ABSTRACT
Cornelia’s name became so standard in lists of exemplary women of the classical world that the subversive poets Martial and Juvenal used it for shock value. To suggest that it would be a bore for a husband to hear the impeccable Cornelia boasting about her noble birth, or to cite her inventive bedroom acrobatics as a model of conjugal sex was a startling and amusing poetic device that must have brought a yelp of horrified laughter from a Roman audience, used from infancy to hearing – and piously rattling off – these famous names.
