" Uttering these words, with the spirit of a prophet, he opened
his veins. How wisely Arruntius anticipated death, the following times
will terribly demonstrate. For Albucilla; she aimed at her own life, but
the blow being impotent, she was by order of Senate dragged to execution
in the prison. Against the ministers of her lusts it was decreed, "that
Grasidius Sacerdos, formerly Praetor, should be exiled into an island;
Pontius Fregellanus be degraded from the Senate; and that upon Laelius
Balbus the same penalty be inflicted:" his punishment particularly proved
matter of joy, as he was accounted a man of pestilent eloquence, and
prompt to attack the innocent.
About the same time, Sextus Papinius of a Consular family, chose on a
sudden a frightful end, by a desperate and precipitate fall. The cause was
ascribed to his mother, who, after many repulses, had by various
allurements and the stimulations of sensuality, urged him to practices and
embarrassments from whence, only by dying, he could devise an issue. She
was therefore accused in the Senate; and, though in a prostrate posture
she embraced the knees of the Fathers, and pleaded "the tenderness and
grief of a mother, the imbecility of a woman's spirit under such an
affecting calamity;" with other motives of pity in the same doleful
strain; she was banished Rome for ten years, till her younger son were
past the age of lubricity.
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