conclusion of the letter by Pliny saying that both he and his wife vie
with one another in seeing who can thank her the more. When Calpurnia
was obliged to leave her husband and go to Campania for her health, we
find Pliny writing her tender love-letters, describing his anxiety on
her behalf, telling her how he conjures up the very things he most
dreads, how he reads and re-reads her letters, which are his only
comfort, and begging her to write him certainly once, and if possible,
twice a day. Then in the prettiest passage of all, he tells her how, at
the hours when he used to visit her, he finds his feet carrying him to
the door of her chamber and turns away from the threshold of the empty
room, sad as a lover who finds the door closed against him. The
glimpses which Roman literature affords us of the conjugal happiness of
man and wife are comparatively few. Cicero, indeed, wrote in a similar
strain to his wife Terentia, and used even tenderer diminutives than
Pliny, but the sequel was that he soon afterwards divorced her and
married a rich ward. We do not know the sequel in the case of Pliny.
All we know is that he nearly lost his wife in a dangerous illness
brought on by a miscarriage, and that she accompanied him to Bithynia
during his governorship. Whether she bore him the child which he so
ardently desired is not stated, but the probabilities are against it, as
there is no mention of such an event in the letters. His correspondence
clearly proves that for all his ambition he was essentially a family
man. Nothing could be finer than his description of the heroic devotion
of Arria to her husband, and the pathos with which he describes the
conduct of Fannia, who concealed the death of her dearly loved son from
her sick husband Paetus, telling him the boy was well and resting
quietly, and controlling her motherly tears until she could keep them
back no longer, and rushed from the room to give them free course.
Then, "Satiata siccis oculis composito vultu redibat, tanquam orbitatem
foris reliquisset." No one could have written that beautiful sentence