CHAPTER LXV IN THE CLUTCH OF NEMESIS

‘I’ll find him out,

Or drag him by the curls to a foul death,

Cursed as his life.’

Milton, Comus.

‘And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy...: this also is vanity.’—Eccles. viii. 10.

It was on the evening of June 8 that Nymphidius Sabinus betrayed Nero, and, by the forged promise of an enormous donative, which was never paid, induced the Prætorians to embrace the cause of Galba. A worthless master makes worthless slaves. This man, whom Nero had lifted out of the dust as a reward for his crimes, sold his bad benefactor without a blush.

Nero heard the grim news before he retired to rest in the evening, and he was well aware that the morrow must decide his fate. At midnight he leapt from his troubled couch, and from that moment there began for him once more the long slow agony of an irremediably shameful death. The first thing he discovered was that all the soldiers who guarded the Palace, and whose barracks were in the Excubitorium, had deserted their posts. In utter despair, he sent for advice to those whom he deemed to be his friends. As he received from them no word of answer, he went to their houses, one by one, in the dead of night, with a few attendants. Inconceivably dreary was that walk through the dark streets, which, as he passed by the silent palaces, seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of the many whom he had slain. But he found every door closed against him. Not a single response was made to his appeals. Almost mad with misery, he returned to his splendid chamber in the Golden House, only to find that during his brief absence the attendants and slaves had fled, after plundering it of all its magnificence, even to the embroidered purple coverlets and the golden box which contained Locusta’s poison. Recalling the memory of his murdered mother, he sought everywhere for the amulet—the bracelet containing the serpent’s skin found near his cradle—which Agrippina had clasped upon his boyish arm. But he had once carelessly flung it away, in a fit of petulance, and now it could nowhere be seen. Then he sought for Spicillus, the mirmillo, to stab him; but neither he nor any one else could be found to fulfil the office. ‘So,’ he said, with one of the small smart epigrams which showed throughout these last scenes that the spirit of melodrama had not deserted him—’so, it seems, I have neither a friend nor an enemy!’

Upon this he set out to fling himself into the Tiber, and the back door by which he went led through a part of the circus which had witnessed his disgraceful triumphs. But when he was half way, his courage failed him, and he told his attendants that he wanted some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. His freedman Phaon, one of the very few who, to their credit, remained true to him in the hour of his utmost shame, offered him his suburban villa. It was at the fourth milestone from the city, between the Salarian and Nomentan roads. It lay on a more remote path called the Patinarian Way, on the other side of the Anio. On that hot night of June Nero had gone out only in sandals and a tunic; so he threw over his shoulders an old washed-out cloak, covered his head with the hood, held up a handkerchief to conceal his face, and mounted the first sorry horse which could be obtained. Thus, in beggar’s guise, he left the gorgeous scene of his manifold iniquities. None were found to accompany him except his secretary Epaphroditus, his freedman Phaon, and Sporus his unhappy favourite. They started together before the first gleam of that most miserable day. The stories that, as he rode, he felt the shock of an earthquake, and saw a flash of lightning which gleamed on the ghostly faces of his victims rising to menace him from the abyss, are doubtless coloured by the agitation of the witnesses. But on his way he had to pass through the Colline gate, and there he heard the shouts of his Prætorians cheering for Galba and cursing Nero. There were but few stirring on the roads at that early hour, but from one group which they passed they heard the remark, ‘These men are in pursuit of Nero.’ ‘Any news about Nero?’ asked another traveller. This was disturbing; but it was a far more serious incident when Nero’s horse swerved at the stench of an unburied corpse which lay by the roadside, and the handkerchief fell from his face. For at that moment a discharged Prætorian chanced to pass, who not only recognised but saluted the Emperor, rendering it too certain that the pursuers would soon be on his track.

By this time it was light. It was the anniversary of the murder of his wife, Octavia!

When the fugitives reached the path that led to Phaon’s property, they let their horses run loose among the trees and brambles, and made their way to the back of the villa by a track through a bed of reeds where the oozy sludge was sometimes so deep that they had to fling a cloak over it to prevent their sinking in the mire. There was obvious peril in taking refuge here. A great price was sure to be set on Nero’s head, and how could the freedman trust his rustic slaves with so perilous a secret? He therefore urged Nero to hide himself in the deep cave of a neighbouring sandpit till something fresh could be devised. But Nero refused. ‘What!’ he exclaimed tragically, ‘go alive into the bowels of the earth?’ The only other course was to make an opening in the back of the villa, through which he could creep secretly, unknown to the household. While this was being done, he complained of thirst. There was nothing for him but some stagnant water in a pool. He drank a little from his hand, with the remark, ‘This, then, is Nero’s choice drink!’ He sat down ruefully in his tattered cloak, which had been torn to shreds by the briers through which he had forced his way; and when the hole in the wall was large enough, crawled through it on all fours into the empty cell of one of Phaon’s slaves. There he flung himself down on the mean straw pallet of the slave, with nothing to cover him except its old dirty coverlet. Hungry and thirsty as he was, it was difficult to procure him any food without arousing suspicion. They could only get him some black bread, at which his stomach revolted, but he drank a mouthful or two of tepid water.

It became evident to them that all hope of escape or concealment was impossible. The fatal recognition of Nero by the Prætorian betrayed the course he had taken. The numberless mounted pursuers would be sure to find the four horses which they had let loose; nor would it be possible for him to conceal the fact of his presence from Phaon’s slaves. His three companions therefore urged him, time after time, to save himself by suicide from the nameless contumelies which awaited him. Even Sporus entreated him again and again to show himself a man. It was in vain! In that coward and perverted nature every spark of manliness was quenched. ‘It is not time yet,’ he said. ‘The destined hour has not arrived. How cruel you are to me!’

‘Cruel?’ said Epaphroditus, indignantly; ‘do not we—alone of all your thousands of slaves—risk our lives for your sake? Since you must die, were it not better to die like an Emperor than like a whipped hound?’

‘Well, then,’ whimpered Nero, ‘can’t you at least dig me a grave, one of you? See, I will lie down to show you the right length.’

They began to dig the grave, and he whined out, ‘Oh, what an artist to perish! What an artist to perish!’

‘The grave is ready,’ said Phaon.

‘But can’t you find some bits of marble to adorn it? Surely there must be some lying about.’

They saw through his pusillanimous delays, but managed to pick up a few fragments of common marble, while he still kept whimpering, ‘Only to think that such an artist as I am must perish!’

‘That is all the marble we can find,’ said Phaon.

‘Well, but you will have to burn my body,’ he said. ‘You must get some water to wash me, and some wood for the pyre.’

‘Nero, Nero,’ said Sporus to him again, ‘will you not die like a man?’

In the midst of these idle pretexts a runner came with a letter for Phaon. Nero snatched it out of his hand and read ‘that the Senate had pronounced him a public enemy, and decreed that he should be punished after the fashion of our ancestors.’

‘What punishment is that?’ he asked.

Is it possible that he did not know? He, who had so often heard it passed on others? he who, as men believed, had secretly wished that it should be inflicted on Antistius for libelling him? he who had suffered it to be pronounced against L. Vetus and the innocent Pollutia? Nevertheless Epaphroditus told him that it meant stripping him naked, thrusting his head into the opening of a forked gibbet, and then beating him to death with rods. Nero turned deadly pale. The thought of such agony and such outrage overwhelmed him. He plucked from their sheaths two daggers which he had brought with him, tried the edge of them, and then once more thrust them back with the threadbare tragic phrase, that ‘the destined hour had not yet come.’ Again the unhappy Sporus entreated him to remember that he was a man, a Roman, an Emperor.

‘There is time, boy,’ he said. ‘Sing my funeral song; raise a lamentation for me.’ And all the while he wept, and whimpered, ‘Such an artist! Such an artist to perish!’

Phaon and Epaphroditus rebuked his abject timidity.

‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘I cannot die. “Wife, father, mother, join to bid me die,” but I dare not. Will not one of you kill himself and show me how to die?’

They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’

But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent, overgrown, corrupted boy—this soul steeped through and through its every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime—how could it be thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead—only the cowardly animal survived.

The sound of horses’ hoofs was heard galloping along the rough road leading to the villa. It denoted the approach of horsemen who had been bidden at all hazards to seize him alive. Strange that even at such a moment he could not help being self-conscious and melodramatic.

‘“Thunder of swift-foot coursers smites my ears.”’121

he said, trembling—quoting a verse of Homer. But at last, when not one second was to be lost, he placed the dagger against his throat, and, seeing that he would be too much of a poltroon to inflict anything more than an ineffectual wound, Epaphroditus with one thrust drove it home.

Then in burst the centurion. Anxious to seize him alive, he cried, ‘Stay, stay, Nero! I have come to help you!’ and tried with his cloak to stanch the bleeding wound.

‘Too late,’ gasped the dying wretch.—‘Is this your fidelity?’

With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out of his head.

Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives, his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death?

Forty-one princes and princesses of his race had perished since the beginning of the century, by the sword, by famine, or by poison; and the historian imagines the shades of those unhappy ones gathered round the miserable pallet on which—more miserably, more pusillanimously, more guiltily, more abjectly than any one of them—perished the last of a race whom heaven had been supposed to receive as gods, and whom earth rejected with disgust. And had their race ended in this manikin, in this cowardly and corrupted actor? ‘The first of the Cæsars,’ says the historian, ‘had married four times; the second thrice; the third twice; the fourth thrice again; the fifth six times; and lastly this sixth Cæsar thrice:—of these repeated unions a large number had borne offspring.’ Where were they all? Cut off for the most part by open murder, or secret suicide, or diseases mysterious and premature! And now the prophecy of the sibyl had been fulfilled—

‘Last of the Æneadæ shall reign—a matricide!’

How many of his fancied enemies, how many of the innocent, had he caused to be decapitated! How often had he allowed their heads to be the mockery of their enemies! How had he himself insulted the ghastly relics of Sulla and of Rubellius Plautus; and suffered his mother and his wife to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the sad and innocent Octavia! His one dread was that his head should be similarly insulted; his one main entreaty to the companions of his flight had been that he should be burnt whole, and his head not be given to his enemies.

Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt to others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus, the powerful freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown him into prison at the news of Galba’s revolt, but at Nero’s flight he had been set free. It was not the usual way with the Romans to make war with the dead, and Icelus gave permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed in the white robe broidered with gold which he had worn at his ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.

No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two women who had nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had loved him in his youth, wept over his bier. No tear was shed besides. They laid his ashes in a porphyry sarcophagus, over which was raised an altar of the white marble of Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.

He was but thirty-one when he died; and he had crowded all that colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that insane degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of fourteen years!

So great was the exultation over his fall of the people whom he had pampered, that the whole body of plebeians appeared in the streets wearing hats. A slave could only wear a hat after he had been manumitted, and the people wished to show that by his death they had been emancipated from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on the vicious ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom vice was dear began to show their sympathy by adorning his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Every base and foul ruler who succeeded him—lascivious Otho, gluttonous Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus, brutal Commodus—all who disgraced the name of Roman and of man—made him their ideal and their hero.

And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude in every land persisted in the belief that another body and not his had been burnt; that he had taken refuge among the Parthians; that he would return to take vengeance on his enemies. The fancy gilded the brief fortune and precipitated the miserable punishment of at least two impostors. Of these Perkin Warbecks and Lambert Simnels of antiquity, one was put to death in the reign of Otho, the other in the reign of Domitian; and for nearly three centuries the legend lingered on in the Christian Church that Nero was the wild beast, wounded to death, but whose deadly wound had been healed—the Antichrist who should return again.

And the people fancied that his restless, miserable ghost haunted for centuries the Collis Hortulorum, the Monte Pincio, where stood the monument of the Domitii; until in pity for their terrors it was exorcised in 1099 by Pope Pascal II., the superb successor of the humble Linus. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo stands to this day as a witness of the changed fortunes of that Church which Nero well-nigh extinguished and exterminated when he made light more ghastly than the darkness by kindling those living torches in the gardens of the Mons Vaticanus. Over that desecrated spot, as I have said, now falls the shadow of the vast Christian basilica, and the obelisk of Heliopolis, which towered over Nero as he drove his chariot through lines of burning men, testifies by its triumphant inscriptions to the victory of the faith of Christ.