Delphi one of their children, who related to him this sad and touching story." Why this usually tolerant and always sensible emperor should have been so inexorable on this occasion is a mystery. There is another instance recorded, in which a woman of different character, presenting a petition of another kind, received an acquiescent response. A lady of rank pretending, as Suetonius puts it, to be desperately enamored of Vespasian,--it must have been that she hoped to achieve a permanent relationship with the widowed emperor,--requested that which it would have been more consistent with her modesty to have avoided. In addition to granting her petition, Vespasian made her a present of four hundred thousand sesterces. When his steward asked how he would have the sum entered in his accounts, he replied: "For Vespasian's being seduced." Considering, however, the parsimonious character which the historian attributes to this emperor, we are more inclined to think that the sum must have been entered on the credit side of the ledger. Vespasian died in A.D. 79. The humor--which is the same thing as saying the sanity--of the man is manifested in his remark, as he felt his life ebbing away: "Well, I suppose I shall soon be a god." Pliny says of him, "Greatness and majesty produced in him no other effect than to render his power of doing good equal to his desire." Suetonius declares: "By him the State was strengthened and adorned." In this same year occurred the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. These two cities, by the manner in which they were by one event both destroyed and preserved, have afforded us so much material for the study of Roman home life that a reference to them is entirely in accord with the plan of this book. Among the Romans, even more so than among ourselves, woman's life was home life. As we look into those Pompeian houses, which the catastrophe of a day rendered impregnable to the siege of centuries, we see in reality before us much which the scraps of information afforded by the ancient writers fail to make intelligible. By a singular good fortune, we are in possession of the narrative furnished by a trustworthy eyewitness of the disaster which overwhelmed Pompeii; it is contained in the two letters which Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus, informing him how Pliny and his mother watched the eruption of Vesuvius while his uncle was perishing in the attempt to rescue the wife of a friend and at the same time to satisfy his spirit of inquiry. We will not recite the well-known account, except as it refers to the women who, if for no other reason than that it was their fate or fortune to be present on this memorable occasion, deserve a mention in the history of Roman women. Pliny says: "On the twenty-fourth of August, about one in the afternoon, my uncle was desired by my mother to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape.... This extraordinary phenomenon excited his philosophical curiosity to