that both would die.  The son, an extremely handsome and modest youth, succumbed.  His mother arranged for his funeral and carried it out, the husband meanwhile being kept in ignorance.  Not only so, but every time she came into his room she pretended that the son was alive and better, and very often, when he asked how the boy was getting on, she answered, ’He has slept well, and shown a good appetite.’  Then, when the tears which she had so long kept back proved too much for her, she used to leave the room and give herself up to grief.  When at last she had dried her eyes and composed her countenance she returned to the room.  When her husband had taken part in an intended revolt against Claudius, he was to be carried as a prisoner across the Adriatic to Rome.  He was on the point of embarking, when Arria begged the soldiers to take her on board with him.  ‘I presume,’ she said, ’you mean to allow an ex-consul a few attendants of some kind, to give him his food, and to put on his clothes and shoes.  I will do all that myself.’” Her request being refused, “she hired a fishing-smack and followed the big vessel in this tiny one.”  When Claudius ordered the husband to put himself to death, Arria took a dagger, stabbed herself in the breast, drew the weapon out, and handed it to him with the words:  “Paetus, it does not hurt.  It is what you are about to do that hurts.”

Arria doubtless is a rare type of heroine.  But also of the quiet domesticated wife we have a description from the same writer.  Unfortunately the letter is one of the most priggish of all the rather self-complacent epistles written by that thoroughly respectable and estimable man; but that fact takes nothing from the information for which we are looking.  Pliny is writing to his own wife’s aunt.  “You will be very glad to learn that Calpurnia is turning out worthy of her father, of yourself, and of her grandfather.  She has admirable sense and is an excellent housekeeper; she is fond of me, which speaks well for her character.  Through her affection for me she has also developed a taste for literature.  She possesses my books and is always reading them; she even learns them by heart.  When I am to make a speech in court, she is all anxiety; when I have made it, she is all joy.  She arranges a string of messengers to let her know what effect I produce, what applause I win, and what result I have obtained.  If I give a reading, she sits in the next room behind a curtain and listens greedily to the compliments paid to me.  She even sets my verses to music and sings them to the harp, with no professional to teach her, but only love, who is the best of masters.  I have therefore every reason to hope that our harmony will not only last but grow greater every day.”

And all this time, away in the country homestead and cottage, the good Marsian or Sabine mother is a veritable pattern of domestic probity and discipline.  If she possesses handmaids, she teaches them their work in the kitchen or at the loom; if she possesses none, she brings up her big daughters in the right ways of modesty, frugality, and obedience to the gods; and her tall sons religiously obey her when she sends them out to chop the firewood in the rain and cold of the mountain-side.