CHAPTER XXIX AGRIPPINA AT BAY

‘Caritas quæ est inter natos et parentes dirimi nisi detestabili scelere non potest.’—Cic. Læl. viii. § 28.

There were some who thought it an unparalleled tragedy that Britannicus should not only have died so young, but also at a banquet, and so suddenly, and by the hand of a bitter enemy, and under his very eyes. There were few in the Pagan world who realised the truth that he who needed their shuddering pity was not the boy who perished, but the youth who murdered him.

At first Nero was alarmed by what he had done. He thought that he would be haunted by the manes of the wronged Britannicus. He shunned Octavia, and if he met her was forced to avert his glance. He faced his mother with shy moroseness. He never dared to sleep alone. The sound of a shaken leaf terrified him. A thunderstorm, which happened a few days later, drove him into a paroxysm of terror, during which, like Gaius before him, he hid himself under a bed, and sent for the skin of a seal as a fancied protection against the flame of heaven.

But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God. The doom was past, but the punishment deferred. The most terrible part of his retribution was that he was let alone to fill to the brim the cup of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the punishment of sin, and the avenging scourge was put into the hand of his own vices. The first fearful crime which he had committed ought to have lit up his dark conscience with its fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for a moment, but only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense was hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into the execration of mankind.

What helped him to this rapid obduracy was the vileness and hypocrisy of the world around him.

The death of Britannicus had to be announced to the Senate. The eyes of Nero had to weep crocodile tears, and the pen of Seneca to be employed in venal falsities. No one could doubt the hand of Seneca in the elegant pathos of the sentence which told the Conscript Fathers that deaths so immature as that of Britannicus were subjects of such bitter grief that his funeral had been hurried over in accordance with the ancestral custom which forbade the protraction of anguish by public oration or funeral obsequies.

‘I have lost the aid of my brother,’ continued the specious oration which Nero learnt by heart; ‘no hopes are left to me save in the commonwealth. A prince like myself, who is now the sole survivor of a family born to the supremest dignity, needs all the love and all the help of the Senate and the people.’

Even the semblance of sorrow was abandoned almost before the cypress had been moved from the doors of the Palatine. Nero was anxious to implicate others as far as possible in the frightful responsibility which he had himself incurred. Britannicus had left a considerable heritage in houses, villas, and personal possessions, which had come to him from his father and mother. Nero, who as yet had not squandered a treasure which might well have been deemed inexhaustible, had no need of these things, and was eager to get rid of them. He therefore distributed them among leading senators, giving a pleasant villa to Seneca and a town house to Burrus. He thought that gifts would serve as a sort of hush-money, and both statesmen felt with inward anguish that they were the price of blood. Seneca was specially humiliated. He knew what men thought and said of him in secret, and his own conscience could not accept the facile excuse that it would have been fatal to refuse a largesse which was meant to bind his destiny irrevocably with that of the guilty Emperor. He thanked Nero for his munificence, and acted as if nothing had happened. Yet the inward voice spoke to him with unmistakable clearness. He called himself a Stoic: he wrote grand eulogies of virtue and simplicity. Ought he to have entered the magic circle of a court steeped in licentiousness and blood? Ought he to have yielded to the avarice which made his usury so notorious? Would Pætus Thrasea have accepted gifts intended to screen complicity with murder? Would such gifts have been offered to the modest poverty of Cornutus or Musonius? or, if so, would they not have faced exile or death rather than accept them? Conscience worked so painfully that he could not induce himself to visit the villa which had been presented to him on the death of Britannicus. ‘Alas!’ he moaned sadly to himself in the watches of the night, ‘it is a viscosum beneficium,—a kindness smeared with birdlime.’

But the great mass of the Roman world, lying as it did in wickedness, was pleased rather than otherwise to hear of the death—which they all knew to have been the murder—of the son of Claudius. The horrors of the civil wars were still vivid in many recollections, and knowing that rival princes rarely lived in concord, they hailed with satisfaction the bold iniquity which had succeeded in ridding them of a nightmare of the future. The story of the murder of a young and innocent prince, the only son of their late deified Emperor, sounded rather ugly, no doubt; but did not nine-tenths of them expose their own superfluous children? Had not Claudius himself exposed the infant of his wife Petina? And what was death? Was it not a dreamless sleep, which anyone might be glad to exchange for the present state of things, and which many of them would probably seek by suicide?

And why should Nero trouble himself any more about a death which scarcely caused so much as a ripple on the bitter and stagnant pool of Roman society? On the contrary he and all Rome felt a glow of conscious virtue when, a few days later, an order was given to execute a knight, named Antonius, as a poisoner, and publicly to burn his poisons. When Locusta heard that fact she smiled grimly. But what had she to fear?

There was one breast in which the earthquake of excitement, caused by the murder of Britannicus, did not soon subside. Octavia, in the depth of her anguish, had known where to find something of consolation. Not so Agrippina. To her also Nero had offered presents, which she refused with disdainful sullenness. Her soul was full of madness. Was she to be totally defeated by the slight, contemptible son on whom she had built all her hopes?

Not without a struggle would she abandon the power which it had been the object of her life to attain, and the fabric of which she had with her own hand shattered to the dust.

Suddenly as the Nemesis had come upon her, she would not yet admit herself to be defeated. She was rich; she would be yet richer. She had friends, and she held many a secret interview with them. Octavia might still become in her hands an engine for political purposes, and Agrippina constantly embraced and consoled her. Every tribune and centurion who attended her levées was received with extreme graciousness. She paid her court to all the nobles of high birth and promising ability. She thought that even now it was not too late to create a conspiracy, and put a fitting leader at the head of it.

But all her efforts were broken like foam on the rock of the Emperor’s deified autocracy and the unscrupulous wickedness of the favourites by whom he was surrounded. At the suggestion of Otho and Tigellinus, Nero dealt blow after blow at the dignity of his mother. One day she no longer saw the two lictors who attended her litter, and was told that they had been discharged by the Emperor. Soon afterwards she missed the accustomed escort of soldiers who guarded her chambers, and heard with sinking heart that they had been removed. Worst of all, she was suddenly deprived of the body-guard of tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired Germans, to whom she had grown attached, and who were the most splendid outward sign of her imperial station. And, as though all this were not enough, at last the final thunderbolt was launched. She received a message from her son that he had assigned to her, as her residence, the house of his grandmother Antonia. She was dismissed from the Palace in which so many of her years had been spent in order that the courtiers who thronged the audience-hall of the Emperor might have no excuse for paying their respects at the same time to her.

Her feelings, as she left the chambers of the Palatine for a private residence, must be imagined rather than described. Her heart was too dry for tears. She felt humiliated to the very dust, and tasted the bitterness of a thousand deaths. All hope of re-establishing her empire over the heart of her son was gone. Thenceforth he scarcely saw her. If he came to visit her, he came, as though to evidence his distrust, amid a throng of soldiers and centurions, did not speak to her in private, and departed after a cold, hurried, and formal interview.

She felt how poisonous was the fruit of ambition by which she had been allured. Her power had never been more than the pale reflection of the imperial despotism, and after her breach with Nero it crumbled to ashes.

From that moment she felt that the coloured bubble of her life had burst. Never had she been so wretched. Her exile at Pandataria had been but brief, and she was then young, and she had many schemes on hand, and might hope for immeasurable success. But now her last arrow had sped from the string, and had fallen useless to the ground. The cold shadow of her son’s displeasure blighted her whole being. She—in whose honour coins had been struck; in whose name decrees had run; under whose auspices colonies had been founded; to whom kings and governors had once made their appeal, and for whose ambition kingdoms had been too small—suddenly found she was nothing and nobody. Even such a creature as Calvia Crispinilla had more influence, and was more sought after than she. The house of Antonia, in which she lived, was shunned like a lazar-house by all who wished to stand well with Nero. No one visited her, no one consoled her, no one helped to dissipate her weariness. The only exceptions were a few ladies whom she knew too well to trust. They did not come to see her out of affection, but because they hated her, and liked to annoy her with the cold curiosity of an insulting pity. Among these was Junia Silana. In old days she had been a bosom-friend of the Augusta, but the ostensible friendship gave ample opportunity for feline amenities on both sides. Junia had been the wife of the handsome Silius, who had fallen a victim to the love of Messalina. In her early widowhood she had been sought in marriage by Sextius Africanus, but Agrippina, not wishing to see him made too powerful by the ample wealth of the childless Silana, had confidentially dissuaded him from the marriage, by telling him that Silana was a woman of dissolute character, and was now getting on in years. The secret had reached the ears of Silana, and while openly she continued to speak of her ‘sweetest and dearest Agrippina,’ she vowed an exemplary revenge.

And now that the time seemed ripe, she matured her plans.

It would be useless to trump up the old charges that Agrippina mourned the murder of Britannicus, or spread abroad the wrongs of Octavia. She determined to devise something entirely new, and to charge Agrippina with the design of marrying and forming a conspiracy with Rubellius Plautus, who, like Nero, was, on the mother’s side, a great-great-grandson of the deified Augustus. Silana sent two of her freedmen, Iturius and Calvisius, with this intelligence to Atimetus, a freedman of Domitia, Nero’s aunt. Atimetus had once been a fellow-slave with Paris. He went to his old friend, and urged him to go at once to Nero, and to denounce the supposed plot with all his consummate vehemence and skill.

The actor was not naturally a villain, but he had been trained in an abominable school, and had erased the words ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ from his vocabulary as completely as most of his contemporaries. That night, at a late hour, he hurried to the Emperor, not in the glittering dress which usually set off his perfect beauty, but in dark and disordered array. His familiarity with Nero procured him at all times a ready entrance into the Palace. He found the Emperor still carousing amid his favourites, and he was received with a burst of welcome by the flushed and full-fed guests.

‘Now this is good of you, Paris,’ said Nero. ‘You alone were wanting to our mirth. Come, brim this crystal vase with our best Falernian, and then let us see a spectacle which would thrill the Muses and the Graces even if Apollo were with them. But—can this be Paris?—our bright, gay, lovely Paris? Why, what is the matter?’

‘Matter enough,’ said Paris, in such accents of woe, and with such a flood of tears, that the guests could not help weeping with him. ‘Dare I speak, Cæsar?’

‘Tell us all,’ said Nero, raising himself on his elbow in agitation. ‘What has happened? Have the legions revolted? Is the prætorium in an uproar?’

‘Not yet,’ said Paris; ‘but—Agrippina—’

‘Ha!’ said Nero. ‘Go on’—for the actor’s voice seemed to be speechless with emotion.

‘Agrippina—and—Rubellius Plautus—’

Nero was listening with painful interest; and, pretending to recover himself with a great effort, Paris told them the fictitious plot, and succeeded in rousing the Emperor to such a pitch of terror that he started from his couch and tore his hair.

‘Agrippina shall die!’ he exclaimed; ‘and Rubellius Plautus shall die. Here, give me my tablets. Despatch instant orders for their arrest and execution. And send for Burrus—no! he is the creature of my mother; she made him Prætorian Præfect. My foster-brother Cæcina Tuscus shall command the Prætorians, and Burrus shall die. Quick, quick, send for Seneca; not a moment is to be lost!’

Late as was the hour, one of the centurions on guard was despatched to the Palace of Seneca. He was reading the ‘Republic’ of Plato to his wife, Paulina, and his friend Fabius Rusticus, after a frugal supper in a modestly furnished room. When the slave announced that he was summoned by soldiers from the Palace, Paulina and Rusticus grew deadly pale; and Seneca, though he strove to conceal his emotion, trembled in every limb. He ordered the centurion to be admitted, and, striving to conceal the agitation of his voice, asked if he knew why the Emperor desired his presence at so late an hour. The centurion did not know, but said that the Emperor seemed to be alarmed about something, and needed the advice of his minister. Seneca demanded his toga, and hastened to the Palace. Nero told him what Paris had disclosed. He did not believe in the reality of the plot, but in those days anything was possible. He, however, pledged his own life on the fidelity of Burrus, and urged the Emperor to summon him into his presence. Burrus came, and listened gravely.

‘It is a serious matter,’ he said, ‘to order the execution of anyone without allowing an opportunity for defence. It would be still more serious to execute without a trial an Augusta, and your own mother.’

‘Think again,’ said Nero. ‘Rubellius Plautus has the blood of the Cæsars in his veins, and my mother is capable of anything to get power.’

‘I need not think again,’ answered Burrus, bluntly. ‘When once I have made up my mind, I do not alter it.’

Nero frowned, but Burrus only added: ‘There are no accusers. You are relying on the sole voice of Paris, a freedman of a hostile family, and you have only heard his story late at night during a drinking bout. Surely the life of even a common citizen ought not to be sworn away so cheaply, much less the life of an Empress.’

Nero, sobered by the gravity of these considerations, still kept a sullen silence; but Burrus would not yield.

‘Cæsar, we will examine her at earliest dawn. If we find her guilty she shall die.’

By this time the Emperor’s terror had exhausted itself, and he was weary. Agrippina’s residence was surrounded with a guard, and at daylight Seneca and Burrus went together to question her. They were accompanied by a number of Nero’s most trusted freedmen, who were to report the trial, and to act as spies both on the ministers and the Augusta.

To be summoned from her sleep into such a presence—to see her house surrounded with soldiers—to be aware that some unknown crisis of the utmost gravity was at hand, might well have shaken the strongest nerves. But, in spite of the horror of this unknown mystery, the indomitable woman swept into the presence of the two statesmen with a demeanour not only undaunted, but conspicuously haughty. The soldier and the philosopher rose at her entrance, and the freedmen bowed low. The freedmen she did not deign to notice, but slightly inclined her head as she motioned the two ministers to be seated, and herself sat down on a stately chair covered with purple cushions.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘as this seems to be a solemn audience, I am informed that the Emperor has sent you two, and these other—persons’—glancing at the freedmen—‘to speak with me. What may be my son’s pleasure?’

‘Augusta,’ said Burrus in his sternest tones, ‘this is, as you have said, a serious occasion; you are accused of nothing short of high treason.’

The charge in days like those was awful enough to have forced back the blood into her heart, and for one instant she felt as if the solid earth were about to yawn beneath her feet. But in that instant she rallied all the forces of her nature. She looked, indeed, pale as a statue, but not the faintest tremor was perceptible in her accents as she exclaimed in a tone of the most freezing irony,—

‘Indeed? I am accused? and of high treason?’

‘You are accused,’ said Burrus, ‘of desiring to form a party among the legionaries to raise Rubellius Plautus to the throne and then to marry him.’

Agrippina’s only answer was a scornful laugh.

‘Poor Rubellius Plautus! the “golden sheep” of my brother Gaius!’

‘You will find it no matter for laughter. The Emperor is seriously alarmed,’ said Burrus.

‘I have no other answer to an accusation so ridiculous.’

‘The Augusta has not been so careful as she might have been,’ said Seneca, in his mildest manner. ‘Those frequent secret meetings with her friends; that courting of senators of influence; those attentions to military personages; those open complaints about the children of Claudius, have aroused suspicion.’

Agrippina turned upon the speaker her flashing glance, and he quailed beneath it. ‘Is this your philosophic gratitude?’ she said. ‘But for me, you might have been dying of malaria in Corsica; and you, Burrus, might have remained a tenth-rate tribune.’

‘We are but obeying the Emperor’s behests,’ said Burrus, in a less threatening tone.

‘And, pray, who are my accusers?’

‘Late last night this charge was laid before the Emperor by Paris—’

‘By Paris!’ said Agrippina, in tones of crushing scorn. ‘Paris is an actor, a buffoon, a pantomime, a thing of infamy whom I scarcely brook to name. Pray, go on.’

‘He had been sent by Atimetus, the freedman of Domitia.’

‘Domitia—and her slave concubine!’ said Agrippina. ‘Of him I deign no word; but she—what has she been doing all these years? While I was arranging the adoption of Nero, his marriage with Octavia, his promotion to the proconsular dignity, his nomination as a future Consul, all that led to his imperial elevation—what was she doing? Improving her fishponds! And now she wants to rob me of my Nero, and for that purpose gets up a pantomime with her paramour and her dancer! Pray, is that all?’

‘The sources of the information were Iturius and Calvisius.’

‘Iturius and Calvisius!—ex-slaves, spendthrifts, debauchees, the scum of the earth, who want to repair their squalid bankruptcies by the gain of turning informers. They are nobodies; poor pieces on the draughts-board. Who moved them?’

‘Junia Silana.’

‘Junia Silana! Ah! now I understand it all—the whole vile plot from beginning to end! Silana—false wife, false friend, evil woman—what does she know of the sacredness of motherhood? Children cannot be got rid of by their mother so easily as lovers are by an adulteress. So! I am to be branded with the fictitious infamy of parricide, and Nero with its actual guilt, that two broken-down freedmen may repay their debts to the old woman their mistress?

‘And you, sirs,’ she said, raising herself to the full height of her stature, ‘ought you not to blush for the sorry part you have played? Instead of repaying me the gratitude which you owe to one who recalled you, Seneca, from your disgraceful exile, and raised you, Burrus, from the dust—instead of making the Emperor ashamed of attaching a feather’s-weight of importance to this paralytic comedy of pantomimes, scoundrels, and rancorous old women—you have encouraged him to try and humiliate me! I am ashamed of you,’ she cried, with the imperious gesture which had often made bold men tremble; ‘for as for these—gentlemen’—and she glanced at the freedmen—‘they, of course, must do as they are bid. And so, such are my accusers! Who will bear witness that I have ever tampered with the city cohorts? who that I have intrigued in the provinces? who that I have bribed one slave or one freedman? They charge me with mourning for the death of Britannicus. Why, had Britannicus become emperor, whose head would have fallen sooner than that of his mother’s enemy and his own? And Rubellius Plautus—if he were emperor—would he be able for a single month to protect me from accusers who, alas! would be able to charge me, not with the incautious freedom of a mother’s indignant utterance, but with deeds from which I can be absolved by no one but that son for whose sake they were committed.’

For one moment her nature broke down under the rush of her emotion, and her glowing cheek was bathed in tears; but, recovering herself before she could dash the tears aside, she repudiated the awkward attempts at consolation offered by her judges, who themselves were deeply moved.

‘Enough!’ she said. ‘Sirs, I have done with you. By the claims of the innocent and the calumniated, if not by the rights of a mother, I demand an interview with my son this very day—this very hour.’

While yet the two ministers, and even the freedmen—in spite of the open scorn which she had manifested towards them—were under the spell of her powerful ascendency, they declared to Nero her complete innocence of the charges laid against her. Relieved from his alarm, Nero came to her. Receiving him with calm dignity, she said not a word about her innocence, which she chose to assume as a matter of course; not a word about the gratitude which he owed to her, lest she should seem to be casting it in his teeth. She only begged for rewards for her friends, and the punishment of her defeated adversaries. Nero was unable to resist her demands. Silana was banished from Italy; Calvisius and Iturius were expelled from Rome; Atimetus was executed. Paris alone was spared, because he was too dear to the Emperor to permit of his being punished. The men for whom Agrippina asked favours were men of honour. Fænius Rufus was made commissioner of the corn market; Arruntius Stella was made superintendent of the games which Nero was preparing to exhibit; the learned Balbillus was made governor of Egypt. Nero was intensely jealous of Rubellius Plautus, but his hour had not yet come.

It was the last flash of Agrippina’s dying power, and it encouraged a few to visit her once more. One or two independent senators, pitying her misfortunes, came to salute her, and some of the Roman matrons. Yet among these women there was not one whom she could either respect or trust. She had sinned so deeply in her days of power that women like the younger Arria, wife of Pætus Thrasea, and Servilia, the daughter of Barea Soranus, and Sextia, the mother of Antistius Vetus, held aloof from her. Paulina, the wife of Seneca, cordially disliked her, and the Vestal Virgins had never lent her the countenance of their private friendship.

But one noble lady came to her, who had never paid her the least court in the days of her splendour. It was Pomponia Græcina. She came on the evening of that memorable trial, and found the Empress prostrate with the reaction which followed the tumultuous passion of the scenes through which she had passed. She lay on her couch an object for even her enemies to pity. The strong, imperial, ambitious princess was utterly broken down in her—only the weeping, broken-hearted woman remained. In spite of her apparent victory, her life, and all its aims, and all it held dear, lay in ruins around her. Even hope was gone. What remained for her but remorse, and anguish, and the cup of humiliation, and the agonising recollection of a brilliant past which she had herself destroyed? There were no loyal friends around her. No children’s faces smiled upon her. There was no brother, or sister, or daughter to comfort her. Those to whom she had been a benefactress either felt no gratitude, or did not dare to show it, or deemed that she had forfeited it by crimes. Homeless, desolate, unloved, left like a stranded wreck by the ebbing tide upon a naked shore, she lay there weeping like a child. Oh! that she had been innocent, like her own mother—like one or two whom she had known;—but, alas! she could only look back upon a life of guilt, flecked here and there with blood which nothing could wash out. And now the Retribution which she had doubted and defied—the Retribution which had been stealing with silent footstep behind her—had broken upon her crowned with fire, and had smitten her into the dust with a blow from which she never could uprise.

And while her head burned and throbbed, and her veins seemed to be full of liquid flame, and ghosts of those who had perished by her machinations glimmered upon her haunted imagination in the deepening gloom, her lady in waiting, Acerronia, came to announce a visitor.

‘Did I not say that I would see no one else to-day?’ said Agrippina, wearily. ‘I am worn out, and fain would sleep.’

‘It is Pomponia Græcina. She told the janitor that though you might not see others who belong to the Court, perhaps you would see her.’

‘Yes; I will see her. She is not like the rest of them. She is sincere, and her presence is like balm.’

Pomponia entered, and could scarcely believe that the lady who lay there, with her dress disregarded, her face haggard and stricken, her eyes dim, her cheeks stained with tears, her hair dishevelled, and, as Pomponia thought, of a perceptibly greyer tinge than when she had seen her last—was indeed the once magnificent and all-powerful Augusta.

An impulse of pity overcame her, and she knelt down by the couch of the unhappy Empress, who pressed her fevered lips to her cheeks, and then wept uncontrollably with her head on Pomponia’s shoulder.

The two ladies presented a strange contrast, not only in their dress, but in their entire aspect. Agrippina was still arrayed in the magnificent robes in which she had received her son, and which, irksome as they were, she had been too weary to lay aside. Pomponia was in the dark mourning dress which she had worn for so many years since the death of the friend of her childhood, Julia, the grand-daughter of Tiberius and mother of Rubellius Plautus. The tresses of Agrippina, though disarranged, showed the elaborate care of the ornatrix. Pomponia wore her dark hair, now beginning to silver, in the simplest bands, and without an ornament. But the chief difference was in their faces. Pride and cruel determination, as well as calamity, had left their marks on the noble lineaments of the daughter of Germanicus; over the calm face of the wife of Plautius it was evident that the shadows of many a sorrow had been cast, but the sorrow was irradiated by hope and gladness, and in her eyes was the sweet light of the Peace of God.

‘Augusta,’ she said, ‘I have come to congratulate you on the defeat of a nefarious conspiracy. I thought I should find you happier after many trials. Pardon me if I have thrust myself too presumptuously upon your sorrow.’

‘Not so,’ said Agrippina. ‘You are always welcome; and more so now than ever. You sought me not in my hour of prosperity. No one would come to me in my hour of ruin who did not wish me well.’

‘It is not, I trust, an hour of ruin. The plot against you has been ignominiously defeated. You may have many happy days in store.’

‘Nay, Pomponia; happiness can never be linked again with the name of Agrippina. It is a dream. I did not find it in the days of my splendour; it is little likely that I should find it when all desert me and I am brought low. I know no one who is happy. We are the slaves and playthings of a horrible destiny, which is blind and pitiless and irresistible. Are you happy?’

‘Yes, Augusta, I am happy, though hardly, perhaps, in the sense you mean. To me, as to all of us, life has brought bitter trials. These dark robes tell of the loss of one whom I loved as my own soul, and even at this moment I am threatened with terrible calamity—perhaps with exile, perhaps with death. On all sides, there are terrors and anxieties, and the state of society seems to portend catastrophe and the vengeance of heaven, for wickedness can hardly go to any greater lengths than now. Yet I am happy.’

‘Oh, that you would give me your secret!’ said the Empress. ‘I can read character; I can detect the accents of sincerity. These words of yours are no pompous and hollow Stoic paradox.’

Pomponia hesitated. The woman before her was, as she well knew, steeped in crime from her childhood. Of what avail would it be, without any of the evangelic preparation, to tell her of Jesus and the Resurrection? Could there be the remotest possibility of exciting in her mind anything but contempt by telling her at that moment of the Cross which was to the Romans something between a horror and a jest?

‘Agrippina,’ she answered, ‘the day may come when I may tell you more of the strange secret. It is not mine only; it is meant for all the world. But it cannot be attained, it cannot be approached, without humility and repentance for wrong-doing, and the love of virtue, and of something higher than virtue, and the lifting to heaven of holy hands.’

‘Alas!’ said Agrippina; ‘you speak to me in a strange language. The Greek tragedians are always telling us that when blood has fallen to the ground it has fallen for ever. Can wrong be atoned for? Can guilt be washed away?’

‘It can,’ said Pomponia, gently; and she longed to speak the words which lingered in her memory from the letter of Peter of Bethsaida—‘Redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.’ But to Agrippina they would at that time have been simply meaningless.

‘I have heard of the mysteries,’ said the Empress, ‘and of the taurobolies. Would it be of any avail if I too were to crouch in a hollow, and let the blood of a bull which has been sacrificed to the gods drop over me?’

‘It would not,’ said Pomponia. ‘God does not require of us things so revolting, nor any mere external ceremonies and superstitions. What that sacred and supreme Majesty requires of us is innocence alone.64 Can you not pray to Him, Augusta? You have read Homer, and you know how the old poet sings about Atè, and the Litai, the Prayers which follow in her path.’

‘Atè? Ah! I know that fearful deity,’ groaned Agrippina. ‘She is the Fury Megæra. I have seen her petrifying face turned towards me. She is the Harpy Celæno. I have often heard her in the banquet-halls of the Palatine, and thought of Phineus and his polluted feasts. But the Prayers—will you not repeat me the lines, Pomponia?’

Pomponia repeated the famous lines of the old bard of Chios:—

‘The gods (the only great and only wise)

Are mov’d by offerings, vows, and sacrifice;

Offending man their high commission wins,

And daily prayers atone for daily sins.

Prayers are Jove’s daughters of celestial race,

Lame are their feet, and wrinkled is their face;

With humble mien, and with dejected eyes

Constant they follow, where Injustice flies.

Who hears these daughters of almighty Jove,

For him they mediate to the throne above;

When man rejects the humble suit they make

The Sire revenges for the daughters’ sake.’65

‘Alas! they have been strangers to me, those Prayers,’ said Agrippina; ‘and though you have spoken truth to me, I see that you have not told me all.’

‘There are times for all things,’ said Pomponia, as she rose to leave; ‘and perhaps, if you will think of what we have said, the day may come when you will be able to bear more. Farewell, Augusta; you need rest and quiet. Pardon me if I have wearied you.’

‘Farewell, Pomponia,’ said the Empress; ‘you are good and true. Your words have been to me as soft and pure as the falling snow. I know not whether the Litai of whom Homer speaks may plead for us through another.’

‘They may.’

‘Then will you ask them to say something which may avert the fury of Atè from one who, to you, is not ashamed to confess that she is wretched above all women?’

‘May you find peace!’ murmured the noble lady, as the Empress once more kissed her, and pressed her to her heart. ‘All may find it who seek it rightly from the Heavenly Powers.’