The Senate exercises a heartless clemency; Servilia and Soranus are allowed to choose their own deaths. This faithful daughter, for seeking by means of her religion to aid her father, is privileged to die with him. With them also perished Thrasea, who had added to his crime of disbelieving in the deification of Poppæa that of neglecting to sacrifice for the preservation of Nero's beautiful voice!
A strikingly magnificent feature of the old Roman character is the manner in which these people met death. This was the one virtue which the Romans, down to the latest period of the decadence, did not cease to retain. In the most dissolute times, the Roman might live badly, but at least he could die bravely. This was the one opportunity always left when atonement might be made for the errors of life. In this ability to meet death with calm fortitude the women shared no less than the men. The maids and matrons of Rome were habituated by training and by their best traditional examples to look upon the possibility of exit from the world as an ever ready refuge from unendurable ills. Lucretia was for Roman matrons an ideal in her death as well as in her life; and they seem to have found it less irksome to follow her in the former respect than in the latter.
In the endeavor to show how, even in the days of Nero, when wickedness reached its climax, virtue and honor and devotion were not utterly gone out of the world, it has been necessary to adopt as illustrations some of the saddest of the many tragedies of human history. Neither side of any true picture of this period can be a pleasing one. Human life in the city of Rome during the middle of the first century of our era was for the most part either insane or sad. To exult in unrighteousness or mourn in bereavement was the lot of every prominent personage; for there were few quiet, honorable folk whom the hand of tyranny did not touch through their friends. Therefore, in the endeavor to show the better side of the life of this time, the necessity has been forced upon us to illustrate how the prevailing remnant of the ancient virtue was manifested in the devotion of women to their stricken husbands and friends, and in the firm manner in which they met their own death.