Pliny gives an account of an incident showing similar conjugal devotion and self-sacrificing courage. "I was sailing lately," says he, "on our Lake Larius, when an elderly friend pointed out to me a house, one of whose rooms projected above the waves. 'From that spot,' he said, 'a townswoman of ours threw herself out with her husband. The latter had long been ill, suffering from an incurable ulcer. When she was convinced that he could not recover from his disease, she exhorted him to kill himself, and became his companion in death--nay, rather his example and leader, for she tied her husband to her and jumped into the lake.'" This was a woman of the common citizens; we do not even know her name. Modern times have no examples to show of a closer marital sympathy than this. Our ideas compel us to deprecate the act of self-destruction; but we cannot question, or more than rival, such devotion. The like degree of faithfulness between married couples was common among the Romans; and this was their manner of showing it. We have, more than once, seen the statement advanced in all seriousness by well-informed writers and public speakers that marital affection, in the modern understanding of the expression, was almost unknown among the ancients. The object of the contention is to enhance the appreciation of the effects of Christianity; but the argument is as absurdly inconsistent with history as it is with common sense. True, Christianity discourages conjugal unions in which that affection does not exist, but it does not create it; nor was there anything whatever in pagan customs or institutions to prevent the existence of the warmest and purest affection between husband and wife. The sole conditions in the ancient world that militated against pure and constant married love were the customary unions of expediency and the inferior position of the wife. As to the first of these customs, it is by no means unknown in the modern world and to Christian times; in regard to the second, the Roman wife in the period with which we are now engaged was almost equally as well off as her modern descendant.