Chapter XXVI…

Chapter XXVI

A BANQUET AND A CONVERSATION

‘The citron board, the bowl embossed with gems, And tender foliage wildly wreathed around Of seeming ivy ... whate’er is known Of rarest acquisition; Tyrian garbs, Neptunian Albion’s high testaceous food, And flavoured Chian wines with incense fumed, To slake patrician thirst.’

DYER, Ruins of Rome.

We are far more likely to underrate than to exaggerate the splendour of a great Cæsarean banquet. It differed wholly from the soft, luxurious, disreputable feast of voluptuous debauchees at which we have been present in the house of Otho. Nothing was allowed to disturb its magnificent decorum.

Nero’s feast was arranged in the highest style of imperial grandeur. Many a gilded and ivory lectica, borne by African slaves in rich liveries and surrounded by crowds of freedmen and clients, had been carried down the Sacred Way and the Street of Apollo; and if any distinguished nobles looked through the curtains the populace raised a cheer. The guests were set down under the great arch of the state entrance.

The noblest senators were there, and the representatives of the oldest families of Rome, and not a few who were destined to wear hereafter the purple shroud of imperial power. Most of them came dressed in togas of dazzling whiteness, and there were few who did not display the broad purple band of the senator, or at least the narrower band of the Roman knight. The knights were conspicuous by their large gold rings, the senators by the crescent of silver or of ivory which they wore in the front of their shoes. Those who, like Otho, were professional dandies were clothed in the most elaborate dresses, but nearly all the guests wore gay tunics under their white togas, which, during the banquet, they laid aside for the lighter and more elegant loose dress of green, violet, or other vernal colours. Nero himself received them in a paludament bordered with golden stars. Agrippina was dressed in robes of rich violet, and on her neck was a great opal from the spoils of Mithridates. Octavia had arrayed herself in one of the most costly dresses from the imperial wardrobe, and her stola was of that amethystine tint the use of which Nero afterwards reserved for himself alone.

But many of the other ladies were hardly less splendid in their attire. The necklaces which reached to their breasts had often as many as fifty fine rubies dependent from their links of gold. Some of them carried fans of peacocks’ feathers. Some were dressed in robes variegated with soft and brilliantly coloured plumage; the mantles of others had broad bands of gold sewed across the folds at the breast; others wore robes of interchanging sheen, or of the favourite mallow-colour, or Coan dresses of fine linen, woven with gold thread. The whole atrium looked like a bed of flowers, and even the pavement flashed with the light of jewelled feet.

When the guests entered the vast triclinium they were almost dazzled with the display of splendour which greeted them. Beautiful statues of youths stood round the room, holding in their hands lamps of gold, which filled the house with the fragrance of perfumed oil. Other cressets of fantastic workmanship hung by golden chains from the gilded fretwork of the roof, which was so constructed that its aspect and colouring could be altered between each course, and that scented essences and little presents of flowers and ornaments could be showered down upon the guests. The great triclinia and sigma-tables of Mauretanian citron and ivory blazed with gold and silver. The goblets from which the guests drank were enriched with gems. The oldest and richest wines of the Opimiam, Falernian, and Setine vintages stood cooling in vases full of snow, round which were twined wreaths of ivy and of roses. In front of Nero’s seat was a superb candelabrum of solid gold representing a tree with lamps hanging from its boughs like golden fruit. It belonged to the Palatine Temple of Apollo, and had been one of the spoils taken by Alexander the Great at the sack of Thebes.[58] Among the other ornaments of the table were a handled vase of white and purple, for which Nero had paid a million sesterces, and the myrrhine goblet which alone Augustus had reserved for himself from the treasures of Cleopatra. There were also some of the vasa diatreta, curious triumphs of art in which a reticulated shell-work of pale blue was fastened by threads of glass to the opalescent vase within. Even the sawdust which was scattered over the polished floor was dyed with minium and breathed of saffron. Underneath the tables had been sprinkled a mixture of vervain and maidenhair, which was believed to promote hilarity in the guests.[59] Vitellius, as he gloated on the veins of the thyine table at which he sat, and the glories with which it was laden, exclaimed, ‘If Jupiter and Nero were both to invite me to dinner, I should accept the invitation of Nero.’[60]

Even the ancients had a custom closely analogous to our ‘saying grace.’ Before the guests sat down, a number of boys, in white robes of byssus, placed upon the table figures of the lares, and carrying round a jar of wine, exclaimed, ‘May the gods be favourable!’

When the ice had been broken by the usual commonplaces, there was no lack of animated and even brilliant conversation among the most polished representatives of a society in which conversation was an art. Much of the talk, indeed, was trivial, and much was scandalous. This was the inevitable result of a tyranny which had driven even literature into such safe ineptitudes as the imaginary conversations between a mushroom and a fig-pecker, which had earned an immense reward from the Emperor Tiberius. Seneca, Burrus, and Pætus Thrasea, who were present and sat at the same sigma, talked on the foreign affairs of the Empire, canvassed the doings of Felix in Palestine and the movements of Tiridates in Armenia. Lucan was eagerly discussing with Otho the sources of the Nile. Not a few of the ladies were listening to stories of magic and vampires and were-wolves told them by travelled youths from Athens or Ephesus, and gossip amply filled up the talk of others.

Britannicus, with some of the youngest scions of noble families, sat, instead of reclining, at a lower table than the elder guests. Augustus had introduced, and Claudius had kept up, the custom of young guests dining on these public occasions in less state, and being served with a less luxurious meal.

The boy had no suspicion of danger, for Acte, though surprised not to have heard from Onesimus, did not know that her purpose had failed in consequence of the levity and folly of her foster-brother. The face of the young prince was radiant, for his heart was full of peace. His whole soul seemed to be expanded by the larger horizons which had opened before him since he had learnt about the truths and promises of the new faith. The light of the dawn, which shone for him upon the distant hills, seemed to shed its rays even upon the evil and troubled world. He maintained a pleasant talk, broken by many a happy and innocent laugh. His peril had been mercifully hidden from him, and on the previous night he had had a dream so happy, and so unlike anything which he had imagined as possible, that he hardly knew how to tell it to Titus and Clemens, who sat on either side of him.

In his dream he had seemed to himself to be sinking to sleep amid strains of melody more tender than any which he had ever heard. And, while his soul was thus lapped in Elysium, a winged youth, whose face looked pure as the flowers of spring, and whose wings were coloured like the rainbow, had come to him and offered him his choice between purple with a diadem, and a white robe with a wreath of lilies. He had chosen the white robe, and with a radiant smile the Vision dropped on the ground the purple robe, and Britannicus saw that it was rent with dagger-thrusts and stained with blood. Then the youth had taken Britannicus by the hand and led him through a vale of fire unhurt into a pleasant land beyond. Bright hands had there clothed him in the robe of shining white, and had placed the wreath of lilies round his hair. After that he looked up, and on every side of him were clouds of light, full of glittering faces; and two other winged youths grasped him by the hands, and led him along a vista of light towards a throne, which looked like a sapphire; but, before he could see who sat thereon, he awoke in such an ecstasy that he lay quivering with joy till the music and the fragrance died away. Never in all his life had he experienced such unutterable blessedness, and it seemed to him as if he could never be unhappy again.

But while Britannicus was thus supremely happy the lord of the banquet was miserable. How could he be happy? On one side of him reclined his mother, once so passionately fond of him, now bitter, furious, and sarcastic--a woman whose life was poisoned by the disappointment of her ambition. On the other side of him reclined his wife, Octavia, young, beautiful, not unaccomplished, but to him cold as death. He could buy the venal love of as many as he chose, but he could command no love that was not either purchasable or shameful. The fires of Tartarus were burning on the altar of his Penates, and his own heart was smouldering with secret crimes, which could only be shared with the most villainous or the most despicable of mankind.

And of all the guests how few were even tolerably happy, except one or two of the boys at the table of Britannicus! Under that thin film of iridescence what abysses of misery filled the Stygian pool of the society which lay beneath!

* * * * *

Among the guests that night was the young king Herod Agrippa II. He sat in a conspicuous position at the highest table. As a boy he had been at Rome, but this was the first time that he had been present at any public gathering for many years. He had only just arrived on a mission from Palestine. He had inherited Chalcis, the little kingdom of his uncle Herod, but he was anxious to add to this domain the city of Tiberias and part of Galilee, where Herod Antipas had ruled, and this year the Emperor granted his wish. Nero had entrusted him to the care of Gallio, with whom he was eagerly conversing in Greek, and whom he overwhelmed with multitudes of questions. They spoke low, and, as they reclined at the banquet side by side, there was little chance of their being overheard, though their conversation was often of that kind which was the more interesting from its being somewhat dangerous.

‘How gay Cæsar’s guests must be,’ said Agrippa; ‘they are all smiles!’

‘It is with many of them the fixed smile of a mask,’ said Gallio. ‘They smile to hide their misery.’

It was necessary for the success of Agrippa’s mission that he should stand well at Rome, and know something about the chief members of Roman society. He therefore asked Gallio the names and history of some of the guests. We will follow his pointed fingers, and perhaps the answers of Gallio may enable us to realise something more of the condition of things in pagan Rome. For Gallio did not spare a single reputation. He did not require to invent. Malignity had no need to search with candles. She only had to tell the truth, and there were few guests there whose reputation did not wither at her breath.

Agrippa first wanted to know something about the ladies who were present, and Gallio drew caustic sketches of Poppæa, on whom Nero’s eyes were constantly fastened, and of Calvia Crispinilla. Agrippa’s attention was next attracted by Domitia Lepida, whose tutulus, or conical head-dress, it was the exclusive task of a slave-maiden to adorn.

‘That lady,’ said Gallio, ‘is the Emperor’s aunt. She used to neglect him, but now that he is Emperor she worships the very ground on which he treads.’

‘And who is that lady in the sea-green Coan dress whose hair seems to be powdered with gold dust?’

‘That is Junia Silana, nominally a bosom friend of Agrippina, really her deadliest enemy. Observe that lady near her, whose grey hairs are so elaborately dyed, and her cheeks so thickly rouged, and who is dressed with such juvenility. She is Ælia Catella. Would you believe that, though she is nearly eighty, she still dances?’

‘O tempora! O mores!’ said Agrippa. ‘That exclamation sufficed for Cicero a hundred years ago; but he would want stronger expletives now.’

‘I will give you Horace for your Cicero. Did he not sing--

‘“What has not cankering Time made worse? Viler than grandsires, sires beget Ourselves, yet baser, soon to curse The world with offspring baser yet.”’

‘Is there no honest and virtuous woman here?’ asked the young king.

Gallio pointed a little mockingly to the king’s sister, the beautiful Berenice, who had come with him to Rome. She was now twenty-six, but had lost none of her voluptuous loveliness. In her ears were earrings, each formed of three orient pearls, and the famous diamond on her finger--a gem of priceless value, her brother’s gift--blazed conspicuously at every movement of her hand.

Agrippa blushed and bit his lips; and Gallio always courteous, added with seriousness, ‘There are some, but not many. My brother, Seneca, is not complimentary to the ladies. He speaks of them as “animal impudens, ferum, cupiditatum incontinens,”[61] which is, to say the least, ungrateful of him, for our mother, Helvia, was perfect; and our aunt, Marcia, gained him his earliest honours; and his own wife, Paulina--she sits there--is one of the Roman matrons who almost deserve the obsolete epitaph, “She stayed at home; she spun wool.” I think, however, that Seneca exaggerates the number of the ladies, who, he says, count the years not by the consuls, but by the number of their divorced husbands.’[62]

‘Point me to another such lady as Paulina,’ said Agrippa.

‘There is one,’ answered Gallio, bending his head towards the Empress Octavia; ‘and there is another.’ He pointed to a lady dressed simply in a white stola beneath a light-blue palla, who wore no jewels except the cameos which fastened the loops of her sleeve. It was Antistia, the wife of Antistius Verus, the daughter of Rubellius Plautus. ‘Antistia,’ said Gallio[*7] ‘is as pure and devoted a lady as you could find anywhere. There, too, sits Servilia, daughter of Barea Soranus; and yonder is Arria, wife of Pætus Thrasea. Pomponia Græcina, wife of Aulus Plautius, is the sweetest and noblest matron in Rome; but she avoids Court society, and she is not here. Nor is Claudia, the fairest of maidens, the daughter of King Caractacus.’

‘And who is that handsome and venerable old man at the second table?’

‘The handsome and venerable old man--his name is Domitius Afer--is, I am sorry to say, a handsome and venerable old scoundrel. He is, or rather was, the greatest orator of his day--as the Emperor Tiberius said, a born orator, suo jure disertus. But he has been neither more nor less than an informer, and one of bad character. He would have lost his head under Caligula, but he pretended to be so thunderstruck and overwhelmed by the mad Emperor’s eloquence that he not only saved his life but rose into high favour. But it is time for him to leave off making speeches. Whenever he attempts a great oration now, half his hearers laugh and the other half blush.’

‘And the young man near him?’

‘King,’ said Gallio, ‘I shall begin to think that you are a physiognomist, and are picking out some of the worst persons present. That is another informer; his name is M. Aquillius Regulus. He is a fortune-hunter as well as an informer. He has earned by infamy a fortune of sixty million sesterces. I had better tell you at once that there are several of them nearly as bad. That brazen-faced man is Suilius Nerulinus, who helped Messalina to ruin Valerius Asiaticus. He was convicted of taking bribes as a judge even in the reign of Tiberius. And, worst of the whole company, there is Eprius Marcellus, a splendid orator, but a man, as you see, of savage countenance, whose eyes flash their fiercest flame, and whose voice rolls its loudest thunder, when he is denouncing any person of special virtue.’

‘Well,’ said Agrippa, ‘unless I am tiring your courtesy I will turn to another table. Who is that extremely stout personage with a red face, bushy eyebrows, and apoplectic neck, who is devouring his dainties with such brutal voracity?’

‘He is a very distinguished person named Vitellius, chiefly distinguished, however, for eating and drinking. He is descended from a cobbler and a cook. He began his childhood with Tiberius at Capreæ. His father set up golden statues of the freedmen Narcissus and Pallas among his household gods, by which merit he won a statue on the rostra. Our friend then turned charioteer to please Gaius, gambler to please Claudius, and has now curried favour with Nero by urging him to sing. His domestic history is not amiable. He had by his first wife a son named Petronianus, to whom she left her wealth. Vitellius made him drink a cup of poison, which he says that the youth had prepared for him.’

‘I shall begin to believe,’ said Agrippa, ‘that the Greek sage was right when he said, “Most men are bad.” Why, Berytus would not show more dubious characters--nor even Jerusalem.’

‘But there are some honest men,’ said Gallio, ‘as well as virtuous women. Burrus is fairly honest; Fenius Rufus is indifferently honest; Pætus Thrasea is honest, though in these days even he has to dissemble; Helvidius Priscus, Barea Soranus, and Arulenus Rusticus, friends of Thrasea, are as honest as the day. So is that old man Lucius Saturninus, who, strange to say, in spite of his worth, has reached the age of ninety-three without being either killed or banished.’

‘I will only ask you one more name. Who is the man to whom Domitius Afer is talking?’

‘His name is Fabricius Veiento. At present he is only known as the editor of a book called “Codicilli,” which is immensely popular and is bringing him in a fortune. It is composed of the spiciest libels against every senator of note whom he ventures to attack. He has found that one secret of getting rich is to pander to the appetite for scandal, and half the people who are talking so fast around us are whispering stories which he has discovered or invented for them.’

At this moment their conversation was rudely interrupted.

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Chapter XXVII

DEATH IN THE GOBLET

‘Fratrum, conjugum, parentum neces, alia solita parentibus ausi.’--TAC. Hist. v. 3.

A cry rang through the banquet-room!

It was the cry of Titus. Every guest started as if a thunderbolt had fallen. In that guilty time, when obscene wings flapped about so many gilded roofs, when the sword dangled by a hair over so many noble heads, when foes cut throats by a whisper, when any day might expose a man to denunciation for imaginary crimes by one of the slaves whom he regarded as his natural enemies, any sudden movement, any unexpected event, was enough to drive the blood from the blanching cheek. But when such a cry--so wild, so startling--rang over the tumultuous sounds of an imperial banquet, they knew not whether the very earth was not about to open beneath their feet.

What had happened?

Britannicus, as we have said, was in no alarm that evening. Of all times and places it seemed the least likely to attempt his poisoning. The fact that at this feast he had his appointed prægustator, and that two deaths would terribly reveal a crime, was, he thought, a sufficient safeguard.

But these were the very reasons why Tigellinus had arranged that Nero’s desire for his brother’s murder should be carried out that night. He fancied that no one would suspect Nero of choosing a scene of such festive splendour and unusual publicity for a crime so dark.

The ingenuity of wickedness easily got over the difficulty about the prægustator. This man was one of the smooth, civil, plausible wretches who abounded at that epoch. He was a Greek slave named Syneros, trained in the worst vices and ready to sell his soul at any time for a few sestertia. He handed to Britannicus a myrrhine goblet filled with some mulled Falernian, which he tasted first. It had been purposely made so hot that no one could drink it. The prince gave it back, and told Syneros to put some cold water to it. The slave did so, and into that cold water--which he had hidden in a vial of Alexandrian glass behind one of the coolers full of snow--had been already dropped the deadly potion which Locusta had given to Nero.

Britannicus drank it unsuspectingly, and Titus had taken it up and drunk a little, when his eye caught sight of Britannicus, and with the cry which had alarmed those three hundred guests he had dropped the myrrhine vase, crashing it to shivers on the mosaic floor.

For Britannicus had scarcely finished his draught when with one wild look he clutched the arm of Titus, and then, half supported by Clemens, sank speechless and breathless from his seat. It seemed as if in one instant the swift poison had pervaded all his limbs. His last conscious thought had been for another. Titus remembered with undying gratitude, that the clutch upon his arm had saved his life. He felt sure that with one and the same flash of intuition Britannicus had recognised that the draught was poisoned, and had tried to prevent Titus from drinking it.

But when the guests turned their eyes to the table where the young prince was sitting they saw the terror-stricken look on the faces of Titus and the other boys, and Flavius Clemens supporting in his arms the white and convulsed form of the son of Claudius. At that spectacle many of them leapt from their couches, and even began to fly in different directions. Who could tell what charges of plots might be founded on such an incident, and who might be involved in them? But those who were more familiar with the mysteries of the Court, though they had started to their feet, stood rooted in their places with their eyes fixed on Nero, waiting for some sign to guide or reassure them.

And then Nero showed the consummate coolness of villainy which could hardly have been expected from so young a murderer. He was short-sighted, but he could very well guess what had happened, and he had his little speech ready prepared. Indeed, he had been repeating it over to himself while he vainly endeavoured to get up a conversation with his mother or his wife. Putting his emerald to his eye,[63] he raised himself on one elbow from his soft mass of cushions, and said, amid the dead silence--

‘Oh, I see what is the matter. My brother Britannicus, poor boy, has been afflicted from childhood with the comitial disease. His epileptic fit will soon be over, and all his senses will return. Pray resume your places, my friends. Do not let the mirth of the banquet be disturbed by this little accident.’

Agrippina was in a ferment of alarm. She could scarcely believe her ears. That ready lie about the epilepsy! She knew--and many of the guests knew--that Britannicus was a fine strong lad, who had never had an epileptic attack in his life. One thing only could have happened. Britannicus, in whom rested the last hopes of her vengeance and her ambition, must have been poisoned by his brother. Infernal gods! was it possible? Could this have been the deed of that youth whom it seemed but yesterday that she had clasped to her bosom as a lovely, rosy, smiling child? Panic, consternation seized her. ‘How long,’ she thought, ‘will he abstain from the prophesied murder of me, his mother?’ She panted; she shuddered in every limb; she required all her efforts not to faint; she grew white and red by turns, and those who were watching her saw the cup of wine which she seized shake so violently in her trembling hand that she spilled half its contents over her bosom.

‘She, at least, is as innocent of this as Octavia herself,’ whispered Seneca to Burrus. ‘But, oh! horror! where will these things end?’

Octavia looked as though she had been turned to marble. She spoke no word; she made no sign. Agrippina had tried in vain to prevent her speaking countenance from betraying the violence of her emotions; but Octavia, young as she still was, and little more than a child, had been taught from her earliest years to hide her emotions under a mask of impassibility; and, indeed, the blow which had thus fallen upon her was beyond her power to realise. The awful grief struck her dumb. One shrinking motion, one stifled scream, and she reclined there as though she were dead--as pale and as motionless, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, conscious of nothing, her white cheek looking all the more ghastly from the crimson roses which circled her dark tresses and fell twining over her fair neck.

But how should the mirth of the banquet be resumed? The stereotyped smile on the features of Seneca looked like a grin of anguish. The brow of Pætus Thrasea was dark as a thunder-cloud. Clemens and several of the prince’s boyish friends were weeping audibly and uncontrollably, while Titus, already feeling ill as well as terrified, was sobbing with his head on the table. Nero himself in vain attempted a fitful hilarity, which could wake no echo among guests of whom many--

‘Like the Ithacensian suitors of old time, Stared with great eyes, and laughed with alien lips, And knew not what they meant.’

So dense a cloud fell over their minds that it was a relief to all when, without waiting for the termination of the banquet, Nero dismissed his guests, availing himself of the excuse that the comitial disease had always been regarded as an evil omen, and that, though he hoped his brother’s attack would prove but slight, he saw how deeply it had affected the spirits of his friends.

They had come to that superb feast in pride and gaiety; they hurried home in horror and alarm.

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Chapter XXVIII

THE LAST OF THE CLAUDII

‘Tu quoque extinctus jaces Deflende nobis semper, infelix puer, Modo sidus orbis, columen Augustæ domus, Britannice.’

SENECA, Octavia.

The poor young prince was carried by the slaves to his cubiculum. The poison had been like a dagger-thrust; but he was not quite dead. He lay at first unconscious, his breast heaving with irregular spasmodic sighs. Acte stole into his chamber, wept over him, strove to revive him, and, if possible, to assuage his pangs. It was too late. He did not recognise her. The moment he could escape from the triclinium Titus came, and found the slave-boy Epictetus sitting at the foot of the couch, with his head covered. ‘He yet lives,’ said the boy, raising for one moment a cheek down which, in spite of every Stoic lesson, the tears chased each other fast. Titus sat down by his friend, called his name, clasped his hand, and wailed aloud without restraint. One almost imperceptible pressure of the hand proved that there was an instant recognition. A Christian slave had secretly brought Linus into the room, which was easy in so numerous a household; and bending over him Linus sprinkled his brow with pure water, raising up his eyes and his hands to heaven. None present knew what it meant; but Britannicus knew. A lambent smile lit his features for a moment, like the last gleam of a fading sunset, for he understood that he had been baptised.

It was the last conscious impression of his young life. The moment that the banquet ended, Octavia, still in her splendid apparel, hurried wildly to the chamber. It was a chamber of death. Already the incense was burning, already the cypress had been placed before the Propylæa of the Palatine. The boy lay there, silent, noble, beautiful, pale as a statue carved in alabaster; and Octavia disburdened the long-pent agony of repression in such a storm of weeping that her attendants tried to lead her away. But she tore off her jewels, and flung her arms round the corpse of her brother, and laid her head upon his breast, and sobbed aloud. Father, mother, brother, her first young and noble lover, Silanus--all who had ever loved and cared for her were gone. He was the last of all his race. The last male Claudius, whose line was derived through that long and splendid ancestry of well-nigh seven hundred years, was lying before her on that lowly bed!

He was to be buried that very night, as though he had been a pauper and not the noblest boy of an imperial aristocracy. There was something fatally suspicious in the rapidity with which every preparation was made.

The obolus for Charon was put under his tongue; the fair young body was arrayed in its finest robe, was laid on a bier, and was carried to the vestibule with its feet towards the door; and as it lay there Titus brought in his hand a wreath of lilies, which he had begged from the keeper of the exotic flowers, and placed it on the innocent forehead of his friend. He turned away with the words, which could scarcely make their way through sobs, ‘Farewell! forever farewell!’ But he never forgot that boyish affection; and long years after, when he was Emperor, he placed in the Palace a statue of Britannicus in gold, and at solemn processions he had an equestrian statuette of ivory carried before him which represented the young prince whose love to him had been far truer and closer than that of his own brother.

Only for one instant did Nero venture to look on his handiwork. He came into the vestibule in his festal robes, his eyes heavy, the garland still on his dishevelled hair, accompanied by Tigellinus and Senecio.

‘I suppose he died in the fit?’ he said to one of the slaves.

‘He breathed his last,’ answered the man, ‘within an hour of being carried from the feast.’

Something disquieted Nero. Furtively pointing his finger towards the dead boy, he said something to Tigellinus.

‘A little chalk will set that right,’ whispered Tigellinus in reply, and he gave an order into the ear of his confidential slave. Leave the corpse a moment,’ he said aloud to the attendants; ‘the Emperor wishes to take a last look at his brother.’

The slave of Tigellinus brought a piece of chalk; and Nero, with his own hand, chalked over some livid patches on the dead boy’s face, which already betrayed the horrible virulence of the poison.

‘Why linger in the charnel-house?’ said Senecio affectedly. ‘Cæsar, may we not have some more wine to refresh our sorrow?’

They turned away, and, before they were outside the hall, a light laugh woke a shuddering echo along the fretted roof.

The bearers were on the point of lifting the bier when Agrippina entered. The dullest of the spectators could see that there was nothing feigned in her anguish as she wept and tore her hair. She grieved for Britannicus, whom she had so irreparably wronged, but hers was a wild and selfish grief, the grief of rage and frustrated purposes. She had built upon this boy’s life to keep her son in terror of her influence. She saw now of what crimes Nero had already become capable. He who in so brief a space had developed into a fratricide, how long would it be ere he would spare the life of an obnoxious mother? She felt, even then, in a bitterness of soul which could not be expressed, that even-handed justice was commending the ingredients of the poisoned chalice to her own lips.

The obsequies were not only disgracefully hurried, but disgracefully mean. Every ceremony which marked a great public funeral was omitted. There were no lictors dressed in black; no siticines with mourning strains; nor præficæ, or wailing women; no lessus, or funeral dirge. Happily too, as some thought, there were not the customary buffoons, nor the archimimus to imitate the words and actions of the deceased. Though he was the noblest of the noble, no liberated slaves walked before his bier, nor men who wore the waxen images of his long line of ancestors. No relations followed him--men with veiled heads, women with unbound tresses. Many a freedman, even many a slave, had a longer funeral procession than the last of the Claudii.

They bore him to his funeral amid storms of rain, which seemed to betoken the wrath of Heaven. The spectators were few, but those few saw by the struggling light of their lanterns that where the rain had washed off the chalk the pale face was marked with patches of black. They saw this, and pointed it out to one another in silence.

The last offices were paid in haste by the drenched and half-frightened attendants. The body was laid on the small rough pyre. Julius Densus was there, and Pudens, and Titus, and Flavius Clemens. Nero had not the grace to be present. With averted face Pudens thrust in the torch. The rain had damped the wood, and at first it would not kindle, but they threw oil and resin into it. At last it blazed up; the body was consumed: the glowing embers were quenched with wine. A handful of white ashes in a silver urn, a sad memory in a few loving hearts, were all that remained on earth of the poisoned son of an emperor of Rome.

But, when all were gone, a few Christians stole from under the dense shadow of the trees in that lonely spot, and bowed their heads in prayer, and sang a low hymn. And among them was he whose hand of blessing had rested on the young prince’s head, and whose voice of prophecy had foretold his doom.

And to Pomponia Græcina and her husband, and to Pudens, Claudia, Titus, Epictetus, and one or two faithful slaves, the world was poorer than before; but in the heart of the hapless Octavia there was a void which on earth could never be filled up. And her heart would haply have broken altogether but for the consolations which she received from Pomponia, and from Tryphæna, her Christian slave. For Pomponia had received a letter from Ephesus, where, at that time, Paul of Tarsus was labouring; and the friend who wrote it told her something of Paul’s teaching respecting the resurrection of the dead. One passage in particular, which this friend quoted to her, rang in her memory: ‘It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’ And so, as there remained for Octavia less and less hope of any joy on earth, glimpses were opened to her more and more of a hope beyond the grave. And one passage in particular from one of the old Jewish books, which Linus had pointed out to Pomponia, seemed to her more lovely than any fragment of lyric song, and constantly woke a sweet echo in her thoughts. It was--

‘Thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall bring to life her shades.’

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Chapter XXIX

AGRIPPINA AT BAY

‘Caritas quæ est inter natos et parentes dirimi nisi detestabili scelere non potest.’--CIC. Læl. viii. § 28.

There were some who thought it an unparalleled tragedy that Britannicus should not only have died so young, but also at a banquet, and so suddenly, and by the hand of a bitter enemy, and under his very eyes. There were few in the Pagan world who realised the truth that he who needed their shuddering pity was not the boy who perished, but the youth who murdered him.

At first Nero was alarmed by what he had done. He thought that he would be haunted by the manes of the wronged Britannicus. He shunned Octavia, and if he met her was forced to avert his glance. He faced his mother with shy moroseness. He never dared to sleep alone. The sound of a shaken leaf terrified him. A thunderstorm, which happened a few days later, drove him into a paroxysm of terror, during which, like Gaius before him, he hid himself under a bed, and sent for the skin of a seal as a fancied protection against the flame of heaven.

But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God. The doom was past, but the punishment deferred. The most terrible part of his retribution was that he was let alone to fill to the brim the cup of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the punishment of sin, and the avenging scourge was put into the hand of his own vices. The first fearful crime which he had committed ought to have lit up his dark conscience with its fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for a moment, but only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense was hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into the execration of mankind.

What helped him to this rapid obduracy was the vileness and hypocrisy of the world around him.

The death of Britannicus had to be announced to the Senate. The eyes of Nero had to weep crocodile tears, and the pen of Seneca to be employed in venal falsities. No one could doubt the hand of Seneca in the elegant pathos of the sentence which told the Conscript Fathers that deaths so immature as that of Britannicus were subjects of such bitter grief that his funeral had been hurried over in accordance with the ancestral custom which forbade the protraction of anguish by public oration or funeral obsequies.

‘I have lost the aid of my brother,’ continued the specious oration which Nero learnt by heart; ‘no hopes are left to me save in the commonwealth. A prince like myself, who is now the sole survivor of a family born to the supremest dignity, needs all the love and all the help of the Senate and the people.’

Even the semblance of sorrow was abandoned almost before the cypress had been moved from the doors of the Palatine. Nero was anxious to implicate others as far as possible in the frightful responsibility which he had himself incurred. Britannicus had left a considerable heritage in houses, villas, and personal possessions, which had come to him from his father and mother. Nero, who as yet had not squandered a treasure which might well have been deemed inexhaustible, had no need of these things, and was eager to get rid of them. He therefore distributed them among leading senators, giving a pleasant villa to Seneca and a town house to Burrus. He thought that gifts would serve as a sort of hush-money, and both statesmen felt with inward anguish that they were the price of blood. Seneca was specially humiliated. He knew what men thought and said of him in secret, and his own conscience could not accept the facile excuse that it would have been fatal to refuse a largesse which was meant to bind his destiny irrevocably with that of the guilty Emperor. He thanked Nero for his munificence, and acted as if nothing had happened. Yet the inward voice spoke to him with unmistakable clearness. He called himself a Stoic: he wrote grand eulogies of virtue and simplicity. Ought he to have entered the magic circle of a court steeped in licentiousness and blood? Ought he to have yielded to the avarice which made his usury so notorious? Would Pætus Thrasea have accepted gifts intended to screen complicity with murder? Would such gifts have been offered to the modest poverty of Cornutus or Musonius? or, if so, would they not have faced exile or death rather than accept them? Conscience worked so painfully that he could not induce himself to visit the villa which had been presented to him on the death of Britannicus. ‘Alas!’ he moaned sadly to himself in the watches of the night, ‘it is a viscosum beneficium,--a kindness smeared with birdlime.’

But the great mass of the Roman world, lying as it did in wickedness, was pleased rather than otherwise to hear of the death--which they all knew to have been the murder--of the son of Claudius. The horrors of the civil wars were still vivid in many recollections, and knowing that rival princes rarely lived in concord, they hailed with satisfaction the bold iniquity which had succeeded in ridding them of a nightmare of the future. The story of the murder of a young and innocent prince, the only son of their late deified Emperor, sounded rather ugly, no doubt; but did not nine-tenths of them expose their own superfluous children? Had not Claudius himself exposed the infant of his wife Petina? And what was death? Was it not a dreamless sleep, which anyone might be glad to exchange for the present state of things, and which many of them would probably seek by suicide?

And why should Nero trouble himself any more about a death which scarcely caused so much as a ripple on the bitter and stagnant pool of Roman society? On the contrary he and all Rome felt a glow of conscious virtue when, a few days later, an order was given to execute a knight, named Antonius, as a poisoner, and publicly to burn his poisons. When Locusta heard that fact she smiled grimly. But what had she to fear?

There was one breast in which the earthquake of excitement, caused by the murder of Britannicus, did not soon subside. Octavia, in the depth of her anguish, had known where to find something of consolation. Not so Agrippina. To her also Nero had offered presents, which she refused with disdainful sullenness. Her soul was full of madness. Was she to be totally defeated by the slight, contemptible son on whom she had built all her hopes?

Not without a struggle would she abandon the power which it had been the object of her life to attain, and the fabric of which she had with her own hand shattered to the dust.

Suddenly as the Nemesis had come upon her, she would not yet admit herself to be defeated. She was rich; she would be yet richer. She had friends, and she held many a secret interview with them. Octavia might still become in her hands an engine for political purposes, and Agrippina constantly embraced and consoled her. Every tribune and centurion who attended her levées was received with extreme graciousness. She paid her court to all the nobles of high birth and promising ability. She thought that even now it was not too late to create a conspiracy, and put a fitting leader at the head of it.

But all her efforts were broken like foam on the rock of the Emperor’s deified autocracy and the unscrupulous wickedness of the favourites by whom he was surrounded. At the suggestion of Otho and Tigellinus, Nero dealt blow after blow at the dignity of his mother. One day she no longer saw the two lictors who attended her litter, and was told that they had been discharged by the Emperor. Soon afterwards she missed the accustomed escort of soldiers who guarded her chambers, and heard with sinking heart that they had been removed. Worst of all, she was suddenly deprived of the body-guard of tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired Germans, to whom she had grown attached, and who were the most splendid outward sign of her imperial station. And, as though all this were not enough, at last the final thunderbolt was launched. She received a message from her son that he had assigned to her, as her residence, the house of his grandmother Antonia. She was dismissed from the Palace in which so many of her years had been spent in order that the courtiers who thronged the audience-hall of the Emperor might have no excuse for paying their respects at the same time to her.

Her feelings, as she left the chambers of the Palatine for a private residence, must be imagined rather than described. Her heart was too dry for tears. She felt humiliated to the very dust, and tasted the bitterness of a thousand deaths. All hope of re-establishing her empire over the heart of her son was gone. Thenceforth he scarcely saw her. If he came to visit her, he came, as though to evidence his distrust, amid a throng of soldiers and centurions, did not speak to her in private, and departed after a cold, hurried, and formal interview.

She felt how poisonous was the fruit of ambition by which she had been allured. Her power had never been more than the pale reflection of the imperial despotism, and after her breach with Nero it crumbled to ashes.

From that moment she felt that the coloured bubble of her life had burst. Never had she been so wretched. Her exile at Pandataria had been but brief, and she was then young, and she had many schemes on hand, and might hope for immeasurable success. But now her last arrow had sped from the string, and had fallen useless to the ground. The cold shadow of her son’s displeasure blighted her whole being. She--in whose honour coins had been struck; in whose name decrees had run; under whose auspices colonies had been founded; to whom kings and governors had once made their appeal, and for whose ambition kingdoms had been too small--suddenly found she was nothing and nobody. Even such a creature as Calvia Crispinilla had more influence, and was more sought after than she. The house of Antonia, in which she lived, was shunned like a lazar-house by all who wished to stand well with Nero. No one visited her, no one consoled her, no one helped to dissipate her weariness. The only exceptions were a few ladies whom she knew too well to trust. They did not come to see her out of affection, but because they hated her, and liked to annoy her with the cold curiosity of an insulting pity. Among these was Junia Silana. In old days she had been a bosom-friend of the Augusta, but the ostensible friendship gave ample opportunity for feline amenities on both sides. Junia had been the wife of the handsome Silius, who had fallen a victim to the love of Messalina. In her early widowhood she had been sought in marriage by Sextius Africanus, but Agrippina, not wishing to see him made too powerful by the ample wealth of the childless Silana, had confidentially dissuaded him from the marriage, by telling him that Silana was a woman of dissolute character, and was now getting on in years. The secret had reached the ears of Silana, and while openly she continued to speak of her ‘sweetest and dearest Agrippina,’ she vowed an exemplary revenge.

And now that the time seemed ripe, she matured her plans.

It would be useless to trump up the old charges that Agrippina mourned the murder of Britannicus, or spread abroad the wrongs of Octavia. She determined to devise something entirely new, and to charge Agrippina with the design of marrying and forming a conspiracy with Rubellius Plautus, who, like Nero, was, on the mother’s side, a great-great-grandson of the deified Augustus. Silana sent two of her freedmen, Iturius and Calvisius, with this intelligence to Atimetus, a freedman of Domitia, Nero’s aunt. Atimetus had once been a fellow-slave with Paris. He went to his old friend, and urged him to go at once to Nero, and to denounce the supposed plot with all his consummate vehemence and skill.

The actor was not naturally a villain, but he had been trained in an abominable school, and had erased the words ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ from his vocabulary as completely as most of his contemporaries. That night, at a late hour, he hurried to the Emperor, not in the glittering dress which usually set off his perfect beauty, but in dark and disordered array. His familiarity with Nero procured him at all times a ready entrance into the Palace. He found the Emperor still carousing amid his favourites, and he was received with a burst of welcome by the flushed and full-fed guests.

‘Now this is good of you, Paris,’ said Nero. ‘You alone were wanting to our mirth. Come, brim this crystal vase with our best Falernian, and then let us see a spectacle which would thrill the Muses and the Graces even if Apollo were with them. But--can this be Paris?--our bright, gay, lovely Paris? Why, what is the matter?’

‘Matter enough,’ said Paris, in such accents of woe, and with such a flood of tears, that the guests could not help weeping with him. ‘Dare I speak, Cæsar?’

‘Tell us all,’ said Nero, raising himself on his elbow in agitation. ‘What has happened? Have the legions revolted? Is the prætorium in an uproar?’

‘Not yet,’ said Paris; ‘but--Agrippina--’

‘Ha!’ said Nero. ‘Go on’--for the actor’s voice seemed to be speechless with emotion.

‘Agrippina--and--Rubellius Plautus--’

Nero was listening with painful interest; and, pretending to recover himself with a great effort, Paris told them the fictitious plot, and succeeded in rousing the Emperor to such a pitch of terror that he started from his couch and tore his hair.

‘Agrippina shall die!’ he exclaimed; ‘and Rubellius Plautus shall die. Here, give me my tablets. Despatch instant orders for their arrest and execution. And send for Burrus--no! he is the creature of my mother; she made him Prætorian Præfect. My foster-brother Cæcina Tuscus shall command the Prætorians, and Burrus shall die. Quick, quick, send for Seneca; not a moment is to be lost!’

Late as was the hour, one of the centurions on guard was despatched to the Palace of Seneca. He was reading the ‘Republic’ of Plato to his wife, Paulina, and his friend Fabius Rusticus, after a frugal supper in a modestly furnished room. When the slave announced that he was summoned by soldiers from the Palace, Paulina and Rusticus grew deadly pale; and Seneca, though he strove to conceal his emotion, trembled in every limb. He ordered the centurion to be admitted, and, striving to conceal the agitation of his voice, asked if he knew why the Emperor desired his presence at so late an hour. The centurion did not know, but said that the Emperor seemed to be alarmed about something, and needed the advice of his minister. Seneca demanded his toga, and hastened to the Palace. Nero told him what Paris had disclosed. He did not believe in the reality of the plot, but in those days anything was possible. He, however, pledged his own life on the fidelity of Burrus, and urged the Emperor to summon him into his presence. Burrus came, and listened gravely.

‘It is a serious matter,’ he said, ‘to order the execution of anyone without allowing an opportunity for defence. It would be still more serious to execute without a trial an Augusta, and your own mother.’

‘Think again,’ said Nero. ‘Rubellius Plautus has the blood of the Cæsars in his veins, and my mother is capable of anything to get power.’

‘I need not think again,’ answered Burrus, bluntly. ‘When once I have made up my mind, I do not alter it.’

Nero frowned, but Burrus only added: ‘There are no accusers. You are relying on the sole voice of Paris, a freedman of a hostile family, and you have only heard his story late at night during a drinking bout. Surely the life of even a common citizen ought not to be sworn away so cheaply, much less the life of an Empress.’

Nero, sobered by the gravity of these considerations, still kept a sullen silence; but Burrus would not yield.

‘Cæsar, we will examine her at earliest dawn. If we find her guilty she shall die.’

By this time the Emperor’s terror had exhausted itself, and he was weary. Agrippina’s residence was surrounded with a guard, and at daylight Seneca and Burrus went together to question her. They were accompanied by a number of Nero’s most trusted freedmen, who were to report the trial, and to act as spies both on the ministers and the Augusta.

To be summoned from her sleep into such a presence--to see her house surrounded with soldiers--to be aware that some unknown crisis of the utmost gravity was at hand, might well have shaken the strongest nerves. But, in spite of the horror of this unknown mystery, the indomitable woman swept into the presence of the two statesmen with a demeanour not only undaunted, but conspicuously haughty. The soldier and the philosopher rose at her entrance, and the freedmen bowed low. The freedmen she did not deign to notice, but slightly inclined her head as she motioned the two ministers to be seated, and herself sat down on a stately chair covered with purple cushions.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘as this seems to be a solemn audience, I am informed that the Emperor has sent you two, and these other-- persons’--glancing at the freedmen--‘to speak with me. What may be my son’s pleasure?’

‘Augusta,’ said Burrus in his sternest tones, ‘this is, as you have said, a serious occasion; you are accused of nothing short of high treason.’

The charge in days like those was awful enough to have forced back the blood into her heart, and for one instant she felt as if the solid earth were about to yawn beneath her feet. But in that instant she rallied all the forces of her nature. She looked, indeed, pale as a statue, but not the faintest tremor was perceptible in her accents as she exclaimed in a tone of the most freezing irony,--

‘Indeed? I am accused? and of high treason?’

‘You are accused,’ said Burrus, ‘of desiring to form a party among the legionaries to raise Rubellius Plautus to the throne and then to marry him.’

Agrippina’s only answer was a scornful laugh.

‘Poor Rubellius Plautus! the “golden sheep” of my brother Gaius!’

‘You will find it no matter for laughter. The Emperor is seriously alarmed,’ said Burrus.

‘I have no other answer to an accusation so ridiculous.’

‘The Augusta has not been so careful as she might have been,’ said Seneca, in his mildest manner. ‘Those frequent secret meetings with her friends; that courting of senators of influence; those attentions to military personages; those open complaints about the children of Claudius, have aroused suspicion.’

Agrippina turned upon the speaker her flashing glance, and he quailed beneath it. ‘Is this your philosophic gratitude?’ she said. ‘But for me, you might have been dying of malaria in Corsica; and you, Burrus, might have remained a tenth-rate tribune.’

‘We are but obeying the Emperor’s behests,’ said Burrus, in a less threatening tone.

‘And, pray, who are my accusers?’

‘Late last night this charge was laid before the Emperor by Paris--’

‘By Paris!’ said Agrippina, in tones of crushing scorn. ‘Paris is an actor, a buffoon, a pantomime, a thing of infamy whom I scarcely brook to name. Pray, go on.’

‘He had been sent by Atimetus, the freedman of Domitia.’

‘Domitia--and her slave concubine!’ said Agrippina. ‘Of him I deign no word; but she--what has she been doing all these years? While I was arranging the adoption of Nero, his marriage with Octavia, his promotion to the proconsular dignity, his nomination as a future Consul, all that led to his imperial elevation--what was she doing? Improving her fishponds! And now she wants to rob me of my Nero, and for that purpose gets up a pantomime with her paramour and her dancer! Pray, is that all?’

‘The sources of the information were Iturius and Calvisius.’

‘Iturius and Calvisius!--ex-slaves, spendthrifts, debauchees, the scum of the earth, who want to repair their squalid bankruptcies by the gain of turning informers. They are nobodies; poor pieces on the draughts-board. Who moved them?’

‘Junia Silana.’

‘Junia Silana! Ah! now I understand it all--the whole vile plot from beginning to end! Silana--false wife, false friend, evil woman--what does she know of the sacredness of motherhood? Children cannot be got rid of by their mother so easily as lovers are by an adulteress. So! I am to be branded with the fictitious infamy of parricide, and Nero with its actual guilt, that two broken-down freedmen may repay their debts to the old woman their mistress?

‘And you, sirs,’ she said, raising herself to the full height of her stature, ‘ought you not to blush for the sorry part you have played? Instead of repaying me the gratitude which you owe to one who recalled you, Seneca, from your disgraceful exile, and raised you, Burrus, from the dust--instead of making the Emperor ashamed of attaching a feather’s-weight of importance to this paralytic comedy of pantomimes, scoundrels, and rancorous old women--you have encouraged him to try and humiliate me! I am ashamed of you,’ she cried, with the imperious gesture which had often made bold men tremble; ‘for as for these--gentlemen’--and she glanced at the freedmen--‘they, of course, must do as they are bid. And so, such are my accusers! Who will bear witness that I have ever tampered with the city cohorts? who that I have intrigued in the provinces? who that I have bribed one slave or one freedman? They charge me with mourning for the death of Britannicus. Why, had Britannicus become emperor, whose head would have fallen sooner than that of his mother’s enemy and his own? And Rubellius Plautus--if he were emperor--would he be able for a single month to protect me from accusers who, alas! would be able to charge me, not with the incautious freedom of a mother’s indignant utterance, but with deeds from which I can be absolved by no one but that son for whose sake they were committed.’

For one moment her nature broke down under the rush of her emotion, and her glowing cheek was bathed in tears; but, recovering herself before she could dash the tears aside, she repudiated the awkward attempts at consolation offered by her judges, who themselves were deeply moved.

‘Enough!’ she said. ‘Sirs, I have done with you. By the claims of the innocent and the calumniated, if not by the rights of a mother, I demand an interview with my son this very day--this very hour.’

While yet the two ministers, and even the freedmen--in spite of the open scorn which she had manifested towards them--were under the spell of her powerful ascendency, they declared to Nero her complete innocence of the charges laid against her. Relieved from his alarm, Nero came to her. Receiving him with calm dignity, she said not a word about her innocence, which she chose to assume as a matter of course; not a word about the gratitude which he owed to her, lest she should seem to be casting it in his teeth. She only begged for rewards for her friends, and the punishment of her defeated adversaries. Nero was unable to resist her demands. Silana was banished from Italy; Calvisius and Iturius were expelled from Rome; Atimetus was executed. Paris alone was spared, because he was too dear to the Emperor to permit of his being punished. The men for whom Agrippina asked favours were men of honour. Fænius Rufus was made commissioner of the corn market; Arruntius Stella was made superintendent of the games which Nero was preparing to exhibit; the learned Balbillus was made governor of Egypt. Nero was intensely jealous of Rubellius Plautus, but his hour had not yet come.

It was the last flash of Agrippina’s dying power, and it encouraged a few to visit her once more. One or two independent senators, pitying her misfortunes, came to salute her, and some of the Roman matrons. Yet among these women there was not one whom she could either respect or trust. She had sinned so deeply in her days of power that women like the younger Arria, wife of Pætus Thrasea, and Servilia, the daughter of Barea Soranus, and Sextia, the mother of Antistius Vetus, held aloof from her. Paulina, the wife of Seneca, cordially disliked her, and the Vestal Virgins had never lent her the countenance of their private friendship.

But one noble lady came to her, who had never paid her the least court in the days of her splendour. It was Pomponia Græcina. She came on the evening of that memorable trial, and found the Empress prostrate with the reaction which followed the tumultuous passion of the scenes through which she had passed. She lay on her couch an object for even her enemies to pity. The strong, imperial, ambitious princess was utterly broken down in her--only the weeping, broken-hearted woman remained. In spite of her apparent victory, her life, and all its aims, and all it held dear, lay in ruins around her. Even hope was gone. What remained for her but remorse, and anguish, and the cup of humiliation, and the agonising recollection of a brilliant past which she had herself destroyed? There were no loyal friends around her. No children’s faces smiled upon her. There was no brother, or sister, or daughter to comfort her. Those to whom she had been a benefactress either felt no gratitude, or did not dare to show it, or deemed that she had forfeited it by crimes. Homeless, desolate, unloved, left like a stranded wreck by the ebbing tide upon a naked shore, she lay there weeping like a child. Oh! that she had been innocent, like her own mother--like one or two whom she had known;--but, alas! she could only look back upon a life of guilt, flecked here and there with blood which nothing could wash out. And now the Retribution which she had doubted and defied--the Retribution which had been stealing with silent footstep behind her--had broken upon her crowned with fire, and had smitten her into the dust with a blow from which she never could uprise.

And while her head burned and throbbed, and her veins seemed to be full of liquid flame, and ghosts of those who had perished by her machinations glimmered upon her haunted imagination in the deepening gloom, her lady in waiting, Acerronia, came to announce a visitor.

‘Did I not say that I would see no one else to-day?’ said Agrippina, wearily. ‘I am worn out, and fain would sleep.’

‘It is Pomponia Græcina. She told the janitor that though you might not see others who belong to the Court, perhaps you would see her.’

‘Yes; I will see her. She is not like the rest of them. She is sincere, and her presence is like balm.’

Pomponia entered, and could scarcely believe that the lady who lay there, with her dress disregarded, her face haggard and stricken, her eyes dim, her cheeks stained with tears, her hair dishevelled, and, as Pomponia thought, of a perceptibly greyer tinge than when she had seen her last--was indeed the once magnificent and all-powerful Augusta.

An impulse of pity overcame her, and she knelt down by the couch of the unhappy Empress, who pressed her fevered lips to her cheeks, and then wept uncontrollably with her head on Pomponia’s shoulder.

The two ladies presented a strange contrast, not only in their dress, but in their entire aspect. Agrippina was still arrayed in the magnificent robes in which she had received her son, and which, irksome as they were, she had been too weary to lay aside. Pomponia was in the dark mourning dress which she had worn for so many years since the death of the friend of her childhood, Julia, the grand-daughter of Tiberius and mother of Rubellius Plautus. The tresses of Agrippina, though disarranged, showed the elaborate care of the ornatrix. Pomponia wore her dark hair, now beginning to silver, in the simplest bands, and without an ornament. But the chief difference was in their faces. Pride and cruel determination, as well as calamity, had left their marks on the noble lineaments of the daughter of Germanicus; over the calm face of the wife of Plautius it was evident that the shadows of many a sorrow had been cast, but the sorrow was irradiated by hope and gladness, and in her eyes was the sweet light of the Peace of God.

‘Augusta,’ she said, ‘I have come to congratulate you on the defeat of a nefarious conspiracy. I thought I should find you happier after many trials. Pardon me if I have thrust myself too presumptuously upon your sorrow.’

‘Not so,’ said Agrippina. ‘You are always welcome; and more so now than ever. You sought me not in my hour of prosperity. No one would come to me in my hour of ruin who did not wish me well.’

‘It is not, I trust, an hour of ruin. The plot against you has been ignominiously defeated. You may have many happy days in store.’

‘Nay, Pomponia; happiness can never be linked again with the name of Agrippina. It is a dream. I did not find it in the days of my splendour; it is little likely that I should find it when all desert me and I am brought low. I know no one who is happy. We are the slaves and playthings of a horrible destiny, which is blind and pitiless and irresistible. Are you happy?’

‘Yes, Augusta, I am happy, though hardly, perhaps, in the sense you mean. To me, as to all of us, life has brought bitter trials. These dark robes tell of the loss of one whom I loved as my own soul, and even at this moment I am threatened with terrible calamity--perhaps with exile, perhaps with death. On all sides, there are terrors and anxieties, and the state of society seems to portend catastrophe and the vengeance of heaven, for wickedness can hardly go to any greater lengths than now. Yet I am happy.’

‘Oh, that you would give me your secret!’ said the Empress. ‘I can read character; I can detect the accents of sincerity. These words of yours are no pompous and hollow Stoic paradox.’

Pomponia hesitated. The woman before her was, as she well knew, steeped in crime from her childhood. Of what avail would it be, without any of the evangelic preparation, to tell her of Jesus and the Resurrection? Could there be the remotest possibility of exciting in her mind anything but contempt by telling her at that moment of the Cross which was to the Romans something between a horror and a jest?

‘Agrippina,’ she answered, ‘the day may come when I may tell you more of the strange secret. It is not mine only; it is meant for all the world. But it cannot be attained, it cannot be approached, without humility and repentance for wrong-doing, and the love of virtue, and of something higher than virtue, and the lifting to heaven of holy hands.’

‘Alas!’ said Agrippina; ‘you speak to me in a strange language. The Greek tragedians are always telling us that when blood has fallen to the ground it has fallen for ever. Can wrong be atoned for? Can guilt be washed away?’

‘It can,’ said Pomponia, gently; and she longed to speak the words which lingered in her memory from the letter of Peter of Bethsaida-- ‘Redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.’ But to Agrippina they would at that time have been simply meaningless.

‘I have heard of the mysteries,’ said the Empress, ‘and of the taurobolies. Would it be of any avail if I too were to crouch in a hollow, and let the blood of a bull which has been sacrificed to the gods drop over me?’

‘It would not,’ said Pomponia. ‘God does not require of us things so revolting, nor any mere external ceremonies and superstitions. What that sacred and supreme Majesty requires of us is innocence alone.[64] Can you not pray to Him, Augusta? You have read Homer, and you know how the old poet sings about Atè, and the Litai, the Prayers which follow in her path.’

‘Atè? Ah! I know that fearful deity,’ groaned Agrippina. ‘She is the Fury Megæra. I have seen her petrifying face turned towards me. She is the Harpy Celæno. I have often heard her in the banquet-halls of the Palatine, and thought of Phineus and his polluted feasts. But the Prayers--will you not repeat me the lines, Pomponia?’

Pomponia repeated the famous lines of the old bard of Chios:--

‘The gods (the only great and only wise) Are mov’d by offerings, vows, and sacrifice; Offending man their high commission wins, And daily prayers atone for daily sins. Prayers are Jove’s daughters of celestial race, Lame are their feet, and wrinkled is their face; With humble mien, and with dejected eyes Constant they follow, where Injustice flies. Who hears these daughters of almighty Jove, For him they mediate to the throne above; When man rejects the humble suit they make The Sire revenges for the daughters’ sake.’[65]

‘Alas! they have been strangers to me, those Prayers,’ said Agrippina; ‘and though you have spoken truth to me, I see that you have not told me all.’

‘There are times for all things,’ said Pomponia, as she rose to leave; ‘and perhaps, if you will think of what we have said, the day may come when you will be able to bear more. Farewell, Augusta; you need rest and quiet. Pardon me if I have wearied you.’

‘Farewell, Pomponia,’ said the Empress; ‘you are good and true. Your words have been to me as soft and pure as the falling snow. I know not whether the Litai of whom Homer speaks may plead for us through another.’

‘They may.’

‘Then will you ask them to say something which may avert the fury of Atè from one who, to you, is not ashamed to confess that she is wretched above all women?’

‘May you find peace!’ murmured the noble lady, as the Empress once more kissed her, and pressed her to her heart. ‘All may find it who seek it rightly from the Heavenly Powers.’

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Chapter XXX

A PRIVATE TRIAL

‘Tanto vogl’io che vi sia manifesto, Pur che mia coscïenza non mi garra, Che alla fortuna, come vuol, son presto.’

DANTE, Inf. XV. 91-93.

Pomponia had incidentally mentioned to Agrippina that she was threatened by a calamity, and it was indeed a serious one. It was strange that one so retired in her mode of life, and so entirely free from rancour and malice, should yet have been the butt of calumny. Yet such was the case. It was the tribute which vice paid to virtue. The base mob of Roman matrons avenged themselves on the chaste wife of the conqueror of Britain for the involuntary shame which they felt as they contrasted her life with theirs. Her constancy; her silence amid the universal buzz and roar of gossip and spite; her aloofness from the cliques and coteries of a scandalous society; her love of good works; her discountenance of their loose talk and complicated intrigues; her absence from the games and theatres; the simplicity of her dress, her home, her manners, her hospitality; the calmness of her temper, and even the sort of sacred beauty on which time seemed to make no impression, made her an object of hatred to the Calvia Crispinillas and the Ælia Catellas of the capital. Her presence among them was like a perpetual reproach, and they determined, if possible, to get rid of her. They would have said of her what the wicked say of the righteous in the Book of Wisdom, that they would lie in wait for her, because she was ‘clean contrary to their doings, and objected to their infamy.’

But how was it to be done? Would it not be easy to set an informer to work? Pomponia was wealthy, and since an informer got a grant of a fourth part of the property of any one who was condemned on his accusation, there were men who sat watching for their opportunity like a crowd of obscene and greedy vultures. Aulus Plautius was a person of distinction, and it might be dangerous to offend him; but if an informer of the front rank, like the eloquent Eprius Marcellus, could not be induced to undertake the risk, surely they might secure the services of a Veiento, a Messallinus, or a Regulus. And as for corroborative evidence of any charge, they thought that it could be obtained with the utmost ease among the herd of dehumanised slaves who thronged every considerable house. If they could not witness to facts, they were first-rate hands at inventing fictions. If the masters were a terror to their slaves, a slave might any day become a terror to an obnoxious master. It was personally disagreeable to tremble before beings who seemed so abject, but there was some convenience in having such agents at hand for the ruin of an enemy.

But what charge could be brought against a lady so blameless as Pomponia? To accuse her of conspiracy, or poisoning, or magic, would sound too preposterous; and it would be impossible to find against her the sort of evidence of evil manners which had amply sufficed in old and even in recent days to confound a lady who was disliked. The question was carefully discussed in a secret meeting of some of the worst beldames of social distinction, and as it was clear that Pomponia took no part in the public religious ceremonies, they agreed to get her charged with being guilty of ‘a foreign superstition.’

The wretches whose business it was to work up a case of this kind, and who were largely bribed to enable them to carry out their designs, began secretly to worm their way on various pretexts into the household of Plautius. Their success was smaller than their hopes. They found that there was some peculiar element in that familia. Many of the slaves and the few chief freedmen were Christians, but the secret was faithfully kept. Danger made them vigilant, and they had been carefully selected for worth and character. The female slaves, without exception, were devoted to a mistress who never addressed to them an unkind word, and who made their lives a paradise of happiness when compared with those who attended the toilettes of pagan ladies. The male slaves were no less faithful to the heads of a household in which they were treated with generosity and consideration. The spies of the informers could scarcely find a slave in the whole family whom they could tempt to drunkenness and indiscreet babbling. All that they could learn from the gossip of the least worthy was that Pomponia did not burn incense in the Lararium, or attend the temples. The informers had to content themselves with these meagre facts, trusting to perjury and invention to do the rest. Regulus undertook the case. The sound of his name was sufficient to strike a chill into an innocent and honest heart, and feeling certain of success, or, at the worst, of impunity, he laid before the Emperor a public information that Pomponia Græcina was the guilty votary of a foreign superstition.

The friends and relatives of Pomponia had heard rumours that some attack of the kind was in contemplation; but in the days of the Empire such rumours were rife, and they often came to nothing. When the charge was published they were filled with consternation. They knew that it mattered very little whether it was true or false. The result would turn on the influences which had been brought to bear on Nero. If Nero favoured the prosecution, Pomponia might be as innocent as a new-born child, yet it was certain that she would be condemned. One could commit no fault so slight but what Cæsar’s house might be mixed up with it. Had not Julius Græcinus been put to death under Gaius simply because he was too honest a man? Were not the wretched little islets of Gyara and Tremerus crowded with illustrious and innocent exiles? If beauty and wealth and imperial blood had not saved the two Julias, or the two Agrippinas, what should save a lady so alien from the common interests of Roman society as the wife of Plautius?

One thing saved her.

Nothing had been more remote from her mind than any thought of self-interest when she visited Agrippina. She had gone to see her chiefly because she knew that the threshold, once thronged with suitors and applicants, had now become so solitary, and because an habitual sense of pity drew her to the side of the unfortunate. Her sole object had been, if possible, to bring a little peace and consolation to a sister-woman, whose dejection and misery could only be measured by the height from which she had fallen. True that Agrippina was guilty. True that every law of the moral world must have been violated if impunity were granted her as the sequel of so many and such various crimes. But there was nothing Pharisaic in Pomponia’s heart. Familiar with sorrow, she was sensitive to the influence of compassion, and she had learnt from the lips of Christian teachers that there may be recovery and forgiveness even for the most fallen. She had gone to the Empress with no desire but to speak gentle and healing words.

Yet it was that little unnoticed impulse of natural kindness and Christian charity which saved her fortunes, perhaps even her life.

For Regulus was rich, eloquent, unscrupulous, formidable; and Nero was intensely timid and suspicious. The notion of a ‘foreign superstition’ was mixed up with that of magic; and magic was supposed to be chiefly practised for treasonable ends. If a panic were created in Nero’s mind, it was certain that the feeble Senate would interpose no barrier to his suggestions of punishment.

But at the moment of consternation in the heart of Pomponia’s friends, Agrippina did one of the few good deeds of her unhappy life. Availing herself of the momentary resuscitation of her influence, she no sooner heard of the information laid against Pomponia, than she wrote a letter to the Emperor strongly urging the innocence and goodness of the wife of Plautius, and entreating him not to stain with a deed of needless injustice the annals of his rule. Nero was struck with his mother’s letter, and with the fact that she should have taken the trouble to intercede for one who had never pretended to pay court to her, and whose character was the antithesis of her own. Octavia also ventured to say a few words of pleading earnestness for her friend. Nero had as yet no grudge, either against Pomponia, whose sombre robe was rarely visible in the Palace, or against her brave, loyal, and simple-minded husband. On the other hand, he did not like to check the activity of the informers. Domitian said in after years, ‘The prince who does not check informers, encourages them.’ Nero did not dream of checking them. Seneca, who was a friend of Plautius, and who had been grieved by the news of this attack upon one whom he and the ladies of his family highly esteemed, suggested to Nero a way out of the difficulty. ‘Follow,’ he said, ‘the ancient custom, and permit Pomponia to be tried at home by her husband, relatives, and friends.’

The Emperor accepted the suggestion, and the meeting of the domestic tribunal was fixed to take place on the next nundine. When Pomponia was told of the Emperor’s decision, she felt that her prayers had been heard, and that her pardon was secured, although it was not impossible that the trial might elicit painful secrets, which, for the sake of others, she thought it her duty to conceal.

She asked Seneca himself to undertake her defence, and he gladly assumed the task. Plautius sat in his own atrium, and had summoned only those of his family whom he could trust. The evidence on which the informers and their patrons relied was slight and negative, and Seneca had no difficulty in tearing it to pieces. To the intense relief and heartfelt gratitude of Pomponia, she was not definitely charged with being a Christian. Indeed, that specific charge could hardly be urged, because no proof was forthcoming. Regulus skilfully made the most of old precedents. He told how, nearly a hundred years ago, the Senate had decreed the destruction of the Temples of Isis and Serapis (B.C. 46), and how Æmilius Paulus had been the first to shatter the doors with an axe. He mentioned the stern dealings with the Bacchanalians (B.C. 186). He told how (B.C. 139) the priests of Sabazius had been driven from Rome. Referring to the days of the Empire, he mentioned the edict of Claudius against the Jews, and reminded Aulus that Tiberius had banished four thousand Jews to Sardinia. He appealed triumphantly to the old law of the Twelve Tables, ‘Let no one separately worship foreign gods.’ When the accusers had mentioned every unfavourable circumstance, and when, on the other hand, an abundance of testimony had been elicited to prove the habitual purity and blamelessness of Pomponia’s life, Seneca rose to argue for her honourable acquittal.

‘What was meant,’ he asked, ‘by a “foreign superstition”? Was the worship of Isis a foreign superstition? Was the worship of the Pessinuntian Cybele a foreign superstition? Was the worship of Iaô--if that were the secret name of the deity--by the Jews a foreign superstition? The State was entirely unconcerned with any of these private beliefs. When, indeed, the votaries of any strange cult were guilty of riotous, licentious, and dishonest conduct, they were justly punished. Referring to the precedents quoted by Regulus, he said that the priests of Isis had deserved the vengeance which fell upon them for having betrayed the stupid credulity of a Roman lady. The Jews, who had been guilty of cheating and embezzlement in the matter of purple hangings for the Temple, were rightly punished. Claudius had been justified in driving all the Jews from Rome when they made tumults at the instigation of one Chrestus; but on the other hand, Julius Cæsar had always been favourable to the Jews, and Augustus had by public edict protected their Sabbath. The priests of the Syrian goddess were for the most part worthless vagabonds, and no one was sorry when they were detected and executed for their nefarious practices. The State took no cognisance of opinions, but only of evil practices. A Roman matron, by way of supposed purification, had gone down to the wintry Tiber, had broken the ice, had plunged into the freezing waters, and had crawled across the Campus Martius with bleeding knees. In such acts we might see the workings of a foreign superstition[*8]; but of no such act--of no secret visit to the base temple of Serapis--of no dealings with the mutilated priests of Cybele--of no lightings of lamps at Jewish festivals, had Pomponia been guilty. And who, he asked, can allege one immoral deed, one malefic practice against the noble wife of the conqueror of Britain? Is it to her discredit that she differs from so many of the noble ladies in Rome? Do we blame her or rather admire her, that she has never betrayed a friend, or changed a husband, or exposed an infant, or plundered a province, or ruined a reputation? Is it to be her destruction that her life has ever been simple, and her words sincere? Or is she to be banished because, through long years, she has continued to mourn for a friend, when so many forget their dearest relatives in less than a month? Cicero mourned the death of a slave, though he was half ashamed of his sensibility; Crassus wept for the death of a favourite lamprey. Is it a crime to cherish a beloved memory? What evidence is there against Pomponia? Have not her slaves, though Regulus has tampered with them, shown themselves entirely faithful? And what wonder? Most of us treat our slaves as though they were enemies--as though they could not claim the rights of human beings. She has treated her slaves as men and women like ourselves; as sharers of her home; as heirs with her of the common slavery of life and death. She has asked their aid; she has admitted them to festive tables; she has sought their love, and not their fear. She has lived, as we should all live, like a member of one great brotherhood, of which all are bound to mutual assistance. She has done good in secret. In the midst of wealth she has been as one who is poor. She has stretched her hand to the shipwrecked; shown his path to the wanderer; divided her bread with the hungry; and has been, as so few are, a friend to the distressed.

‘But she does not go to the theatre! Is that to be accounted a crime? Rather let us erect a statue to a virtue which can still blush for infamies at which so many women dare to be spectators. Is the licence of the Fescennines, and the grossness of the Atellan plays, acted by slaves whom the ancient laws branded with shame, a fit amusement for pure matrons? If these be deemed tolerable, what shall be said of the softer luxury, the subtler indecency, the more fascinating corruption of the modern mimes? Instead of blaming Pomponia for not patronising such spectacles, let us commend her example!

‘Or is it a sign of moroseness and alienation from the customs of her country, that she is never to be seen among the multitudes of every rank and age who gaze with frenzied delight at the gladiatorial shows? Nay, she is to be applauded for shunning scenes so fatal to true morality! It is shocking enough to see noble beasts ruthlessly mangled, and once, at least, a cry of compassion has risen from the dense throngs when they saw that frightful combat between five hundred Gætulians and twenty elephants. But their compassion was for the elephants![66] How much deeper is the compassion due to the unhappy human beings whose carcases encrimson the white sands of the amphitheatre! Augustus tried to check and limit this savagery. To see men torn by wild beasts in the morning, and hacking each other to pieces in the afternoon--and that as a mere amusement, to kill the time--is simply degrading, however much custom may sanction it. It is true that Cicero invented an excuse for his brutality of pleasure, this delirium of homicide, by the absurd plea that it stimulated courage. The courage of the tiger, which leaps with bare breast on the hunter’s steel, exists in the lowest of the human race, without the need for this bloody stimulus. Man should be to man a sacred thing; the only result of gazing at such scenes is to destroy this generous sense of a common humanity. It may be said that the gladiators, or those who fight the wild beasts, are often criminals. Be it so; but are we criminals also? If not, why should we condemn ourselves to the shame of gloating over the supreme agony and mystery of death?

‘But Pomponia is charged with speaking as though there were but one God. Well, do we not read even in the sacred poems of Orpheus--

‘“One God, one Hades, one Sun, and one Dionysus?”

Does not Varro, one of the most honoured of Roman writers, distinguish carefully between the mythology of poets, the religion of the commonwealth, and the beliefs of philosophers? It is true that he deprecated the revelation of these truths to the multitude, because there is no way to keep them in order but by illusions. Yet scarcely an old woman or beardless boy in Rome really believes in these fables; and it is a good thing that they do not. If they attached genuine credence to the supposed deeds of this rabble of gods, they would have patrons and examples of every lust and of every crime. But they are dimly aware that Stator, Liber, Hercules, Mercury, are but names or manifestations of one Divine Existence. The mysteries are divulged; the oracles are dumb; and as the wailing spirits cried to Epitherses thirty years ago as he sailed past the promontory of Paludes, “Great Pan is dead.”[67]

‘A person, then, who can regard it as criminal to reject the popular belief must be ignorant of all philosophy and all literature. Is any one bound to suppose that there really is such a god as Panic; or such goddesses as Muta, Febris, and Strenia? Are the Greek poets to be condemned who have repeatedly spoken of one God? God is everywhere. He is that without which nothing is. He comes to men; He comes into men. No one is good without God. Pomponia’s character alone is sufficient to prove that there is nothing harmful in her belief. To the God who is near us, to the sacred Spirit who dwells with us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and our good, she has been supremely true. The image of the gods cannot be formed with gold and silver, or such materials, but with the beauty and dignity of human souls. God is best worshipped, not by sacrifices of bulls, but by innocence and rectitude.

‘And you, O Aulus, you know what a wife Pomponia has been to you, how chaste, how gentle, how faithful! How often have you found her quietly spinning wool among her modest maidens, when other matrons are sitting at riotous banquets, or gazing at dishonourable scenes! How wisely and quietly has she managed your fortunes, and governed your family! How true and tender she was as a mother to the little boy whose immature death you wept, whose ashes are inurned in the tomb of your house! How purely has she trained your youthful Aulus! To whom save to her does he owe that beautiful mixture of manly courage and virginal modesty which distinguishes him among the youth of Rome? And will you, at the word of a vile informer actuated by base greed, and set on by female rancour--will you desecrate the shrine of your own household gods? Will you dishonour the fame of your ancestors? Will you sever a union which has been to you so fruitful of blessings? Remember how she smiled on you on the day that you walked in proud ovation with Cæsar by your side! Remember how she shared the toils, the hardships, the anxieties of your campaigns in that far-off Thule, which was subdued by your valour! Remember how by her sympathy she has diminished all your troubles, and intensified all your joys! And will you hand over such a wife, and such a mother--so gentle, so pure, so noble--to the fury of the executioner? Will you see the sword flash down upon a head which has often rested on your breast? Or will you coldly and sternly dismiss your innocent and well-loved wife to end her days on some dreary island-rock, amid the storms of Adria or the Tyrrhene Sea? Yours, O Aulus, yours and not hers, will be the infamy; yours, not hers, will be the loss! Not hers the shame--for no informer, and no unjust condemnation can fix a stain upon the guiltless; not hers the misery--for wherever she goes she will carry the God within her, since in each one of us, as our great poet says,

‘“Some god is dwelling, though we know not who.”

You may banish her to Pontia or Pandataria, but everywhere she will see the sunlight and the stars, and will feel that she is not abandoned. When we enter a dense forest, we are struck with awe at its huge tree-trunks, its spreading boughs, its dark shade, and we feel that the Divine is there; when we enter some cavern in the hills, we feel the presence of a Deity: but we feel it much more when we see a brave and pure soul rising superior to the menaces of calamity. Look at her, Aulus, where she sits. In her calmness, in her fortitude, in the serene and tranquil beauty of a countenance on which no vice has set its mark, see the living proof of her freedom from all blame! Proclaim to Cæsar, to Regulus, to the society of Rome, to all the world, that Pomponia has done or thought nothing unworthy of the immortal gods, nothing unworthy of her ancestors, of her husband, and of her home!’

Many a cry of applause had greeted Seneca, as he thus ventured to pour forth, in the secrecy of a domestic tribunal, the thoughts which he had often uttered to his friends, and even published in his writings. He sat down amid a murmur of admiration, during which not a few of the noblest of his auditors pressed round him with expressions of warmest congratulation, and Amplias, the Christian freedman of Pomponia, in a burst of enthusiasm, bent down and kissed his hand. He was deeply gratified by the impression he had made, for when there was nothing to arouse his fear or imperil his ambition, he felt a genuine happiness in doing deeds of kindness. But he raised his hands for silence while the assembly awaited the decision of those whom Plautius had asked to be his assessors in the judgment.

They consulted together for a few moments, and then, amid the deepest silence, Plautius rose. He was almost too much moved to speak. It required all his Roman firmness and dignity to force back the tears which were brimming in his eyes, and to control into steadiness the voice which seemed ready to break; but he succeeded. Rising with dignity, he said:

‘Friends and kinsmen, I have consulted with those who have shared with me the responsibility of judgment. We are agreed. The evidence is altogether worthless. Pomponia is innocent of anything hostile to religion, or forbidden by the laws of Rome. Friends and kinsmen, I thank you for your presence and your counsel, and I thank you most of all, illustrious Seneca. I thank the Emperor, that he has spared us the pain and anxiety of a public trial, and I shall announce to him, and to all Rome, that Aulus Plautius will thank the gods, even till death, that they have given him a wife so innocent, so noble, and so chaste.’

Pomponia raised her eyes and her clasped hands to heaven in a transport of gratitude, and as she did so a sudden burst of sunshine streamed through the window, and glorified her face. The lambent flame played over her hair, and lit up her features, and gave to her calm beauty a heavenly radiance. This was regarded as a complete justification of the sentence of acquittal, and a visible proof of the divine favour. The hall resounded with acclamations, and Claudia, who had been among the witnesses of the scene, flung herself into the arms of Pomponia, who tenderly folded the fair British maiden to her heart, while Pudens looked on with a happy smile.

And when Pomponia retired to her own room, she knelt down, and with bowed head, and clasped hands, and outstretched arms, poured out her thanks to Him who had been her protector in this most painful trial of her life. She was a confessor and a martyr, in will if not in deed; for though she had not been called upon to declare herself a Christian, she had been prepared to do so if the question had been put to her. When Plautius entered he found her praying, and as she rose at his entrance he saw upon her features a beauty even brighter than that which she had caught from the sunbeam which had shone upon her in the hall.

‘My wife,’ he said to her very tenderly, as he kissed her. ‘I know not what to think of thy beliefs. Thou hast not concealed from me that thou art of this new sect. I know that men call it despicable and execrated; but if it makes its votaries such as thou art, it is more blessed and more potent than the worship of the gods of Rome.’

‘My Aulus,’ she answered, ‘I know well that as yet thou canst not think with me. Yet thou, too, art dear to God, for thou hast felt after Him if happily thou mightest find Him. Our teachers say that He is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that seeketh Him and doeth righteousness, as thou dost, is accepted of Him. Fear not, my husband; in the next world, as in this, we shall be united, for thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven.’

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Chapter XXXI

THE INTERIOR OF A SLAVE-PRISON

‘Magnam rem sine dubio fecerimus si servulum infelicem in ergastulum miserimus.’--SENECA, De Ira, iii. 32.

We left Onesimus in a prison cell among the substructions of the Palatine, his back sore with scourging, his soul torn with shame and indignation. He cursed his folly, without repenting of his faults. Once more he had thrown away every element of prosperity; and his manner of looking on life was so entirely selfish that the source of his self-reproach was rather the shipwreck of his chances than the moral instability which had led to it. No news reached him in his prison. It was not till his liberation that he learnt the fate of Britannicus--a fate which, if he had continued steadfast in duty, he might have averted or delayed.

He knew that he could not be restored to his trusted position as the servus a purpura of the Empress. He would lose that, and with it lose all the flattery and gain which accrued so easily to the higher slaves of Cæsar’s household. He doubted whether even Acte’s influence could screen him from the consequences of an offense so deadly as misconduct in the august presence of the imperial divinity. But he felt a desperate pride and a morbid shame which made him determine to conceal all traces of himself and his misdemeanour from Acte’s knowledge.

His behaviour in prison was refractory, for the jailer had taken a strong dislike to him, and delighted to humiliate this bird of finer feather than those who usually came under his charge. He was quite safe in doing so. There was little compassion in the breast of the steward who managed the slaves, and rarely, if ever, did he take the trouble to inquire how a prisoner was getting on, or whether he was alive or dead. Amid blows and insults the heavy days dragged on, and seemed interminable to the poor Phrygian youth. In the desperation of idleness he tried to find some amusement from scribbling with a nail on the plaster wall of his dungeon, and one day, thinking of the drunken bout which had reduced him to this level, he defiantly scrawled ‘When I am set free, I will drain every wine-jar in the house.’[68]

‘Will you?’ said the jailer, who had entered unobserved as he finished his scrawl. ‘You won’t have a chance just yet, my fine friend.’

He gave Onesimus a blow with his whip, which made him writhe with anguish, and said, ‘Thank Anubis, I shall be rid of you to-day. You are sent to the slave-prison (ergastulum).’

‘Who sends me?’ asked Onesimus shuddering.

‘What’s that to you, crucisalus?’ said the slave, dealing him another blow. ‘Oh you writhe, do you, my fine bird? What will you do when the bulls’ hides rattle the cottabus on your shoulders?’

What he said was true. That evening Onesimus was loaded with fetters and taken into the country.

The sight of slaves in chains being hurried off to punishment was far too familiar to excite much notice in the streets of Rome, but it was torture to Onesimus to be thus exposed to the gaze and jeers of idle passers-by. He felt a painful dread lest any of his friends--above all, lest Acte, or Pudens, or Titus, or Junia--should see him in this wretched and disgraceful guise. No one, however, saw him, and that evening he was safely lodged in the slave-jail attached to Nero’s villa at Antium.

The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented the spectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanised by despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there were treated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts, with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. They worked in chains, and were driven to work with scourges. Torture and starvation were the sole methods of government. They were a herd of wretches clothed in rags, ill-fed, untended, unpitied, passing their days and nights under filthy conditions and in pestilential air, hateful and hating one another. Some of them were men half mad and wholly untameable, who could not be depended upon except so far as they were coerced by violence. Others were pure barbarians, only speaking a few words of any intelligible language, and therefore useless in a town familia. Others were criminals only exempted from death because of the value of their labour. Some of them knew that there was little chance of their being taken thence, unless it were to be crucified, and that when death released them, their bodies would be carelessly flung to rot amid the seething abominations of the corpse-pits (puticuli) like that which Onesimus had once seen in Rome near the Esquiline hill.

The only slaves who retained any vestige of decency and self-respect in these seething masses of human misery and degradation, were those who found themselves denizens of an ergastulum for a short period, at the caprice of a master or mistress. The experience was so terrible that it cowed the most contumacious into trembling servility. A few came there for no real fault, who were far less guilty of any misdoing than the owners who subjected them to this dreaded punishment. Sometimes a page or favourite who had been tempted to speak pertly in consequence of too much petting, or a youth who had been goaded into rebellion by the intolerable tyranny of a freedman, or a slave whose blood had been turned into flame by some atrocious wrong, learnt forever the hopelessness of his condition, and the abjectness of his servitude, by being sent there for a week or even for a month. Emerging from that den of despair, a human being felt the conviction enter like iron into his soul, that slaves were not men, and had none of the rights of men; and that, unless they wished to throw away their lives altogether, no complaisance to an owner could be too abject, and nothing must be considered criminal which an owner required of his human chattel.

Oaths, and curses, and the lowest abysses of vileness in human conduct, and that blackness of darkness which follows the extinction of the last spark of humanity in the soul of man, and the clanking of fetters all day long, and the shrieks of the tortured, and the yelling of the scourged, and jests more horrible than weeping, and the manifold leprosies of all moral and physical disease--all this Onesimus had to witness, and had to endure, in the slave-jail at Antium. We have read what prisons were before the days of Howard; what penal settlements and convict ships were forty years ago; but men trained in the most rudimentary principles of Christianity could not, under the worst circumstances, sink quite so low, or be so wholly beyond the sphere of pity, as the offscourings of pagan slavery, the scum of the misery of all nations, huddled into these abodes of death.

It was soon whispered among the wretches there that the handsome Phrygian youth had been high in place among the attendants of Octavia, and had been favoured and promoted by Acte. In their baseness they exulted at his humiliation, and the extent to which his soul revolted from their malice happily helped to preserve him from the contamination which would have been involved in their friendliness. He lived from day to day in the sullen silence of an indomitable purpose. He did not know how long he would be kept there. He waited a month, sustained by fierce resolve, and then determined that, at the cost of life itself--even if it should end in feeding the crows upon a cross--he would attempt his escape. He knew that he had many foes among the struggling envies of Cæsar’s palace, and he suspected that Nero’s dispensator purposely intended to forget him, and to leave him there to rot.

After a few days he was left comparatively unmolested by his companions in misfortune, for there was no amusement to be got out of his savage taciturnity. Once, when one of the ruder denizens had tried to molest him, Onesimus struck him so furious a blow with his fettered hands that he was looked upon as dangerous. As he glanced round at the degraded ugliness of the majority of the prisoners, whose faces only varied in degrees of villany, he had less than no desire to join their society. He saw but one on whom he could look with any pleasure, or from whom he could hope for any sympathy. This was a young man of honest and pleasant countenance, whose name, he learnt, was Hermas, and who bore himself under his misfortunes with sweetness and dignity. Like Onesimus, he seemed to find his only relief in the strenuous performance of the tasks allotted to him by the ergastularius, and as Onesimus watched him he felt convinced that he was there for no crime, and also that he was a Christian.

His conjecture was turned into a certainty by an accident. One day, as Hermas was digging the stubborn soil, something dropped out of the fold of his dress. He snatched it up hastily and in confusion, and seemed relieved when he noticed that no one but Onesimus had seen him. But the quick eyes of the Phrygian had observed that what he dropped was a tiny fish rudely fashioned in glass, on which had been painted the one word CΩCΙC, ‘May’st thou save!’ They were not uncommon among Christians, and some of them have been found in the catacombs.

The fettered slaves were taken out in gangs every morning under the guardianship of armed drivers, whose whips enforced diligence, and whose swords protected them from assault. The refractory were soon reduced to discipline, but those who worked diligently were not often tormented. In the various works of tillage, Onesimus, hampered though he was by his intolerable manacles, found some outlet for his pent-up anguish and hard remorse. But no one can live without some human intercourse, and one day, when Hermas was working beside him, and none of the rest were near, Onesimus glanced up at him and said the one word Ἰχθὺς, ‘Fish.’

Quick as lightning came the whispered answer Ἰχθύδιον, ‘a little fish,’ by which Hermas meant to imply that he was a weak and humble Christian.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you one of us?’

Onesimus sadly shook his head. ‘Perhaps I was, or might have been, a Christian once.’

‘Have you been illuminated and fallen away, unhappy one?’

‘Ask me no more,’ said Onesimus. ‘I am a lost wretch.’

‘The Good Shepherd,’ said Hermas, ‘came to seek and save the lost.’

‘It[*9] is vain to talk to me,’ said Onesimus. ‘Tell me of yourself. You are not a criminal, or a madman, or a barbarian, like these.’

‘Talk not of them with scorn,’ said Hermas. ‘Are they worse than the harlots and sinners whose friend Christ was?’

Onesimus would not talk of Christ. ‘I never saw you,’ he said, ‘in Cæsar’s household.’

‘No,’ said Hermas; ‘I was the slave of Pedanius Secundus, the city Præfect. He has no rustic prison, and, being a friend of Nero, he asked his freedman to get leave to send me here.’

‘But why?’

‘He bade me do what I could not do. Seeing that I was strong and vigorous, he wanted me to marry one of his slave-girls. The worshippers of the gods know nothing of what marriage means. I loved a Christian maiden; I refused the union with a girl of evil character, who, being beautiful, had been the victim of Pedanius already. He scourged me; he tortured me; he threatened to fling me into his fish-ponds; and, when I still held out, he sent me here.’

‘Is there no escape from this horrible place?’

‘When you go in again, look round you, and see how hopeless is the attempt. The ergastulum is half subterranean. Its windows are narrow, and high above our heads. If we attempted to escape, the least noise would wake the jailers, and some of these around us would be the first to curry favour by helping to defeat our plan.’

‘Is bribery useless?’

‘Even if I could get the money, I do not think it right to bribe.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that Christ means us to endure all He sends. I trust in Him. If He sends me hunger, I bear it. If He casts me down, I believe that in due time He will lift me up. If He suffers me to be sent to prison, I try to turn the prison into His Temple. But I feel sure that He will deliver me--and that soon.’

Hermas was not wrong. His incarceration was short, because he was one of the few slaves in the family of Pedanius whom the Præfect could trust. Pedanius was a man whose cruel indifference and imperious temper made him more than usually obnoxious to his slaves. He lived in terror of them, and tried to avert danger by inspiring terror into them. He could not do without Hermas. He did not know that he was a Christian; but he knew that in other houses besides his own there had recently sprung up a class of slaves honest and faithful, and that Hermas was one of them. He married his slave-girl to another youth, and Hermas was set free.

And then Onesimus, seeing that every other method of escape was impossible, tried the effects of bribery. He had managed, though with infinite difficulty, to conceal the gold piece which Octavia had given him, and he had noted that one of the underlings of the prison-keeper seemed to be not unkindly disposed to him. He was a man named Croto, chosen for the office because his stalwart proportions and herculean strength would make him formidable to any unruly slave; but there was a certain rough honesty and kindliness in his face which made Onesimus think that he might move his compassion.

Seizing his opportunity one day, as Croto passed him in the field, he boldly whispered,

‘Croto, if I gave you an aureus, would you swear to let me have a chance to escape?’

Croto looked long and hard at his beautiful face, and walked on without a word. But as he returned from his rounds he touched him, and said,

‘Yes; I pity you. You are not like the rest of this herd of swine. Such things as an escape have happened ere now, and no one is the wiser. Masters don’t care to ask many questions.’

‘I will trust you,’ said Onesimus; and tearing the aureus from the hem of his dark serge dress, he slipped it into Croto’s hand.

‘Keep awake to-night. The two who guard the door shall be drunk. Get up a disturbance after midnight; be near the door, and when it opens-- The plan may fail, but it is the only chance I can give you.’

Onesimus pointed in despair to the fetters on his feet.

‘When a slave has shown himself quiet and reasonable, they are sometimes removed; and yours shall be. But the manacles on your wrists must remain; they are never removed at night.’

Onesimus made his plans. At the dead of night, when the prison was plunged in darkness--for oil was much too dear to be wasted on chained slaves--he raised a great outcry, as though he had been suddenly attacked. The slaves sprang up from their pallets, heavy and confused with sleep. But Onesimus had all his senses on the alert, and by violently pushing one, jostling against another, and striking a third, he soon had the whole place in a tumultuous uproar of rage and panic, during which he quietly crouched down beside the door. It was opened by the sleepy and drunken guardians, to find the cause of the disturbance, and, before they could be reinforced by their more sober colleagues, Onesimus dashed the lamp out of the hand of one of them, tripped up the other, and ran to hide himself in the dark corner of an adjacent street, behind the Temple of Fortune. He succeeded, though with great pain, in forcing one hand free from the chain; and hiding the other, with the manacle which dangled from it, under his sleeve, he determined, at the first gleam of light, to try and find some assembly of Christians. He knew that it was their custom to meet at earliest dawn in secret places--generally, if possible, the secluded entrance to some sand-pit--to sing hymns to Christ as God, before the slumbering pagan population began to stir. He was fortunate, for soon, with senses preternaturally quickened by peril, he heard at no great distance the faint sound of a hymn. He made his way towards the spot, and concealed himself till the congregation should break up. He knew that the last to leave was generally the Presbyter; and, waiting for him, he called him as he passed.

The Presbyter started, and said, ‘Who goes there?’

Onesimus stepped out of his hiding-place, and said, ‘Oh, for the love of Christ, help me to get free from this chain!’

‘Thou usest the language of a Christian,’ said the Presbyter, ‘but thy chain would prove thee a fugitive or a criminal.’

‘I have erred,’ said Onesimus; ‘but I am not a criminal.’

The Presbyter fixed on him a long and troubled look.

‘Thou hast adjured me,’ he said, ‘in the name of Christ: I dare not refuse. But neither must I, for thy sake, imperil the brethren. Hide thyself again. I will send my son, Stephanus, to file thy chain, and then thou must depart. If thou hast erred, may Christ forgive thee!’

It was not many minutes before the young man came, and, without a word, filed the thinnest part of the manacle till Onesimus was free.

‘Peace be with thee, brother!’ said Stephanus. ‘Men begin to stir. Thou wilt be in danger. We dare not shelter thee. It were best to hide here till nightfall. Food shall be brought thee.’

Onesimus saw that the advice was good. Search might be made for him; but Antium was a large place, and the sand-pit might escape observation. It was so; bread and water were left near his hiding-place, and at night he made his way to Gaieta, which was twenty miles away from Antium.

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Chapter XXXII

WANDERINGS OF AN OUTCAST

‘Matrisque Deum chorus intrat, et ingens Semivir, obscæno facies reverenda minori,

* * * * *

Jam pridem cui rauca cohors, cui tympana cedunt Plebeia, et Phrygia vestitur bucca tiara.’

JUV. Sat. vi. 511.

Onesimus was still in evil case. Everywhere he was looked upon with suspicious eyes. The mass of the population felt an aversion for fugitive slaves, and such, at the first glance, they conjectured him to be. His dress was a slave’s dress--he had no means of changing it--and his hand still bore the bruises of the manacle. There was nothing for him to do but to beg his way, and he rarely got anything but scraps of food which barely sufficed to keep body and soul together. In those days there had long been visible that sure sign of national decadence,

‘Wealth, a monster gorged ‘Mid starving populations.’

‘Huge estates,’ says Pliny, ‘ruined Italy.’ Along the roads villas were visible here and there, among umbrageous groves of elm and chestnut, and their owners, to whom belonged the land for miles around, often did not visit these villas once in a year. Onesimus would gladly have laboured, but labour was a drug in the market. The old honest race of Roman farmers, who ate their beans and bacon in peace and plenty by fount and stream, and who each enlisted the services of a few free labourers and their sons, had almost entirely disappeared. The fields were tilled by gangs of slaves, whose only home was often an ergastulum, and who worked in chains. Luxury surrounded itself with hordes of superfluous and vicious ministers; but these were mainly purchased from foreign slave-markets, and a slave who had already been in service was regarded as a veterator, up to every trick and villany--for otherwise no master would have parted with him. A good, honest, sober, well-behaved slave, on whose fidelity and love a master could trust, was regarded as a treasure; and happy were the nobles or wealthy knights and burghers who possessed a few such slaves to rid them from the terror of being surrounded by thieves and secret foes. But how was Onesimus, now for a second time a fugitive, to find his way again into any honourable household? As he thought of the fair lot which might have befallen him, he sat down by the dusty road and wept. He was hungry, and in rags. Life lay wasted and disgraced behind him, while the prospect of the future was full of despair and shame. He was a prodigal among the swine in a far country, and no man gave him even the husks to eat.

Misery after misery assailed him. One night as he slept under a plane tree in the open air the wolves came down from the neighbouring hills, and he only saved his life from their hungry rage by the agility with which he climbed the tree. One day as he came near a villa to beg for bread he was taken for a spy of bandits. The slaves set a fierce Molossian dog upon him, and he would have been torn to pieces if he had not dropped on all fours, and confronted the dog with such a shout that the Molossus started back, and Onesimus had time to dash a huge stone against his snarling teeth, which drove him howling away.

For one who thus wandered through the country there were abundant proofs of the wretchedness and wickedness of the lower classes of Pagan life. He observed one day the blackened ruins of a large farm-house with its ricks and cattle-sheds, and not far from it he saw the white skeleton of a man chained to the hollow trunk of an aged fig-tree. The spot seemed to be shunned by all human beings, as though the curse of God were upon it. Onesimus was wandering curiously about it, and trying to appease his hunger with a few ears of corn from one of the half-burnt ricks, when the shout of a shepherd on a distant hill attracted his attention. He went to the man, who shared with him some of his black barley-bread, and told him that he had shouted to warn him from an ‘ill-omened and fatal place.’ ‘Why ill-omened and fatal?’ asked Onesimus. ‘The place belonged,’ answered the peasant, ‘to a master who had entrusted the care of it to a head slave. This man, though married, deserted his wife for a free woman of foreign extraction, whom his master had brought to the villa. The fury of his slave-wife turned into raging madness. She burnt all her husband’s accounts and possessions. She thrust a torch into every rick and barn, and when she saw the flames mount high, tied herself to her little son, and precipitated herself with him into a deep well. The master, furious at his losses, and shocked by such a tragedy, inflicted a terrible vengeance on the guilty slave. Stripping him naked, he chained him to the fig-tree, of which the hollow trunk had been the immemorial nest of swarms of bees. He smeared the wretch’s body with honey, and left him to perish.’ The bleaching skeleton had become the terror of the neighbourhood. No one dared to touch it, and the place, haunted with dark spirits of crime and retribution, was shunned far and wide as an accursed spot.

Sickened with miseries, Onesimus gradually made his way to Pompeii. Every street and wall of the bright little Greek town bore witness to the depths of degradation into which the inhabitants had fallen, and the youth found that the radiant scene, under the shadow of Vesuvius and its glorious vineyards by that blue and sparkling sea, was a garden of God indeed, but, like that of the Cities of the Plain, awaiting the fire and brimstone which were to fall on it from heaven. He was specially disgusted because, alien as he was now from all Christian truth, he saw on the walls of a large assembly-room in the Street of the Baths a mass of scribblings full of deadly insults towards the Christians. One in particular offended him, for, by way of coarse satire on some Christian teacher, it said:--

‘Mulus hic muscellas docuit.’ ‘Here a mule taught small flies.’

It was evidently no place for any one who still loved Christianity. Hurrying from its fascination of corruption, to which he felt it only too possible that he might succumb, he was for some time reduced to the very brink of starvation, and was at last driven to live on such fruits and berries as he could pluck from the trees and hedges. Once, while he was trying to reach some wild crab-apples in a place by the side of a little stream, which was overgrown with dense foliage, he slipped, and fell crashing through the brushwood into the deep and muddy water which was hidden by the undergrowth. Too weak to rise and struggle, he could only just support himself by clinging to a bough, when his cries were heard. A labourer came and rescued him, and left him sitting in the sunlight to dry his soaking rags. And now he thought that there was nothing left him but to die, and seriously meditated whether it would not be best to fling himself into the green-covered sludge of black water from which he had been rescued, and so to end his miseries.

A sound arrested him, and, lifting his head, he saw a group of the eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess approaching along the road, one of whom shook the jingling sistrum which had attracted his attention. They were a company of seven, and were men taken from the dregs of the populace. With them was a stout youth, who rode an ass which carried their various properties, the chief of which were musical instruments, and the image of the goddess wrapped in an embroidered veil.

As they passed they eyed him curiously, and stopped a few paces beyond him as though for a consultation.

‘A likely youth,’ he heard one of them say, ‘though now he looks thin and miserable. We have long wanted another servant. Would not he do for us, Philebus?’

‘Probably a runaway slave,’ said another.

‘What does that matter to us?’ said Philebus. ‘We can say that he called himself free-born, and told us that he ran away from the cruelties of a step-mother--or anything else we choose to invent. I will go and question him.’

Philebus was an old man with a wizened and wrinkled face. The top of his head was bald; the rest of his grey locks were trained to hang round his head in long curls.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

Onesimus nodded.

‘Here is bread for you, and some flesh of kid, and some wine.’

Onesimus ate and drank with ravenous eagerness, and the old man asked him, ‘A fugitive slave?’

‘I was free born.’

‘Hum-m!’ muttered Philebus, incredulously. ‘Well, you are wet, hungry, ragged, miserable. Will you be our servant?’

‘I am not going to be a priest of the Syrian goddess,’ said Onesimus, with horror.

‘No one asked you to be,’ answered Philebus, with a sneer. ‘You will have light work, good pay, good food.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Only to help in tending the ass, and cooking our meals, and going round with the bag for us when we perform.’

The youth paused. Could he, once a Christian, accept this degrading servitude to the vilest of mankind? Yet, after all, what was servitude? What was degradation? Could he be more miserable than he was? To be a servant of the Galli was better than the suicide and the dimly imagined horrors of that unknown world which he had just been about to brave.

‘I will come,’ he said.

The old man brought him a tunic in place of his soaked and torn dress, gave him more wine and food, and taking him to the rest congratulated them on their new and handsome servant.

Then began a mode of life which Onesimus could never recall in after years without a blush of shame and indignation--a life of squalor, mendacity[*10], and imposture, made more vile by the sanction of abject superstition. In the morning, when the priests drew near to any place where a few spectators could be gathered together, they set out in motley array, dressed in many-coloured robes, and with yellow caps of linen or woollen on their heads. They smeared their faces with a dye, and painted their eyes with henna. Some of them put on white tunics, embroidered with stripes of purple, and fastened with a girdle, and on their feet they wore shoes dyed of a saffron colour. They placed on the back of the ass the image of their goddess in its silken covering, and then, with wild cries, began a dervish-like dance to the tones of the flute played by their youthful attendant. During this dance they bared their arms to the shoulder, and flourished aloft swords and axes. In this way they wandered through various hamlets till they reached the villa of a wealthy landowner. Here they determined to exhibit the full extent of their mercenary fanaticism. Looking on the ground, turning from side to side with various contortions, whirling themselves round and round till their long curls streamed from their heads, they bit their arms, and at length cut some of their veins with the weapons which they carried. Then Philebus simulated a sort of epileptic fit. Falling to the ground, with long sobs, which seemed to shake his whole body, he rolled about, accusing himself of the deadliest crimes, like one possessed. After this he seized a scourge, of which the long leathern thongs were studded with bones, and scourged himself with all the endurance of a fakir, till the soil was wet with the blood which streamed from his own wounds and the gashes of his comrades. The crowd looked on with a sort of stupor at the hideous spectacle, and when it ended it was the part of Onesimus, on the attraction of whose personal appearance the wretches relied, to go round with a bag for the offerings of copper and silver coins which were abundantly bestowed on them by the distorted religionism of the spectators. The Galli were further rewarded with gifts in kind. One peasant brought them milk, another bread, and corn, and cheeses, and barley; and a farmer gave them a cask of wine. All these were placed in sacks, side by side with the image of the goddess, upon the ass, which, as the flute-player wittily remarked to Onesimus, ‘was now both a barn and a temple.’ In this way they made spoil of all the country side.

Occasionally they were even more successful. If they found a farmer specially credulous, they would tell him that their goddess was thirsty, and needed the blood of a ram, promising him a prophecy of the future if he would provide one for sacrifice. The sacrificial victim afforded them an excellent banquet, to which they would invite the lowest scoundrels, and fearlessly reveal themselves in their true colours. Once one of the country landowners, named Britinnus, awe-struck by their supposed sanctity, invited the whole company to the hospitality of his farm. Their stay might have been prolonged but for two accidents. The cook had been ordered to prepare a side of venison for a feast, but this was stolen; and, while he was in despair at the punishment which would be inflicted on him for the loss, his wife suggested that they should secretly kill the ass of the priests, and cook part of it instead of the lost venison. But when the cook came to the stable, the ass took fright, and rushed straight through the house into the dining-room of the farmer, upsetting the table with a huge crash. The next day a boy burst in, with his face as white as a sheet, and told the terrified Britinnus that a dog had gone mad, had sprung among the hounds, and had bitten not only some of them and some of the farm-cattle, but also Myrtilus, the muleteer, and Hephæstion, the cook, and Hypatius, the footman. On this Britinnus assumed that the Galli had brought him ill luck, and sent the whole troupe about their business.

In the neighbourhood of one town they took to fortune-telling. Binding each person who consulted them to absolute secrecy, they showed their lack of invention by returning the same oracle to all. It was simplicity itself, consisting of the two lines--

‘The oxen plough the furrowed soil, And harvests rich repay their toil.’

Whether they were asked about plans for a matrimonial alliance, or the heirdom to an estate, or anything else, this oracle admitted of any interpretation they chose to put upon it.

Altogether sickened with his companions and with their way of living, Onesimus was further troubled by the insight into every hidden wound and portent of pagan wickedness which came to his ears, or which he witnessed in these country wanderings. Long afterwards, when he was an old man in Ephesus, he used to tell these stories to his friends, to urge them to yet more zealous effort for the healing of that heathen wickedness of which the whole head was sick and the whole heart faint.

On one occasion, for instance, in his wanderings, the Galli had been unable to collect an audience, because the entire population of the little town of Varia was absorbed in the interest of a trial which affected the family of one of their prominent residents. A wealthy burgher had been left a widower with an only son, a boy of modest character, and devoted to his studies. Some years afterwards he married again, and another son was born to him. By the time this second boy was twelve years old his half-brother had grown into manhood, and his step-mother, who hated him for his virtues, determined to poison him. Summoning a slave who was in her confidence, she sent him to a physician to purchase poison, which she mixed in a cup of wine and placed ready for the youth at the next meal. It happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot and thirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank it. He had scarcely finished the draught, when he fell to the ground as dead. The slave who attended him filled the air with his clamour, and when the inmates of the house came flocking in, one accused another of the crime. The master of the house was out, and his wife sent to inform him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son was the murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the double calamity. His boy was dead; the elder son, of whom he had been so proud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely were the boy’s obsequies finished when the hapless father, his grey hairs defiled with dust, hastened to the Forum, and there embraced the knees of the magistrates, and besought them to avenge him on the fratricide. The local Senate was assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser. Onesimus, who had nothing to do that day, was present at the trial. He heard the old man plead pathetically against the son who had been the pride of his life and home; he heard the youth, with all the calm of innocence, deny the charge. There was no evidence against him but the word of his step-mother and her confidential slave. This man stood up with a front of brass, and declared that the youth had been actuated by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him. There was nothing to rebut this evidence, and every jury-man was prepared to drop into the brazen urn the fatal ticket marked with the letter C, for condemno, which would have handed over the offender to be first scourged until his bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up in a sack with a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea. The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive power of reading character, he felt convinced of his innocence. But while with palpitating heart he awaited the voting, an aged physician arose, and, covering the orifice of the voting-urn with his hand, he said: ‘Fathers, let me prevent the triumph of an infamous woman and a perjured slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offered me a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the man’s face, and put the gold in a purse, which I made him stamp with his seal. Here is the bag. Seize his hand, take off his iron ring, and see whether this be not his seal. If it is, clearly he, and not the poor youth yonder, was the purchaser of the poison.’ Onesimus turned his eyes on the slave. His face had assumed a deadly pallor, and all his limbs had burst into a cold sweat; but even when his seal was recognised, he continued to stammer protestations of his innocence. He was tortured, but would not confess. Then the physician rose with a mysterious smile. ‘Enough of tortures,’ he said. ‘The time has come to unravel this web of villany. I sold to yonder wretch, not poison, but mandragora. If, indeed, the boy drank that draught, he does but sleep. About this time he will be awakening, and may be brought back to the light of day.’ The magistrates at once sent messengers to the sepulchre where the boy’s body had been laid. The father with his own hands removed the cover of the tomb, and there lay the little lad, unchanged, and just beginning to awake, with intense astonishment depicted on his features. Striving in vain to express his joy in words, the happy father--father once more of two dear sons, both of whom he thought that he had lost--folded the child to his heart in a close embrace, and carried him as he was, with all his grave-clothes about him, to the judgment seat. Terror-stricken by such a portent, the woman confessed her crime, and was sentenced to perpetual banishment; the slave was crucified.[69]

Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass, saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fine proportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowly ebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as they passed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was not only living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continue to live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or the magistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by two blows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of having the cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygian linger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awful pity--a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as he himself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminder of One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and in whom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he had fallen away from his heavenly calling.

The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘By all the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench my thirst.’

‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’ and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common posca--sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry--he poured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to the sufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always) was raised but a little from the ground.

‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber on Golgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not find even this poor wretch in his hour of agony--yea, and even me?’

‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or I would say, “The gods bless thee who canst pity such as I am.”’

Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awful helplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of the mystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, as it had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle of human wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and death of Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did not know.

Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for a moment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stood the cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor, the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sight which, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have made the sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony, conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, and unpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the human victim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’s knee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form of punishment--so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of mankind--had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to the gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate still further the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token of degeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he saw that fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by the roadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuring bees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped the luxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majestic ideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn.

Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading than ever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort, accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days with these sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense of nameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had he save to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with a start that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer; that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by his mad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every sense even his fellow-slaves would have called him furcifer. And if he were once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stained his face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once to conceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Was he, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?

It seemed as if that would be better than to beg from the gulled throngs of peasants, and dupe the credulity of farmers, and witness day by day the stupid and loathly self-gashing and self-scourging of these deplorable eunuch priests. More than once he thought that he would get up by night, seize the image of the Syrian goddess, and fling her into the greenest and slimiest pool he could find, among the efts and water-beetles and frogs; while he himself would plunge into the pathless wastes until he should gain the sea-shore, work his passage on board a ship to Troas or Ephesus, and so making his way back to quiet Colossæ, would fling himself at the feet of Philemon and implore the forgiveness which he felt sure would not be long withheld.

But that ‘unseen Providence which men nickname chance’ came to rescue him from his unhealthy bondage. As they were starting for one of their exhibitions in their usual motley and many-coloured gear, the Galli suddenly heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, and, before they knew where to turn, a body of mounted soldiers came thundering down upon them, drew their swords, surrounded and seized the whole company, and, beating the wretched priests with their fists and the flat of their swords, called them thieves and all other opprobrious names, and charged them with having stolen a golden beaker from a neighbouring temple of the Mother of the Gods. In vain the Galli protested and swore their innocence and threatened the soldiers with the vengeance of the Syrian goddess for this insult to her ministers. The soldiers silenced their curses with blows, and, tearing away the covering of the image, found the golden beaker wrapped up within it.

Detected in their theft, the priests were still unabashed. After an evening sacrifice they had watched their opportunity, concealed the sacred cup of Cybele, and at the grey dawn had made their way out of the pomœrium of the city, trusting to get sufficiently far to elude pursuit. The beaker was, however, ancient and valuable, and the police asked the mounted soldiers to help them in tracking the fugitives.

‘It was not a theft,’ said Philebus, who was archigallus. ‘The Mother of the Gods freely lent the beaker to her sister the Syrian goddess, who intended shortly to return it to her. You cannot escape her wrath for this outrage.’

The soldiers and their decurio broke into loud laughter at the threat, and without ceremony put gyves on the wrists of the seven Galli. They consulted whether they should also arrest Onesimus and the flute-player, but Onesimus said that he was ignorant of the theft, that neither he nor his companion--who were acting as slaves of the priests--had ever been permitted to see the contents of the silken veil. The soldiers believed him, and all the more because they did not care to burden themselves with too many prisoners. They took the Galli to Naples, where Onesimus was afterwards told that they had been scourged, imprisoned, and mulcted of all they possessed.

Free once more, and not troubling himself about their fate, Onesimus asked the flute-player what he meant to do. Finding that he regarded his present calling as too comfortable a berth to be given up, Onesimus left him and made his way disconsolately to Baiæ.

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Chapter XXXIII

TITUS AND THE VESTAL

‘Laudabile est infelicis scire misereri.’--VAL. MAX. v. i. 8.

Cast once more on his own resources, Onesimus tried his chance of earning a living in the streets. He had a little money in hand, and, seeing that the street vendors drove a brisker trade in drink than in anything else, he bought two or three dozen bottles of posca, and sold them at a small profit to the poorer wayfarers. In this, as in all his adventures, his good looks were of use to him, for men and women alike were more inclined to buy of a lively and pleasant youth than of the wandering Jews and beggars who sometimes attempted the same trade. He began to think that, for the present, he could keep soul and body together in this way; but he had been rash in choosing a place so near Rome, and still more rash in discarding his disguise.

For one day, as he was calling out the merits of his wine in his clear, ringing voice, and making the people laugh with his jokes, Dama, the steward of the lovely villa which Nero owned at Baiæ, caught sight of him. The man had often been to the Palace on business connected with his accounts, and had noticed Onesimus, then dressed in gay attire and at the zenith of his prosperity, as a youth high in favour in the imperial household. He had heard from Callicles, Nero’s dispensator, of the drunken escapade which had put so sudden an end to his good fortune, and of his subsequent flight from the ergastulum. Now the flight of any slave, but above all of one of Cæsar’s slaves, was so capital an offence that Callicles had asked his friend to keep a good lookout for the recovery of the fugitive. A glance made him nearly sure of the identity of Onesimus, but to be quite certain he took out a copy of the reward which had been offered. It ran as follows:--

‘Wanted, a fugitive slave, Aged about 17. Handsome, with dark curly hair, Named Onesimus. Any one who will give him up, or indicate where he may be arrested, shall receive a reward of a thousand sesterces.’

To be quite sure of his prey, Dama stole away so as to approach Onesimus from behind, and coming up to him tapped him smartly on the shoulder and said ‘Onesimus.’

‘Yes?’ said Onesimus with a violent start, taken completely off his guard.

‘I thought so,’ said Dama, with an unpleasant smile. ‘Come with me, my gay fugitive. Cæsar can’t possibly spare such a lively and good-looking slave as you; and I shall be very glad of a thousand sesterces.’

Onesimus tried to dart away in flight, but the remorseless hand of Dama clutched his shoulder with too tight a grasp, and with a gesture of despair he remained silent.

‘Rescue! rescue!’ cried some of the crowd who pitied him, and with whom he was a favourite; and as no soldiers or police were in sight one or two stepped forward to give the youth a chance.

‘Rescue?’ said Dama, looking around him with cool contempt. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Do you dare to interfere with the arrest of a runaway from Cæsar’s Palace?’

The crowd fell back awe-struck before the awful name of Cæsar, and Dama despatched a slave to bring fetters from Nero’s villa hard by. Onesimus was once more a chained criminal with a destiny before him even more horrible than any of which he had yet been in danger. He thought of the poor wretch to whom he had given drink as he hung on his cross. Would that be his own fate of agony now in the flush and heyday of his youth?

Next morning he was sent off towards Rome. He thought of trying to communicate with Acte, who had been deeply grieved by losing sight of him. But this was impossible. There was no one to take any message for him. He was told that not only Callicles--on whom fell in part the disgrace of his escape--but Nero himself was bitterly incensed against him, first, for his unpardonable indiscretion, then for his flight, and lastly--though this was a secret motive--because it had come to his ears that Onesimus had been the slave who had defeated the midnight attempt on the life of Britannicus. Onesimus, when he had drunk too much Sabine wine, had sometimes forgotten all reticence, and Nero believed that it was through him that certain dark secrets of the Palace had come to be whispered among the lower orders of the Roman population. Acte herself would have been powerless to defend him. One day Octavia, finding that her purple robes had been looked after less skilfully than they had been when under his care, had asked some question about him in the presence of Nero. The Emperor was angry at the mention of his name. Some slaves had been in the room on the occasion, and the circumstance had become notorious in the gossip of the Palace. The unhappy young Phrygian was told that he would probably be crucified; but if not, he would be tied to the furca and scourged, perhaps to death, with the horrible thongs.

On his arrival at Rome the order was given. He was to be beaten-- practically to death. In indescribable anguish of soul he spent what he believed to be his last night on earth.

Next morning the furca--two pieces of wood nailed together in the shape of the letter Λ--was placed on his neck, his hands were fast bound to the ends of the wood, and he was led out towards the Esquiline, where afterwards his corpse would be flung into the common pit.

He was too much stunned and stupefied even to pray. The iron had entered deep into his soul. He looked on himself as a lost apostate who would end a life of miserable failure by entering into the outer gloom beyond, where he feared that the face of the Saviour of whom he once had heard would be utterly turned away from him.

But his hour had not yet come.

Stooping under the furca, with his arms already cramped by their unnatural position, he was led by the slaves and lictors who were to preside at his execution into the Vicus Tuscus on the way to the Esquiline. But as they entered the long street a boy who was strolling towards the Gelotian house caught sight of them, and no sooner had his quick eye seen them than he took in the whole situation at a glance.

It was Titus, much sobered from the gay lad he once had been, and still pale from the illness caused by the sip he had taken of the poison which had carried off Britannicus. He recognised Onesimus, and a Palace rumour had that morning made him aware of the Phrygian’s peril. He looked on the slave-youth as a protégé of his own, for his admission into the family of Pudens had been mainly due to his intercession. He also felt grateful to him for his ready services towards the murdered friend of his youth, and his kindly heart was filled with pity.

A way of saving him had flashed across his mind, and, bidding his slaves follow him, he darted off at a pace too swift for Roman dignity. In an adjoining street he met--as he was well aware that he should meet--a beautiful and stately lady whom he knew, and who was very fond of him. It was Lælia, the senior vestal, the Virgo Maxima.

Greeting her with extreme reverence, he yet ventured to make her an unsuspecting agent in his little plot.

‘Noble Lælia,’ he said, with the charm of manner which few could resist, and with a ready fertility of invention, ‘I have just seen in the book-shop of Atrectus, in the Argiletum, just opposite the Forum of Julius, a charming little copy of Virgil’s Eclogues with such a good portrait! You promised me a present on my last birthday, and said I should choose it myself. May I have that book, and will you come and buy it for me? It is my birthday to-day.’

‘Certainly,’ said the vestal, with a smile. ‘For a boy like you, so good and steady, I would do much more than that.’ She little guessed that the birthday was a fib extemporised by Titus for his own purposes, for his birthday was on December 30.

‘Thanks, dear vestal,’ said Titus. ‘Will you not come by this short cut?’

He led her by the hand, her lictor following, into the Vicus Tuscus, which was close by the Argiletum, where he well knew that she would not fail to meet Onesimus and his escort. As they approached he said:

‘Oh, Lælia, how I should like to have your privilege of saving the lives of the wretched! See, there is some miserable slave whom they are taking to scourge or crucify. Will you not intercede for him?’

‘For a poor furcifer like that?’ asked Lælia. ‘Our high privilege is used for nobles--at the lowest, for freedmen.’

‘Are not slaves men like ourselves?’ he asked. ‘Musonius says so; and Seneca says so. Look, what a fine youth he is! He looks as if he had been free-born; and I dare say he has done nothing really wrong.’

Lælia glanced at the pallid, beautiful face of the sufferer. It would hardly have touched her heart, accustomed as she had been to the massacres of the arena, to which Nero of late years had invited the vestal virgins. But there was something in his youth, and something in the earnest pleading of her favourite Titus--something perhaps also in the sense of power--which decided her to interfere.

‘Stop!’ she said to the lictors and soldiers, as they bowed reverently before her majestic presence. ‘By virtue of my office, I bid you take off that furca, and spare the life of your prisoner.’

‘He is a runaway slave, whom for great misdemeanours the Emperor has ordered to be scourged,’ said Callicles, stepping forward.

‘Dare you disobey the Virgo Maxima?’ asked Lælia, with flashing eye. ‘Do you think that even the Emperor will insult the majesty of Vesta and her sacred fire, by questioning the immemorial prerogative of her eldest vestal? Take off the furca at once!’

The very lictors were overawed by her gesture of command. They hastily unbound the tired arms of Onesimus, and took the furca off his neck. What would happen to him he knew not, but he knew that for the time his life was saved.

‘Thanks, kindest of vestals,’ said Titus, gratefully kissing the purple hem of her suffibulum, and not betraying by look or sign that Onesimus was known to him. ‘I never saw a vestal exercise her prerogative before, and I am so glad to have seen it. May Vesta reward your sleep with her divinest dreams! May Opiconsiva bless you!’

‘Opiconsiva?’ said the vestal with difficulty suppressing a smile; ‘is the boy laughing at me? What do you know of Opiconsiva?’

‘Not much,’ said Titus, ‘except that she has something to do with vestals; and if so, Lælia must be very dear to her!’

Onesimus, with his usual quickness, took his cue from the conduct of Titus. The right of the vestals was well known in Rome, though it was rarely used, for they were not often seen in the streets. But it was understood that, in order to be valid, the meeting of vestal and criminal must be accidental. Lælia would have been seriously displeased had she known that she was in reality the victim of a little plot on the part of her boy-friend, and Titus was in some trepidation till he had hurried the vestal past the prisoner, and to the choice book-stall which was spread with the purple bindings of Atrectus. There she not only purchased for him the copy of Virgil, but, as he had quoted Seneca, she also gave him a radiant little volume of some of his treatises from the shop of his bookseller, Dorus, hard by. When she gave him this second gift the delighted youth felt a little compunction at his manœuvre.

No one knew what he had done; but, when he narrated the incident to Pudens, the tribune suspected the real state of the case, for the boy’s eye twinkled suspiciously as he told his little story with the most innocent candour.

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Book II

* * * * *

‘LACHESIS ROTAT!’

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Chapter XXXIV

AN EVIL EPOCH

‘Inde metus maculat pœnarum præmia vitæ, Circumretit enim vis atque injuria quemque ... Nec facile est placidam ac pacatam degere vitam Qui violat facteis communia federa vitæ.’

LUCRET. De Rer. Nat. v. 1151.

The career and character of Nero grew darker every year, for every year more fully revealed to him the awful absoluteness of his autocracy. No one dreamed of disputing his will. Every desire, however frivolous, however shameful, however immense, was instantly gratified. His Court was prolific of the vilest characters. There was scarcely a man near his person who did not daily extol his power, his wit, his accomplishments, his beauty, his divinity. ‘Do you not yet know that you are Cæsar?’ they whispered to him if he hesitated for a moment to commit some deadly crime, or plunge into some unheard-of prodigality.

All things went on much as usual in the corrupt, trembling world of Rome. To-day some wealthy nobleman would commit suicide, amid the laudations of his friends, out of utter weariness of life. To-morrow all Rome would be talking of the trial of some provincial governor who had gorged himself with the rapine of a wealthy province. Or everybody would be whispering a series of witty pasquinades, attributed to Antistius Sosianus or Fabricius Veiento, full of lacerating innuendoes, aimed now at the Emperor and now at some prominent senator. Pætus Thrasea and the peril he incurred by his opposition to the Court furnished a frequent subject of conversation, both to his Stoic admirers and to the rabble of venal senators, who cordially hated him. ‘To put Thrasea to death would be to slay virtue itself,’ said the graver citizens. ‘He is a pompous sham, who wants taking down,’ said the gilded youth.

It was a fearful comment on the wretchedness of the times that most of the prominent thinkers and statesmen looked on self-destruction as the sole path to freedom, and the best boon of heaven. They thought it a proof of philosophic heroism when a man died calmly by his own hand, though the act involves no more courage than the vilest of mankind can evince. Seneca tells with rapture the story of the death of Julius Canus. The Emperor Gaius had said to him, after a quarrel, ‘That you may not deceive yourself, I have ordered you to be led to execution.’ ‘I thank you, excellent prince,’ said Canus. Ten days passed, and Canus spent them without the smallest sign of trepidation, awaiting the tyrant’s mandate. When the centurion arrived at his house with the order that he was to die, he was playing at draughts. He first counted the pieces, and then said with a smile to his friend, ‘Mind you don’t claim the victory when I am dead. You, centurion, will be the witness that I have one piece more than he has.’ Observing the grief of his friends, he said, ‘Why are you sad? You are perplexed about the question whether souls are immortal or not. In a moment or two I shall know. If I can come back I will tell you.’[70]

The letters, and all the latest writings, of Seneca vibrate with terror. They are full of the thought of death, and doubtless he lived with the sense of such grim satisfaction as could be derived from the thought that if life became too unbearable he could end it. ‘And death,’ he said to himself, ‘means only “not to be.”’[71]

And all this was felt even in Nero’s ‘golden quinquennium’! Men boasted of the happiness of the days in which their lot was cast, but they knew that under their vineyards burnt the fires of a volcano. Common conversation, home life, dinner parties, literature, philosophy, virtue, wealth, were all dangerous. Neither retirement nor obscurity always availed to save a man. The only remedy was to learn endurance; not to fill too prominent a place; not to display too much ability; never to speak in public without a digression in flattery of the Emperor; to pretend cheerfulness though one felt anguish; and to thank the tyrant for the deadliest injuries, like the rich knight who thanked Gaius when he had killed his son.

Now and then some painful incident, like the bitumen which floats up from the Dead Sea depths, showed the foulness which lay beneath the film of civilisation. Such, for instance, was the fate of Octavius Sagitta, the tribune of the people, and one of Nero’s intimates, who was banished for the brutal murder of a married lady who had played fast and loose with his affections. Such, too, was the savage attack made upon Seneca in the Senate by the aged informer Publius Suillius, whose sneers and denunciations caused bitter anguish to the unhappy philosopher. But Nero recked little of such scenes; and as time went on, he fell wholly under the influence which, even more than that of Tigellinus, developed his worst impulses. He became more and more enslaved by the fatal fascinations of the wife of Otho.

Poppæa had every charm and every gift except that of virtue. From the moment that she had riveted the wandering fancy of Nero at the banquet of her husband, she felt sure that her succession to the splendour of an Augusta was only a matter of time. There were obstacles in the way. Otho loved her to distraction. Nero still admired him, and did not think of putting him to death. Nor did he venture to defy public opinion by taking her from her husband, as Augustus had taken Livia from the elder Tiberius. Octavia was Empress, and as the daughter of Claudius, she had a hold on the affections of the people. As the niece of Germanicus, she was dear to the soldiers. Her life was blameless, and Agrippina was anxious to protect her, though she knew that it was impossible to make Nero a faithful husband. Octavia retained the distinction of a consort, if she had none of the love which was a wife’s due.

Poppæa determined to surmount these difficulties, and she it was who gradually goaded her imperial lover to the worst crimes which disgrace his name. Through two murders and two divorces she waded her way to a miserable throne.

Her first husband was Rufius Crispinus, by whom she had a son. She had accepted the advances of Otho, who passed for the finest of the young Roman aristocrats; but she aimed from the first at becoming Empress, and it was with this aim that she had flung her spells over Nero. Her consummate beauty was enhanced by the utmost refinements of a coquette. She pretended to love Nero passionately for his own sake, as though she had become enamoured of his personal beauty; yet while she thus allured his devotion, she carefully checked his advances with a bewitching semblance of modesty. She played the part of the honourable Roman matron. She extolled the open-handed liberality and artistic grace of Otho. She taunted Nero with his love for a freedwoman like Acte. Above all, she missed no opportunity of deepening his irritation against his mother. She saw the instinctive fear of Agrippina which Nero could never quite throw off, and feeling convinced that so long as the Empress-mother lived she could not supplant Octavia, she made it her aim to goad Nero to her murder or banishment. Whenever she saw him most enraptured with her charms--when his hand wandered to the golden tresses, full of burning gleams in the sunlight, which Nero had astonished the poets by describing as ‘amber-hued,’ and which were the despair and envy of the Roman ladies--she would push his hand aside, and tell him that she was much happier as the wife of Otho than she could be in a palace where her lover was still subject to the maternal sway of one who detested her. Nero became haunted by the fixed impression that he could never be free and never be happy while Agrippina lived. Poppæa did not even hesitate to taunt him. ‘You a Cæsar!’ she said. ‘Why, you are not even a free man! You are still a schoolboy tied to your mother’s girdle!’

Nero saw but little of Agrippina. She spent much of her time at one or other of her numerous villas, and rarely occupied the palace of Antonia at Rome. Yet he felt sure that during her sullen isolation she had never abandoned her designs. She might seem to be living in retirement, busy with the improvement of her gardens, or amusing herself with her talking starlings and nightingales; but he knew her too well to imagine that she acquiesced in a defeat which she might yet retrieve. She was but forty-two years old, and in past days she had shown that she knew how to wait. It was known that she was writing her own memoirs, and that their scandalous pages abounded in accusations against others, so dark as to render men more credulous of the worst accusations which were launched against herself. How could Nero tell what might be passing between her and Octavia when they exchanged visits? His timid and conscience-stricken nature often imagined that she might be intriguing with Faustus Sulla or Rubellius Plautus, both of whom, like himself, were scions of the imperial family of the Cæsars. He saw in her the one fatal obstacle to the fulfilment of his desires.

And she, in those grim years of terror, knew well that Poppæa was no gentle girl like Acte, but would strive to trample on her rivals as Agrippina herself had done in former years. The struggle against Poppæa and her beauty and her ambition would be a struggle of life and death. And, indeed, the bitterness of death was almost past, for her son stooped to the most ignoble methods for rendering her life miserable, and humiliating her even to the dust. At Rome he set on his emissaries to harass her with lawsuits; and, stooping to yet more vulgar baseness, he paid the lowest of the populace to annoy her with coarse jests and infamous reproaches, which they shouted at her from boat or roadside, when she was resting at her country houses.

An attempt was made to poison her at a banquet given by Otho; but Agrippina was wary and abstemious. She had watchful slaves and freedmen near her person, and the attempt failed. Nero persuaded himself that his mother was watching him like a tiger-cat in act to spring. It was not only Poppæa who inflamed his hatred. Tigellinus also had his own designs. He suggested that Otho should first be got out of the way, and then that the death of Agrippina should leave the path open for Nero’s union with the siren who had mastered his soul. Octavia, without Agrippina to help her, was hardly considered in the light of an obstacle. She could be swept aside with ease.

The first step was soon taken. Otho was sent as governor to Lusitania. So long as he was there he could not stand in Nero’s way. The exile cherished his love for Poppæa to the last; and during his brief spell of empire he induced the Senate to honour her with statues. But he never saw her more.

One day, as Nero sat, with Tigellinus by his side, looking on at a sham sea-fight, for the purpose of which the arena had been flooded, they were struck with one of the novelties which Arruntius Stella, the president of the games, had devised for the amusement of the populace. During the fight one of the vessels had been so constructed as to go to pieces, to pour a number of armed men out of its hold, and then to be reunited into a trireme as before.

Tigellinus touched the arm of Nero, and Nero, filled with the same thought, turned to him a glance of intelligence.

‘The sea is a treacherous element,’ said Tigellinus. ‘All sorts of strange and unaccountable accidents happen at sea.’

‘I wonder who could make me a ship of that kind,’ said the Emperor.

‘Your old tutor, Anicetus. He is at this moment admiral of the fleet at Misenum. Stella would put at his disposal the artist who contrived this vessel. One like it could be made in a few weeks, and magnificently adorned for the use of the Empress.’

‘How could she be induced to go on board?’

‘She is at Antium; you are going to Baiæ. The Feast of Minerva is coming on. You must be reconciled to her publicly, must invite her to your villa, and must place the galley at her disposal.’

The sea-fight went on, but it was observed that after the new contrivance of the mechanical ship, Nero did not pay much attention to it. He was apparently lost in thought. He was impatiently revolving in his mind the intolerable conditions by which he was surrounded. On the one side was his mother, haughty, menacing, powerful in spite of her dethronement; and, on the other, Poppæa entangling him in her sorceries, worrying him with importunities, goading him to matricide with envenomed taunts. And behind them both stood the spectre of his tormenting conscience, with thrilling whisper and outstretched hand.

And thus it was that the world went on. In that age morality had well-nigh vanished because faith was well-nigh dead. Man cannot live without a conscience or without God. Guilty pleasure is brief-lived, and afterwards it stingeth like a serpent. It is self-slain by the Nemesis of satiety. The wickedest age the world has ever seen was also the most incurably sad.

But for the poor Christians of Rome, though the days were so evil, life had neither tumult nor terror. They had found that which more than compensated them for the trials of the world. Their life was a spiritual life. To them, to live was Christ. They possessed the strange secret of joy in sorrow, the boast of which upon the lips of the Stoics was an idle vaunt. That secret lay in a spiritual conviction, an indomitable faith, above all, in an In-dwelling Presence which breathed into their souls a peace which the world could neither give nor take away. The life which was to most of their contemporaries a tragedy without dignity, or a comedy without humour, was to them a gift sweet and sacred, a race to be bravely run under that lucent cloud which shone with the faces of angel witnesses,--a mystery indeed, yet a mystery luminous with a ray which streamed to them out of God’s Eternity from the Glory of their Risen Lord.

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Chapter XXXV

THE MATRICIDE

‘It was not in the battle, No tempest gave the shock; She sprang no fatal leak, She ran upon no rock’----

COWPER.

‘Hæc monstra Neroni Nec jussæ quondam præstiteratis aquæ.’

MART. iv. 63.

Baiæ in the springtide of A.D. 59 must have been as lovely a place as the world can show. Its blue sky, its soft air, its sparkling sea, its delightful shore, its dry hard yellow sands and rocks gleaming in the clear water, its green and wooded heights, combined with its healing waters and splendid buildings to make it a fairyland of beauty and enjoyment. Marius, Pompey, Cæsar, had built villas there, and the whole line of coast to Puteoli had gradually become crowded with the gay houses of the Roman aristocracy. Temples, and baths, and theatres, and palaces rose on every side, among groves enriched with grottoes and blooming like a garden of enchantment with fruits and flowers. Passing the promontory of Misenum, the traveller first arrived at the bright town of Baiæ itself, and then at the more quiet and exclusive Bauli, until he reached the lakes of Lucrine and Avernus, of which the former had been joined to the sea by a canal, and protected by the magnificent causeway of Agrippina’s grandfather Agrippa. Beyond these was Puteoli, with the stately and pillared fane of Serapis, the ruins of which still attest its former magnificence.

The festive splendour of the lovely and dissolute resort was heightened by the universal holiday of the Quinquatrus, or Feast of Minerva. It was kept almost like our Christmastide. All the boys had five days’ holiday, beginning on March 19, and were at home from their various schools, adding fresh mirth to the joyous watering-place. There were exhibitions of wild beasts, and plays, and poetic and oratorical contests; and on the fifth day of the festival, which was called the Tubilustrium, all the trumpets were blown, and the sacred implements of the temples lustrated.

By this time Nero had accustomed himself to the thought of getting rid of his mother by treacherous violence. His five years of empire had inspired him with audacity and confidence. His passion for Poppæa burned with ever fiercer flame. His hatred for Agrippina, as the main obstacle in the path of his desires, grew daily more sullen; and Poppæa had aroused his fears by persuading him that his mother was plotting against his life. Since poison had failed, and he shrank from using the dagger, he had determined to follow the deadly suggestion of Tigellinus, and to make it appear that the Augusta had perished in an accident at sea.

To prepare the way for his purpose, he began to express his determination to be reconciled with his mother. ‘The anger of parents,’ he said, ‘must be cheerfully borne. It is my duty as a son to soothe my mother’s irritation. I long to be on good terms with her once more.’ Again and again he repeated these sentiments to various persons, and he took care that they should reach the ears of his mother. Octavia herself, grateful for the efforts of Agrippina on her behalf, told the Augusta that Nero’s feelings seemed to be undergoing a change, and that perhaps he would restore to her, spontaneously, her former honours. The hope kindled by this intelligence fell on the last days of the Empress-mother like a ray of cruel sunshine out of the thunder-clouds which had so long been gathering around her. It was natural that in her misery she should be credulous of good tidings, and perhaps her heart was softened to her son by the fact that she was now living in the villa at Antium where she had given him birth, and in which nearly every room recalled the memories of his childish brightness, and the winning trustfulness of a heart as yet unstained, of a beauty as yet unshadowed by evil secrets and base desires. The villa was full of splendour. The Apollo Belvedere and the Fighting Gladiator were but two of the many statues which adorned it. But what was art, what was splendour to a mind diseased? She found more happiness in the tame birds which would settle on her finger, and the yellow brown-marbled lampreys which came to feed out of her hand.

On March 18, the day before the Feast of Minerva began, her heart throbbed with pleasure to receive a delightful letter from her son. Couched in the most loving terms, it conveyed to her a genial invitation to come to him at Baiæ, and there to spend, in due mirth and feast, the first day of the festival. ‘Fancy that I am a schoolboy once more,’ wrote Nero, ‘and that you, my loving mother, are welcoming me home for my holidays.’ How could Agrippina help indulging the hope that better days had at last begun to dawn? The next morning, gladder than she had ever been since her husband’s murder, she made her way through the grounds of her villa to the little haven where was moored the Liburnian galley which she used for excursions along the shore.

Agrippina thought that Nature had never looked lovelier as she glided over the flashing waves, and her stalwart rowers in gay liveries,

‘Bending to their oars with splash and strain, Made white with foam the green and purple sea.’

They had hardly rounded Cape Misenum when they met the imperial yacht in which Nero had sailed to meet her. He came on board her galley, warmly embraced her, and accompanied her to the landing-stage of her villa at Bauli, where he bade her farewell, saying that they would meet again in the evening. ‘And look, mother,’ he said, ‘I have provided that you shall be conducted to Baiæ with proper splendour.’

He pointed to a yacht anchored under the trees of her villa, manned with the imperial marines, and superb with fluttering pennons and decorations of gilding and vermilion. It was more splendid than any to which she had been accustomed in the days when, as the sole Augusta and as all-powerful with Claudius, she wielded the resources of the Empire. This yacht, he told her, was to be rowed in front of her Liburnian, and to announce her arrival. There it lay, making a lovely show, and casting its bright broken reflection on the dancing sunlit waters. She was delighted, for she loved magnificence, both for its own sake and for the impression which it makes on the multitude; and she took this as an omen that Nero would restore to her the body-guard of Germans and the escort of Prætorians the withdrawal of which had cut her most deeply to the heart.

As Agrippina rested after her voyage, she prepared to array herself in her richest and most jewelled robes. She was full of bright anticipations, and thought that now the tortures of the last five years were at an end. The whole world had turned for her to thorns; would some new rose-bud now unfold itself among them? Hardly! It was the custom of ladies on the first day of the Quinquatrus to consult astrologers and fortune-tellers, and the answers of those whom Agrippina consulted that day were far from encouraging. And a disagreeable incident occurred during the morning. While she was being dressed, the message was brought her that, in the concourse of vessels which had attended the Emperor, one of them had accidentally crashed into her own galley, and so broken its sides that it was temporarily unfit for service; happily, however, she could now sail on board the bright vessel which had been sent to wait upon her.

Little did the unhappy woman know that all this had been pre-arranged, and that the chief reason why Nero had sailed to meet her was in order to make the disabling of her galley wear the aspect of a colourable accident!

But she felt an unaccountable unwillingness to go on board the untried vessel. She had heard mysterious hints of danger, too impalpable to be understood, but sufficient to awaken a dim suspicion. Her astrologer, whom she again consulted, vaguely indicated that a storm might arise, and it might be as well for her to go to Baiæ by the road. These faint surmises were emphasised by the arbitrary foreboding of her own heart, which every now and then seemed to pause in its beating, and to chill her happiness with the suspense of the unknown. In vain she tried to dispel these vague spiritual fears. At the last moment she ordered her litter to be prepared, and, making some excuse about the better protection of her robes, had herself conveyed to Baiæ by land.

She was received with open arms from the moment that, with queenly step, she descended from her litter. The guests, and the many slaves, all in their finest array, were grouped around the entrance, and broke into a respectful murmur of greeting and applause as the gleam of the westering sun flashed on the diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires which encircled her neck and arms and thickly encrusted the broidery of her inner robe. The assembled nobles and courtiers bowed low, the attendants almost prostrated themselves as she advanced towards her son. He seemed to be in his brightest mood of hilarity and affection. He welcomed her with playful sentences and attractive tenderness. He himself conducted her to the banquet, which, to add to its delight, was spread in a room where the couches were so arranged that each guest could have a full view on one side of that ‘golden shore of happy Venus,’ proud with the gifts of nature and of art; and, on the other side, of the river with its painted shallops and merry holiday-makers. No refinement of luxury or beauty was lacking to the banquet. Nero assured her--but she knew that no one could believe a word he said--he had himself caught the fish by a line from the window beneath which the sea-waves flowed. Then there were plates of melimela, sweet as honeycombs, glowing rosily from their baskets of silver filagree, and olives from Picenum, and cinnamon from the shop of Niceros in Rome, which was so choice that, as he solemnly assured his wealthy purchasers, it could only be procured from the nest of the Phœnix.

Nero insisted that Agrippina should occupy the seat of honour at the table above himself. When she gently remonstrated, he said, ‘To whom is the precedence due but to the mother who gave me both my life and my Empire?’ Never had he seemed to her to shine with more princely charm than at that entertainment! He exerted himself to display all his geniality and all his accomplishments. He bade her look at the sea, and quoted some lines of young Martial to her:

‘The wavelets wake from their purple sleep, The soft breeze ruffles the dimpling deep, Gently the painted shallops glide, Borne by the breeze o’er the rippling tide.’

Sometimes he entered with grave dignity upon questions of State, which he respectfully submitted to her maturer judgment; at other times, dropping the tone of confidential inquiry, he plunged into almost boyish gaiety, and interchanged witticisms with the younger nobles to beguile her into laughter. His conduct was a consummate piece of acting, which would not have disgraced Paris or Aliturus, and Agrippina fell into the snare. At first the shadowy foreboding flitted every now and then across her soul, but now she dismissed it. Surely all those blandishments were sincere! After all, was not she his mother? was not he her son? What was more natural than such a reconciliation between two who were so dear to each other? The hours sped by almost unnoticed, and the exhilaration of the rich wine of which, on an occasion so joyful, she freely partook, added to the hope and bliss which for four weary summers had been strangers to her heart.

But at last it was time to leave, for the banquet and its amusements had prolonged themselves far into the evening. Even Nero, frivolous, corrupt, abandoned as he was, felt the awful solemnity of the moment when he would for the last time behold in life the mother to whom he owed so immense a debt. He strained her again and again to his heart; he gazed long and earnestly into the eyes which were so soon to be closed forever; he covered her hands and her cheeks and even her eyes with his passionate kisses. Almost he wished that the terrible deed had never been contemplated, that the sham reconciliation had indeed been real. ‘Farewell, dear mother,’ he said, almost with a sob, which came easily to a nature so superficially emotional. ‘Take care of your health for my sake.’ And then, handing her to the charge of Anicetus, he turned hastily away.

With deep obeisances, but with a smile in his evil eye, the admiral, who had once been a slave, conducted her on board the fatal ship, along the planks which had been covered with purple for her proud footsteps. He led her to the stern, where a canopy of purple silk, fringed with golden broiderings, overshadowed the sumptuous couch on which she was now glad to rest. There were but two attendants with her, her lady-in-waiting, Acerronia Polla, and Crepereius Gallus. Little did those three dream that it was to be their last night on earth!

The night was as enchanting as only a night of the spring on the shores of Italy can be. Overhead, in the deep blue vault, numberless stars seemed to hang like golden cressets, raining their large lustre over that unequalled scene. Beneath the rhythmic strokes of the rowers the sea flashed into brighter phosphorescence in the shadow of the boat, and the waves rolled away in molten gold. From the near coast, as they steered northwards, the air seemed to come laden with the perfume of flowers from the gardens and blossoming trees. Countless spectators watched the gilded barque, and their torches glimmered along the crowded sands, and the music of their gay songs and serenades came to the happy voyagers. The balm and peacefulness and beauty of the night seemed to set its seal on the reunion of hearts too long divided, and for that hour of blessedness it almost seemed worth while to have lived.

Acerronia, bending over the feet of the Empress as she reclined on the couch, was congratulating her with all her heart on the warmth with which she had been received, and was indulging in a hundred flattering auguries of the future. Surely Agrippina would now be restored to her full honours as Augusta! Once more she would have her home in the Palace of the Cæsars, and ride in a carriage to the capital, and be surrounded by her tall and glittering body-guard! ‘He kissed your eyes, Augusta,’ said Acerronia, ‘as though he would embrace your very soul.’[72] To Agrippina also at that moment

‘Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair.’

Crepereius stood near them, only joining in the conversation by an occasional word of congratulation, but enjoying with the two ladies the happy events of the day and the splendour of the balmy night.

Suddenly a whistle was heard from near the prow, where Anicetus was standing. The whistle was followed by a frightful crash. The gay canopy over the Empress had been weighted with lead, and so contrived that by the pulling of a rope it could be freed from its supports. Down it rushed upon the heads of the unsuspecting victims. Crepereius, who was standing up, was instantly crushed to death; but not so the two ladies. They were protected by the side of the boat and of the couch on which the Empress was resting. Half stunned by the terrible accident, they had scarcely realised what had occurred before they saw the galley in a state of indescribable confusion. Only a few of the sailors shared the hideous secret with Anicetus; and as the machinery had failed to act--for the loosing of the canopy ought to have been accompanied by the dissolution of the vessel--they rushed to the larboard in order to upset the boat by their weight. Those who had not been warned of the intended murder rushed to the starboard to prevent an accident. Fierce cries and discordant commands sounded on every side. Half wild with selfish terror, Acerronia struggled from the débris of the canopy and screamed out, ‘I am the Empress; help the mother of the Cæsar.’ A shower of fierce blows, dealt on her head with oars and boat-hooks, was the answer to her cry and the punishment of her faithlessness. In a moment she too lay outstretched in death. Agrippina was sobered by peril from the fumes of the Falernian of which she had plentifully partaken, and was enabled, by her familiarity with guilty plots, to take in at a glance the significance of the scene. She kept perfect silence. The murder of Acerronia showed her that it was her own life which was being deliberately attempted under pretence of a shipwreck; but she clung fiercely to that life, horrible as it had become, and little as she could now hope ultimately to escape the machinations of her son. Taking advantage of the confusion and the darkness, she dropped herself unobserved into the sea. She was a good swimmer, and boldly struck out for the land; though she then first became conscious that during the scuffle she had received a wound in the shoulder, either from the falling canopy or from the oar of one of the conspirators. Every stroke was painful; she was weighted by her heavy robes, and she doubted whether her strength would hold out; but still she swam for the land with all her remaining force. Surely the silent stars had never looked down on a stranger scene! Here was a matron who but recently had swayed the world, a half-deified Empress, the great-granddaughter of Augustus, the daughter of Germanicus, the wife and priestess of one deified Emperor, and the mother of the reigning Cæsar, swimming for her life in the jewelled robes which she had worn at the imperial banquet--swimming for her life in the dark waves, which became phosphorescent at every stroke, and thus trying to escape to land from the gilded barge which had been murderously wrecked by the contrivance of her son!

It happened that Pudens as one of the officers in charge of the Prætorian escort, was spending his holiday at Baiæ, and had asked Titus to accompany him. King Caractacus and Claudia were also there, and had accepted the invitation of Pudens to join him and their young favourite Titus for a moonlight sail on one of the scores of painted shallops in which the visitors to the watering-place were enjoying the beauty of the night. The youth’s eyes had been following the gay vessel which bore Agrippina to Bauli. He saw that there had been some strange disaster; he had heard the crash of the falling canopy, and the discordant tumult of cries and groans which followed. He had seen a splash in the water, and observed the golden divided ripple behind some one who was evidently swimming to escape. He instantly steered the pleasure-boat toward the swimmer, as did some fishermen in another vessel who, then as now, were plying their trade by night. The unhappy Empress first reached the boat of Pudens, and the centurion stretched out his strong arm to rescue her. As she grasped it the light of a torch upheld by Titus shone on his face, and she recognised the young friend of Britannicus. He, too, by the same light caught the flash of her jewels, and saw who she was.

‘Immortal gods!’ he exclaimed, ‘it is the Empress Agrippina!’

Claudia at once pressed to her side. Her face was deadly pale, and the blood of Acerronia had left on it some ghastly spots of crimson. The sleeve of her robe was stained with blood from the wound[*11] in her shoulder. She was almost too exhausted to speak, but she faintly whispered, ‘Hush! Do not mention my name. Let me be unknown.’

They laid her on the cushioned seat, and Claudia, sitting beside her, clasped her hand, wrung the sea-water from the folds of her dripping robe, tenderly parted the wet disordered tresses which clung about her face, and covered her with a mantle, while, at her request, they rowed her towards the Lucrine lake and the landing-place of her villa. Titus bade the fisher-boat accompany them, for their own little pinnace was overloaded. When they touched the land he offered to run up to the villa and order her slaves to bring a litter for their mistress. The Empress, however, entreated them not to wait, but to carry her as best they could, for she was too weak to walk. A rude litter was hastily constructed from a bench of the fishing-boat, and in this humble and pathetic guise the Augusta was carried by Pudens and Titus into the hall of her house, where a group of wondering and terrified slaves awaited her.

The news had spread like wildfire among the thousands of idlers who were promenading on the shore, and tumult reigned among them. What did it mean? The night was absolutely calm. There were no rocks in the bay. No collision had occurred. That there could have been a real shipwreck was impossible. The gods themselves, by the exceptional calmness of sea and air, seemed to have interfered to expose the hypocritical pretence of any accident. But if there could have been no accident, what was it that had happened? What were they to do? They were in wild excitement. All along the shore of the bay were crowds of men and women, who had streamed out of the villas at the news of some variously reported disaster. No one knew the real facts of the case. The strangest tales were repeated from mouth to mouth, and on all sides were heard agitated questions and startling but discordant answers. The sea-road and the sands and the causeway of the Lucrine lake glimmered with countless torches, which flowed now in one direction, now in another, like streams of fire. The one steady report was that the Empress had been shipwrecked, and was in danger of her life; and the one object was to get a share in the credit of saving her. The piers and boats were crowded with an impatient throng. Some stood at the very edge of the summer waves; others waded neck deep into the warm and glowing water, and stood with outstretched hands staring over the sea to catch sight of any floating form. Amid the confusion, the little pleasure-boat of Pudens was seen rippling its golden path toward Baiæ from the landing-stage of Agrippina’s villa, and was instantly surrounded by throngs of eager questioners. In answer to the confused inquiries, Pudens and Titus said that undoubtedly the splendid state galley had, in some way or other, been shipwrecked, but that the Empress-mother had escaped by swimming, and was now safe at her own villa.

As the news spread among the multitudes, they streamed off to the villa at Bauli to convey their congratulations and to surround the house and gardens with applauding cries. Most of them felt an agreeable sensation in the fact that a first-rate incident had occurred to break the monotony of idleness and vulgar dissipation.

But Agrippina was lying in her chamber, shivering, agitated, with aching body and despairing soul. The undaunted woman had betrayed to her slaves and household no sign that she was aware of what had been intended. She only told them that her galley had been shipwrecked, and her life marvellously preserved. She expressed her deep regret at the loss of her friends Acerronia and Crepereius, and ordered the will of the former to be produced, and all her effects sealed. Not till then did she withdraw into privacy, to meditate on what she should do. All was too plain now! She understood that sugared letter which had summoned her from Antium! She understood why her son had sailed to Cape Misenum to meet her; why her own galley had been purposely run into; why the gorgeous state-barge had been pressed upon her acceptance! She saw through the exquisite banquet, the hypocritical caresses, the murder so deliberately and diabolically planned.... Alas! alas!

Revenge, the appeal to force, was out of the question. She was ill and miserable, and felt drained of all her energies. The crowd buzzed and shouted outside; but she gauged too well their cowardly and vacillating nature to rely on any protection from them. She knew that at the sight of a dozen soldiers they would be scattered like the chaff. And who would strike a blow for her? Not the mob, for she was universally hated; not the nobles or the Senate, for they loved her not, and were in any case too selfish, too servile, and too much steeped in dissolute luxury to lift a hand on her behalf. Would the Prætorians rise at her bidding? It was more than doubtful, and if they would, she was at Bauli and they at Rome.

But one thistledown of hope remained to bear the weight of her ruined fortunes. Was it possible that, at the last moment, her son would relent? Those farewell embraces seemed to express something genuine. Perhaps when he found that he had, in spite of himself, escaped the guilt of actual matricide, he might come to a better mind. The gods had offered him one more opportunity for repentance: would he embrace it? Yes; she came to the decision that her best course was to feign ignorance of the design of which she had been the victim, and to trust to the reawakenment of filial affection in Nero’s mind.

She summoned to her presence her freedman Lucius Agerinus.

‘Go to the Emperor,’ she said, ‘and tell him that, by the merciful protection of the gods, his mother has been saved from a terrible disaster. Anxious as he must naturally be about my safety, ask him not to cherish any solicitude, but to postpone for the present the visit which he will wish to pay me. I am greatly in need of rest.’

Agerinus set out, little foreseeing that he too was potentially a murdered man. Agrippina--ill, disenchanted, utterly weary of the world--once more lay on her couch, with throbbing brows and lacerated soul, a prey to unspeakable anguish. A single slave-maiden was her attendant; a single golden lamp shed its dim light from its marble stand over her room. In her utmost need there was not one to whom she could speak, or in whom she could confide. Oh, how she longed for one hour of Pomponia’s company, for one whisper of the consolation which had once fallen for a moment like the dew upon her soul! But Baiæ was the last place where Pomponia would be likely to be found.

The slave-girl, withdrawn into the shadow, and engaged in spinning wool, looked up furtively again and again at the face of the Empress, who was too much absorbed in her own thoughts to notice her. The girl saw passion after passion chase each other like dark clouds across Agrippina’s face. At one moment the clenched hand, the quivering nostril, the flashing glance, showed that the thought of possible vengeance was passing through her soul. Then for a moment a softer expression would smooth her features, as she dreamed of the possibility of her son’s remorse. Then terror would express itself on her features as she recognised the frightfulness of her position. Last of all, an infinite languor seemed to droop through her whole being, as she resigned herself to sullen despair.

In those dark uncertain hours she realised all the error and infatuation of her life. Impunity, after so many crimes? Impunity, when the menacing spectres of perjury and adultery and murder kept starting upon her out of the darkness? Crispus Passienus poisoned; Lucius Silanus hounded to death by lying informers; his murdered brother Junius; her husband Claudius--were they all to be unavenged? Had the gods no thunderbolts? Had the guilty ever escaped them? Had Tiberius died in peace after his atrocities and crimes? Had Gaius died in peace amid the tears of his beloved? Had Messalina escaped the consequences of her debaucheries and murders? Did not the violated laws of heaven put into the hand of their transgressors their whips of flame? And as she began to realise that Retribution dogs guilt like its own inevitable shadow, the line of the old Greek poet rang ominously in her memory:--

‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. Though in patience long He waiteth, with exactness grinds He all.’

And, all the while, the nightingales in the gardens of her villa were pealing forth their ecstasy, and the stars shone, and the soft wind breathed of perfume.

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Chapter XXXVI

SELF-AVENGED

‘Sua quemque fraus, suum facinus, suum scelus, sua audacia, de sanitate ac mente deturbat. Hæ sunt impiorum furiæ, hæ flammæ, hæ faces.’--CIC. In Pisonem, xx. 46.

Nero, in a mood of fearful restlessness, awaited news of the issue of his design. Long ere this he ought to have received the intelligence which would relieve his life of a great burden. Hardly for a moment did the enormity of the crime he was committing press upon a soul given up to shameful self-indulgence. He only yearned to be rid of a figure which frightened him, and checked the rushing chariot-wheels of his passions. Once free from his mother and her threats, he would marry Poppæa and give himself up to whatever his heart desired. Too uneasy to sleep, too much occupied with anxiety to follow his usual pleasures, he talked to Tigellinus, who alone was with him, pacing up and down the hall of his villa, tossing down goblet after goblet of wine, and trying to conjure before his imagination the scene which was being enacted. Surely it could not fail! And, if it succeeded, the dead tell no tales, and the sea-waves would keep the secret! Every one had seen the warmth of his attention to his mother, and the affectionate tenderness with which he had bidden her farewell. What remained but publicly to deplore with tears the sad bereavement which had been inflicted on his youth by the treachery of winds and waves, and then to decree to his mother’s memory the temples and the altars which would be ostentatious proofs of his filial regard?

But how was it that no news had reached him? Three or four hours had passed. By this time the deed must have been done. Something had happened--so much was certain; for though he dared not send out to inquire, as though he suspected that anything was wrong, yet from the balcony he saw the torches moving in hurried streams hither and thither, and he could hear the distant cries of excitement and alarm.

A messenger was announced.

‘Who is it?’ asked Nero anxiously.

‘The centurion Pudens,’ said the slave; ‘and he is accompanied by Titus Flavius.’

Nero started at the name, for it recalled the night of the murder of Britannicus.

‘What do they want?’

‘They have important tidings, which they will tell to Cæsar’s ears alone.’

‘Admit them. See that the guard is on duty close at hand.’

Pudens and the youth were ushered into Nero’s presence, and, in answer to his agitated inquiries, told him all that had occurred, and how they had helped to rescue the Empress as she was saving herself by swimming. They were dismissed, each with a handsome gift; and scarcely had they left the room when Nero, pale as death, and with a heart which throbbed with painful palpitations, flung himself on a couch and turned a terrified look on his accomplice.

‘The plan has been bungled,’ he said. ‘I am ruined. My mother has been wounded. She knows all.’

Tigellinus feared that in his terror he would swoon away, and sprinkled his face with water.

‘What will she do?’ asked Nero in a faint voice. ‘Will she arm her slaves to attack and murder me? Will she rouse the soldiers? Will she go to Rome and accuse me of matricide before the Senate and the people?’

The older and robuster villany of Tigellinus was not terrified by these alarms; but he too saw that the situation was serious, and did not know what to advise.

Nero, shaking with alarm, sent messengers in fiery haste for Burrus and Seneca, both of whom had come from Rome to Baiæ at his request to attend upon him during the Quinquatrus. They were roused from their beds at the dead of night, and hurried to Nero’s villa. He told them that, after his mother had left him, her vessel had been wrecked, and that she had swam to land with no worse hurt than a slight wound; but he added, ‘She suspects that I have attempted her life: and how am I to escape her vengeance?’

Burrus and Seneca stood silent and thunderstricken. They were innocent of the vile attempt. Dim rumours of some grave crime which was in contemplation had indeed reached them; and in Nero’s court everything seemed credible. The murder had been the design of the execrable Anicetus and the yet more execrable Tigellinus, and had only been revealed to kindred spirits such as Poppæa. But they at once saw through the story which Nero told them, in which he had indeed betrayed himself.

It was a moment of anguish and of degradation for them both. The blunt, honest soldier was thinking of his happier youth, in which virtue was not compelled to breathe so contaminated an atmosphere. He was secretly cursing the day on which ambition had led him to espouse the cause of Nero, and so to be dragged into loathed complicity with so many crimes.

And through the heart of Seneca there shot a pang of yet keener agony. He a philosopher; he a Stoic; he a writer of so many high-soaring moral truths; he so superior to the vile and vulgar standard of his age--to what had he now sunk! Was this corrupt fratricide--this would-be murderer of his mother--the timid boy who, little more than five years before, had been entrusted to his tutelage? And was he now called upon to advise the most feasible way in which a matricide could be accomplished? Was he, of all men, to be the Pylades to this viler Orestes? Was it to the edge of such a precipice that he had been led by the devious ways of a selfish ambition?

A nobler path was open to him had he desired it. Why should he not have urged Nero to visit his mother, to expostulate with her if need be, to be reconciled with her in reality? Might he not have told him that, if Agrippina were really conspiring, it would be better for him to run that risk than to stain his hands in a mother’s blood? Titus was not a professed philosopher like Seneca, yet Titus rose spontaneously to that height of virtue in later years. He knew that his brother Domitian was working in secret as his deadly enemy, yet he only took him gently aside, and entreated him to behave more worthily of a brother. And when he saw that his entreaty had failed, he did indeed weep as he sat at the games, but he would not shed his brother’s blood.

Alas! the conscience of Seneca did not suggest to him this means by which he could extricate himself. That Agrippina was, at such a crisis, preparing to rebel against her son he did not believe; but might she not--so whispered to him once more the demon of concession --might she not become dangerous hereafter? In other words, must he not help the Emperor to accomplish his fell purpose? The silence became intolerable.

At last Seneca turned his troubled eyes on Burrus, as though to inquire whether it would be safe to command the execution of Agrippina by the Prætorians.

Burrus understood his look and bluntly replied that such a thing was not to be thought of. The Prætorians would never lift a hand against the daughter of Germanicus. The same thought had been in his mind as in that of Seneca, though he had blushed to give it utterance. But now that he saw the drift of his colleague’s purpose, he gulped down his scruples, and said with sullen brevity, ‘Let Anicetus complete what he has begun.’

Anicetus had been on board the deceitful vessel, and, on the failure of the device, had made his way with all speed in a rowing boat to the Emperor’s villa. He entered at the moment when Burrus spoke. Nero turned on him a look of rage, and, walking up to him, stammered into his ear the threat that his life should pay the penalty of his clumsy failure.

‘Be calm, Cæsar,’ he replied in a whisper; ‘your wish shall still be accomplished. Only give me your authority to end the business.’

Anicetus hated Agrippina for private reasons, and he knew that, if she were not put to death, she would demand vengeance upon him, since the treachery on board the vessel could not have been effected without his cognizance. ‘Leave it in my hands,’ he said. ‘If Seneca and Burrus are too timid to strike a blow for their Emperor, at least Anicetus will not shrink.’

‘Thanks, Anicetus,’ said Nero, changing his mood. ‘To-day, for the first time, I feel secure. Now I begin to recognise that I am indeed Emperor. And a freedman is the author of the boon!’

He frowned at his two ministers to reprove their backwardness in murder, and effusively grasped the hand of the admiral. Burrus, as he looked at his scowling countenance, felt a fresh pang of remorse that he had ever deserted the cause of Britannicus. Seneca said to his agonised conscience, ‘If one would be the friend of a tyrant, one must not only wink at crimes, but commit them without a moment’s hesitation, however heinous they may be.’

While Anicetus was hastily suggesting the steps to be taken, the announcement came that one of Agrippina’s attendants--Lucius Agerinus--was waiting outside with a verbal message from the Augusta. Before he was admitted Nero whispered something to Anicetus. ‘Yes, yes,’ said the admiral, ‘the plan is excellent.’

Both Seneca and Burrus were amazed and shocked at the stupid and shameless comedy which was then enacted before their eyes. Agerinus had hardly begun to deliver his message when Nero, stepping up to him, dropped a sword at his feet. It fell with a clang on the white and purple mosaic, and instantly Nero and Anicetus began to clamour, ‘Murder! treason! murder! he has been sent by Agrippina to stab the Emperor!’

At this shout the body-guard came running in, and Agerinus was loaded with chains. Anicetus now had the excuse he needed. He summoned a band of soldiers and marines, and, accompanied by Herculeius, one of his naval captains, and Obaritus, an officer of the marines, he made his way to the villa at Bauli, giving out that he was ordered to execute Agrippina, who had just been detected in an attempt to assassinate her son.

They found the precincts of the villa thronged by a curious crowd. These they drove away, and surrounded the grounds with guards. The slaves dispersed in all directions. Agrippina was still in her dimly lighted room, growing momently more alarmed because Agerinus did not return and she received no message from Nero. Nearer and nearer came the tread of feet till they heard the soldiers enter the atrium. There followed a brief altercation as the murderers scattered the few faithful attendants who would still have guarded the door of the chamber. The slave-girl rose to fly.

‘Dost thou also desert me?’ said the Empress bitterly.

But the girl’s figure had scarcely disappeared when the door was rudely burst open, and she saw the cruel face of her enemy Anicetus, who held his drawn sword in his hand.

For a moment they stopped before her imperious gesture.

‘If you have come from my son to inquire after my health,’ she said, ‘tell him that I am better. If you have come to commit a crime, I will not believe that you have his authority.’

‘We have his authority,’ said Anicetus. ‘Behold his signet-ring!’

They advanced upon her. She sprang from her couch and stood erect. Then the brutal Herculeius struck her a blow on the head with his baton, and Anicetus aimed his sword at her breast. She avoided the stroke, and, rending her tunic, ‘Strike here,’ she said, pointing to her womb; ‘it bore a monster!’

She fell, stricken down, and thrust through with many deadly wounds.

Thus ended that career of wickedness and splendour. Almost from the day which consummated her many crimes she heard behind her the fatal footstep of the avenger. Her murder of Claudius had placed the diadem upon the brow of her own murderer. For that young murderer she had felt the frantic love of a tigress for the cub which she licks and fondles. And now the tiger-whelp had shown the nature which it inherited.

* * * * *

When Nero received the news that his mother was dead, he would not trust to any testimony. With wild haste and utmost secrecy he went to the villa at Bauli. With trembling hand he drew the winding-sheet from the face, and gazed on the corpse. The colour fled from his cheeks; but after a moment or two he grew bolder. The matricide was still the æsthete. ‘I did not know,’ he said, ‘that I had so beautiful a mother.’ Then he hurried back.

That same night they carried her corpse to the funeral pyre. It was laid upon a couch from her banquet-hall, for lack of a regular bier. Hurried and scant and humble were her obsequies. Her ashes were laid in a mean grave near the road to Misenum, where the villa of the dictator Cæsar crowned an eminence which commanded a wide view of the gulf.

During the remaining ten years of her son’s reign, the site of her sepulchre was left unhonoured and no mound was raised above her ashes. But the spot was not forgotten, and to this day the peasant points to the Sepolcro d’ Agrippina. One instance of faithfulness gave a yet more pathetic interest to the spot where so many lofty hopes were quenched in blood. Before the pyre was kindled, Mnester, her loyal freedman, stabbed himself over her corpse. He would not survive a mistress who, whatever had been her crimes, had been kind to him, and whom he loved.

What pathos is there in the fact that even the worst and most criminal of human souls have rarely died entirely unloved! Even a Marat, even a Robespierre, even a Borgia, even an Agrippina, found at least one to mourn when they were dead.

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Chapter XXXVII

VICTOR OVER THE PUBLIC SERVITUDE

‘Palliduamque visa Matris lampade respicis Neronem.’

STAT. Sylv. II. vii. 118.

‘Prima est hæc ultio, quod se Judice nemo nocens absolvitur.’

JUV. Sat. xiii. 2.

There is a marvellous force of illumination in a great crime, but it is the lurid illumination of the lightning-flash, revealing to the lost Alpine wanderer the precipices which yawn on every side of him. While the murder was yet to do, Nero could talk of it lightly and eagerly among the accomplices who were in the secret. To the irresponsible Emperor of the world it did not seem so great a matter to order the murder of a mother. But when the deed was done, when he had got back to his Baian villa, when the pale face flecked with crimson bloodstains came hauntingly back upon his memory, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. Then first he realised the atrocious magnitude of his crime, and every moment there rang in his ears a damning accusation. The very birds of the air seemed to flit away from him, twittering ‘Matricide! matricide!’ He drank more Falernian from the glittering table, on which yet lay the remains of the banquet, but it seemed as if all his senses were too preternaturally acute with horror to be dulled by wine. He lay down to sleep, but strange sounds seemed to be creeping through the dead stillness of the night, which made him shudder with alarm. If he closed his eyes, there flashed at once upon them the pale face, the firm-set lips, the splashes of blood. The dead eyes of his mother seemed to open upon him with a gleam of vengeance. Till that night he had never known what it was to dream. He started up with a shriek and summoned his attendants round him, and paced up and down in a frenzy of delirium, declaring that when the dawn came he would certainly be slain. They persuaded him to lie down again, but scarcely had he dropped into an uneasy sleep when it seemed to him as though he saw the three Furies sweeping down upon him with the blue snakes gleaming in their hair and the torches shaken in their hands, while his mother, who pointed them to him, shrieked aloud, ‘Ho! murderer of thy mother! no sleep henceforth for thee!’

Leaping once more from that couch of agony, he sat mute, and trembling in every limb, his clenched hands buried in his hair, waiting in anguish the break of day. When the first beam of dawn lit the east, it showed a youth whose pallid features were haggard with agonies of fear.

If there had been a spark of nobleness in the Roman world, the indignation of a people’s moral sense might have sprung to arms and smitten the tyrant while he was yet red-handed from his crime. Nothing was farther from the general intention. The universal desire was to ‘skin and film the ulcerous place’ with adulation and hypocrisy. Men, not naturally evil or case-hardened, were carried away by the tide of complaisance to the imperial murderer. As though to leave no chance for any feelings of penitence to work, all classes began to flood him with congratulations. The fears which at the moment he half mistook for remorse vanished like the early dew, for society seized upon the convention that Agrippina, detected in a plot against the life of her son, had been justly executed. The tribunes and centurions of the Prætorians, Burrus at their head, came to Nero that morning, poured their felicitations upon him, pressed his hands, expressed their effusive joy that he had escaped from so sudden a peril created by his mother’s crime. His friends crowded to the temples to thank the gods for his safety. There was scarcely a town of Campania which did not express its joy by sending deputations and offering victims. Distant provinces caught the infection, and Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul surpassed all the rest by the fulsome entreaty which they sent by their ambassador, Julius Africanus, ‘that Nero would endure his felicity with fortitude!’ Certainly it did not seem as if there were much cause for fear! In a few days Nero became an adept at the counter-hypocrisy with which he feigned to weep over the fate of his mother, and to be grieved by his own deliverance!

But places cannot change their aspect as do the looks of men. From the windows and gardens of Nero’s villa were always visible the sea which he had attempted to pollute, the long line of shore which he had stained with a mother’s blood. The aspect of nature in that lovely spot had lost its fascination. It seemed to be eloquent with mute reproach. And what were those sounds which assailed his ears at the dead of night? What meant that blast of a solitary trumpet, blown by no earthly breath, from the promontory of Misenum? What meant those ghostly wailings which seemed to shriek around his mother’s grave? He could not endure this haunted place. He fled to Naples.

From thence he despatched to the Senate a letter, of which the conceits betrayed, alas! the hand of Seneca. ‘As yet,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot believe, I do not rejoice, that I am safe.’ Men of letters admired the euphuistic phrases and despised their author. The letter did not mention any details, but left it to be inferred that Agrippina, detected in an attempt to murder her son, had committed suicide. And then with unmanly malignity it dwelt on the long catalogue of her crimes--her bitter enmities, her immense ambition, her unscrupulous intrigues. To her it attributed all the cruelties of the reign of Claudius, and it ended by saying that her death was a public blessing. The more cynical of the senators laughed at the absurdities of this missive, for it narrated Agrippina’s shipwreck as though it had been accidental, and tried to gain credence for the gross absurdity that a woman barely saved from drowning had chosen the moment of her rescue to send off to murder her only son in the midst of his fleets and cohorts!

But though men shook their heads at Seneca, they plunged no less emulously into the vortex of criminal adulation. Public thanksgivings were decreed to all the gods; annual games at the Quinquatrus; a golden statue to Minerva in the senate-house, with a statue of the Emperor beside it. The birthday of Agrippina was pronounced accursed. Such abject servility was too much for the haughty spirit of Pætus Thrasea. He rose from his seat and left the senate-house in silence, and a blush rose to the cheek of not a few who did not dare to follow him.

Yet, after all, Nero was so timid that six months elapsed before he ventured once more to face the people of his capital. An eclipse of the sun had happened during the thanksgiving decreed by the Senate. Fourteen regions of the city had been struck by lightning. Would these portents of heaven awaken the tardy indignation of men? Every piece of news, however trivial, frightened him. He was told the ridiculous story that a woman had given birth to a snake. Was that meant by the gods, if there were any, for a scornful symbol of himself? There were hours in which it seemed to him as if the Empire itself would be a poor price for the purchase of one day of the innocence which he had so frightfully sacrificed.

But the foul creatures who swarmed about him assured him with the effrontery of experienced villany that he need not be in the least anxious as to the obsequiousness of the Senate and the zeal of the people.

‘You will find yourself more popular than before,’ they said. ‘Every one detested Agrippina. Go to Rome with confidence, and you will see that you are as much adored as ever.’

They were right in their conjectures. Even Nero was amazed at the abandon of welcome, the delirium of ostentatious applause with which he was received, while his hands were still red-wet with his mother’s blood. The people thronged forth by their tribes to greet him. The senators were in festal array. They were surrounded by their wives and children. Stages had been built all along the road, in which the spectators had purchased their places to look on as at a triumph. Incense burned in the streets; the shouts of myriads of voices rent the air. Rome received him not as a murderer, but rather as a great conqueror or a human god. And he, as he rode in his gilded chariot through those serried files of cheering flatterers, proudly upheld his head, tossed back the curls from his forehead, smiled, and bent low, and, accepting these greetings as a tribute to his merits, drowned deep within his heart all sense of shame. With long retinue and dazzling pomp he visited the Capitol, gave thanks to Jupiter, best and greatest, and returned to the Palace ‘a victor over the public servitude.’

Yet even so he could not escape. He dared not be left alone. The manes of his mother haunted him by day and by night. In vain he practised the old expiatory rites to rid himself of the menacing phantom. On the night of May 13, two months after Agrippina’s death, he determined to go through the mummery of the Lemuralia, which some of his credulous advisers had told him would be efficacious. At midnight, amid the dead silence, he stole with naked feet to the water of the fountain in the atrium, and there, trembling with excitement, washed his hands thrice. Then with his thumb and finger, he filled his mouth with nine black beans, and, full of superstitious horror, flung them one by one behind him over his shoulder, saying each time, ‘With these beans redeem me and mine.’ Arrived at his chamber he again dipped his hands in water, and beat a great brazen gong to terrify the pursuing ghost.[73] Then he turned round, and peered with a frightened glance into the darkness; and as he peered--was even this expiation all in vain?--what were those glimmering lights? What was that white and wavy form? A shriek rang through the villa, and Nero sank fainting into the arms of the timid minions who had awaited the result of the expiation and rushed forward at his cry.

The following year, when he had returned to the city, he repeated this antiquated rite, and he commanded the vestals to bear him specially in mind when, on the Ides of May, they flung from the Sublician Bridge into the Tiber the thirty little figures called argei, made of bulrushes, which were supposed to be in lieu of human sacrifices.

Then he tried yet further forms of magic and yet darker rites of propitiation to the infernal powers, in which it was whispered that human blood--the blood of murdered infants--formed part of the instruments of sorcery. But he could learn no secrets of the future; he could evoke no powers who could ward away that white menacing spectre which gleamed upon him if at any moment he found himself alone in the hours of night.

Nero became a haunted man. The whole earth seemed to him to be ‘made of glass’ to reveal his turpitude. He knew in his miserable heart that the very street boys of Rome--the ragged urchins of the slaves and gladiators--were aware of the crime which he had committed. Kind friends kept him informed, under pretence of officious indignation, that one night an infant had been found exposed in the Forum with a scrap of parchment round its neck, on which was written, ‘I expose you, lest you should murder your mother;’ and that, another night, a sack had been hung round the neck of his statue as though to threaten him with the old weird punishment of parricides. Once, when he was looking on at one of the rude plays known as Atellane, the actor Datus had to pronounce the line,

‘Good health to you, father; good health to you, mother;’

and, with the swift inimitable gestures of which the quick Italian people never missed the significance, he managed to indicate Claudius dying of poison and Agrippina swimming for her life. The populace roared out its applause at an illusion so managed that it could hardly be resented; and once again, when coming to the line,

‘Death drags you by the foot.’

Datus indicated Nero’s hatred to the Senate by pointing significantly to Nero at the word ‘death’ and to the senatorial seats as he emphasized the word ‘you.’

But Nero was liable to insults still more direct. Could he not read with his own eyes the graffito scrawled upon every blank space of wall in Rome: ‘Nero, Orestes, Alcmæon, matricidæ’? He could not detect or punish these anonymous scrawlers, but he would have liked to punish men of rank, whom he well knew to have written stinging satires against him, branding him with every kind of infamy.

Two resources alone were adequate to dissipate the terrors of his conscience--the intoxication of promiscuous applause and the self-abandonment to a sensuality which grew ever more shameless as the restraints of Agrippina’s authority and Seneca’s influence were removed.

Nero had long delighted to sing to the harp at his own banquets in citharœdic array. To the old Roman dignity such conduct seemed unspeakably degrading in the Emperor of the legions. Yet Nero divulged his shame to the world by having himself represented in statues and on coins in the dress of a harpist, his lips open as though in the act of song, his lyre half supported on a baldric embossed with gems, his tunic falling in variegated folds to his feet, and his arms covered by the chlamys, while with his delicate left hand he twanged the strings, and with his right struck them with the golden plectrum. The pains which he took to preserve his voice, which after all was dull and harsh, were almost incredible. Following the advice of every quack who chose to pass himself off as an expert, he used to walk about with his thick neck encircled in a puffy handkerchief, to sleep with a plate of lead on his chest, and to live for a month at a time on peas cooked in oil.

To give him more opportunities for display he instituted the Juvenalia to celebrate his arrival at full manhood, as marked by the shaving of his beard. His first beard was deposited in a box of gold, adorned with costly pearls, and he dedicated it to the Capitoline Jupiter. But even this event in his life was accompanied by a crime. Shortly before he laid aside his beard he paid a visit to his aunt Domitia, who was ill.

Laying her hand on the soft down, she said to him in her blandishing way, ‘As soon as I have received this, I am ready to die.’

Nero turned round to the loose comrades who usually attended him and whispered, with a coarse jest, ‘Then I will shave it off at once.’

From that sick-bed Domitia, who was almost the last of Nero’s living relatives, never rose again. The Roman world suspected foul play on the part of the physicians at Nero’s order. Certain it is that he seized all her ample possessions, and suppressed her will.

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