Examples of this in Roman life are so numerous that two thousand years have not sufficed to hide them all. Of women in high places who suffered death or banishment for their virtues, the list is a long one. Caligula decreed the same honors to his grandmother, the pure and high-minded Antonia, which had been given to Livia. But when this dignified matron, worthy daughter of the gentle Octavia, presumed to reprove him for his vices, he starved her to death. Vitellius banished his mother, Sextilia, a woman of admirable character, because she wept at his elevation to the throne. This was a reproach which he could not brook, and, failing to break her heart by his cruelties, he took her life, or made it so intolerable that she was forced to end it herself. It was impossible for a good woman to stay in the palace, and the Empress Galeria begged permission to retire to a modest dwelling on the Aventine. Domitian ordered a vestal, charged with scandalous acts which were denied and not proved, to be buried alive; but he consistently marked virtue for persecution, hesitated at no crime, and declared a woman to be “a natural slave, with man for her divinely appointed master.” Carrying this to its logical conclusion, he made the Palatine unsafe for any woman. That the great heart of Roman womanhood was on the side of loyalty and virtue, and looked upon conjugal infidelity as a sin to be frowned upon even in men, is shown by their attitude toward Nero when he sent away his young, lovely, and innocent wife, Octavia, to marry the most dissolute woman of the time. Many men remonstrated, and women rose in a body to demand her return. For the moment he thought it best to yield to the popular clamor, but he soon invented a pretext to send her to the long silence from which there is no return. Yet she was beautiful, of cloudless fame, and had lived hardly twenty years! Roman history is full of instances of moral heroism on the part of women, that had no counterpart among men, and of feminine virtue held at the expense of life. Servilia, the youthful daughter of Soranus, took upon herself a fault for which it was sought to compass her father’s death, and not being able to save him, died with him. Women in great numbers retired in sad dignity from a society whose current of vice they were powerless to change. A stately and pathetic figure is Pomponia Græcina, who wore mourning for forty years, and never smiled after her friend Julia, the daughter of Drusus, was murdered by Messalina. It was a pitiless world in which neither virtue nor life was safe, but it had its heroines, and they were not few.