ria's life were
as courageous as the final one of death. "Mother has told me all kinds
of things about her," she said. "Once her husband and son were both
desperately ill, and the son died. It wasn't safe to tell grandfather,
and grandmother went through it all, even the funeral, without his
knowing it. She would go into his room and answer questions about
the boy, saying he had slept well and eaten more. When she couldn't
bear it any longer she would go to her own room and give way, and
come back again, calm and serene, to nurse her husband."

"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,