Nero meanwhile, having no personal hatred against Paulina and
not wishing to heighten the odium of his cruelty, forbade her death. At the
soldiers' prompting, her slaves and freedmen bound up her arms, and stanched
the bleeding, whether with her knowledge is doubtful. For as the vulgar are
ever ready to think the worst, there were persons who believed that, as long
as she dreaded Nero's relentlessness,
she sought the glory of sharing her husband's death, but that
after a time, when a more soothing prospect presented itself, she yielded to
the charms of life. To this she added a few subsequent years, with a most
praiseworthy remembrance of her husband, and with a countenance and frame
white to a degree of pallor which denoted a loss of much vital energy.
Seneca meantime, as the tedious process of death still lingered on,
begged Statius Annæus, whom he had long esteemed for his faithful
friendship and medical skill, to produce a poison with which he had some
time before provided himself, the same drug which extinguished the life of
those who were condemned by a public sentence of the people of
Athens. It was brought to him and he drank it in vain,
chilled as he was throughout his limbs, and his frame closed against the
efficacy of the poison. At last he entered a pool of heated water, from
which he sprinkled the nearest of his slaves, adding the exclamation, "I
offer this liquid as a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer." He was then
carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated, and he was
burnt without any of the usual funeral rites. So he had directed in a
codicil of his will, when even in the height of his wealth and power he was
thinking of his life's close.