Yet this man, apparently without the slightest taste for philosophic inquiry, or even for the homilies which, in his day, had taken the place of real speculation, had a profound veneration for the Stoic martyrs, and, true gentleman as he was, he risked his life in the times of the last Terror to befriend them. It needed both nerve and dexterity to be the friend of philosophers in those days. In that perilous year, 93 A.D., when Pliny was praetor,(866) the philosophers were banished from the city. Yet the praetor visited Artemidorus in his suburban retreat, and, with his wonted generosity, he helped the philosopher to wipe out a heavy debt which he had contracted. One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Junius Mauricus, the brother of Arulenus Rusticus, who had been put to death by Domitian for writing a eulogy on Thrasea the Stoic saint, the champion of the higher life in Nero’s reign.(867) Junius Mauricus afterwards suffered exile himself in the same cause. He had charged himself with the care of his martyred brother’s children, and Pliny helped him to find a worthy husband for the daughter of Rusticus.(868) With Fannia the widow of Helvidius, and the daughter of Thrasea, Pliny’s intimacy seems to have been of the closest kind. From her he heard the tales, now too well worn, of the fierce firmness of the elder Arria in nerving her husband Paetus for death, and of her own determined self-immolation.(869) The mother of Fannia, the younger Arria, when Thrasea her husband was condemned to die in the reign of Nero, was only prevented from sharing his fate by the most earnest entreaties of her friends.(870) Fannia had followed Helvidius into exile in Nero’s reign,(871) and again under Vespasian, when the philosopher, with a petulance very unlike the reserve of Thrasea, brought his fate upon himself by an insulting disregard of the emperor’s dignity as first magistrate of the State, if not by revolutionary tendencies.(872) Fannia seems to have inherited many of the great qualities of her father Thrasea, the noblest and the wisest member of the Stoic opposition. He sprang from a district in Lombardy which was noted for its soundness and gravity of character. Unlike Paetus(873) and Helvidius, he never defied or intrigued against the emperor, even when the emperor was a Nero. And, though he belonged to the austere circle of Persius, he did not disdain to sing in tragic costume, at a festival of immemorial antiquity, in his native Patavium.(874) He performed his duties as senator with firm dignity, and yet with cautious tact. His worst political crime, and that which proved his ruin, was a severe reserve and a refusal to join in the shameful adulation of the matricide prince. He would not stoop to vote divine honours to the adulteress Poppaea, and for three years he absented himself from the Senate-house.(875) Yet, when the end came, he would not allow the fiery Arulenus Rusticus to imperil his future, by interposing