It will be a relief to the reader, after spending so much time in this
unwholesome atmosphere, to turn for a moment in the last place to a
record, unique and entirely credible, of a truly good and wholesome
woman, and of a long period of uninterrupted conjugal devotion. About
the year 8 B.C., not long before Ovid wrote those poems in which
married life was assumed to be hardly worth living, a husband in
high life at Rome lost the wife who had for forty-one years been his
faithful companion in prosperity, his wise and courageous counsellor
in adversity. He recorded her praises and the story of her devotion to
him in a long inscription, placed, as we may suppose, on the wall of
the tomb in which he laid her to rest, and a most fortunate chance has
preserved for us a great part of the marble on which this inscription
was engraved. It is in the form of a laudatio, or funeral encomium;
yet we cannot feel sure that he actually delivered it as a speech,
for throughout it he addresses, not an audience, but the lost wife
herself, in a manner unique among such documents of the kind as have
come down to us.
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