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What stories he would tell you about Marc Antony and the actress Cytheris in their chariot drawn by tigers! What a character would he paint of that Flora who gave her gardens to the Roman people! It would draw tears to your eyes. No man was ever so learned in the female manners of the last centuries of polytheism as Sidonia.
For a time all prospered; he was appointed the first prefect of Egypt, then recently annexed as a province, but his haughtiness and success had made him many enemies; he was accused of treasonable conversation, and interdicted the palace of the emperor. His poetry was entirely taken from Alexandria; he translated Euphorion and wrote four books of love-elegies to Cytheris.
It was Cytheris, the fickle actress if the scholiasts are right who opened his eyes to the fact that there were themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales; and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman self-pity, this first poet of the poitrinaire school.
Cicero himself writes sometimes in the lightest-hearted way of conjugal relations which we should think most serious; and we find him telling Atticus how he had met at dinner the actress Cytheris, a woman of notoriously bad character. "I did not know she was going to be there," he says, "but even the Socratic Aristippus himself did not blush when he was taunted about Lais."
Sergius, the player, was one of the friends who could do most with him; also Cytheris, a woman of the same trade, whom he made much of, and who, when he went his progress, accompanied him in a litter, and had her equipage, not in anything inferior to his mother's; while every one, moreover, was scandalized at the sight of the golden cups that he took with him, fitter for the ornaments of a procession than the uses of a journey, at his having pavilions set up, and sumptuous morning repasts laid out by river-sides and in groves, at his having chariots drawn by lions, and common women and singing girls quartered upon the houses of serious fathers and mothers of families.
Servius calls her a Mima, or one who danced in the Pantomimic dances, and which seems more probable, as she is mentioned by Cicero, who says the part of Andromache was played by a male performer on the very day Arbuscula also performed. The principal Roman Mimas were: Arbuscula, Thymele, Licilia, Dionysia, Cytheris, Valeria, and Cloppia.
The tenth Eclogue gives Vergil's impressions upon reading one of the elegies of Gallus which had apparently been written at some lonely army post in Greece after the news of Cytheris' desertion. In his elegy the poet had, it would seem, bemoaned the lot that had drawn him to the East away from his beloved.
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