“I wonder,” said Cornelia, “if blood counted more in that apparently simpler thing.  Do you think a middle-class woman could have controlled herself so finely?” Voconius broke in with a quick answer:  “It is nothing against Arria, whose memory we all reverence, if I say I think she might.  It seems to me that the kind of thing that only an aristocrat could do was done by Corellius Rufus.  It isn’t a matter of courage but of humour.  Tell the story, Pliny.  I haven’t heard it since the year he died—­let me see, seven years ago, that was.  It’s time we heard it again.”

Tacitus leaned forward to listen as Pliny willingly complied:  “Corellius was, you know, a Stoic of the Stoics, believing in suicide.  When the doctors had assured him that he could never be cured of a most dreadful disease, all his reasons for living, his wealth and position and fame, his wife and daughter and grandchildren and sisters and friends, became secondary to his reasons for dying.  He had held the disease in check, while he was younger, by the most temperate living.  But in old age it gained on him; he was bedridden and had only weakening torments to face.  I went to see him one day while Domitian was still living.  His wife went out of the room, for, although she had his full confidence, she was tactful enough to leave him alone with his friends.  He turned his eyes to me and said:  ’Why do you think I have endured this pain so long?  It is because I want to survive our Hangman at least one day.’  As soon as we were rid of Domitian he began to starve himself to death.  I agree with Voconius that only an aristocrat could have thought of outwitting a tyrant by outliving him.”

“It is a pity, is it not,” said Cornelia, “that Juvenal could not have known men like Corellius and your uncle, Pliny, and all the rest of you?  He might be less savage in his attacks on our order.”  “And equally a pity,” Pliny gallantly responded, “that he could not modify his views on your sex by knowing such ladies as are in this room.”  Tacitus bowed gravely to Quadratilla as their host said this.  A retort trembled on the wicked old lips, but Calpurnia, seeing it, made haste to ask if any of them had ever talked with Juvenal.  “I asked Martial once,” she said, “to bring him to see us, but he never came.  I cannot help feeling that, if he could know us better, his arraignment would be less harsh.”  “Dear Lady,” said Tacitus, “you forget that people like you are cut jewels, very different from the rough rock of our order as well as from the shifting sands of the populace.”  “Dear Cynic,” laughed Calpurnia, “do we know any more about the populace than Juvenal knows about us?”