The second part of this book moves chronologically from the Renaissance to the Restoration, and thematically from discussion of women's races in texts dealing with the founding of Rome and Rome's absorption of Egypt into its developing empire to texts concerned with the roles and races of women as actors in English culture. As we have seen, the matter of Rome provided important substance for Renaissance reproductions of the information it presented about gender, its relations to the state, and its placement in history. Stories about Antony and Cleopatra, Dido, and Hannibal were unfolded so as to underline the implications of their concerns with sexuality, gentility, and domesticity, important social terms which in their turn were understood as qualities appertaining to race. While the skin color of all those milky skinned, golden-haired Cleopatras and dark, deceitful “Afres” is reiterated too insistently to be entirely irrelevant to the stories which contain them, racial affinity in these early modern versions of Roman history is just as frequently marked by contrasting or related behavior, particularly marital or sexual behavior. Race becomes a matter of what the English writers and readers of these stories are not, or are not supposed to be. Thus, Octavia's sorrowful railing against her unfaithful husband and the evil Cleopatra who is “[t]he staine of Egypt and the shame of Rome” (Letter, 2:3) is launched from within her home, the profaned “temple” (Letter, 11:6) of her abandoned bedroom.