CHAPTER LXIII MUTTERING THUNDER

Αἰεὶ τὸ μὲν ζῇ, τὸ δὲ μεθίσταται κακόν,

τὸ δ’ ἐκπέφηνεν αὖθιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς νέον.

Euripides.

The insistency of Helius, and the alarming reports which reached Nero from all quarters, roused him at last from his intoxication of frivolous vanity and compelled him to cut short the ‘ignoble masquerade with which he had soiled Greece.’ But he would not reveal the least consciousness of alarm, and, indeed, in the madness of the moment, he did not realise it. What did it matter if he was deposed? ‘All the world,’ he used to say, ‘supports art,’ and he could easily gain his living as a favourite harpist or singer on the public stage. The glory of the actor, won by his own talents, should be more dazzling than the diadem of the Emperor, which was but the heritage of his race!

He first entered Naples, because there he had made his first stage appearance. He entered it as a hieronices, riding in a chariot drawn by four milk-white steeds, through a breach made in the walls. He made the same magnificent entry into Antium, dear to him as the place of his birth, and into Alba, the city where the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris was venerated by the entire Latin race. But he reserved for Rome the fullest magnificence of a triumph heretofore undreamed of, and such as might well cause every true Roman to blush for shame. He degraded to his ignoble purpose the chariot in which Augustus had triumphed after the battle of Actium. His robe was of purple; over it flowed a chlamys gleaming with golden stars; on his brow he wore the olive wreath of the Olympic victors; in his right hand he carried the laurel crown of Pythia. Seated in the chariot by his side was no brave soldier or noble statesman, but Diodorus the harpist! Before him went a long procession of heralds, each carrying some garland of victory, with tablets on which were inscribed the names of those whom he had conquered, and the songs or tragedies in which he had gained the prize. Thousands of the trained applauders whom he called Augustiani, followed his chariot proclaiming themselves the soldiers and comrades of his successes. An arch of the Circus Maximus had been broken down for him, and through it he made his way along the Velabrum and the Forum, not to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, or to that of Mars the Avenger, but to the Palace and the temple of his patron Apollo. The Senate had gone forth in festal robes to meet and greet him. As the champing steeds tossed their white manes and bore him slowly along, every door and window and roof and lattice was crowded with spectators, and the air was rent with shouts of ‘Hail, Olympic, hail, Pythic victor! Hail, sole periodonices!119 Augustus, Augustus! Hail, Nero-Hercules! Nero-Apollo! Hail, sacred voice! Happy are they who hear it!’ In street after street victims were immolated as he passed; showers of fragrant saffron were sprinkled down; the air was rich with the perfume of incense burning on hundreds of altars; birds and little ornaments, and jewels and flowers were scattered over him. It rained roses from the balconies full of matrons and maidens. Of his eighteen hundred and eight crowns he arranged the choicest in his own bedchamber and around his bed. The rest he sent in masses to adorn the great Egyptian obelisk which Augustus had reared to be the goal of the Circus Maximus.

Such men as the consuls of the year—the dull poet Silius Italicus and the orator Trachalus—might estimate highly the successes of a comedian, but the indignant shade of Thrasea might have rejoiced in its Elysian fields to have been spared the sight of such a triumph!

But so far from being ashamed, Nero henceforth made his celestial voice his chief concern. As it was too precious to be wasted in addressing crass Prætorians, he contented himself with sending messages to them, or having his addresses read aloud in his presence. What he had to say to the Senate was similarly read by one of the consuls. An attendant whom he called a phonascus stood constantly at his side to warn him to be careful of his throat, and to keep a handkerchief before his mouth. Whoever extolled his wretched voice was his friend; whoever praised it insufficiently was his enemy.

It is part of the subtle irony of history that the zenith of apparent prosperity is often the culminating moment of misfortune, and the scene of most splendid exaltation is that in which the fingers of a man’s hand steal forth and write on the palace-wall the flashing messages of doom. The triumph of the sole periodonices whom the world had ever seen was the last hour of his sham glory. The patience of God and man was exhausted, and ‘down rushed the thunderbolt.’

Romans might be too deeply abased to avenge the degradation of their name by the latest of those triumphs which seemed to cover with ridiculous parody the three hundred which had preceded it. But there was yet a Gaul brave enough to arouse the Empire from its fatal apathy.

His name was Julius Vindex, and he was the Proprætor of Gaul. He was rich, and he was a senator, as his father had been before him, for Claudius had granted this distinction to the descendant of the ancient kings of Aquitania. Nero envied his wealth, but Vindex, in order to make the greedy parasites of the Court think that he would soon die and leave them his possessions, drank cumin-water and made himself artificially pale. In Gaul he received constant news of Nero’s villanies both paltry and heinous, and his soul burned within him. He sounded the legionaries to discover whether they were as much ashamed and weary as himself of the tyranny of a comedian and a monster. He found them ripe for rebellion. He had no personal objects. He knew that a Gaul could hardly be Emperor, and he secretly offered the Empire to Galba. On March 16, A.D. 68, he gave, a little too prematurely, the signal of revolt. Nero had gone to Naples to refresh himself and to rest his precious voice, and there he received the news of the insurrection on March 19, the anniversary of the murder of his mother.

The idiotic frivolity with which he acted upon such serious intelligence astonished even his courtiers. He only laughed, and pretended to rejoice at the opportunity which would thus be afforded him of spoiling the wealthiest of the provinces. He went into the gymnasium, and watched with affected transport the contests of the athletes. At supper still more perilous tidings reached him, but he contented himself with saying, ‘Woe to the rebels!’ Meanwhile the walls of Rome were scrawled over with satirical inscriptions. Yet for eight days he took no step whatever, answered no letters, gave no orders, attempted to get over the peril by calmly ignoring it. His long impunity had made him a fatalist. Had not Britain been lost and recovered? Had not Armenia been lost and recovered? Whatever happened, was he not promised an Eastern kingdom, or could he not support himself by his voice and lyre?

A few days later came an edict of Vindex, in which he spoke of Nero as Ahenobarbus, which angered Nero as much as it angered Henry VII. to be described by Richard III. as ‘one Henry Tidder or Tudor.’ Vindex also described Nero as a wretched twangler on the harp. Now indeed he was furious. To call him a wretched twangler! Did any of his friends know of a better harpist than himself? Was not such a criticism a proof of ignorance and bad taste? Let the Senate rouse itself to avenge him! He would come in person, but that he felt a certain weakness in his throat.

Messenger after messenger came spurring to Naples, and Nero was compelled to hurry back in alarm to Rome. Vindex was by this time at the head of a hundred thousand men, yet Nero quite recovered his spirits when, on his road to Rome, he saw the statue of a Gaulish soldier subdued and dragged by the hair by a Roman knight. At the sight of it he leapt up for joy, and adored heaven. When he reached Rome, instead of summoning an assembly of the Senate and the people to meet him, he only invited a few leading men to the Palace, and after a brief consultation, spent the afternoon in showing them new kinds of hydraulic organs. ‘I intend to display them all on the stage,’ he said—with the affected afterthought ‘if Vindex will let me.’

When Galba first received the secret overtures of Vindex he temporised. He had only preserved his life under various tyrants by consummate care, and by affecting a policy of submission and indifference. Vindex implored him to constitute himself ‘the leader and avenger of the human race,’ but he took no step until he discovered that Nero had sent secret orders that he was to be murdered, and found that he had only escaped very narrowly and by the merest accident. Besides, as his officer T. Vinius reminded him, he had hesitated in his allegiance, and to hesitate was to be lost. He must either assume the purple or prepare to die.

The fresh intelligence that Galba and the two provinces of Spain had also revolted, struck Nero with panic. He swooned away, and remained for some time speechless and motionless. On recovering his senses he tore his robe, and beat his head, with the cry, ‘I am ruined!’ His nurse tried to console him with the remark that other Princes had suffered similar calamities. ‘Nay,’ he answered, ‘my fate is more unheard of than that of all others, for I lose the Empire while yet I live.’ Some steps were suggested to him. He recalled some troops from Illyria, and put Petronius Turpilianus at the head of such forces as he could secure. He set a price on the head of Vindex, and Vindex replied with the ‘sublime gasconade,’ ‘Nero promises ten million sesterces to any one who will bring him my head. I promise my head to any one who will bring me his.’ But scarcely a single plan occurred to Nero which was not puerile; not one measure which was not monstrous. He would execute the provincial governors, and appoint new ones. He would send round to the islands and kill all the exiles, for they might join the revolters. He would order a general massacre of all the Gauls in Rome, for they might favour their countrymen. He would give up the Gallic provinces to be plundered by the soldiers. He would invite the whole Senate to a banquet, and poison them. He deposed the two consuls, appointed himself sole consul, and as he left the banquet, leaning on the shoulders of his intimates, he declared that he would present himself before the legions unarmed and weeping; and, when he had melted their hearts by his tears, he would sing strains of victory to the rejoicing soldiers—which he must immediately compose. Above this ‘lugubrious buffoonery’ he could not rise!

His other preparations to meet the crisis—such as they were—bore the same stamp of infructuous folly. They were all tainted with vanity, imbecility, and corruption. In choosing vehicles for his expedition, his chief care was about those which were necessary for his stage properties. The women who were to accompany him had their hair cut short to make them look like Amazons, and were armed with axes and targets. In raising money he was very fastidious that the silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine. Many flatly refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get back the sums with which the informers had been gorged to repletion. He was made daily to feel that his power was gone. When he summoned the city tribes to renew their oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves as soldiers, the result was such a failure that he had to order each household to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these he would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting stewards and secretaries.

But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The people were suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of an Alexandrian corn-vessel was announced. This always gave an occasion for rejoicing, but when it turned out that the vessel was only laden with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle over the arena, there was an outburst of rage and contumely. Scoffs at his chariot-racing and singing were heard everywhere. Burghers pretended to get up quarrels with their slaves at night, and then shouted Vindex! Vindex! as though they were merely appealing to the police. Nor was this all. He was tormented with dreams and portents of every description, which made his days and nights hideous. He dreamt that he was steering a ship, and that some one wrenched the helm out of his hand; that his murdered wife Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss; that he was covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was a stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey’s theatre sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path. It was rumoured that on the first day of the year, the Lares had fallen down in the middle of a sacrifice, and that the great gates of the mausoleum of his family had opened spontaneously, while a voice came from their awful recesses which summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to be performed at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found. When his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the Senate, and he said that ‘criminals should soon meet the end they had deserved,’ the senators had joined in an ill-omened shout of approval. It was noticed, too, that the last tragedy which he had chanted in public was that of ‘Œdipus in Exile,’ and that the last verse which he had spoken was—

‘Wife, Mother, Father, join to bid me die.’

If, on receiving the news of the revolt of Vindex, he had put himself, like a true Roman Emperor, at the head of his legions, the terrible prestige of a Cæsar, the remembered failure of previous conspiracies, and the disunion of his enemies, might have secured his triumph. For the German legions of Verginius Rufus disdained to follow the initiative of the Gauls. Their own general refused the Empire, and declared for Galba; but an unhappy and accidental collision between the jealous cohorts led to a battle in which twenty thousand Gauls were left dead upon the field. Vindex, in despair, stabbed himself with his own sword. Galba, in scarcely less despair, meditated suicide at Clunia, hearing that the soldiers of Verginius were anything but favourable to his claims. If but one pulse of true blood of his brave patrician ancestors had stirred in the veins of Nero, if he could have shown but one momentary flash of their spirit, he would have been gloriously saved. But his abuse of passion, his disgraced manhood, his polluted mind, his enervated frame, stamped upon him the curse of nullity, and the infamous throng of contaminated courtiers who formed his band of intimates were as empty and effeminate as himself. No strength was left among them to evoke the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.

And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it was not passed. In petulant passion he tore the letters to pieces. Then, like a spoilt boy in a rage, he seized from the table two crystal cups, of priceless value, of which he was specially fond, and which were embossed with scenes from Homer, and dashed them to shivers on the marble floor.

More wild and wicked follies suggested themselves to his diseased and whirling brain. Why should he not again set fire to the city, and prevent all attempts to extinguish the flames, by sending to the vivaria of the amphitheatre, and letting loose all the wild beasts among the people? What a scene it would be! Lions, and tigers, and bears, and panthers, growling, leaping, roaring, amid the streets of a city bursting everywhere into conflagration, and—while themselves wild with terror—striking fresh terror into a screaming populace! Incapable of consecutive thought, he had not even considered what would come of this. Suffice it that it would be a magnificent excitement, a thrilling and supreme sensation! He did not repent of this design; he was not appalled by the stupendous and selfish wickedness; he was only deterred by the impossibility of carrying it out. It may be said that such schemes betray the madman; but Nero’s brain was undisturbed by any madness except that which consists in, and is the Nemesis of, a soul eaten away by conceit, selfishness, and lust. Caligula, it has been truly said, would, in modern days, have found his way to Bedlam; but Nero to Tyburn. His hour was come. He sent his most trusted freedman to Ostia to prepare the fleet. He sounded the tribunes and centurions of the Prætorian guard to see if they would share his flight. Some of them made excuses; some flatly refused; one of them even dared to quote to him the line: ‘Is it so very difficult to die?’ As for his Præfects—Tigellinus, whom he had laden with wealth and honours; Nymphidius, the son of a slave-woman—creatures who had crawled and sunned themselves in the noon of his prosperity, they shamelessly and without hesitation betrayed and abandoned him. The poisonous sunlight of his favour had bred no creature nobler than adders. What should he do? Should he array himself in his tragic robe and present himself as a suppliant before the Parthians, or before Galba, moving them to tears by his histrionic skill? But how could he get so far in safety? No; he would clothe himself in black garments, would go to the Forum, and there would weep before the Rostra, imploring pardon for the past, and begging the people—if only he succeeded in moving their minds—at least to allow him to be Præfect of Egypt in place of Tiberius Alexander! He even wrote the oration which he intended to deliver on the occasion, and it was found in his writing-desk after his death. His one dread was that, if he so much as ventured outside the gates of the Golden House, he would be torn to pieces before he could make his way to the Forum. He postponed the decision, and, summoning Locusta, obtained from her a poison which he placed in a golden box. Then he passed over to his favourite retreat in the Servilian gardens, and slept as well as he could his last wretched sleep on earth.