CHAPTER LVII A CONSPIRACY AND ITS COLLAPSE

‘Ma cruauté se lasse, et ne peut s’arrêter,

Je veux me faire craindre, et ne fais qu’irriter,

Et le sang répandu de mille conjurés

Rend mes jours plus maudits et non plus assurés.’

Corneille, Cinna, iv. 2.

‘Our emperor is a tyrant, fear’d and hated;

I scarce remember in his reign one day

Pass guiltless o’er his execrable head.

He thinks the sun is lost that sees not blood,

When none is shed, we count it holiday;

We who are most in favour, cannot call

This our own.’

Dryden, The Cruelty of Tyranny, v. 15-16.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stretch out your neck manfully,’ said Niger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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