as they indicated his downfall, she did not regret the loss of her former place in society or the desertion of many of their so-called friends.  Indeed, she had welcomed as her only comfort whatever share she could have in his losses.  But was it true that her life as a whole had no meaning or value apart from his?  Had the hard, solitary fight to be brave meant nothing except that she could write her husband stimulating letters and help his child to take up again the joys of youth?  She had found and tested powers in herself that were not Ovid’s.  What meaning was there in her phrase—­“The wife of a Roman citizen?” She began to think over Ovid’s idea of citizenship.  Suddenly she realised, in one of those flashes that illuminate a series of facts long taken for granted, that the time he had shown most emotion over being a citizen was on the night he had left home, when he had insisted that he still retained his property and his rights.  Before that indeed, on the annual occasions when the Emperor reviewed the equestrian order and he rode on his beautiful horse in the procession, he had always come home in a glow of enthusiasm.  But she had often felt vaguely, even then, that the citizen’s pride was largely made up of the courtier’s devotion to a ruler, the artist’s delight in a pageant and the favourite’s pleasure in applause in which he had a personal share.  That he loved Rome she had never doubted.  He loved the external city because it was fair to the eye.  He loved Roman life because it was free from all that was rustic, because it gave the prizes to wit and imagination and refinement.  The culture of Athens had at last become domiciled in the capital of a world-empire.  Ovid’s idea of citizenship, Fabia said to herself, was to live, amid the beauties of this capital and in the warmth of imperial and popular favour, freely, easily, joyfully.

And what was her own idea?  Fabia’s mind fled back to the days when she was a little girl in Falerii and her uncle used to come to the nursery after his dinner and take her on his lap and tell her stories until she was borne off to bed.  The stories had always been about brave people, and her nurse used to scold, while she undressed her, about her flushed cheeks and shining eyes.  The procession of these brave ones walked before her now, as a child’s eyes had seen them—­Horatius, Virginia, Lucretia, Decius, Regulus, Cato—­men and women who had loved the honour and virtue demanded by Rome, or Rome’s safety better than their lives.  The best story of all had been the one about her own ancestors, the three hundred and six Fabii who, to establish their country’s power, fought by the River Cremera until every man was dead.