Abstract
This article analyzes the efficacy of female suicide in the Roman historian Tacitus' account of the age of Nero. I argue that women who reclaim authority over their bodies through suicide perform acts of courage and display feminine virtus. The freedwoman Epicharis introduces this theme (Tac. Ann. 15,57,1-2). The paper then turns to other female role models, including Seneca's wife Pompeia Paulina (Tac. Ann. 15,64,1-2), Antista Pollitta (Tac. Ann. 16,10,1-11,3), Servilia (Tac. Ann. 16,30,1-33,2), and Arria (Tac. Ann. 16,34,2). These women are models of fides and pietas, whose deaths are represented as a form of political protest; however, in the age of a tyrant, Tacitus suggests that survival is a more powerful expression of pietas.