Pompeia Paulina

1st century) was the wife of the statesman, philosopher, and orator Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and she was part of a circle of educated Romans who sought to lead a principled life under the emperor Nero.

[6] Another member of the family, Aulus Pompeius Paulinus, served as legate in Lower Germany around 55 AD and is thought to have been her brother.

Seneca wrote the epistle just after he had travelled to his Nomentum villa from Rome where he had been feeling unwell:[8] Although Paulina held me back I insisted on leaving.

I had on my lips that comment of milord Gallio: when he began to feel fever in Achaea he immediately embarked on shipboard, protesting that this sickness came not from his body but the place itself.

So my dear Paulina can hold me in her debt not only for her fear but for my own.In the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy, Nero ordered Seneca as his former advisor and tutor to kill himself and sent soldiers to see that the deed was done.

[14] Jean-Joseph Taillasson's 1791 painting Pauline, femme de Sénèque, rappelée à la vie is unique in focusing on Paulina to the exclusion of Seneca.

[13] Pompeia Paulina is one of the 106 famous women described by Giovanni Boccaccio in his De mulieribus claris as biography 94.

[15][16][17][18] Similarly she was one of three Roman women eulogised by Michel de Montaigne in his Essais 2.35 "De trois bonne femmes":[19][20] To which Paulina, having a little recovered her spirits, and warmed the magnanimity of her courage with a most generous affection, replied—"No, Seneca,” said she, “I am not a woman to suffer you to go alone in such a necessity: I will not have you think that the virtuous examples of your life have not taught me how to die; and when can I ever better or more fittingly do it, or more to my own desire, than with you?