“Am I to listen to you who could go on living after Scribonianus died in your arms?”

It was this sentence which alerted everyone to her intention of dying alongside Paetus.

Her son-in-law, Thrasea, attempted to persuade her to live, asking her if she would want her own daughter to kill herself if he were sentenced to death. Arria insisted that she would if her daughter (also called Arria) had lived as long and happily with Thrasea as she herself had with Caecina.

She was watched very closely from that point onwards but, realising this, Arria said that they could not stop her from dying. Having pointed this out she ran, head first, in to a wall and knocked herself out cold. When she came to, she cried:

“I told you I would do it the hard way if you stopped me from doing it the easy way.”

Arria was eventually permitted to join her husband in a “noble death” (falling on one’s own sword/dagger).

- Definition of Arria, Webster’s Online Dictionary.

2. Ten years ago, the Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodóvar called Elena Anaya and asked to meet. She went to Madrid and immediately the director started to apologise profusely; he had a tiny role in his new project, he explained, but he couldn’t imagine anyone else playing it. The young actor told him to stop: “I said to him I would be a vase or a lampshade if he wanted – facing a wall or whatever,” she remembers now. The film was Talk to Her and Almodóvar was not exaggerating; Anaya’s part is so small that when her father went to the premiere, he didn’t even notice she was in it.

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