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   Julia seemed puffed up at her control of the situation. "Your own accounts and you're filled with --- I can only think drivel about this nonsense permeating all your media. Ye Gods, what has really changed in our whole history? Your nonsense about marrying the object of your affection -- or more accurately said your lust-- has led to where? Serial marriages, unstable families for young children. And somehow that is good? For whom? Certainly not for the children who do deserve stable families-- not alliances that shift at the hormone level of parents."
   "Like your own children, and your list of marriages."
   "Back off," Julia said. "True I was married three times. My first husband died. Was that my fault? My second was Agrippa-- although I did not choose him.  You know that was a political marriage about which I had little to say. Nevertheless, Agrippa was the father of all my children. I did not carry them from father to father as my sexual needs called for."
    I was about to counter her but she plowed ahead. "I may not have done better, but I did not give my children father after father. You know something? I don't know what talking about it matters in the long run. Society is her own thing. She always fails the individual. She does not care about the individual. She cares about herself. Think about it. Society decides something and no matter what the tugs on it , it controls until it changes. But it always watches out for its own welfare. When society decides your same sexes can marry, then they can marry. Meantime you have to live with the strains."
   "Oh Julia, dear impulsive opinionated Julia," I said  "Of course changes in society comes when society says. But when does she say its okay for change? Reaction to the tugs and pulls on it. Reaction to objecting people, to an aggressive press. You seem to have forgotten how during your lifetime-- and to some extent by your own efforts and those of your friend  -- Roman society did its own share of changing-- of adapting to the tugs and pulls. Need we explore that next time we meet?"