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Sunday, August 29, 2010 - 12:23 PM
With equal courage Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, his mother-in-law Sextia, and
his daughter Pollutia submitted to death. They were hated by the emperor
because they seemed a living reproach to him for the murder of Rubellius
Plautus, son-in-law of Lucius Vetus. But the first opportunity of unmasking
his savage wrath was furnished by Fortunatus, a freedman, who having embezzled
his patron's property, deserted him to become his accuser. He had as his
accomplice Claudius Demianus, whom Vetus, when proconsul of Asia, had imprisoned
for his gross misdeeds, and whom Nero now released as a recompense for
the accusation.
When the accused knew this and saw that he and his freedman were
pitted against each other on an equal footing, he retired to his estate
at Formiae. There he was put under the secret surveillance of soldiers.
With him was his daughter, who, to say nothing of the now imminent peril,
had all the fury of a long grief ever since she had seen the murderers
of her husband Plautus. She had clasped his bleeding neck, and still kept
by her the blood-stained apparel, clinging in her widowhood to perpetual
sorrow, and using only such nourishment as might suffice to avert starvation.
Then at her father's bidding she went to Neapolis. And as she was forbidden
to approach Nero, she would haunt his doors; and implore him to hear an
innocent man, and not surrender to a freedman one who had once been his
colleague in the consulship, now pleading with the cries of a woman, now
again forgetting her sex and lifting up her voice in a tone of menace,
till the emperor showed himself unmoved alike by entreaty and
reproach.
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