The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint, the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable, side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which, from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny’s Letters. Brescia and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for frugality and severity.(839) And it was from among the youth of Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or Fabatus,(840) or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of vulgar self-assertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the lusts of the flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds. There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.(841)