g his young wife, Eponina,
behind him, and he had not the heart to forsake her. At moments of
disaster and sorrow we learn the true value of life; nor did Julius
Sabinus welcome the idea of death. He possessed a villa, beneath which
there stretched vast subterranean caverns, known only to him and two
freedmen. This villa he caused to be burned, and the rumour was spread
that he had sought death by poison, and that his body was consumed by
the flames. Eponina herself was deceived, says Plutarch, whose story I
follow, with the additions made thereto by the Comte de Champagny, the
historian of Antoninus; and when Martialis the freedman told her of her
husband's self-slaughter, she lay for three days and three nights on
the ground, refusing all nourishment. When Sabinus heard of her grief,
he took pity and caused her to know that he lived. She none the less
mourned and shed floods of tears, in the daytime, when people were
near, but when night fell she sought him below in his cavern. For seven
long months did she thus confront the shades, every night, to be with
her husband; she even attempted to help him escape; she shaved off his
hair and his beard, wrapped his head round with fillets, disguised him,
and then had him sent, in a bundle of clothes, to her own native city.
But his stay there becoming unsafe, she soon brought him back to his
cavern; and herself divided her stay between town and the country,
spending her nights with him, and from time to time going to town to be
seen by her friends. She became big with child, and, by means of an
unguent wherewith she anointed her body, her condition remained
unsuspected by even the women at the baths, which at that time were
taken in common. And when her confinement drew nigh she went down to
her cavern, and there, with no midwife, alone, she gave birth to two
sons, as a lioness throws off her cubs. She nourished her twins with
her milk, she nursed them through childhood; and for nine years she
stood by her husband in the gloom and the darkness. But Sabinus at last
was discovered and taken to Rome. He surely would seem to have merited
Vespasian's pardon. Eponina led forth the two sons she had reared in
the depths of the earth, and said to the Emperor, "These have I brought
into the world and fed on my milk, that we might one day be more to
implore thy forgiveness." Tears filled the eyes of all who were there;
but Caesar stood firm, and the brave Gaul at last was reduced to deman