CHAPTER LX THE DOOM OF VIRTUE

‘Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.’

Shakespeare, Macbeth, iv. 3.

Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime. One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he had already killed.

In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ of Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the funeral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that he was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius, the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, Marcus Silanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisoned by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with false charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. He begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish patience and pusillanimous acquiescence.113 All that he can say is that it was destiny—it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of Rome.

We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous births—which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, the roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone.

Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco, and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed. He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor, handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood, looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith to amuse him—no wit, no learning—nothing but the coarse satieties of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret misery and terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society, a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberating echoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderbolts of heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden goblet which he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table at which he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for some time grovelled there—a heap of abject terror. But the cup of his iniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every other warning was sent in vain.

Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reach of all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing his prosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in a shipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them back to him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised the imagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour which Augustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendant of the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receive from Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian, he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore came all the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont. He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousand horsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra, among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then begged that he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition was repeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed the diadem—a band of purple silk woven with pearls—upon the head of Tiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had been redecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding that the day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over the theatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the costume of Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nero sang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt of the wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison with the manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘in Corbulo he had a good slave.’

The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largesse before his departure were almost incredible. It was believed that one motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire to be initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, in order to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made, and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one of the ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile, and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to the unworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like a gorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds and more than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might be amassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, and closed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.

But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed in the pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commission of further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false charges the innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of the aristocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he now ventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, the two most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doing so, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.

The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treat the accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longed to hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggish acquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bled themselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friends advised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches, possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in that degraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even the good would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defence would assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of his wife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune Rusticus Arulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancient tribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thrasea decided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generous tribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his career were over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to await the decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friends remonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘Œdipus’ of Seneca—

‘Tacere liceat; nulla libertas minor

A rege petitur.’

‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding my tongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy which might have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimity which yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thrasea might, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such a murder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficent revolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flash nobleness into a host of slaves.

The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who, in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to the assembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaints were read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed against senators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglecting their legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and used this charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated by personal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Eprius was still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, with threatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazing with fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of sedition by impotent disdain for his clear duties. But if the senate was terrified by this lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia,114 it was terrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms. Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, was banished from Italy.

It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng of illustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messenger came to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends to leave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by association with one who had been condemned. In those days compassion was dangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snapped by fear.

He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wished to die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband, Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a dagger into her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into the hand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ The daughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would not let her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of their child, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed more cheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grieved that he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said, ‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make me do wrong.’

He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. The indomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm his resolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements, and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted to leave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-clad philosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing. On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmly replied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. When his blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, and exclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look, young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are born to times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples of constancy.’

They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyre burned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when they had gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure the anguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breaking sorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the people greeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of Venus Genetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic—of a tragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assembly of woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had been the Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime of friendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered his province rather with a view to his own glory than for the public good. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in having supported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedy robbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These were old charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that his daughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money to the diviners of horoscopes.

The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she was practically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driven into exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though no evidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow—she was not yet twenty years old—was falling sick with the intensity of her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She had merely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and the inexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable, and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or, at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after accepting large sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the two consuls stood the hapless prisoners—the father grey with age, the young daughter not even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face, because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ he asked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, did you not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for your magic incantations?’

Servilia prostrated herself upon the ground, and for some time could find no voice to speak; then rising, and embracing the altar of Venus Genetrix, ‘I invoked,’ she exclaimed, ‘no infernal deities; I uttered no prayers of imprecation. The sole object of my ill-omened supplications was that thou, O Cæsar, that ye, O senators, might preserve to me this the best of fathers. I gave the Chaldeans my gems, my robes, the adornment of my matronly dignity; I would have given them, had they demanded it, my blood, my life. Let them look to it; their very existence and the nature of their arts were hitherto unknown to me. I never mentioned the name of the Emperor, except among the deities. And of all that I did my father knew nothing. If what I have done be a crime, I have sinned alone.’

‘Senators!’ exclaimed her father, Soranus, ‘let her be at once acquitted. She is free from all the charges urged against me. She did not accompany me to my province; she was too young to have known Rubellius Plautus; she was in no way implicated in the accusations against her husband. Her sole error has been her filial affection. Separate her case from mine. She is still in early youth. Let one victim suffice you. I am prepared to undergo whatever fate you inflict upon me, but spare my child!’

At those tender words he opened his arms, and his daughter sprang to his embrace, but the lictors lowered their cruel fasces, and interposed between them.

Then the witnesses were called, and a murmur of contempt and indignation broke out even among those abject senators when Publius Egnatius Celer stepped out first among them. The lip of Soranus curled in strong disdain, and he muttered the one word ‘Traitor!’ For Egnatius was a professed Stoic; he was a client of Soranus; he had been his teacher in philosophy; he was old, and Soranus young; he had received from his hands unnumbered kindnesses; he had himself encouraged Servilia to consult the astrologers. He wore the dress of a philosopher; he had trained his features to assume the aspect of Stoic dignity. But on this day he tore the mask off his own face, and revealed himself as what he was—a lecherous, treacherous, avaricious, hypocritic villain, who, having concealed his leprous character under the guise of honour, did not hesitate for a moment to sell his friend for money in the hour of calamity, and thereby dishonoured his grey hairs, and earned for himself the execration of all time.115 The wretch lived on in deserved and general infamy. In better days he was accused by Musonius Rufus and himself condemned. But to Soranus and Servilia were meted out such justice as could alone be expected from such judges. The only mercy extended to them was the permission to choose their mode of death.

Such was the state of things in the days of Nero. The aristocracy were like men who live in an unknown land, glancing on every side at the slightest sound. Seneca, who had lived through that reign of terror, most truly depicts it. His sole remedy is stubborn resignation. Even abstinence from action requires prudence, for you may be condemned for what you do not do. Above all must men shun the Court, ‘that sad prison of slaves.’ But, after every precaution, no one could be safe, and therefore, Stoic-fashion, men must accustom themselves to regard all calamities as matters of indifference. ‘Above all, is not suicide always possible?’ Seneca asks; ‘and is not that the best antidote to tyranny? The path of escape is open everywhere. Do you see this precipice? It is the descent to Liberty! Do you see this sea, this well, this river? Liberty lies hidden in their depths! Do you see this little barren, distorted tree? Liberty hangs from its branches!’116 The historian is reminded of the picture of Pascal. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom have their throats cut daily in sight of the rest, while the survivors see in their fate their own condition, and gaze one on another with sorrow, and without hope.’