CHAPTER XIII

THE ADVENTURES OF A RUNAWAY

Ἕκαστος δὲ πειράζεται ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας ἐξελκόμενος καὶ δελεαζόμενος.—S. Jac. Ep. i. 14.

Φρύγα οἰκέτην ἔχω πονηρόν.—Alciphr. Ep. iii. 38.

The real history of Onesimus was this. He had been born at Thyatira; his parents had once been in a respectable position, but his father had been unfortunate, and when the boy became an orphan he had sunk so low in the world that, to save him from the pangs of hunger, the creditors sold him as a slave to the purple-factory of which Lydia—who afterwards became St. Paul’s convert at Philippi—was part-owner. There he had learnt a great deal about the purple-trade and the best way of folding and keeping purple robes. But he was wild and careless and fond of pleasure, and the head workman, not finding him profitable or easy to manage, had again offered him for sale. He was a quick, good-looking boy, and Philemon, a gentleman of Colossæ, touched with his forlorn look as he stood on the slave-platform (catasta) with his feet chalked and a description (titulus) round his neck, had felt compassion for him and had bought him. Not long after this, Philemon, with his wife Apphia, his son Archippus, and several slaves of their household, had been converted by St. Paul. The Apostle had not, indeed, visited the strange Phrygian city, where the Lycus flows under its natural bridges of gleaming travertine; but Philemon and his party had gone down to witness the great Asian games at Ephesus, and to view the treasures of the famous Temple of Artemis, which was one of the wonders of the world. There they had heard Paul preach in the hall of the rhetorician Tyrannus, and, being of sweet and serious disposition, had been profoundly impressed by the message of the gospel. The grace of God had taken possession of their hearts. They exulted in the purity, the hope, and the gladness of Christianity, and under the fostering care of Epaphras, to whose charge St. Paul had entrusted the churches of the Lycian valley, they had finally been led to the full acceptance of the gospel, and had been baptised in the waters of their native river.

Onesimus had not been baptised with them, though he had learnt something of Christianity as a young catechumen. He had lived in daily contact with these good people from early boyhood, and they had treated him with a kindness and consideration which was in marked contrast to the brutal manner of most Pagans towards the human beings whom they regarded as chattels of which they were the indefeasible owners. But Colossæ was a sleepy and decaying city. It offered none of the pleasures and excitements which Onesimus had tasted at Thyatira and Ephesus. He longed to escape from the narrow valley of the dull town; to hear in the streets of Ephesus the shrill wail of the priests of Cybele; to gaze at the superb Artemisian processions; to sit palpitating with enthusiasm as he watched the chariots dash past him in wild career in the circus, or the gorgeous spectacles of the amphitheatre. Above all he sighed and yearned for Rome, for he had often heard of its glory, its magnificence, its unchecked indulgencies. He was only a slave—only one of those Phrygian slaves, who were the least esteemed; but he had been free born. The passions of the Asiatic Greek were strong in him. Other slaves had made their way—why should not he? He was strong, clever, good-looking—was he not certain to secure some fortune in the world?

The ‘tempting opportunity’ met the ‘susceptible disposition.’ Philemon was engaged in the wool-dyeing which formed the most prosperous industry of Colossæ, and on a certain day after the great fair of Laodicea considerable sums were paid to him. He had never had any reason to distrust Onesimus, and the youth knew where the money was kept. One day, when Philemon had been summoned by business to Hierapolis and was likely to be absent for a week, Onesimus abstracted some of the gold coins—enough, he thought, to take him safely to Rome if necessary—and absconded to Ephesus. There, for a few days, he enjoyed himself in visiting the marvels and amusements of the city. But a fair youth, in servile dress, alone, in a crowded town, could hardly escape falling among companions of the lowest type. Fain would they have plunged him into vice and dissipation; but though the runaway was not always truthful, and had fallen into dishonesty, he was far from being depraved. One who had breathed in a pure Christian household the dewy dawn of the Christian faith, and had watched its purple glow transfiguring the commonest elements of life, could hardly sink to the depths of Satan in the great weltering sea of heathen wickedness. Fallen as he was, he never wholly lost his self-respect, and when he had satisfied his first wild impulse he longed to return and plead for forgiveness. After all, how infinitely more happy had he been in sleepy Colossæ than in tumultuous Ephesus! But for a slave to abscond from a kind master, and in absconding to steal his master’s gold, was not only a heinous but a capital offence. He did not know but what Philemon, good and kind as he was, might still deem it right to uphold the laws of the State, and to hand him over to the magistrates. And then he shuddered to think of what awaited him: what blows, what brandings, what wearing of the furca, or thrusting into the stocks, or being made to work in the mines or the galleys, or among the chained wretches of some public slave-prison. The soft nature of the Eastern shrank from such horrors, and almost more from the intolerable sense of shame which would overwhelm him when he stood for the first time a convict-fugitive in his master’s house.

His ill-got money was soon ill-gone. A little of it was lost in gambling; some he had to squander on worthless companions, who tried to insinuate themselves into his favour, or to terrify him with their suspicions; the rest was stolen one night in the low lodging which he had been obliged to seek. Penniless, and sick at heart, he hurried down to the great quay of the city, and offered to work his passage to Italy in a galley. Landed in Italy he had begged his way to Rome, and in Rome he had sunk to the wretchedness in which we first saw him. No career seemed open to him but a career of vice; no possibility offered of earning his daily bread but by criminal courses. He sank back horrified from the rascality which he had witnessed on every side, among those who, being past feeling, and having their consciences seared as with a hot iron, wrought all uncleanness with greediness. He grew more and more emaciated, more and more wretched, sleeping under arches or porticoes, and depending for his scant supply of polenta on the chance of a farthing flung to him now and then in scornful alms. The accident which threw him in the path of Pudens came only just in time to save him from ruin and despair.

Nereus, the freedman of Pudens, was not unwilling to get for nothing an active youth who might turn out to be a useful slave; and in that household he once more found kindness and happiness. It is true that Pudens was not yet an open Christian, but several of his slaves were, as Onesimus soon discovered; and he had learnt by experience that, among Christian men and women, he was safe from a thousand miseries and a thousand temptations. The busy thronging, rushing life of Rome delighted his quick intelligence, and all the more from the contrast it presented to the silent streets of Colossæ, and the narrow valley of its strange white stream.

He had several adventures, and such principles of righteousness as were left to him were severely tried. Some of the young slaves whom he encountered took him to the theatres, and in the pantomimic displays and Atellan fables a cynical shamelessness reigned supreme. To witness the acting of a Paris or an Aliturus was to witness consummate human skill and beauty pandering to the lowest instincts of humanity. Yet Onesimus could not keep away from these scenes, though Stachys and Nereus and Junia and others of the Christian slaves of Pudens did their best, when the chance offered, to save him from the vortex of such perilous dissipation.

Still more brutalising, still more destructive of every element of pureness and kindness were the gladiatorial games. Of these he had no experience. In the provinces they were comparatively rare, and Philemon had forbidden his slaves ever to be present in the amphitheatre when they were exhibited. Onesimus, who had nothing cruel in his nature, had so far preserved a sort of respect for the wishes of Philemon, that he determined not to witness a gladiatorial show. When the great day came, all the slaves were talking of the prowess of Gallina and Syrus, two famous gladiators, and of the magnificent number of lions and tigers which were to be exhibited.

He could not help being interested in a topic which seemed so absorbing, but he still meant to keep away. Some of his comrades, however, thought that scruples which might suit a Cicero and a Seneca were quite out of place in a Phrygian foot-boy, and seized him in the street and said, ‘We are going to take you to the amphitheatre by force.’

‘It is of no use to take me,’ said Onesimus, repeating a sentiment which he had heard from Philemon. ‘I am not going to see fine fellows—fine Dacians and Britons—hack one another to pieces to please a multitude of whom the majority deserve life much less than the gladiators themselves.’

‘Di magni, salaputium disertum!’ exclaimed Lygdus, one of the gay and festal company who belonged to Cæsar’s household. ‘I heard Epictetus say something of the kind, and we all know that the poor little fellow is only a small echo of Musonius. But you, Onesimus, cannot pretend to be a philosopher, and instead of talking seditious nonsense against the majesty of the Roman people, go you shall.’

‘Well then, you will have to drag me there by force,’ said Onesimus.

‘Never mind; go you shall,’ said Lygdus; and, seizing him by the neck and arms, they hurried him along with them into the top seats set apart for slaves and the proletariat.

When once there, Onesimus had not the wisdom to behave as young Alypius did three centuries later, and to close his eyes. On the contrary, he caught fire, almost from the first moment, with the wild excitement, and returned home paganised in every fibre of his being by the horrid voluptuous maddening scene which he had witnessed—in which he had taken part. All that was sweet and pure and tender in the lessons which he had learnt in the house of Philemon seemed to have been swept away for the time in that crimson tide of blood, in that demoniac spectacle of strong men sacrificed as on a Moloch-altar for the amusement of the idle populace. The more splendid the agility of the nets-man, the more brawny the muscles of the Samnite, the more dazzling the sweep of the mirmillo’s steel, the more vivid was the excitement of watching the glazing eye and ebbing life. It was thrilling to see the supreme moments and most unfathomed mysteries of existence turned into the spectacle of a holiday; and even to help in deciding by the movement of a thumb whether some blue-eyed German from the Teutobergian forests should live or die. What wonder was it that waves of emotion swept over the assembled multitude as the gusts of a summer tempest sweep over the waving corn? What wonder that the hearts of thousands, as though they were the heart of one man, throbbed together in fierce sympathy, and became like a wild Æolian harp, of which the strings were beaten into murmurs or shrieks or sobs by some intermittent hurricane? In the concentrated passion of those hours, when every pulse leapt and tingled with excitement, the youth seemed to live through years in moments; his whole being palpitated with a delicious horror, which annihilated all the ordinary interests of life. Here, for the mere dissipation of time, the most consummate tragedies were enacted as part of a scenic display. The spasms of anguish and the heroism of endurance were but the passing incidents of a gymnastic show.

When Onesimus returned to his cell that night he was a changed being. For a long time he could not sleep, and when he did sleep the tumult of the arena still rolled through his troubled dreams. His fellow-slaves, long familiar with such games, were amused to hear him start up from his pallet with shouts of Habet! Occide! Verbera! and all the wild cries of the amphitheatre, and from these bloodshot dreams he would awake panting as from a nightmare, while the chant of the gladiators, Ave, Cæsar! Morituri te salutamus, still woke its solemn echoes in his ears.

All life looked stale and dull to the Phrygian slave when the glow of an Italian morning entering his cell aroused him to the duties of the day. Slaves, even in a humble home like that of Pudens, were so numerous as to make those duties inconceivably light. For the greater part of the day his time was his own, for all he had to do was to wait on Pudens when he went out, carrying anything which his master might require. But henceforth his thoughts were day-dreams, and, when not engaged in work, he found nothing to do but to join in the gossip of his fellow-slaves. Their talk turned usually on three subjects—their masters, and all the low society slanders of the city; the delights of the taverns; the merits of rival gladiators and charioteers, whose names were on every lip. Such conversation led of course to incessant betting, and many a slave lost the whole amount of his savings again and again by backing the merits of a Pacideianus or a Spicillus; or by running up too long scores at the cook-shop (popina) to which his fellow-slaves resorted; or by trying to win the affections of some favourite female flute-player from Syria or Spain.

Gambling, too, was the incessant diversion of these idle hordes. The familia of Pudens only consisted of the modest number of thirty, but the slave population of Rome was of colossal magnitude, and there was a terrible free-masonry among the members of this wretched and corrupted class. The companions of Onesimus were not chiefly to be found in the household to which he belonged, but among the lewd idlers whom he picked up as acquaintances in every street. With these he played at dice, and sauntered about, and jested, and drank, and squabbled, and betted, until he was on the high road towards being as low a specimen of the slave-world as any of them all—a beautiful human soul caught in the snare of the devil, lured by the glittering bait of vice, to be dragged forth soon to die lacerated and gasping upon the shore.

Hitherto a very little had sufficed him, but now he began to need money—money for gambling, money for the taverns, money to spend in the same sins and follies in which the slaves about him spent their days. He could indeed have gained it, had he sunk so low, in a thousand nefarious ways; and, gifted as he was with a quick and supple intelligence, as well as with no small share of the beauty of his race, he might have run away once more, or have secured his purchase into many a pagan household, where he might have become the pampered favourite of some luxurious master. Such, in such a city as Rome, would have been the certain fate of any youth like him, had it not been for the truths which he had heard from Epaphras in the house of Philemon. When he was most willing to forget those holy lessons they still hung about him and gave him checks. The grace of God still lived as a faint spark, not wholly quenched, under the whitening embers of his life. He could not forget that what were now his pleasures had once been pains, and sometimes amid the stifling atmosphere of a dissipation which rapidly tended to become pleasureless, his soul seemed to ‘gasp among the shallows,’ sore athirst for purer air.

But he resisted these retarding influences, and by fiercer draughts of excitement strove to dispel the pleadings of the still small voice.

It was not long before he felt hard pressed, for he had gambled away the little he had earned.

He had stolen before—he would steal again.

The slaves of Pudens were mostly of a simpler and more faithful class than those of the more luxurious houses. There was no need for Pudens to take great precautions about the safety of his money. Most of it was safe in the hands of his banker (mensarius), but sums which to a slave would seem considerable were locked up in a chest under the charge of Nereus. Nereus, as we have already mentioned, was a Christian, and Onesimus, until he had begun to degenerate, had felt warmly drawn towards his daughter Junia. He thought, too, that the simple maiden was not wholly indifferent to him. But Nereus had watched his career, and as it became too probable that the Phrygian would sink into worthlessness, he had taken care that Onesimus and his daughter should scarcely ever meet.

But when, as in every Roman house, a multitude live in a confined space, the whole ways of the house become known to all, and Onesimus knew the place where Nereus kept the ready money of his master. He watched his opportunity when all but a few members of the household were absent to witness a festival, from which he had purposely absented himself on a plea of sickness. The only persons left at home were Nereus and others who, being Christians, avoided giving the smallest sanction to pagan ceremonies. The house was still as the grave in the noontide, when the youth glided into the cell of the sleeping Nereus, and deftly abstracted from his tunic the key which he wanted. Armed with this, he slipped into the tablinum, or private room, of Pudens—whom he knew to be on duty at the Palace—and had already opened the casket in which he kept his money, when he was startled by a low voice and a gliding footstep.

He had not been unobserved. Nereus was too faithful, and too much aware of the dishonesty of the unhappy class to which he belonged, to leave his master’s interests unprotected. He had directed his daughter always to be watchful at the hour when he knew that a theft was most feasible. Junia, from the apartments of the female slaves, on the other side of the house, had heard some one moving stealthily along the passage. Hidden behind a statue, she had observed a slave stealing into her father’s cell, had followed lightly, and with a pang of shame had seen the youth of whom she had thought as a lover make his way noiselessly to the room of his master.

She followed him to the entrance; she saw him open the casket; and she grew almost sick with terror when she thought of the frightful punishment—possibly even crucifixion itself—which might follow the crime he was on the eve of committing. She would fain have stopped him, but did not dare to enter the chamber; and, meanwhile, for some reason the youth was lingering.

He was lingering because there rang in his ear a voiceless memory of words which Epaphras had quoted as a message of Paul of Tarsus. The still voice said to him: ‘Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands.’

He was trying to suppress the mutiny of ‘the blushing shamefast spirit’ within him, as he thought of the games and the dice-box and the Subura, when he was thrilled through and through by a terrified and scarcely audible whisper of his name—

‘Onesimus!’

He turned round, and with nervous haste relocking the casket, hurried into the passage. There, with head bowed over her hands, he saw the figure of a young girl. For one instant she raised her face as he came out, and he exclaimed—‘Junia!’

She raised her hand with a warning gesture, put her finger to her lips, and vanished. She fled towards the garden behind the farthest precincts of the house, and he overtook her in a walk sheltered from view by a trellis covered with the leaves of a spreading vine.

‘Junia,’ he said, flinging himself on his knees, ‘will you betray me?’

The girl stood pale and trembling. ‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘I conceal nothing from my father.’

‘From your father? Oh, Junia, he would drag me before Pudens. Would you see me beaten, perhaps to death, with the leaded thongs? Would you hear me shriek under the horrible scutica? Could you bear to see the crows tearing my flesh as I hung on the cross?’

‘Pudens is just and kind,’ she said, faintly, ‘he never inflicts upon his slaves such horrors as these.’

‘No,’ answered Onesimus, bitterly; ‘it would suffice to send me, chained, to work in some sunless pit to the music of clanking fetters. It would suffice to brand three letters on my forehead, and turn me into the world to starve as a spectacle of shame.’

‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘would God I could—’ She stopped, confused and terrified, for she did not know that Onesimus had ever heard the truths of Christianity.

‘Junia,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a Christian; so am I’—and he marked on the gravel the monogram of Christ.

‘Alas!’ she answered, ‘a Christian you cannot be. It seems that you have heard of Jesus; but Christians cannot steal, and cannot live as you have been living. Christians are innocent.’

‘Then you will betray me? Ah! but if you do, you are in my power. Christianity is a foreign superstition. The City Prætor—’

‘Base,’ she answered, ‘and baser than I thought. Know you not’—and a light came into her eye, and a glow over all her face—‘that a Christian can suffer? that even a Christian slave-girl does not fear at all to die?’

He thought that she had never looked so beautiful—so like one of the angels of whom he had heard in the gatherings at Colossæ. But the sight of the gladiators hacking each other to pieces had inured him to cruelty and blood—had filled him with fierce egotism, and indifference to human life. A horrible thought suddenly leapt upon him as with a tiger’s leap. Why not get rid of the sole witness of his crime?

‘Then you will betray me to chains, to branding, to the scourge, to the cross?’ he asked, fiercely.

Weeping, hiding her face in her hands, she said: ‘What duty tells me, I must do. I must tell my father.’

In an instant the devil had Onesimus in his grip. He thrust his right hand into his bosom, where he had purposely concealed a dagger.

‘Then die!’ he exclaimed, seizing her with his left hand, while the steel gleamed in the sun.

The girl moved not; but his own shriek startled the air, as he felt a hand come down on his shoulder with the grasp of a vice. The dagger was wrenched out of his hand; he was whirled round, the blow of a powerful fist stretched him on the path, and a foot which seemed as if it would crush out his life was placed upon his breast.

‘Oh, father, spare him!’ said Junia.

Nereus still kept his foot on the prostrate youth, still held the dagger in his hand; his eyes still flashed, his whole frame was dilated with righteous indignation. He had misunderstood the meaning of the scene.

‘Explain!’ he said. ‘Junia! You here alone with Onesimus in the vine-walk, at the lonely noon! How did he inveigle you here? Did he dare to insult you?’

The girl had risen; and while Onesimus lay on the ground, stunned with the violence of his fall, she told her father all that had happened.

Nereus spurned the youth with his foot.

‘And I once thought,’ he said, ‘that he was a secret Christian! I once thought that some day he might be worthy to be the husband of my Junia! A thief! a would-be murderer! This comes of harbouring a strange Phrygian in an honest household.’

‘Father, forgive him!’ said Junia. ‘Are not we forgiven?’

‘The wrong to me—the threat against the life of the child I love—yes, that might be forgiven,’ said Nereus; ‘forgiven if repented of. But how can I do otherwise than tell Pudens? How can I keep this youth a member of the household?’

And again, moved by strong passion, he spurned him with his foot.

‘Is there one house in Rome, father,’ she said, ‘in which there are not thieves? in which there are not men—aye, and women too—who steal, and would murder if they could? Is he worse than thousands whom yet we do not see chained in the prisons or rotting on the crosses? And have we not all sinned? and did not Jesus say, “Forgive one another your trespasses”?’

A half-suppressed groan from Onesimus stopped the conversation.

‘I know not what to do,’ said Nereus. ‘Go back, my child, to your cell and to your distaff. I will see you soon. And you,’ he said, ‘thrice-wretched boy, come with me.’

He dragged Onesimus from the ground, and was in such a transport of wrath that he could not refrain from shaking him by the shoulders with the roughest and most contemptuous violence, before he thrust him into the house, and into the cell which had been assigned to him. Then, calling two of his fellow-slaves, Stachys and Amplias, Christians like himself, whom he could implicitly trust, he bade them bind Onesimus hand and foot, and leave him, not unwatched, till he should have time to consider his case.

CHAPTER XIV

MOTHER AND SON

Nero was now firmly seated on the throne of the Empire. Its cares sat lightly on him. The government went on admirably without him. He had nothing to do but to glut himself with enjoyments, and to make what he could of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.

At first, like one dazed with a sudden outburst of light, he had been unable to understand the immensity of his own power. For the first month of his reign he could hardly realise that he was more than a boy. He had always been passionately fond of chariot races, which as a boy he had not been permitted to frequent. One day, while at his lessons, he had been deploring to his companions the fate of a charioteer of the green faction who had been thrown out of his chariot and dragged to death by his own horses. His master, overhearing the conversation, reproved him, and the boy, with a clever and ready lie, said, ‘I was only talking about Hector being dragged round the walls of Troy by Achilles.’ And now he might watch the races all day long and plunge into the hottest rivalry of the factions, and neither in this pursuit nor in any other was there a single human being to say him nay.

The only thing which troubled him was the jealous interference of his mother. Agrippina still clutched with desperate tenacity at the vanishing fruits of the ambition for the sake of which all her crimes had been committed. She had sold her soul, and was beating back the conviction that she had sold it for nought. How could that slight boy of seventeen, whom as a child she had so often chastised with her own hand, dream of resisting her? Was not her nature, compared with his, as adamant to clay? She had been a princess of the blood from infancy, surrounded by near relatives who had been adored in life and deified after death; she had enjoyed power during two reigns, and now at last she had fancied that she would control the Empire for the remainder of her life. Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia? Was not her indomitable purpose even more intense? She forgot that Livia had been, what Caligula called her, Ulysses stolatus, ‘a Ulysses in petticoats,’ a woman with absolute control over her own emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of a wild passion which ruined her caution and precipitated her end.

And she forgot, more fatally, the total collapse of all Livia’s soaring ambitions. Livia had procured the death of prince after prince who stood between her son Tiberius and the throne. Tiberius did indeed become Emperor, but ‘had Zimri peace who slew his master’? Pliny calls Tiberius ‘confessedly the gloomiest of men.’ He himself wrote to the Senate that he felt himself daily destroyed by all the gods and goddesses. And, after all, his only son died, and he was succeeded by Caligula, the bad and brutal son of the hated and murdered Germanicus and the hated and murdered Agrippina the elder. He might have said with the bloodstained usurper of our great tragedy:—

Was it likely to be otherwise with her son Nero?

Nero—slight boy as she thought him—had hardly been seated on the throne when he began to slip out of her control. Pallas, her secret lover, her chief supporter, was speedily ejected and disgraced. Seneca and Burrus were both opposed to her influence, and neither of them dreaded her vengeance. Suitors for favours were more anxious to secure the intercession of Acte than hers. Nero, surrounded by dissolute young aristocrats, and also by adventurers, buffoons and parasites, was daily showing himself more indifferent to her threats, her commands, even her reasonable wishes. He liked to parade his new-born freedom. She felt sure that among the circle of his familiar companions, she and her pretensions were turned into ridicule. Her proud cheek flushed even in solitude to think that she, who, for Nero’s sake, had dared all, should have been superseded in her influence by such curled and jewelled weaklings as Otho, and ousted from her son’s affections by a meek freedwoman like Acte. How terribly had she miscalculated! In the reign of Claudius she had been the mightiest person in the Court and in the State. Had she become the murderess of her husband only to transfer from herself into the hands of men whom she despised too much to hate, the power which was once her own? Had she flung away the substance and only grasped a flickering shadow?

A thousand plans of revenge crossed her mind, only to be rejected. The die was cast. The deeds done were irrevocable. It only remained for her to dree the judgment for her crimes, and to take such few steps as still were possible to her along the precipice’s edge. She had plucked a tempting fruit, and she found that its taste was poison; she had nursed a serpent in her bosom, and its sting was death.

But she would not resign her power without at least one mad struggle to retain it. She still had access to the Emperor whenever she desired, and many a wild scene had occurred between the mother and the son. In such interviews she let her tongue run riot. She refrained from nothing. She no longer attempted to conceal from him that Claudius had died by her hand. She wrapped the youth round in the whirlwind of her sulphurous passion; she raised her voice so loud in a storm of reproaches and recriminations that sometimes even the freedmen and soldiers outside the imperial apartments heard the fierce voices of altercation, and were in doubt whether they should not rush in and interfere. And often the feeble nature of Nero cowered before her menaces as she poured on him a flood of undisguised contempt. Sometimes she wrapped him in a storm of satire and sarcasm. She upbraided him with his unmanliness; she contrasted him unfavourably with Britannicus; she told him that he was more fit to be an actor of melodrama, or a tenth-rate charioteer, or a fiftieth-rate singer, than to be the Emperor of Rome.

‘To think,’ she said, raising her voice almost to a scream, as he sat before her in sullen silence—‘to think that the blood of the Domitii and of the Neros and of the Cæsars is in your veins! You an emperor! Yes; an emperor of pantomime! You have nothing of the Roman, much less of the ruler, nay, not even of the man, in you. Who made you Emperor? Who but I?’

‘I wish you had left me alone, then,’ he answered, desperately. ‘It is no such pleasure to be Emperor with you to spy on me and domineer over me.’

‘Spy on you? Domineer over you? Ungrateful! Infamous! You, who have made a slave-girl the rival of your mother! Let me tell you, Ahenobarbus, that I at least am the daughter of Germanicus, though you are wholly unworthy to be his grandson. Whence did you get your pale and feeble blood? Not from me, coward and weakling as you are; not from your father Domitius, who, if he was cruel, was at least a man! He would not have chosen such creatures as Otho and Senecio for his friends. He had a man’s taste and a man’s ambition. He would have blushed to be father of a singing and painting girl like you! But beware! You are an agrippa; you were born feet-foremost—a certain augury of future misery.’36

Stung to the quick by these reproaches, trembling with impotent anger to hear his effeminate vanity—to which his comrades burnt daily incense—thus ruthlessly insulted, and angry, above all, that his mother dared to pour contempt on his cherished accomplishments, Nero’s timid nature at last turned in self-defence.

‘I am Emperor now, at any rate,’ he said; ‘and ere now the wives and sisters, if not the mothers, of the Cæsars have had to cool their rage on the rocks of Gyara or Pontia!’

‘You dare to threaten me?’ she cried. ‘You to threaten me; me, your mother; me, who have toiled and schemed, aye, and committed crimes for you, from a child; me, whose womb bare you, whose hand has often beaten you; me, to whom you owe it that you are not at this moment a disgraced and penniless boy!’

‘You call me an actor. Are not you more than half an actress?’ he said, in a sneering tone.

Agrippina sprang from her seat in a burst of passion.

‘Oh, if there be gods!’ she exclaimed, uplifting her hands, ‘let them hear me! Infernal Furies at least there are, for I have felt them! Oh! may they avenge on you my wrongs!’

Nero cared but little for the curse. He was not superstitious. He thought how Senecio and Petronius would laugh at the notion of there being real Furies or subterranean gods!

‘You know more of the Furies than I do, then,’ he said, in a mocking tone. ‘Besides, I have an amulet. Look at this!’

He handed to her the icuncula puellaris—the wooden doll which had been given him in the streets, with the mysterious promise that it would prove to be a charm against every malignant influence. He honoured it as Louis XI. did the little leaden saint which he wore in his hat when he had ceased to honour anything else. She glanced at it with utter scorn; then, to his horror, flung it on the ground and spurned it away.

‘And you are Pontifex Maximus!’ she said, concentrating into the words a world of unmitigated scorn.

Nero was silent, but his look was so dark that, fearing lest she should have gone too far, she said in calmer tones, ‘You have a better amulet than that paltry image, and one which your mother gave you. But your follies render it unavailing.’

She pointed to a golden armlet, in which was set the skin of a serpent, which he wore on his right arm. The serpent had been found gliding in his room near his cradle; or, perhaps, according to another story, its cast-off skin had been found beside his pillow. Many legends had sprung up about it. The populace believed that it was a sacred spirit which had protected him, and had driven from his infant cradle the murderers sent by Messalina to destroy him. But, while Nero was yet a child, Agrippina had had the skin of the serpent curiously set in a jewelled armlet of great value, with rubies for its eyes, and emeralds marking the traces of its scales, and had clasped it on Nero’s arm, and bidden him to wear it forever. And as his life advanced in golden prosperity she had come to believe, or to half believe, that there was some mysterious charm about it—for a mind may be atheistical and yet profoundly superstitious.

But as she gazed at it with a sort of fascination, she was seized by one of the violent reactions of feeling which often sweeps over a mind untrained in the control of its passions. It brought before her the image of a little boy, whose sweet and sunny face looked the picture of engaging innocence; whose golden hair, when it caught the sunlight, shone like an aureole round his head; whose blue eyes danced with childish glee at the sight of what was beautiful; to whom his mother was all in all; who had often flung his arms round her neck, in joy and in sorrow, with the fondness of a loving child. That child stood before her—through her crimes Emperor of Rome. He stood there, hateful and hating her—on his lips the flickering smile of mockery; on his once bright forehead the scowl of anger. Yet whom had she in all the world besides? Her father had been murdered; her mother murdered; three of her brothers murdered; her sisters were dead, and had died in shame; her first husband dead; two others of her husbands poisoned—and by her; her lovers dead, or banished far away. She knew that a chaos of hatred yawned wide and deep around her; she knew that in all the wide world no single person, except possibly one or two of her freedmen, cared for her. In her agony, in her loneliness, she had tried of late to win something like forgiveness, something like tolerance, if not affection, from the deeply injured Britannicus and Octavia. She pitied the sorrows and wrongs which she had herself inflicted on them. She had even learnt to admire some gracious quality in them both, for which she could find no name. But, alas! she soon found that, while they were perfect in courtesy, they could never love her. The life, the affection of her son was the sole thing left her; and he was turning against her with a feeling akin to loathing stamped upon his face.

All these thoughts rushed over her mind like a tornado. Unable to bear them, she ended the interview by a passion of uncontrollable weeping. And, as she wept, she held out her appealing arms to her son, and wailed:

‘Oh, Nero, forgive my wild words. Whom have we but one another? In this drowning sea must we not sink or rise together? My son! my son! your mother pleads with you. Forgive me—kiss me; let Agrippina feel once more that she has the love of the son for whose sole sake she has lived—for whom she would gladly die!’

A noble nature would have been moved by the tragic appeal of so proud a mother; but the nature of Nero, essentially mean, had become constantly meaner. He trembled before those who confronted him with boldness; but he triumphed over all who showed that they feared him. He wanted to feel perfectly independent. The only person whose power he feared was his mother. And here was this all-dreaded mother pleading with him, at whose lightest look he had been accustomed for years to tremble! He was not in the least moved; he only intended to secure the ascendency of which, in that struggle, he had won the first step.

‘You curse me,’ he said, ‘one moment, and the next you are all tears and entreaties. Do you think that it is only your amulet that keeps me from your Furies? You have dishonoured my image; see how much I care for your amulet. I will never wear it again.’

He unclasped the armlet from his wrist, and flung it to the other end of the room.

‘There!’ he said. ‘You may have it; I have done with it!’ And with these words he turned his back upon her, and went out without a farewell.

It seemed a small matter, and what else could she expect from such a being as her son—a youth soft without tenderness, caressing without affection, cruel without courage?

She stood and looked towards the curtain through which he had disappeared. She stood with gleaming eyes and dilated nostrils, and firm-set lips. Every tear was dried up in her burning glance, as she outstretched her clenched hand and vowed a terrible vengeance.

‘O wronged Britannicus!’ she murmured; ‘O wronged Octavia! cannot I even now redress your wrongs? Alas! it cannot be. Their first act would be to avenge the injured manes of Claudius. But does not Rubellius Plautus live, and Cornelius Sulla? Could I not even yet brush this mean and thankless actor like an insect from my path—son though he be—and seat one of them upon the throne of the Cæsars?’

She picked up the armlet with the serpent’s skin. ‘It shall be as he said,’ she murmured; ‘he shall never wear or see it more.’

When his hour of doom had come, Nero searched for that amulet in vain!

CHAPTER XV

EMPEROR AND ÆSTHETE.

Nero tried to persuade himself that he cared little for such scenes as that which we have witnessed; but in reality they troubled him. It required a strong effort to shake off their effects, and they left his small pleasure-loving nature in a state of tremor and disgust. He longed to escape from them to some complete retirement, where, away from all pomp, he could give himself up, heart and soul, to selfish æstheticism and voluptuous delight.

He had villas at Antium and at Baiæ, but even they were more public than he desired, and he determined to escape from the noise and heat and worry of Rome to an enchanting lodge which had been designed by the architects, Severus and Celer, in one of the wildest gorges of the Simbruine ridge of the Apennines, a little above the modern town of Subiaco. Through this gorge the icy stream of the Anio forces its way, leaping down into the valley beneath in tumultuous cataracts. By damming the river the architects had with consummate taste and skill, caused it to spread into three mountain lakes, three hundred feet above the valley. On either side of the gorge they had built a hunting-lodge half hidden amid the dense foliage, and the two villas—for such they practically were—had been united by a bridge which spanned the abyss with a graceful arch at a stupendous height above the valley. Nature and art combined to make the scene supremely beautiful. The grounds and gardens of the villas spread down to the smiling vale beneath, by walks under overhanging rocks, tapestried with the luxuriant growth of creepers and wild flowers. Underfoot the moss of softest emerald was now variegated with the red autumnal leaves. Where the pure runnels trickled down little gullies of the rocks they were brightened with maidenhair and arborescent ferns. The artificial sheets of water, in which many water-fowl swam undisturbed, were overshadowed by beeches and oaks and golden platanes which late autumn had touched with her fiery finger.

It was an enchanting spot. Gay shallops were always ready on the artificial lakes if any guest cared to row or to plunge in the cool bright water. On the smooth lawn the ‘gemmy peacocks,’ as the Latin poets called them, strutted and displayed their Indian glories, mingled with tame pheasants and partridges. Kids leaped and sported about the rocky slopes. The cushat-doves cooed from the groves, and white pigeons from the dove-cotes would come crowding round for maize-grain at the slightest call. The Rhodian hens clucked contentedly about the farmyard, which was crowded also with geese and guinea-fowls. The long-haired young town-slaves, full of frolic, worked in the garden in mock obedience to the orders of the country bailiff; but the gardener did not attach much importance to their labours, for they were far more intent on pilfering the best fruit they could find in the granaries than on cultivating the soil; and the rustics knew that to offend them was as much as their place was worth.

The lodges themselves made no pretence to the Cæsarean magnificence of the Palace at Rome. But their simplicity did not exclude the exercise of luxurious taste in their construction and adornment. All the rooms were brightened with lovely frescoes painted by the most famous rhyparographists. On the walls of the richer apartments there were orbs of porphyry and lapis lazuli. The impluvium, into which fell the ceaseless plash of a musical fountain, was a basin of Thasian stone, once a rarity even in temples, and the stop which regulated the play of the water was formed into the winged figure of a child moulded in silver. In the centre of the hall, which was tessellated with small pieces of blue and white marble, there was an exquisite copy of the doves of Scopas. Statues by such masters as Myron and Praxiteles stood between the pillars of the peristyle. The windows were filled with glass, and between them were abaci of peacock-marble, supported on the gilded wings of Cupids, and of griffins which looked in opposite directions. On these slabs of marble stood some of the gold and silver plate which Augustus had ordered to be made out of the statuettes of precious metals which had been erected to him by too-adulatory provincials. On other tables of ivory and fragrant woods lay engraved gems and cameos, or curiosities, brought from all lands. The walls of the small but precious library were covered, in imitation of the famous library of Apollo, with medallions of the most famous Greek and Roman authors in repoussé work of gold and silver, or moulded of Corinthian bronze. Poets, historians, jurists, orators were grouped together, and between the groups were framed specimens of the most exquisite palæography.

Nero was going for the first time to take possession of this enchanting retreat, the loveliness of which had kindled the surprise and admiration of the few who had seen it. He started from Rome with a splendid retinue. He himself rode in a light car, inlaid with ivory and silver, and was followed by an army of a thousand slaves and retainers. One of the earliest lessons which he learnt was that his resources were practically boundless, so that from the first he broke out into unheard-of extravagance. His mules were shod with silver. The muleteers were dressed in liveries of Canusian wool, dyed scarlet. The runners in front of his chariot, and the swarthy cohort of outriders from Mazaca in Numidia, selected for their skill in horsemanship, were adorned with bracelets and trappings of gold. The more delicate slaves had their faces covered with masks, or tinged with cosmetics, lest their complexions should suffer from the sunlight. Many of the slaves had no other office than to carry, with due care, the lyres and other musical instruments which were required for the theatrical entertainments.

Agrippina, devoured with chagrin and resentment, had indeed been asked to accompany him, but in a way so insultingly ungracious, that she declined. She dreaded to share with him a place so retired, in which she knew that almost every hour would fill her with disgust and anger. She had chosen instead to go alone to her stately villa at Bauli, on the Campanian shore. There, if she had little else to occupy her time, she could continue her own memoirs, or amuse herself with the lampreys and mullets, which were so tame that they would come at her call, and feed out of her hand. Her husband’s mother, Antonia, had attached earrings to one pet lamprey, so that people used to visit the villa to see it. Agrippina followed her example.

Octavia followed Nero. She had not been suffered to possess any villa which she could call her own, and much as Nero would have liked to leave her behind, he was compelled by public opinion to observe a certain conventional respect for his Empress, the daughter of Claudius. The sedan in which she travelled was carried by eight stalwart Bithynian porters, but she was not honoured with any splendour or observance, and had only a modest retinue out of her six hundred nominal attendants. Still humbler was the following of Britannicus. He had been bidden to come partly because it would have seemed shameful to leave him alone in Rome during an unhealthy season, when even persons of low position were driven into the country by the month in which Libitina claimed her most numerous victims; and also because Nero was glad to keep him in sight. He was happy enough, for Titus was with him, and Pudens was one of the escort; and as Epaphroditus necessarily attended his master, Nero, it was not difficult to get leave for Epictetus to come in his train. The two kind-hearted boys thought that the pale face of the slave-child might gain a touch of rose from the fresh winds of the Apennines.

Very few ladies were invited. It was necessary, indeed, that one or two should accompany Octavia; and Nero, for his own reasons, wished Junia Silana and Calvia Crispinilla to be of the party. These were ladies with whom a young matron like Octavia could scarcely exchange a word, but happily for her, Flavia Domitilla, the wife of Vespasian, was asked to accompany the Empress. Vespasian, who had just returned from his proconsulate, had been summoned to have an interview with Nero on the state of affairs in Africa, and to stay for some days. Acte was in the train of Nero, but, though she rarely saw Octavia, the unfortunate Empress little knew that the presence of Domitilla, the only lady to whom she could speak without a shudder, was really due to the private suggestion of the lovely and kind-hearted freedwoman. Flavia Domitilla was of the humblest origin, and her father had occupied no higher office than that of a quæstor’s clerk. That no nobler companion had been sought for her would have been regarded as an insult by any lady of haughty character; but Octavia preferred the society of the honest matron to that of a thousand Crispinillas.

Seneca and Burrus were invited for a brief visit only, and as Nero liked to give a flavour of intellectuality to the society which he gathered round him, Lucan was asked, as the rising poet of the day; and Silius Italicus, as a sort of established poet laureate; and Persius, the young Etrurian knight, who, though but twenty-one years old, was so warmly eulogised by his tutor, Cornutus, that great things were expected of him. None of his satires had yet seen the light, but his head would hardly have been safe if Nero could have read some of the lines locked up in his writing-desk. With these had been also invited C. Plinius Secundus, a wealthy knight, thirty-four years of age, in whose encyclopædic range of knowledge it was hoped that the guests might find an endless fund of amusement and anecdote in their more serious moments.

But while Nero liked to keep up the credit of dabbling in literary pursuits, the choice spirits to whom he looked for his real delight were very different from these graver personages. The fashionable elegance of Otho and the luxurious cynicism of Petronius were indispensable for his amusement. Tigellinus was too intimate to be excluded; and with these came Vatinius, the witty buffoon and cobbler of Beneventum, an informer of the lowest class. This cobbler’s chief recommendations were personal deformity, an outrageous tongue, and an abnormally prominent nose. He avenged himself on society for the wrongs inflicted on him by nature. He rejoiced in the immortality of having given his name to a drinking-cup with a long nozzle, which has preserved his memory in the verse of Juvenal and Martial.

Here Nero enjoyed life to his heart’s content. The happy accident that the villa really consisted of two edifices, separated by the bridge across the glen, enabled him to keep his least welcome guests in the Villa Castor, and his chosen companions in the Villa Pollux.

In the grounds of the Villa Castor, Seneca and Burrus had rooms in which they could transact with their secretaries their ministerial and military business. Pliny could bury himself among the rarer treasures of the library, or amuse his leisure by seeing what further he could learn about the habits of the flamingoes and other foreign birds, which were carefully kept in cages and fed from the hands of the visitors. For Britannicus and Titus, who often asked Persius to be their companion, there was the resource of the tennis-court, the gymnastic room, and rowing, bathing, and fishing in the lakes; and Persius, who had heard all about Epictetus from his young patron, sometimes let the little slave sit at his feet while he read choice passages of old Roman poems in works which had been found for him by the clever librarian.

The meals were held separately in the two villas, though sometimes all the guests were invited to Nero’s table. He varied his amusements in every possible way. Sometimes he would take a long swim in the cold lake; sometimes he would fish with a purple line and a golden hook, though he caught fewer fish in a morning than Britannicus would catch in an hour. He delighted to spend hours at a time with the harpist Terpnos or the singer Diodorus, who trained him how to use what it had become the fashion to describe as his celestial voice.

He soon got tired of the small restraint upon his amusements which resulted from the presence of the graver guests across the bridge. But they helped to form an audience for him in the room which had been fitted up as a theatre. One evening he had been displaying his accomplishments to all the guests at both villas, and had been received by the listening slaves and courtiers with tumults of applause. The others were obliged, or felt themselves obliged, to join in the clapping; but Nero could read in their faces that they were unwilling listeners. Seneca blushed, and his smooth tongue stumbled, as he attempted to express his gratification. Burrus looked on with profound disapproval. A look of involuntary scorn stole over the grave features of Persius, whom Nero already hated, because the young man’s virginal modesty formed such a contrast to his own shamelessness. But, worst of all, the blunt soldier, Vespasian, to the intense amusement of Titus and Britannicus, had first of all begun to nod, and then had fallen asleep with his mouth wide open, and had snored—had actually and audibly snored, so that all the audience heard it, while Nero was chanting his own divine verses with the most bewitching trills of his own divine voice!

Nero, in his rage, half thought of having him arrested on the charge of high treason—an accusation of which the meshes were equally adapted to entangle the most daring criminals and the most trivial offenders. But when he poured out his wrath to Petronius, his elegant friend laughed immoderately, and pacified Nero’s offended vanity by dwelling on Vespasian’s somnolence as a proof of his vulgarity.

‘I suppose, then,’ said Nero, ‘I must say with Horace, “solvuntur risu tabulæ”?’

‘Yes,’ said Petronius, ‘and you may add “tu missus abibis.” Why not make a clean sweep of these dreadful old fogies in the Villa Castor? Pliny has told us all we care to know about flamingoes and lampreys. Seneca’s pomposities grow stale. We have been sufficiently amused for the present by the blushes of Persius, and the good Silius Italicus is as tedious as his own epic. Give them a respectful farewell. Send for Paris the actor, and Aliturus the pantomime, and some of your fairest slaves to wait on us at our choicest banquets. Let us dismiss this humbug of respectability and pluck the blossom of the days.’

The advice fell on congenial ears. It was intimated to the guests in the Villa Castor that they might present their respects to the Emperor, and disperse where they chose. They were not sorry to depart from such dubious neighbours as those in the Villa Pollux. Vespasian and Titus were rudely sent off the next morning, without being permitted to see Nero again. Flavia Domitilla accompanied them, and as the presence of Britannicus was always a trouble to Nero, he was allowed to spend the rest of the autumn in the humble Sabine villa of Vespasian’s family at Phalacrine, near Reate, where he would not only have Titus as a companion, but also his cousins—the two young sons of Vespasian’s brother, Flavius Sabinus.

‘Among those dull farmers,’ said Nero, ‘he is not likely to have any nonsense put into his head. Let him eat beans and bacon, and grow as sluggish as his friends.’

To Nero and the fashionable nobles of his time every man was sluggish and plebeian who did not care to season his recreation with a variety of vices.