of those noble consolations which she must derive from the contemplation of his virtuous life. But Paulina declared that she would die with him, and Seneca, not opposing the deed which would win her such permanent glory, and at the same time unwilling to leave her to future wrongs, yielded to her wish. The veins of their arms were opened by the same blow; but the blood of Seneca, impoverished by old age and temperate living, flowed so slowly that it was necessary also to open the veins of his legs. This mode of death, chosen by the Romans as comparatively painless, is in fact under certain circumstances most agonizing. Worn out by these cruel tortures, and unwilling to weaken his wife's fortitude by so dreadful a spectacle, glad at the same time to spare himself the sight of _her_ sufferings, he persuaded her to go to another room. Even then his eloquence did not fail. It is told of Andrè Chénier, the French poet, that on his way to execution he asked for writing materials to record some of the strange thoughts which filled his mind. The wish was denied him, but Seneca had ample liberty to record his last utterances. Amanuenses were summoned, who took down those dying admonitions, and in the time of Tacitus they still were extant. To us, however, this interesting memorial of a Pagan deathbed is irrevocably lost. Nero, meanwhile, to whom the news of these circumstances was taken, having no dislike to Paulina, and unwilling to incur the odium of too much bloodshed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her wounds to be bound. She was already unconscious, but her slaves and freedmen succeeded in saving her life. She lived a few years longer, cherishing her husband's memory, and bearing in the attenuation of her frame, and the ghastly pallor of her countenance, the lasting proofs of that deep affection which had characterised their married life. Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these protracted and useless sufferings, he begged his friend and physician Statius Annaeus to give him a draught of hemlock, the same poison by which the great philosopher of Athens had been put to death. But his limbs were already cold, and the draught proved fruitless. He then entered a bath of hot water, sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with the words that he was pouring a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called _sudatoria_, and stifled with its steam. His body was burned privately, without any of the usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish, expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great wealth and conspicuous power.