CHAPTER LVII

A CONSPIRACY AND ITS COLLAPSE

The persecution of the Christians, once begun, did not cease, but broke out again and again, in various parts of the Empire, like a conflagration which only pauses from the exhaustion of materials which it can devour. But a few more sporadic executions could furnish no further excitement to Nero, after he had supped so full of horrors. The jaded ‘old man of thirty’ therefore turned his whole attention to the building and embellishment of the Palace, which was not only to cover the vast area of the Domus Transitoria, but also the additional room which he had snatched from the ruins. It extended over a space equal to that covered by the Louvre and Tuileries together. It was called the Golden House, and exceeded in sumptuosity everything which the world had hitherto seen. It showed the degeneracy of taste which marked that age, by its tendency to hugeness of size and strangeness of material. Nothing but the grotesque and the enormous suited the diseased appetite of Nero. At the entrance stood a colossus of himself, of which the base is still visible, beside the Colosseum. It was a hundred and twenty feet high, and was the work of Zenodorus. Inside the hall was also a picture of Nero, a hundred and twenty feet high, painted on linen, which was afterwards burnt up by lightning.109 The famous architects Severus and Celer were set to work, with all the power of the Empire to back them, and all the treasures of the world at command. Triple colonnades of marble pillars led to the Palace from the vestibule, and the outer spaces of the columns were filled with statues and flowers. At the four corners of the hall, on tables of citron, of which the veins looked like curled tresses, stood huge vases of silver, embossed by Acragas, with scenes of the chase derived from the ‘Cynegetica’ of Xenophon. The painter Fabullus, who stood at the head of the artists of the age, was bidden to enrich the halls of audience with scenes of history and mythology. One of his paintings was a Pallas, which to the astonishment of the spectators seemed always to follow them with her eyes. The most distinguished pupils of the schools of landscape, founded by Ludius, and of the rhyparographer Pyroeicus, were set to adorn the private chambers. A thousand statues of bronze, alabaster, gold, silver, and delicately tinted marble were ranged about the building, and in porticoes a thousand feet long. Not only were the old temples of Rome plundered of their treasures, but Acratus the freedman and Carinas the Greek philosopher were sent to Greece to seize whatever was most precious in her ancient cities. So shameless was the rapacity with which they served the Emperor’s greed, that at Delphi—from which he carried off five hundred statues of bronze—the population rose in arms to protect the images and bas-reliefs of their temples.

The baths of alabaster, inlaid with lapis lazuli, were supplied from the Aqua Virgo, and from the sea, and from the pale sulphur-impregnated waters of the river Albula. The vaulted roof of one banquet-room was made to represent the heavens, and to revolve in imitation of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. The roof of another, fretted with gold and ivory, was so constructed as to shower roses on the guests, or to sprinkle them with the fine dew of fragrant essences.

Nero’s own bedroom was a prodigy of gorgeousness. It contained the golden statue of Victory, which spread her wings in sign of good omen over the slumbers of successive Cæsars. On a slab of agate stood the statuette of Nero, five inches high, armed in a corslet which had been carved with infinite labour out of hard jasper. A debased art—which did not rely for its triumph on the genius of the artist or the beauty of the result, but stimulated the languors of imagination by the conquest of apparent impossibilities—was further illustrated by other minute images cut out of emerald or topaz, like those described by Pliny. On abaci of carved ivory stood myrrhine vases—the most precious known to antiquity—red, veined, lustrous, of a value which could hardly be expressed in terms of purchase. Besides such treasures there was a little gem of sculpture, the Amazon of Strongylion, known as Eucnemos, from its exquisite proportions, which Nero took with him wherever he went. A place of special honour was assigned to Nero’s harp of gold, adorned with precious stones.

Still more marvellous were the gardens. They covered a space so large that a single lake on which imperial galleys were moored, sufficed, when filled up, for the site of the Colosseum. They were full of grottoes, and gardens for exotic plants, and waterfalls shaded with masses of foliage, and pastures in which the sheep, with revolting bad taste, were dyed blue or crimson. They also contained aviaries of rare tropical birds, and dens for animals—among the rest a monster which was said to be fed with human flesh. The palace-stables of Nero’s favourite horse Asturco, and of the other horses which drew his chariot, were in distant parts of these enchanting grounds, and were far more magnificent in their appointments than the houses of the poorer senators. The chief ornament of the garden was a temple of Seia, the goddess who was propitious to harvests. It was built of a newly discovered marble, so warm and glowing that, according to Pliny, it seemed rather to enclose than to transmit the light.

But the splendour with which he had surrounded himself soon became insupportably wearisome. It involved him further in pecuniary anxieties. Buoyed up for a time by the chimera of a Roman knight, who, giving credence to a dream, promised, at small expense, to discover the legendary treasures which Dido had carried with her from Troy, and which were supposed to be hidden in the caves of Carthage, he was compelled, when that bubble burst, to have recourse to expedients both pitiful and violent. With great peril to himself he had to let the payments of his Prætorians fall into arrears. Instead of half the patrimony left by his freedmen, he now impropriated nine-tenths. Confiscations raged on every side. Temples were plundered, and their statues—even those of the Roman Penates—were sent to the melting-pot. A law was made against wearing amethystine colours, and once when he saw a lady with the forbidden colour at the games, he pointed her out to his Procurator, and not only inflicted the fine, but forfeited her entire property. No meanness was too base for him to practise, no wrong too cruel for him to inflict. Italy, the provinces, the allied peoples, the free states, groaned under intolerable burdens.

And while his bodily functions, disordered by riotous living, made of his life a physical burden, he was distracted by daily superstitions. In his theatric way he used to tell his intimates that he was haunted by all the Furies. His effeminated intellect was constantly unnerved by rumours of storms, and earthquakes, and strange births, and comets, which the astrologers interpreted to imply change and political disaster. A revolt of gladiators at Præneste threatened a renewal of the devastations in the days of Spartacus. In consequence of an ill-advised order of Nero, the whole fleet of triremes and smaller vessels was hopelessly shipwrecked at Misenum, and he had to bear the odium of the disaster.

While he was thus wearied and agitated, there burst upon him the immense weight of Piso’s conspiracy, which afforded him a proof how many and how varied were the forces of hatred and contempt which he had kindled in the hearts of all.

Piso stood at the head of the great Calpurnian house, and was connected by ties of relationship with many of the noblest families in Rome. He was not himself the author of the conspiracy, for which, indeed, his character was altogether too unstable and corrupt. He was dragged into it by Subrius Flavus, a tribune, and Sulpicius Asper, a centurion of the Prætorian guards. Fænius Rufus, the Prætorian Præfect, approved of the plot, out of disgust for the machinations of his rival, Tigellinus, who was constantly incriminating him to the Emperor. Seneca lent a dubious sanction, which many believed to be mixed up with personal designs. Lucan was goaded into complicity by the wrongs heaped upon him by Nero’s jealousy. Perhaps the most important, courageous, and disinterested adherent was Plautius Lateranus, the consul-elect. He had no motive but a noble patriotism which felt the shame of a Roman at being governed by a histrionic debauchee. Joined to these were very unpromising elements. No credit could accrue to any cause from the support of such men as Flavius Scævinus, a man of dissolute character and slothful life; Quintianus, stained with the same vices which made Nero infamous; Senecio, a dandy long endeared to Nero by similarity of tastes; Natalis, a confidential friend of Piso, who had probably meditated treachery from the first; and Epicharis, a freed woman of the lowest character, though for some unknown reason she proved herself the most impassioned and the most courageous of them all.

The conspiracy was revealed through the fantastic and effeminate folly of Scævinus, but not until it had left Nero almost wild with terror. Natalis, Scævinus, Quintianus, Senecio, shrinking from the thought of torture—which the poor freedwoman heroically braved, and under which she expired—turned informers. The friends of Piso strove in vain to awaken him to manly counsels. He went home, and lay hidden there till the band of tiros arrived whom Nero—distrusting the older soldiers—had sent to bid him kill himself. He opened his veins, wrote a will full of the grossest flattery to the Emperor and ignobly died.

More courageous was the death of Lateranus. When Epaphroditus came to question him, he answered: ‘If I should have anything to say, I will say it to your master.’ Nero did not allow him to choose his mode of death, or to embrace his children. Hurried to a place of servile execution, he maintained a disdainful silence, not even reproaching the tribune Statius, an accomplice in the conspiracy, by whose hand he was to die. He stretched out his neck without a word, and stretched it out again when the first blow failed.

Fænius Rufus did not escape. He overdid his part by trying to terrify the conspirators as he sat by Nero and Tigellinus before his own name had been denounced. It was too much to expect that among that crowd of cowards, dupes, and traitors no one would find it intolerable to have the same man as both an accomplice and inquisitor. So, as he browbeat and threatened Scævinus, he answered with a smile that no one knew more than Rufus himself, and urged him to show his gratitude to such an excellent Emperor. Rufus turned pale, stammered, and so completely betrayed his guilt that Nero ordered a powerful soldier to seize and bind him then and there. His death was pusillanimous. He poured his lamentations even into his will.

Subrius Flavus was the next to be betrayed. ‘As if I, a soldier, could ever have undertaken such work with such helpless women as these!’ he exclaimed. But, pressed with questions, he confessed and gloried in the deed.

‘What made you forget your oath of allegiance to me?’ asked Nero.

‘Because I hated you,’ he answered. ‘While you were worthy to be loved, you had no more faithful soldier than myself. I began to hate you when you displayed yourself as the murderer of your mother and your wife, a jockey, a mummer, and an incendiary.’

The words struck the ears of Nero like a terrific blow. Familiar with crime, he was unaccustomed to be charged with it. Indifferent to the deeds, he shrank from the name of a criminal, and nothing in the conspiracy caused him worse pain than this. He ordered the tribune Veianus Niger to execute Flavus. To increase the terror of the condemned it was customary to dig a grave before their eyes. The grave was dug for Flavus in a field hard by. Looking at its shortness and shallowness with contempt, as at a scamped piece of work, he exclaimed with disdain, ‘You cannot even do a thing like that as a soldier should.’

‘Stretch out your neck manfully,’ said Niger.

‘Would that you would strike as manfully!’ he replied.

Unwarned by the answer which he had received from Flavus, Nero, who felt himself specially injured by the defection of his soldiers, asked Sulpicius Asper also ‘why he had conspired to murder him.’

‘It was the only remedy left for so many infamies,’ answered the centurion; and spoke no more.

After this Nero still continued to bathe in blood. The consul Vestinus was his enemy, and a man of courage, but he had not engaged in the plot. He had once been one of the Emperor’s intimate circle, and Nero, who had felt the weight of his rough wit and shrunk from its truthfulness, had cause to dread his spirit. Before the consul had been accused or even mentioned, the Emperor sent a tribune with a cohort to seize his best slaves, and take his house as it were by storm. Vestinus was giving a banquet, and when summoned by the soldiers, rose from the table without hesitation. He was immediately shut up in his chamber, his veins were opened, and, without uttering so much as a word of complaint, he was stifled in a bath. His terrified guests were meanwhile kept in their places by the soldiers, expecting that their fate would follow. It was late at night before Nero, who had secretly gloated over the imagination of their terrors, allowed them to be dismissed, with the remark that they had been sufficiently punished for their consular banquet.

Nero seized the opportunity to get rid of all who were for any reason obnoxious to him. Rufius Crispinus was banished because he had once been Poppæa’s husband; Verginius, because he was an eloquent orator and instructor of youth; Musonius Rufus, because he was a genuine Stoic. There was no room for such eminence in such a Rome.

There was no room even for a Petronius Arbiter, by the side of a Tigellinus. To pagan conceptions Petronius, despite his dissolute life, was still a gentleman, and Tigellinus, whatever might be his position, was the opposite. Petronius, however vicious, was the reverse of cruel; Tigellinus, far blacker and baser in his vices, superadded to them a savage ruthlessness. It was he who developed this phase of Nero’s degradation, whereas Petronius entirely disapproved of it. The Præfect felt, therefore, that Petronius must be crushed. He suborned one of the household to give false witness against him, permitted him no defence, and threw most of his slaves into chains. Petronius had left home for Campania to pay his respects to Nero. At Cumæ he was ordered to stop, and, not choosing to await the tedious delays of hope and fear, he set the example of a death as satirical as any which history records. There was nothing tragic in it, nothing remotely serious. He treated death as a jest no less contemptible than life, and died with complete coolness, effeminately brave, and sincerely frivolous. If in the deaths of some of the philosophic republicans of that day we see the theatric pomposity of Stoicism, in that of Petronius we see the callous levity of the infidel voluptuary.

Opening his veins, he discoursed with his friends, not on high topics, but on trivial literature and vers de société. If he felt interested, he had his veins bound up again, and banqueted, and slept, to make his death seem a matter of freewill, not of compulsion. He had his bad slaves scourged, his good slaves rewarded. Instead of mentioning Nero and Tigellinus in his will with lying adulation, he penned a scathing satire, in which he drew a vivid picture of Nero’s infamies, and sent a sealed copy of the document to the Emperor himself. Then he broke his signet ring, that it might not, after his death, be abused for purposes of forgery and delation; and dashed into shivers a myrrhine vase for which he had paid a fabulous sum, that it might not fall into Nero’s hands. When Nero received his satire, he writhed under it. He could not tell how Petronius had become acquainted with some of those deeds which he had concealed in the closet and the midnight, but which were here blazoned in the noonday. Thinking that Petronius could only have learnt them from an abandoned lady, named Silia, the wife of a senator, he drove her into exile on the suspicion that she had betrayed the secrets which she had shared and witnessed. At the same time he banished the ex-Prætor Minucius Thermus, and tortured one of his freedmen, because the latter had spread similar reports about Tigellinus.

And so, day after day, ‘the hard reality of death was brushed by the rustling masquerade of life,’ and society presented the spectacle of a lascivious dance on the edge of a precipice, over which some dancer or some indignant spectator from hour to hour was violently hurled.

CHAPTER LVIII

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA

‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod perseverandum est.’—Seneca.

The family of Spanish Romans from Cordova of which Seneca was the head had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged through deadlier overthrow; but the fate of their greatest scion, the poet Lucan, was the most humiliating. He might seem to have been marked out from infancy as the spoiled favourite of fortune. While little more than a boy, he had gained such a reputation for ability, that Nero had summoned him from Athens before his studies were completed. For a year or two he was the Emperor’s intimate friend, and at the same time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the day. When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an astonishing success. He was appointed augur and quæstor before the legal age, and when, as quæstor, he exhibited games to the people, he was received with thunders of applause as loud as those which had greeted Virgil in the days of Augustus. It is impossible to imagine a giddier pinnacle of temptation for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius, who at the age of twenty could not have been a friend and courtier of Nero without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation. Let it be remembered in Lucan’s honour, that if he did not escape from that furnace unscathed—if his hair had been singed and the smell of fire had passed upon his garments—he yet never showed himself lost to virtue. In the midst of deplorable weakness he retained his conviction that freedom, and truth, and purity, were best.

Nero’s jealousy showed itself in the most public and insulting manner, when one day he got up and went out of the room for no reason whatever, in the middle of one of Lucan’s readings. It culminated in a prohibition to Lucan to read or publish anything further. The young poet, feeling within him the true fire of genius, nursed his rage in secret, and changed the tone of the ‘Pharsalia’ from inflated Cæsarism to savage denunciation. He mocks at the sham liberty which it accorded; brands with satire its shameful flatteries; and treating its apotheoses as a sacrilegious comedy, declares that the day would come ‘when a freer and truer Rome would make a god, not of Cæsar, but of Cato.’110 Ten years earlier he had been writing of Nero as a supreme divinity; now in his writing-desk lay the fierce complaint that, as a consequence of the civil wars, men had come to worship shadows in the temples of the gods.111 He consoled his seclusion by living in virtuous union with the young wife whom he loved, and as he poured forth the epic of a soul lacerated by indignation, conscious of his future immortality, he wrote in secret—

When Piso’s conspiracy began, Lucan became its passionate supporter. Men might ask what was the use of substituting one actor like Piso for another like Nero, but if a republic was impossible, Lucan felt that no change of a Cæsar could be for the worse, and in his burning hatred promised that he would slay the Emperor with his own hand.

Alas! when detection came; when he saw knights and senators and soldiers sinking all around him into treacherous weakness; when the grim executioner stood at his elbow pointing to the rack, Lucan had none of the inward strength or ennobling convictions which might have enabled him to retain his manhood. Sinking to an incredible depth of baseness, he betrayed the name of his own mother as an accomplice in the plot. His momentary infamy did not save his life, though it must have cost him a pang worse than that of death. Bidden to die, he opened his veins in four places, and went into a hot bath. His last thoughts at the end of a life so brief, so full of glory, so full of shame, are left unrecorded. Only as he watched the blood flow, he was reminded of the fantastic lines of the ‘Pharsalia’ in which he had described the similar death of a soldier on the field of battle. He recited them with a feeble voice, and spoke no more. That he should, at such a moment, have recalled verses so fantastic is characteristic of a soul not naturally ignoble, but distorted and, so to speak, encrimsoned by the horrors of life’s tragedies and life’s amusements in the midst of which he lived.

The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour. Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not even the death of his glorious son could check Mela’s besetting vice. A nobler man would have hid his head in shame as well as sorrow, but Mela showed a discreditable eagerness in recovering the debts due to Lucan, whose great wealth was now added to his own. Among other debtors, he pressed hard on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan’s intimate friend. What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of Rome when we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence, that, in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who had betrayed his mother resorted to forgery in order to ruin his friend’s father! He forged a letter of Lucan to prove an imaginary complicity in the plot between him and his father. Mela knew that his wealth would be his death warrant. Nero no sooner read the forged letter than he summoned Mela to his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela saw that the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after having written a will which was doubly base. To save his estate from confiscation, he left a large donation to Tigellinus, and his worthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added spite to his greed and baseness. ‘I am condemned to die,’ he said, ‘though I have done nothing to deserve punishment; but Crispinus and Anicius Cerealis live, though they are enemies of the Emperor.’ Anicius Cerealis was the consul-designate who, after the conspiracy, had proposed in the senate that a temple should with all speed be reared at the public expense ‘to the Divine Nero.’ His abjectness did not save him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela’s will he, too, committed suicide.

The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous adulation. They decreed supplications to the gods, and a special honour to the Sun as the detector of the conspiracy, and a restoration of the Temple of Fortune from which Scævinus had taken his dagger. Amid these decrees, ‘the sweet Gallio’ pleaded humbly that his life might be spared, although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca and Lucan. Whereupon a senator got up and denounced him as an enemy and a parricide. The rest had the decency to interfere on behalf of their popular and distinguished colleague. They begged the accuser to let sleeping dogs lie. But Gallio felt that his career of glory and popularity was over, and he too committed suicide.

The city was full of deaths, and the streets witnessed the daily spectacle of the stately funerals of these political victims, of whom so many were judicially murdered for their wealth, or to gratify the hatred of the Emperor. Yet such was the prevalent baseness, that men whose sons, or brothers, or friends, or kinsmen had been thus slain, returned thanks to the gods, adorned their doors with laurel as at the news of a public victory, and rushed to fling themselves at the knees of Nero, and cover his hand with their kisses! Many of the people believed that the reign of terror had been enacted simply to replenish the Emperor’s treasury, and pitied the murdered aristocrats as though they had been as innocent as the murdered Christians.

No delation pleased Nero more than when Natalis coupled the name of Seneca with the name of Piso. How far Seneca was really an accomplice is doubtful. He had been cautious, but he can hardly have been ignorant that Subrius Flavus had formed a design to set Piso aside and elevate Seneca himself to the Empire. It was certainly suspicious that on the eve of the conspiracy Seneca had returned from his Campanian retreat, and stopped at one of his villas only four miles from the city. There was no evidence against him except this:—Natalis had been sent from Piso to complain that Seneca would never see him, and to ask ‘why their friendship should thus be allowed to drop.’ Seneca had replied ‘that frequent intercourse was inexpedient for them both, but that his happiness depended on Piso’s safety.’ But it was whispered among Seneca’s most intimate friends that he had, in fact, assented to the assassination of Nero ‘in order to free Rome from Nero, and Nero from himself.’ The glittering antithesis betrayed its own authorship.

Nero sent a Prætorian tribune, named Silvanus—not knowing that he too was one of the conspirators—to require an explanation from Seneca. He found the philosopher at supper with his beloved wife, Pompeia Paulina, and two friends.

Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he was in weak health, and desired perfect quiet. ‘Why,’ he said, in reply to the Emperor’s inquiry, ‘should I have preferred the fortunes of a private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I should have made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who has experienced my boldness more often than my servility.’

When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting with Poppæa and Tigellinus—a bad omen for Seneca’s safety.

‘Is he preparing to put himself to death?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ said the tribune. ‘He showed no sign of panic. His look and his words were entirely cheerful.’

‘Go, bid him die,’ was Nero’s brief answer.

Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in person to a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.

On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave, ‘Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those who love me.’

‘I am sorry,’ said the centurion, ‘that the Emperor’s commands admit of no such delay.’

‘Be it so,’ said Seneca, turning to his friends. ‘Since, then, I have nothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession, the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fame of honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep. Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid these tears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Was any one of us unaware of Nero’s cruelty? After murdering his mother and his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?’

Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been spent in virtue.

‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veins as well as yours.’

‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your glorious desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the endurance of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater distinction will be yours.’

In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable, if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a violent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though, like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet with the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’ Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’s best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to die’—

‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’112

The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but, as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break down Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room. When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were so well known that he would not record them. They probably added little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him, saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few years of her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial of those tragic hours.

That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those who justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his being; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute the self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history. A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted the martyr’s crown.

CHAPTER LIX

THE AGONY OF AN EMPRESS

In one of the most enchanting rooms of the Golden Palace, surrounded by every object of beauty and splendour which the wealth of kingdoms could supply, sat Poppæa, miserable in heart with a misery which nothing could alleviate—no luxury of the present, no memory of the past, no hope of the future. Like Agrippina, like Seneca, like Nero, she had been ‘cursed with every granted prayer.’ Nothing which this world could give was left for her to attain. Of the honours which overpower, of the riches which clog, of the pleasures which inflame the soul, she had unbounded experience. They had left her heart weary and her life in ashes, and she had never dreamed of the secret which had enabled so many thousands of humble Christians, whom she would have regarded as the dust beneath her feet, to find exaltation in abasement, wealth in penury, and joy in tribulation.

She was Empress; she was Augusta; she was mother of an infant who had been deified; her smile meant prosperity, her frown was death. Of what avail was it all? Could this awful power, could those inestimable gems, could the gorgeousness of her Golden House fill up the void in a heart numbed by satiety and chilled by despair? What had she to aim at? Her enemies had been swept out of her path. What had she left to hope for? There was no object of earthly wishes which she had not attained. Ah! but what work worth doing could she find to do in order to fill up the vacuity of aimless self-indulgence? Who was there to love her, or whom she could love?

She thought of her early home, of her lovely mother, of her consular and triumphant grandfather, of the adoration which had surrounded her in the days of her own dawning beauty. She thought of Rufius Crispinus, the bridegroom of her youth, who had loved her tenderly, and whom she had loved, and of the little son whom she had borne him. He had grown up into a beautiful and gallant child, and the mother had always listened with pride to the anecdotes about him which were secretly brought to her. One of the heaviest of the many afflicting thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa’s husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso’s conspiracy first to banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his life. How fatal had her love been to him! It had blighted his career; it had stained his home; it had cut short his life. But what had her poor boy done that he too should perish? She had heard only a few days since that simply because in his games the high-spirited lad had played at being general or emperor, Nero had given orders to his slaves to drown him by suddenly pushing him into the sea while he sat fishing on a rock. She knew that this crime had been committed, and his bright young life sacrificed simply because he shared her blood; and what maddened her most of all was that she dared make no complaint, dared not even to reveal that she was aware of the murder, because to allude to her first husband or her son was always to rouse Nero into a paroxysm of fury. In the brightest and most luxurious room of the Golden House she sat solitary, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

Then she thought of Otho. Dandy as he was, and debauchee, to her at least he had been passionately faithful. She had abandoned Crispinus to live with Otho partly from a certain fascination which hung about his wickedness, but even more from motives of ambition, and because he was Nero’s most cherished favourite. She heard good accounts of his administration in Lusitania. Her intrigues to entangle the love of Nero had succeeded; but would she not have been incomparably more happy if she had remained in the home of Otho, and still more if she had lived as the virtuous wife of her first husband?

For with Nero she had long been disgusted, while she was obliged to feed his gluttonous vanity with perpetual eulogies of his beauty. And when in the close intercourse of daily life she saw to the depths of the man’s nature, it was impossible for her to find any words sufficiently bitter for the expression of her contempt. And this wretched meticulous creature, with no manliness in him; this tenth-rate singer and dilettante twangler on harps; this lump of egregious vanity; this catspaw of Tigellinus, whose effeminacy was steeped in the blood of the innocent which he had shed like water—this womanish man, with none of the worth of Crispinus, and none of the charm of Otho, was to be her husband and companion for life! The day for other lovers, the day when she could have the excitement of secret intrigues, was past, for anything of the kind would mean instant death. And yet she felt more and more that it was impossible to retain secure hold on such love as Nero’s. It was an ignoble love, tigerish and animal, which would evanesce long before her youth and beauty had faded away. If Nero had been a man—if there had been in his passion for her a single ennobling element—she might have retained him in her bondage for long years, as she could certainly have retained Otho. But already Nero preferred to her society the flattery of parasites and minions, and at this very time, though she was very sick and languid with the approach of motherhood, to which she looked forward with neither hope nor happiness, he had left her to her weary solitude, and for days had scarcely so much as seen or talked with her. Was some rival casting her spells over his volatile and evil nature, and taking vengeance on her for the wrongs of Octavia? The thought made her heart burn with a fury of impotent indignation.

She was determined that she would sit up this night and await his return in his own bedchamber; and, as opportunity occurred, would either assail him by reproaches, or win him back by caresses. How could she kill the interminable hours? She had no friend, no child, no confidante—none near her but slaves who hated her and yet trembled at her presence. She had no resources in herself, nothing to occupy her but her own evil thoughts and deplorable regrets.

The Empress grew more and more weary, more and more tormented with intolerable thoughts through the leaden hours. At length, long after midnight, she heard the footsteps of the watch and of many slaves as they conducted Nero to his chamber.

‘What! you here?’ he said with contemptuous indifference as he dismissed his attendants.

She looked at him. He had evidently been drinking, and was fresh from one of the scenes of debauchery which always formed the conclusion of his charioteering displays. For he still wore the dress of a jockey of the green faction, and its succinctness revealed his thin legs and protuberant person. To her he looked a spectacle of ignominy. Where was the passionate courtesy with which her Otho would have greeted her? Where the fond caress which Crispinus would have printed on her cheek? To think that this thing was the Emperor of Rome!

She half-rose from her couch, her pale face aflame with indignation.

‘Jockey!’ she hissed out. ‘Companion of base minions, comrade of coarse gladiators, where have you been? Why do you thus steep manhood in ignominy and drag the purple of Empire through the mud?’

It was the pent-up passion of her woman’s heart which thus burst forth, and it came on Nero like an unexpected blow. He looked at her for a moment with eyes opened to their fullest, and then, staggering forwards, dealt her a brutal kick.

Poppæa, with a groan of anguish, sank swooning to the ground. She lay on the floor as dead, her features white as marble, her hair streaming from its bands and covering the floor with its gleaming waves. The sight sobered Nero. Had he killed her? Furious as he was, he had not intended that. He loudly summoned his slaves and Poppæa’s attendants, and they bore her, still unconscious, to her own apartments. Nero did not tell any one what had happened, but when the physicians saw the bruise which his foot had made they knew everything, and when she had awoke from her swoon Poppæa disdainfully told them the simple truth. From the first they did not conceal from her or from Nero that, in her delicate situation, her life would be in extreme peril.

She lingered on in anguish for many days, her heart broken, her life sacrificed. Nero would fain have testified his maudlin and unavailing remorse. He passionately desired a child to continue his line, and now he had shattered his own hopes. If he had ever loved any woman with anything resembling real love, it was Poppæa. He had only kicked her in the blind rage of ruthless egotism. Nothing had been further from his intention than to murder her or even to cause her excruciating pangs.

He asked to be admitted to her presence, but she refused to see him. She sent to tell him that unless he wished to kill her, he would not visit her. The physicians assured him that the mere suggestion of his entering the room had thrown her into dangerous convulsions. As for the expressions of regret which he had written to her, she was too weak and ill to write any reply, and she deigned to send no message.

There was one person, and one only, whom she wished to see. It was Pomponia Græcina. For her Poppæa had always felt an involuntary respect, and had been deeply impressed by her words and bearing when she came to plead for the Christians. If there were any one who could bring healing to her wounded soul, or suggest one moment’s peace to her tortured heart, it was the stainless wife of Aulus Plautius.

Pomponia had been sick nigh unto death. The prison fever which she had caught in ministering to the Christians had been a virulent typhoid, from which she would not have recovered but for her untroubled conscience, her pure and simple life. For herself she did not wish to live. Not only had her young Aulus been disgraced and murdered, but what she had witnessed of the treatment of the Christians, and what she had heard of their exterminating martyrdoms, had ploughed up the depths of her soul with horror. She almost longed that it could have been permitted her to share the fate of all those dear men and women whom she had known, and who had now passed with white robes and palms in their hands into the presence of their Saviour. But her husband was falling into deep melancholy, and for his sake she made every effort to recover. And because in all her troubles the peace of God was with her, her constitution triumphed over the ravages of the disease, and when she received a message that Poppæa was lying on her death-bed and longed to see her, she was daily regaining her strength in her villa at Tibur.

She did not hesitate;—for what purpose was there in life if it were not to do deeds of helpfulness and love? She was carried in her litter from Tibur to the Golden House, and conducted to the chamber of the Empress. She was spared the trial of meeting Nero, who that day was taking part in a contest of singing and harp-playing on the public stage at the quinquennial Neronia. To prevent that disgrace, the Senate had spontaneously offered him the crowns of eloquence and song. But the semblance of victory did not suit his vanity. He played at being a fair competitor. The theatre was crowded to suffocation, not only with Romans but with provincials, and several knights and burghers had been trodden to death in the opening rush to secure seats. And there stood Nero on the stage, harp in hand, bowing and scraping to the assembly, and trembling with sham nervousness before the adjudicators! It was an infinitely dreary entertainment, for the soldiers stood in every gangway with batons, beating those who did not applaud or who applauded in wrong places, and as no one was allowed to leave the theatre on pain of death, not a few were taken seriously ill, while some braved the risk of dropping down from the outside, and some pretended to faint or die that they might be carried out of the theatre. It was on this occasion that poor Vespasian fell into new disgrace. Harp-playing and singing, whether good or execrable, was not at all in his line, and, do what he would, he found it impossible to prevent himself from falling asleep, as he had already done in the villa at Subiaco. He was caught in the act by Phœbus, the freedman of Nero, who roughly shook him by the shoulder, and abused him without stint. He was very near being condemned to death, but so many persons of distinction interceded for him, that this time Nero spared him. He was, however, forbidden ever again to appear at Court, and received a strong hint that the more entirely he kept out of the way the safer it would be for him. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked Phœbus, ‘and whither am I to go?’ ‘Abi Morboniam! Go to the dogs!’ answered the insolent freedman. A few years later, when Vespasian wore the purple, the freedman implored his pardon for the insult. ‘Abi Morboniam! Go to the dogs!’ was the only answer of the good-humoured Emperor.

While Nero was fooling away his Empire in such scenes Pomponia entered the chamber of death. There lay Poppæa in the miserable wreck of her youth and loveliness. Wicked she had been, and crowned with every gift but that of virtue, yet Pomponia could not but pity one so young and so lost, childless, hopeless, unloved, bereaved—thrice wedded, though little more than girl, and now the victim of her husband’s brutality.

Poppæa turned her languid glance towards the opening door, but when she saw who her visitor was, the poor face, drawn and convulsed with pain, brightened for an instant. The ‘amber’ tresses which Nero had sung of had been cut off to relieve her feverish brows, and Pomponia’s experienced eye detected on her countenance the seal of death.

‘You think that there is no hope?’ whispered Poppæa as she saw the look of compassion deepen on Pomponia’s face. ‘Ah, tell me the truth as it is, and do not flatter me with false hopes as these slaves do.’

‘I fear that you will die, Augusta,’ answered Pomponia, solemnly yet tenderly.

‘Call me not by that vain title. Would that I had never borne it! Would that I had died in childhood, or in my first home! Had I done so, loving faces might have been looking on me now.’

‘Linger not in the thoughts of the past, Poppæa; it is irrevocable.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is irrevocable; and I cannot bear the faces which look upon me so reproachfully—the face of my murdered husband, Crispinus; of my drowned son; worst of all the sad face of Octavia.’ A shudder ran through all her frame. ‘At every moment,’ she said, ‘directly I close my eyes, her head is before me, as I saw it in all its ghastliness.’

‘Grieve not for Octavia,’ said Pomponia. ‘I have heard all about her death. She died forgiving all her enemies, and in perfect peace.’

‘Peace? Where is it to be had?’ asked Poppæa. ‘It is not a pearl, I think, of any earthly ocean.’

‘No,’ said Pomponia, ‘but of a heavenly.’

‘Heavenly? What is heaven?’ asked Poppæa, wearily. ‘All that we know is life; and life has given me all that pleasure can give, and rank and riches, and the adoration of self; and it has left me so miserable that life itself has grown hateful to me, while yet I fear death.’

Pomponia listened in profound sadness. ‘Poppæa,’ she said, ‘I need not fear now to tell you that I am a Christian; and we Christians have been taught that “he who saveth his life shall lose it, and he who loseth it for Christ’s sake, shall find it.” It is too late for you to redeem the life which you have flung away, or to find the pleasure which you have slain in seeking for it. But while there is life, there is hope. The God in whom we Christians believe is a God of mercy, and we believe also that Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins, and that by Him they may be washed away.’

‘All the waters of Adria would not wash mine away. Oh, Pomponia, do you know that Seneca, and Octavia, and many others owed their deaths to me?’

‘You have sinned deeply; but you have, I know, been taught about the sacred books of the Jews, and have you not read there of a guilty king, an adulterer and murderer, who yet prayed “Oh, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great”? And has no Jewish teacher read you the promise of God by His prophet, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool”?’

‘I have heard those words,’ said Poppæa. ‘They were quoted to me once by Helen, Queen of Adiabene, who is now living as a proselyte at Jerusalem; and I have been taught that there is but one God.’

‘Oh, pray to Him, then,’ said Pomponia, ‘for He is abundant in pardon.’

‘I know not how to pray,’ said the dying Empress; ‘pray for me.’

If Poppæa knew not, Pomponia knew well; for to her, as a Christian, prayer had become the habit, the attitude of her life. Poppæa had never before heard such words as those. She knew that when she died she would be made a goddess by the Senate, as her infant child had been; yet here by her bedside Pomponia was speaking of her as though she were any other woman, speaking of her deep sinfulness, and not making any difference between her case and that of the commonest slave-girl who might have lived an evil life. And all that she could do was to resign her soul, and suffer it to be borne along unresisting on that stream of prayer.

And yet she felt, even in her misery, some dim sense of consolation, some faint gleam of hope such as she had never felt before. She knew that death was near, and urged Pomponia not to leave her. Pomponia sat by the bedside, holding the weak hand, and doing every act of tenderness, and speaking words of consolation, until the sinful troubled life had ebbed away.

Such a mind as Nero’s had become was incapable of sorrow. He announced, indeed, that he was overwhelmed with grief, and he indulged in a certain amount of hysterical and theatric lamentation, which interfered in no way with his follies or his appetites. A funeral was decreed to Poppæa at the public expense, and Nero at the Rostra pronounced a eulogy—not on her virtues, for there were none on which he could speak, but on her beauty and high fortune, and because she had been the mother of a divine infant. By her own wish—learnt doubtless from the Jews—she was buried, and not burnt as was the Roman custom. Nero had so many spices burnt at her funeral that the learned doubted whether Arabia could furnish more in a single summer. But not one genuine tear was shed upon her grave.