CHAPTER XLIX THE DEPTHS OF SATAN

‘He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,

And crowned his hair with flowers—

No easier nor no quicker passed

The impracticable hours.’

Matthew Arnold.

It became daily more difficult for Nero to stimulate the jaded pulse of appetites at once sated and insatiable; but in the year A.D. 64 a new and immense sensation broke the tedious monotony of a life cursed with the gratification of every desire. The influence of Poppæa grew irresistible when it became evident that she was about to make Nero a father. In due time she gave birth to a daughter, who seemed destined to continue the imperial line. Nero went wild with joy. The child was born in the villa at Antium, where he himself had first seen the light. The highest of all titles, that of Augusta, was immediately conferred not only upon Poppæa, but even on the unconscious infant. Public vows, which had already been undertaken for her safety, were paid and multiplied. Thanksgivings on the most superb scale were given to the gods. A temple was reared to the goddess Fecundity. Golden statues of the Antian goddesses of Fortune were placed on the throne of the Capitoline Jupiter. Coins were struck on which the baby was glorified under the names of Claudia Augusta. The entire Senate set forth in long procession from Rome to congratulate the Emperor and Empress. Nero seized the opportunity to indulge his hatred against Pætus Thrasea. When the other senators were received into his presence, he sent an order that Thrasea was not to be admitted. Every one understood the significance of the message. It was a presage of certain doom. But Thrasea received it with unmoved countenance, and set out on his return to Rome with undiminished cheerfulness. To a noble and virtuous Roman all life was at that time the valley of the shadow of death.

The birth of Nero’s child greatly strengthened his position as Emperor. While he remained childless there was the possibility that when he died, or was swept away, the Senate might be able to summon to the purple some worthier successor. That hope was now cut off. Seneca withdrew himself to the utmost from public notice. The fate of Pallas was an additional warning to him. The boundless extravagances of Nero were rapidly exhausting a treasure which would have sufficed for anything except a superhuman rapacity. The wealth of Pallas proved too strong a temptation for Nero. He had the freedman poisoned, and seized his ill-gotten gains. To avoid a similar fate, Seneca entreated the Emperor to accept all his possessions and to suffer him to retire. Nero received the request with hypocritical assurances. How, he asked, could Seneca possibly suspect a prince who was so deeply indebted to his care? But, though Nero refused to accept either his resignation or his property, the philosopher did not deceive himself. He shut himself up in a seclusion into which he suffered none but his most intimate friends to intrude. He found his sole relief in writing to his friend Lucilius letters which were meant to console those who were living like himself under the daily pressure of agonising anticipations.

But the extravagant joy of Nero was rudely quenched. Before four months had ended the infant Claudia Augusta died, and Nero was plunged in a grief as extravagant as had been his delight. The birth of his child was to him a proof that the gods had averted their wrath, by omens of which he was frequently terrified. To train youths for the Neronian games, he had built a gymnasium, in which was placed a bronze statue of himself. The gymnasium had been struck by lightning, and the statue had been fused and disfigured into a mass of shapeless metal. The omen was horrific, and was followed by the news that the bright and wanton little cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had been shaken almost into ruins by an earthquake of unusual severity. The safe birth of a child had alleviated the haunting fears which these events had excited in his mind; but they returned when the little Claudia died, nor were they greatly eased by making her a goddess, by striking coins with the inscription ‘Diva Claudia Neronis,’ and by appointing in her honour a pulvinar, a temple, and a priest!

Those who understood his needs and his character saw that life could only be made tolerable for him by excitements still more intense, and crimes still more colossal, than those to which he had grown accustomed. It had become his constant boast that the Emperor could do anything he chose, and that he had been the first Emperor to find out the fact. He therefore never hesitated to secure the death of any one whom he disliked. If they were insignificant persons, he had them poisoned and seized their goods. As no instinct of gratitude prevented him from thus murdering Pallas, who had been the chief agent in procuring his adoption and his succession to the Empire, he had the less hesitation in sacrificing others of less fame. Since Torquatus Silanus was the great-great-grandson of Augustus, he determined to get rid of him on charges of ostentation and seditious practices. When he had driven him to suicide he proclaimed that he had intended to forgive him. Against the Senate he cherished so deep a grudge that with his intimates he discussed the plan of putting all the members of the order to death and distributing its functions among the knights and freedmen. Cruelty had not been among his natural vices, but he now became athirst for blood.

But hatred could only be gratified by spasms of brief indulgence, and the animal passions also required something ever new to galvanise their decrepitude. No one understood this better than Tigellinus. Himself a voluptuary, who had exhausted the resources of every base pleasure, he sought to supply by effrontery the lack of new sensations. With this view he organised continuous revelries which should be unparalleled either for costly extravagance or for outrageous infamy.

Ruinous to the well-being of the State as were these portents of materialism, they were innocent in comparison with the deliberate corruption of public morals. Things are at their worst when vice is so hardened that, instead of seeking concealment, it courts notoriety. All Rome, even her ordinarily vicious population, recalled with shame the orgies, at once monstrous and vulgar, which were planned and paid for by Tigellinus to please his patron. Happily the world has never seen or heard of an entertainment more abominable. In the centre of the Campus Martius, near the Pantheon, was the Lake of Agrippa, surrounded by a park full of groves, gardens, and shrines. On the lake Tigellinus had constructed a raft for the guests. The gondolas moored by the margin to convey the banqueters to the raft were decorated with gilding, and vermilion, and silken streamers, and rowed by boy-slaves from Britain, Greece, and Asia, with long curled hair and bracelets of gold on their bare arms and ankles. On the raft were erected pavilions, filled with delicacies, and furnished as luxuriously as the tents of Eastern kings. When the actual feasting was over the whole of the gardens were filled with choirs of musicians, and all the varletry of either sex that could be assembled from the confines of Rome. Not one honest or honourable person was invited. It was to be a banquet of reprobates. Slaves, and gladiators, and nobles, and women of consular families, and soldiers, and men who had held high offices, and the gilded youth of Roman effeminacy, and Greeklings skilled in all refinements of evil, roamed promiscuously under the light of numberless cressets, their heads crowned with roses, their hearts inflamed with wine. It was a chaos of abomination, such as would not have been possible in any other age than the first century after Christ, or in any other place than imperial Rome. No Christian pen can paint that revelry of Antichrist, or do more than distantly allude to the scenes which followed, when Nero, disguised in the skin of a bear, crawled on all fours among the vilest of those wretches, and gave to him ‘who saw the Apocalypse’ the image of the wild beast who sprang from the foul scum of the world’s most turbid sea.

Yet though there was no truce to such scenes of darkness, except such as was imposed by the premature paralysis of excess, they were insufficient to occupy Nero’s tedium, or fill to the brim the cup of his desires. To be an actor, to be a public singer—that seemed to him to be the culmination of earthly bliss. Nothing would satisfy his burning caprice but to appear before the multitude as Paris and Aliturus did. But he dared not as yet insult the majesty of Rome with the spectacle of a stage Augustus, and therefore determined to sing first before an enchanted provincial audience, and thence to proceed to Greece, not displaying himself in the theatre of the capital till he could return as a victor in the Olympic and Pythian games. But when he had got as far as Beneventum he changed his mind, and determined to visit Egypt and the Eastern provinces instead of Greece. In Egypt he meant to re-enact with unheard-of splendour the old revelries of Antony and Cleopatra, and thought that in the hot, luxurious valley of the Nile he might hear of new forms of pleasure and luxury. Magnificent preparations were set on foot for his reception, and his foster-brother, Cæcina Tuscus, was sent to superintend them. Tuscus ventured to bathe in a sumptuous bath constructed for Nero’s use, and for this harmless act Nero sentenced him to exile. But the visit to Egypt was never paid. On his return to the Palace, he entered the Temple of Vesta, beside the Forum. Whether he was suddenly smitten with superstitious dread from the recollection of his crimes or from some other cause, he was there seized with a violent fit of shivering. His conscience smote him, not for other enormities, but for a crime which, in mere wanton wickedness, he had committed against the majesty of Vesta and the most sacred beliefs of Rome. In defiance of every law, human and divine, he had recently seized Rubria, one of the vestal virgins. It had become one of the horrible characteristics of his mind that half the fascination of wickedness consisted for him in the scandal which it caused. His rank elevated him above human vengeance, but in that circular shrine, and in presence of the ever-burning fire, he felt as if he were in the power of the goddess, and swooned away. The omen frightened him. Pretending that he could not endure to see his people saddened by the thought of his absence, he abandoned his journey, and announced that he would not leave them.

What new thing could be devised to dispel his weariness? He passionately longed for some tremendous sensation to dissipate his lassitude. If the hours had passed with leaden pace when he first tasted the sweets of autocracy, how unutterably weary had they now become!

‘Tigellinus, cannot you invent for me some new excitement?’ he asked. ‘I shall commit suicide from sheer fatigue. Tiberius went to Capri, but a rock like that would not suit me. I cannot live in the vulgar respectability of an Augustus or a Claudius.’

‘Shall I give you another feast like that at the Lake of Agrippa?’

‘That was all very well,’ said Nero, ‘but things grow tedious by repetition. Petronius used to be suggestive, but even he has long ago exhausted his inventiveness.’

‘I never knew why you gave up going to Greece,’ said the Præfect.

‘I thought it better to put it off till my voice was still more perfect. But what am I to do now? I am dying for a new experience. Of what use is life except to concentrate its essence into thrilling sensations?’

‘Was it not a new sensation, Cæsar, when the elephant walked on the tight rope with the knight Julius Drusus on his back?’

‘It amused me for once,’ said Nero. ‘It would be stale a second time.’

‘Well, then, when you had the “Conflagration” of Afranius put on the stage, and let the actors pillage the burning house?’

‘Aye,’ said Nero, ‘that was worth seeing. It gave me a hint or two for my poem on the “Taking of Troy.” What might not art gain, and how might not my poem be enriched, if I had an actual scene to draw from!’

‘You would hardly like to see Rome in flames, Cæsar?’

‘Indeed I should. It would be worth living for. Happy Priam, who saw the Burning of Troy, about which I can only write.’

‘But Rome is something different from Troy,’ said Tigellinus.

‘Rome!’ answered the Emperor. ‘I am sick of it. Look at these close, narrow, crowded streets. I should like to see a city of broad streets, and palaces, and gardens, like Thebes, or Memphis, or Babylon. Ninus and Sardanapalus had cities worth living in.’

Their conversation was held in a spacious room of the Domus Transitoria, with which Nero had filled up the whole space from the Palatine to the Esquiline.

‘Does not this Palace suffice you?’ asked the Præfect.

‘Not at all,’ replied Nero. ‘Many of the neighbouringT13 houses and temples are in my way, and I should like to clear them off, and give myself air to breathe.’

‘Are you serious, Cæsar?’

‘Of course I am,’ he answered, petulantly.

Tigellinus shrugged his shoulders, and quoted a line from the Bellerophon of Euripides:—

‘When I am dead, let earth be rolled in flame.’

‘Nay, while I live let earth be rolled in flame,’ answered the Emperor, altering the iambic. ‘Anything would be better than to smoulder to death for want of something to amuse me.’

Nero was not altogether in earnest. His conversation was habitually grandiose, because he fed a perverse imagination with phantasmagorias and monstrosities. He was suffering from that blood-poisoning of unchecked vice which has so often maddened Eastern despots.

The fixed idea of watching a conflagration, and getting illustrations for his Trojan epic, often returned to this Emperor of melodrama. Without resolutely entertaining the purpose of wrapping Rome in flames, he allowed himself to hint at it and to play with it. But he had made Tigellinus much more in earnest than himself. That evil genius of the Emperor thought that from such a calamity he at least would have nothing to lose, and might have everything to gain. He had inexhaustible riches at his disposal, and numberless wretches in his pay. He meant to see what could be done. Not long after the above conversation Nero went for a few days of literary leisure and musical practice to his villa at Antium, and Tigellinus gave him hints that at Antium he might expect startling news, and that a first-rate sensation was in store for him. For the magnitude and horror of that sensation even Nero was not prepared.

To us it all seems incredible. It did not seem incredible to Tacitus, and it is positively affirmed by Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and even by the grave and learned Pliny the Elder, who, as a contemporary, must have known infinitely better than we can do ‘the depths to which despotism in delirium can descend.’