept for her sparrow was 'Lesbia,' the mistress of Catullus, whose real name was Clodia." While the equation of these pseudonyms with historical women is debatable, the reference within Satire VI to Propertius and Catullus is clear. In opposition to the sophisticated, urban woman of the elegiac ideal, the woman of the mythical golden age was a simple rustic. The constant touchstone of the remainder of the poem is the deviance of contemporary Roman women from an amorphous ideal located in the unspecified past. Though it is frequently decried as a misogynistic rant, feminist scholar Jamie Corson has pointed out: The author sets the frame for his satire with a hyperbolic presentation of the options available to the Roman male – marriage, suicide, or a boy lover: Are you even in this day and age preparing both a prenup and an engagement, and getting a trim from a master barber, and you have even perchance given the pledge to her finger? You certainly used to be sane. Postumus, are you getting married? Tell me by what Fury and by