to death without changing their countenance.
And Cicero has seen them fight in parties, with fists, feet, and teeth,
till they have fainted and sunk down, rather than confess themselves
overcome:

["Custom could never conquer nature; she is ever invincible; but we
have infected the mind with shadows, delights, negligence, sloth;
we have grown effeminate through opinions and corrupt morality."
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 27.]

Every one knows the story of Scaevola, that having slipped into the
enemy's camp to kill their general, and having missed his blow, to repair
his fault, by a more strange invention and to deliver his country, he
boldly confessed to Porsenna, who was the king he had a purpose to kill,
not only his design, but moreover added that there were then in the camp
a great number of Romans, his accomplices in the enterprise, as good men
as he; and to show what a one he himself was, having caused a pan of
burning coals to be brought, he saw and endured his arm to broil and
roast, till the king himself, conceiving horror at the sight, commanded
the pan to be taken away. What would you say of him that would not
vouchsafe to respite his reading in a book whilst he was under incision?
And of the other that persisted to mock and laugh in contempt of the
pains inflicted upon him; so that the provoked cruelty of the
executioners that had him in handling, and all the inventions of tortures
redoubled upon him, one after another, spent in vain, gave him the
bucklers? But he was a philosopher. But what! a gladiator of Caesar's
endured, laughing all the while, his wounds to be searched, lanced, and
laid open:

["What ordinary gladiator ever groaned? Which of them ever changed
countenance? Which of them not only stood or fell indecorously?
Which, when he had fallen and was commanded to receive the stroke of
the sword, contracted his neck."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 17.]

Let us bring in the women too. Who has not heard at Paris of her that
caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new
skin? There are who have drawn good and sound teeth to make their voices
more soft and sweet, or to place the other teeth in better order. How
many examples of the contempt of pain have we in that sex? What can they
not do, what do they fear to do, for never so little hope of an addition
to their beauty?

"Vallere queis cura est albos a stirpe capi