fe.
She was perfectly sure that she did not miss the outer satisfactions
of being Ovid's wife. Except 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,