It was through the dagger mentioned above, and also the cupidity of a woman, that the whole conspiracy came to light. Scævinus impatiently ordered his freedman Milichus to put the weapon to the grindstone and bring it to a sharp point. Milichus, putting together this and other preparations he witnessed, guessed the project that was on foot. He told his suspicions to the emperor. Scævinus was arrested; but his bearing was so confident that the accuser would have broken down had not the wife of Milichus reminded him that "Natalis had taken part in many secret conversations with Scævinus, and that both were confidants of Piso." Then followed numerous arrests, confessions, and accusations, each conspirator endeavoring to lighten the burden of his own guilt by revealing how many there were who shared it. Lucan the poet even informed against his own mother, Atilla. Amid all this disaster, there was one spirit that remained undaunted, one tongue that could not be persuaded by promises or compelled by torment to confess and thus implicate others. Epicharis had been held in custody from the time of her unguarded enthusiasm in Campania. Nero recollected her, and commanded that she should be put to the torture. "But," says the historian, "neither stripes, nor fire, nor the rage of the tormentors, who tore her with the more vehemence, lest they should be scorned by a woman, could vanquish her." Thus the first day of torture was passed without producing any effect upon her. "The day following, as she was being brought back to suffer the same torments, riding in a chair, for all her members being disjointed, she could not support herself, taking off the girdle that bound her breast, she tied it in a noose to the canopy of the chair, and, placing her neck in it, hung upon it with the weight of her whole body, and thus forced out the slender remains of life. A freedwoman, by thus screening strangers and persons almost unknown to her, though pressed to divulge their names by the most extreme torture, exhibited an example which derived augmented lustre from the fact that freeborn persons, men, Roman knights, and Senators, untouched by the instruments of inquisition, all betrayed their dearest pledges of affection."