CHAPTER LXII NERO IN GREECE

‘Hæc opera atque hæ sunt generosi Principis artes

Gaudentis fœdo peregrina ad pulpita cantu

Prostitui, Graiæque apium meruisse coronæ.’

Juv. Sat. viii. 224.

Nero grew weary of Rome. While he was there he could not wholly exclude the voice of the conscience of mankind which awoke echoes in his own. With art, and æsthetics, and the race-course, and the theatre, he tried to create around him the elements of a sham and shadowy world. It was a world filled with the ghosts of crime and weird with insensate projects and monstrous revellings. He had attempted everything, abused everything, polluted everything, and ‘the scoriac river of passion accursed,’ of which he drank so freely, did but consume and burn up his powers. He had become like a dead thing in a wilderness of dead capacities, inspired at once by ‘insatiable desires and incurable disgusts.’ While he played the god he sank lower than Christian eye can follow him, into the beast. With Domitian, Tiberius, Caligula, and Helagabalus—with Vitellius, Commodus, and Maximin—he was one of a group of Cæsars who have been set forth last on the stage of history, a spectacle to angels and to men to show that human nature can sink into ‘half beast and half devil’ when there are no restraints to save men from all that is most abject. They became, as St. Paul said, inventors of evil; not only doers of whatsoever things are vile, whatsoever things are infamous, whatsoever things are of ill report, but also delighters in those that do them.

But at Rome, even in his beloved theatre, Nero was not safe from insults. They scorched him as with the touch of flame, and yet were so impalpable that he could not avenge them unless he put a whole population to death. Opposite his Palace, or on the outer circus, were written, in chalk or coal, denunciations so stinging as to show that if blank walls are the paper of fools they may also be the avengers of tyrants. One of these pasquinades hailed him as the true descendant of Æneas, since Æneas ‘took off’ his father, Nero his mother. Another criticised the over-grown space of the Golden House, and bade the Quirites to emigrate to Veii, if the House did not forestall them by extending so far. Yet another reminded him that the Parthian could be an Apollo with his arrows no less than Nero with his harp.

He pretended indifference to these things, but he felt them, and longed to find a fresh scene for display. At Rome he considered that his musical talent, though he had exhibited it to the promiscuous populace, was yet a flower which blushed unseen. The astute and adulatory Greeks had sent him the crowns of all their citharœdic contests. He was delighted, and asked their delegates to supper. When they begged him to give them a specimen of his powers, they went into such ecstasies over his performance that he said the Greeks were the only connoisseurs who were worthy of his proficiency.

To Greece, therefore, he set forth with a retinue which would have sufficed for the conquest of India, only that they were more concerned with masks and robes and musical instruments than with arms. He was accompanied, too, by all his train of minions, as well as by an army of claqueurs. When he appeared at Naples he was so enchanted by the ‘Kentish fire’ of some Alexandrians who were present—a mode of applause which was new to him—that he took a number of these Egyptians into his service. He had also trained a band of youths of equestrian rank, and more than five thousand of the lustiest plebeians to act together in bands and learn certain modes of cheering, which were called ‘buzzings,’ ‘tiles,’ and ‘jars.’ They were mostly boys, and were arrayed in fine dresses, with their thick hair shining with perfumes, and with rings on their left hands.

With such accompaniments he might feel tolerably secure of victory, yet when he appeared at a contest he always felt or pretended a girlish timidity. The Emperor of Rome might be seen on the stage of Greek towns bending his knee before the mob, humbly adoring them with his hands, assuring the judges that he had done his little best, tremblingly solicitous to observe the slightest rules, and perspiring with anxiety if he made the smallest mistake. Besides this, he debased himself with all the pettiest intrigues of tenth-rate theatrical life. He defamed his competitors, or bribed them not to do their best, or cajoled them to cede the victory to him. When an Epirot, with a fine voice, refused to cede the prize unless Nero paid him ten talents, he was pushed against a column by Nero’s clique and stabbed to death. It required the power of the Emperor to secure the rewards of the comedian.

Without believing, or even alluding to, the deeds recorded of him by Dion Cassius, it is clear that his plunderings, and crimes, and secret orgies continued unabated. From the Thespians he stole the Cupid of Praxiteles in Pentelic marble; from the Pisatans of Olympia the statue of Ulysses among the Greek chiefs drawing lots to answer the challenge of Hector. Rich men were proscribed in consequence of secret delations, which often sprang from the greed of the detestable Calvia Crispinilla, who was now the keeper of the wardrobe of Sporus. They were struck down, unheard, and their possessions were divided. Rome had been left under the government of two ex-slaves, Helius and Polycletus, who were so rapacious that the people complained of being under two Neros instead of one.

Amid such crimes little was thought of the fate of Paris. The poor pantomime, whose beauty, grace, and skill had been the delight of Rome, had excited the jealousy of Nero because he could not teach him how to dance. Paris, like Aliturus, had been no better than a slave, and we cannot blame him too severely if, in such an age and such surroundings, he had been stained by the vices in the midst of which he lived, and his nature, not originally ignoble, had been

‘subdued

To what it wrought in, like the dyer’s hand.’

But his death, like that of Roscius, ‘eclipsed the gaiety of nations,’ and gave one warning more—had it been needed—to Aliturus, that the friendship of tyrants means death.

But the worst of these Grecian enormities—many of which cannot be narrated—involved the acme of treachery and ingratitude. No man had shed a purer lustre over the age of Nero than the brave and honest Corbulo. His life had been devoted to the service of the Empire. To him had been due those splendid victories which kept the Parthians in check, and induced Tiridates to put the colophon on Nero’s glory by coming to receive at his hands before the Roman people the diadem of Armenia. Well might the Arsacid tell Nero that in Corbulo he had a good slave. The great victorious general had spent his life in foreign service. He had never come near the Court; had received no civil honours; had never returned to enjoy a triumph or an ovation. He had been content to keep himself away from those scenes of gilded slavery and miserable splendour, and perhaps anticipated the sole reward which tyrants can give to true greatness. Now, however, that Nero was in Greece, he wrote to Corbulo a letter of almost filial reverence, and invited him to come and receive proofs of his gratitude. To refuse would have been tantamount to rebellion, and Corbulo had always been stainlessly loyal to his worthless master. But good men invariably have their slanderers, and one of his officers, Arrius Varus, had been whispering suspicions about him into the Emperor’s ear. He was not granted so much as an audience. No sooner had he landed at Cenchreæ than Nero sent him the command to die. Corbulo wasted no words on execration or complaint. For a moment, perhaps, it flashed across him that he would have been wiser to listen to the voice of Rome and of the East, which had invited him to be their liberator. But it was too late to repent of the fault of putting trust in a monster. He drew his sword and stabbed himself with the single word ‘Deserved!’118

We cannot wonder that Nero did not visit Sparta, because every tradition of Sparta would have cried shame on his histrionic effeminacy. He did not visit Athens, because Athens did not deign to invite him, and because he shrank from eliciting a keenness of wit which had not spared the bloodstained Sylla. But his chief reason for avoiding ‘the Eye of Greece’ was because he dreaded the Temple of the Furies, who had avenged the less guilty and more expiable matricide of Orestes. Nor did he dare to visit Eleusis, because the voice of the herald forbade the profane to be initiated into its mysteries. He did not even venture to present himself to the hierophants of the little mysteries of Agra on the banks of the Ilissus. Visits opened to the humblest, and mysteries revealed to the simplest of the pure, were barred to him.

And before his journey was over, amid his sham triumphs, he began to be disturbed by disquieting rumours.

Judæa was in a state of violent revolt, and the presence of an able general was urgently needed. Nero therefore appointed Vespasian to the command. The old general was expiating in seclusion and obscurity the crime of having snored while Nero sang. One day an Imperial messenger was announced at his humble home. His blood ran cold, for he made sure that the soldier brought him an order to die. Instead of that he brought a nomination to the government of Judæa and the command of the army. To these high offices Nero appointed him because a man of valour and military ability was wanted. Nero overlooked what he called his want of taste because, though eminent as a soldier, he was a man of such humble name and origin that he could not possibly be regarded as dangerous. But the revolt of the Jews, though it was a serious matter, was far less alarming than the other news which now reached Nero.

Helius wrote to say that affairs in the city urgently required his presence. ‘You summon me back,’ he wrote in reply; ‘your wish ought rather to be that I should return worthy of Nero.’ But the menace of disaster was too grave to admit of its being neglected for a verbal pomposity, and Helius hurried to Corinth in person to rouse the Emperor from his insensate frivolity. The weather was so stormy that his enemies fondly hoped for his shipwreck if he sailed. Delay, however, was impossible. His day of doom was close at hand.