imprisoned and sentenced to death by starvation (see Roman Charity). The scene is among the moral paintings in a Pompeiian bedroom that belonged to a child, along with the legend "in sadness is the meeting of modesty and piety". Pliny records medicinal uses of breast milk, and ranks it as one of the most useful remedies, especially for ailments of the eyes and ears. Wrapping one's head in a bra was said to cure a headache. Baring the breasts is one of the gestures made by women, particularly mothers or nurses, to express mourning or as an appeal for mercy. The baring and beating of breasts ritually in grief was interpreted by Servius as producing milk to feed the dead. In Greek and Latin literature, mythological mothers sometimes expose their breasts in moments of extreme emotional duress to demand that their nurturing role be respected. Breasts exposed with such intensity held apotropaic power. Julius Caesar indicates that the gesture had a similar significance in Celtic culture: during the siege of Avaricum, the female heads of household (matres familiae) expose their breasts and extend their hands to ask that the women and children be spared. Tacitus notes Germanic women who exhorted their reluctant men to valorous battle by aggressively baring their breasts. Although in general "the gesture is meant to arouse pity rather than sexual desire", the beauty of the breasts so exposed is sometimes in evidence and remarked upon. Because women were normally portrayed clothed in art, bared breasts can signify vulnerability or erotic availability by choice, accident, or force. Baring a single breast was a visual motif of Classical Greek sculpture, where among other situations, including seductions, it often represented impending physical violence or rape. Some scholars have attempted to find a "code" in which exposing the right breast had an erotic significance, while the left breast signified nurturing. Although art produced by the Romans may imitate or directly draw on Greek conventions, during the Classical period of Greek art images of women nursing were treated as animalistic or barbaric; by contrast, the coexisting Italic tradition emphasized the breast as a focus of the mother–child relationship and as a source of female power. The erogenous power of the breast was not utterly neglected: in comparing sex with a woman to sex with a boy, a Greek novel of the Roman Imperial era notes that "her breast when it is