braver sense than the poet expressed it:  for she was so far from being deterred by the thought of her husband’s wound and death and her own, that she had been their promotress and adviser:  but having performed this high and courageous enterprise for her husband’s only convenience, she had even in the last gasp of her life no other concern but for him, and of dispossessing him of the fear of dying with her.  Paetus presently struck himself to the heart with the same weapon, ashamed, I suppose, to have stood in need of so dear and precious an example.

Pompeia Paulina, a young and very noble Roman lady, had married Seneca in his extreme old age.  Nero, his fine pupil, sent his guards to him to denounce the sentence of death, which was performed after this manner:  When the Roman emperors of those times had condemned any man of quality, they sent to him by their officers to choose what death he would, and to execute it within such or such a time, which was limited, according to the degree of their indignation, to a shorter or a longer respite, that they might therein have better leisure to dispose their affairs, and sometimes depriving them of the means of doing it by the shortness of the time; and if the condemned seemed unwilling to submit to the order, they had people ready at hand to execute it either by cutting the veins of the arms and legs, or by compelling them by force to swallow a draught of poison.  But persons of honour would not abide this necessity, but made use of their own physicians and surgeons for this purpose.  Seneca, with a calm and steady countenance, heard their charge, and presently called for paper to write his will, which being by the captain refused, he turned himself towards his friends, saying to them, “Since I cannot leave you any other acknowledgment of the obligation I have to you, I leave you at least the best thing I have, namely, the image of my life and manners, which I entreat you to keep in memory of me, that by so doing you may acquire the glory of sincere and real friends.”  And there withal, one while appeasing the sorrow he saw in them with gentle words, and presently raising his voice to reprove them:  “What,” said he, “are become of all our brave philosophical precepts?  What are become of all the provisions we have so many years laid up against the accidents of fortune?  Is Nero’s cruelty unknown to us?  What could we expect from him who had murdered his mother and his brother, but that he should put his tutor to death who had brought him up?” After having spoken these words in general, he turned himself towards his wife, and embracing her fast in his arms, as, her heart and strength failing her, she was ready to sink down with grief, he begged of her, for his sake, to bear this accident with a little more patience, telling her, that now the hour was come wherein he was to show, not by argument and discourse, but effect, the fruit he had acquired by his studies, and that he really embraced his death, not only without