CHAPTER XXVII

DEATH IN THE GOBLET

‘Fratrum, conjugum, parentum neces, alia solita parentibus ausi.’—Tac. Hist. v. 3.

A cry rang through the banquet-room!

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

What had happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE LAST OF THE CLAUDII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXIX

AGRIPPINA AT BAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Agrippina—and—Rubellius Plautus—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agrippina’s only answer was a scornful laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And, pray, who are my accusers?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Junia Silana.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They may.’

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

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