For women’s tears are but the sweat of eyes.

The line expresses a cynical, misogynistic commonplace: that women’s tears are not sincere expressions of grief but a kind of bodily “perspiration” of the eyes—automatic, easily produced, and therefore untrustworthy. Read in Juvenal’s satiric mode, it functions as a barbed generalization meant to puncture claims of female emotional authenticity and to warn men against being manipulated by displays of weeping. The metaphor reduces tears to a physiological secretion, stripping them of moral or emotional meaning. In a broader Roman rhetorical context, it aligns with satirical attacks on perceived social hypocrisy and with stereotypes about women’s supposed duplicity in love, marriage, and litigation.