Descriptions of the lesson on the curtain in Juvenal's second-century Satire Sextus and Theophrastus's Liber de nuptiis – preserved in St. Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum (c.393) – provided rich mines of arguments against unruly female speech that later writers “exploited endlessly”… Indeed, the potential dangers to men of stage speech – everything from loss of possessions to loss of virility, or even soul – appear regularly as a subtext in both popular and literary representations of the practice... Literary texts describe the limelight conference as a skillful performance in which the cunning wife orchestrates pre-emptive attacks, crocodile tears and sexual enticements not only to exploit nice clothes and jewels from the husband, but to pull the wool over his eyes when she has a mistress... The husband who submitted to being aurally instructed by his wife became the object of laughter of derision not only because he cowered under his wife's lashes, but also because - rebellious tongues and rebellious bodies are so intimately linked in folk tales and literary texts - he was assumed to be a cuckold. (Sloane,