The younger Pliny’ had near a house of his in Italy a neighbour who was exceedingly tormented with certain ulcers in his private parts.  His wife seeing him so long to languish, entreated that he would give her leave to see and at leisure to consider of the condition of his disease, and that she would freely tell him what she thought.  This permission being obtained, and she having curiously examined the business, found it impossible he could ever be cured, and that all he had to hope for or expect was a great while to linger out a painful and miserable life, and therefore, as the most sure and sovereign remedy, resolutely advised him to kill himself.  But finding him a little tender and backward in so rude an attempt:  “Do not think, my friend,” said she, “that the torments I see thee endure are not as sensible to me as to thyself, and that to deliver myself from them, I will not myself make use of the same remedy I have prescribed to thee.  I will accompany thee in the cure as I have done in the disease; fear nothing, but believe that we shall have pleasure in this passage that is to free us from so many miseries, and we will go happily together.”  Which having said, and roused up her husband’s courage, she resolved that they should throw themselves headlong into the sea out of a window that overlooked it, and that she might maintain to the last the loyal and vehement affection wherewith she had embraced him during his life, she would also have him die in her arms; but lest they should fail, and should quit their hold in the fall through fear, she tied herself fast to him by the waist, and so gave up her own life to procure her husband’s repose.  This was a woman of mean condition; and, amongst that class of people, ’tis no very new thing to see some examples of rare virtue: 

                         “Extrema per illos
               Justitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.”

          ["Justice, when she left the earth, took her last
          steps among them.”—­Virgil, Georg., ii. 473.]

The other two were noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged.

Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus, a consular person, was the mother of another Arria, the wife of Thrasea Paetus, he whose virtue was so renowned in the time of Nero, and by this son-in-law, the grandmother of Fannia:  for the resemblance of the names of these men and women, and their fortunes, have led to several mistakes.  This first Arria, her husband Caecina Paetus, having been taken prisoner by some of the Emperor Claudius’ people, after Scribonianus’ defeat, whose party he had embraced in the war, begged of those who were to carry him prisoner to Rome, that they would take her into their ship, where she would be of much less charge and trouble to them than a great many persons they must otherwise have to attend her husband, and that she alone would undertake to serve him in his chamber, his kitchen, and all other