A few women were also executed. I did not see why a woman’s sex should protect her from punishment if she had been guilty of fomenting rebellion, particularly a woman who had not married a man in the strict form of marriage but had kept her independence and her own property, and so could not plead coercion. They were brought to the scaffold in chains, just like their husbands, and on the whole showed much greater courage in facing death. One woman, Arria, Paetus’s wife but a close friend of Messalina’s, married in the strict form, could no doubt have won a pardon if she had dared to sue for
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