CHAPTER XXXIV AN EVIL EPOCH

‘Inde metus maculat pœnarum præmia vitæ,

Circumretit enim vis atque injuria quemque ...

Nec facile est placidam ac pacatam degere vitam

Qui violat facteis communia federa vitæ.’

Lucret. De Rer. Nat. v. 1151.

The career and character of Nero grew darker every year, for every year more fully revealed to him the awful absoluteness of his autocracy. No one dreamed of disputing his will. Every desire, however frivolous, however shameful, however immense, was instantly gratified. His Court was prolific of the vilest characters. There was scarcely a man near his person who did not daily extol his power, his wit, his accomplishments, his beauty, his divinity. ‘Do you not yet know that you are Cæsar?’ they whispered to him if he hesitated for a moment to commit some deadly crime, or plunge into some unheard-of prodigality.

All things went on much as usual in the corrupt, trembling world of Rome. To-day some wealthy nobleman would commit suicide, amid the laudations of his friends, out of utter weariness of life. To-morrow all Rome would be talking of the trial of some provincial governor who had gorged himself with the rapine of a wealthy province. Or everybody would be whispering a series of witty pasquinades, attributed to Antistius Sosianus or Fabricius Veiento, full of lacerating innuendoes, aimed now at the Emperor and now at some prominent senator. Pætus Thrasea and the peril he incurred by his opposition to the Court furnished a frequent subject of conversation, both to his Stoic admirers and to the rabble of venal senators, who cordially hated him. ‘To put Thrasea to death would be to slay virtue itself,’ said the graver citizens. ‘He is a pompous sham, who wants taking down,’ said the gilded youth.

It was a fearful comment on the wretchedness of the times that most of the prominent thinkers and statesmen looked on self-destruction as the sole path to freedom, and the best boon of heaven. They thought it a proof of philosophic heroism when a man died calmly by his own hand, though the act involves no more courage than the vilest of mankind can evince. Seneca tells with rapture the story of the death of Julius Canus. The Emperor Gaius had said to him, after a quarrel, ‘That you may not deceive yourself, I have ordered you to be led to execution.’ ‘I thank you, excellent prince,’ said Canus. Ten days passed, and Canus spent them without the smallest sign of trepidation, awaiting the tyrant’s mandate. When the centurion arrived at his house with the order that he was to die, he was playing at draughts. He first counted the pieces, and then said with a smile to his friend, ‘Mind you don’t claim the victory when I am dead. You, centurion, will be the witness that I have one piece more than he has.’ Observing the grief of his friends, he said, ‘Why are you sad? You are perplexed about the question whether souls are immortal or not. In a moment or two I shall know. If I can come back I will tell you.’70

The letters, and all the latest writings, of Seneca vibrate with terror. They are full of the thought of death, and doubtless he lived with the sense of such grim satisfaction as could be derived from the thought that if life became too unbearable he could end it. ‘And death,’ he said to himself, ‘means only “not to be.”’71

And all this was felt even in Nero’s ‘golden quinquennium’! Men boasted of the happiness of the days in which their lot was cast, but they knew that under their vineyards burnt the fires of a volcano. Common conversation, home life, dinner parties, literature, philosophy, virtue, wealth, were all dangerous. Neither retirement nor obscurity always availed to save a man. The only remedy was to learn endurance; not to fill too prominent a place; not to display too much ability; never to speak in public without a digression in flattery of the Emperor; to pretend cheerfulness though one felt anguish; and to thank the tyrant for the deadliest injuries, like the rich knight who thanked Gaius when he had killed his son.

Now and then some painful incident, like the bitumen which floats up from the Dead Sea depths, showed the foulness which lay beneath the film of civilisation. Such, for instance, was the fate of Octavius Sagitta, the tribune of the people, and one of Nero’s intimates, who was banished for the brutal murder of a married lady who had played fast and loose with his affections. Such, too, was the savage attack made upon Seneca in the Senate by the aged informer Publius Suillius, whose sneers and denunciations caused bitter anguish to the unhappy philosopher. But Nero recked little of such scenes; and as time went on, he fell wholly under the influence which, even more than that of Tigellinus, developed his worst impulses. He became more and more enslaved by the fatal fascinations of the wife of Otho.

Poppæa had every charm and every gift except that of virtue. From the moment that she had riveted the wandering fancy of Nero at the banquet of her husband, she felt sure that her succession to the splendour of an Augusta was only a matter of time. There were obstacles in the way. Otho loved her to distraction. Nero still admired him, and did not think of putting him to death. Nor did he venture to defy public opinion by taking her from her husband, as Augustus had taken Livia from the elder Tiberius. Octavia was Empress, and as the daughter of Claudius, she had a hold on the affections of the people. As the niece of Germanicus, she was dear to the soldiers. Her life was blameless, and Agrippina was anxious to protect her, though she knew that it was impossible to make Nero a faithful husband. Octavia retained the distinction of a consort, if she had none of the love which was a wife’s due.

Poppæa determined to surmount these difficulties, and she it was who gradually goaded her imperial lover to the worst crimes which disgrace his name. Through two murders and two divorces she waded her way to a miserable throne.

Her first husband was Rufius Crispinus, by whom she had a son. She had accepted the advances of Otho, who passed for the finest of the young Roman aristocrats; but she aimed from the first at becoming Empress, and it was with this aim that she had flung her spells over Nero. Her consummate beauty was enhanced by the utmost refinements of a coquette. She pretended to love Nero passionately for his own sake, as though she had become enamoured of his personal beauty; yet while she thus allured his devotion, she carefully checked his advances with a bewitching semblance of modesty. She played the part of the honourable Roman matron. She extolled the open-handed liberality and artistic grace of Otho. She taunted Nero with his love for a freedwoman like Acte. Above all, she missed no opportunity of deepening his irritation against his mother. She saw the instinctive fear of Agrippina which Nero could never quite throw off, and feeling convinced that so long as the Empress-mother lived she could not supplant Octavia, she made it her aim to goad Nero to her murder or banishment. Whenever she saw him most enraptured with her charms—when his hand wandered to the golden tresses, full of burning gleams in the sunlight, which Nero had astonished the poets by describing as ‘amber-hued,’ and which were the despair and envy of the Roman ladies—she would push his hand aside, and tell him that she was much happier as the wife of Otho than she could be in a palace where her lover was still subject to the maternal sway of one who detested her. Nero became haunted by the fixed impression that he could never be free and never be happy while Agrippina lived. Poppæa did not even hesitate to taunt him. ‘You a Cæsar!’ she said. ‘Why, you are not even a free man! You are still a schoolboy tied to your mother’s girdle!’

Nero saw but little of Agrippina. She spent much of her time at one or other of her numerous villas, and rarely occupied the palace of Antonia at Rome. Yet he felt sure that during her sullen isolation she had never abandoned her designs. She might seem to be living in retirement, busy with the improvement of her gardens, or amusing herself with her talking starlings and nightingales; but he knew her too well to imagine that she acquiesced in a defeat which she might yet retrieve. She was but forty-two years old, and in past days she had shown that she knew how to wait. It was known that she was writing her own memoirs, and that their scandalous pages abounded in accusations against others, so dark as to render men more credulous of the worst accusations which were launched against herself. How could Nero tell what might be passing between her and Octavia when they exchanged visits? His timid and conscience-stricken nature often imagined that she might be intriguing with Faustus Sulla or Rubellius Plautus, both of whom, like himself, were scions of the imperial family of the Cæsars. He saw in her the one fatal obstacle to the fulfilment of his desires.

And she, in those grim years of terror, knew well that Poppæa was no gentle girl like Acte, but would strive to trample on her rivals as Agrippina herself had done in former years. The struggle against Poppæa and her beauty and her ambition would be a struggle of life and death. And, indeed, the bitterness of death was almost past, for her son stooped to the most ignoble methods for rendering her life miserable, and humiliating her even to the dust. At Rome he set on his emissaries to harass her with lawsuits; and, stooping to yet more vulgar baseness, he paid the lowest of the populace to annoy her with coarse jests and infamous reproaches, which they shouted at her from boat or roadside, when she was resting at her country houses.

An attempt was made to poison her at a banquet given by Otho; but Agrippina was wary and abstemious. She had watchful slaves and freedmen near her person, and the attempt failed. Nero persuaded himself that his mother was watching him like a tiger-cat in act to spring. It was not only Poppæa who inflamed his hatred. Tigellinus also had his own designs. He suggested that Otho should first be got out of the way, and then that the death of Agrippina should leave the path open for Nero’s union with the siren who had mastered his soul. Octavia, without Agrippina to help her, was hardly considered in the light of an obstacle. She could be swept aside with ease.

The first step was soon taken. Otho was sent as governor to Lusitania. So long as he was there he could not stand in Nero’s way. The exile cherished his love for Poppæa to the last; and during his brief spell of empire he induced the Senate to honour her with statues. But he never saw her more.

One day, as Nero sat, with Tigellinus by his side, looking on at a sham sea-fight, for the purpose of which the arena had been flooded, they were struck with one of the novelties which Arruntius Stella, the president of the games, had devised for the amusement of the populace. During the fight one of the vessels had been so constructed as to go to pieces, to pour a number of armed men out of its hold, and then to be reunited into a trireme as before.

Tigellinus touched the arm of Nero, and Nero, filled with the same thought, turned to him a glance of intelligence.

‘The sea is a treacherous element,’ said Tigellinus. ‘All sorts of strange and unaccountable accidents happen at sea.’

‘I wonder who could make me a ship of that kind,’ said the Emperor.

‘Your old tutor, Anicetus. He is at this moment admiral of the fleet at Misenum. Stella would put at his disposal the artist who contrived this vessel. One like it could be made in a few weeks, and magnificently adorned for the use of the Empress.’

‘How could she be induced to go on board?’

‘She is at Antium; you are going to Baiæ. The Feast of Minerva is coming on. You must be reconciled to her publicly, must invite her to your villa, and must place the galley at her disposal.’

The sea-fight went on, but it was observed that after the new contrivance of the mechanical ship, Nero did not pay much attention to it. He was apparently lost in thought. He was impatiently revolving in his mind the intolerable conditions by which he was surrounded. On the one side was his mother, haughty, menacing, powerful in spite of her dethronement; and, on the other, Poppæa entangling him in her sorceries, worrying him with importunities, goading him to matricide with envenomed taunts. And behind them both stood the spectre of his tormenting conscience, with thrilling whisper and outstretched hand.

And thus it was that the world went on. In that age morality had well-nigh vanished because faith was well-nigh dead. Man cannot live without a conscience or without God. Guilty pleasure is brief-lived, and afterwards it stingeth like a serpent. It is self-slain by the Nemesis of satiety. The wickedest age the world has ever seen was also the most incurably sad.

But for the poor Christians of Rome, though the days were so evil, life had neither tumult nor terror. They had found that which more than compensated them for the trials of the world. Their life was a spiritual life. To them, to live was Christ. They possessed the strange secret of joy in sorrow, the boast of which upon the lips of the Stoics was an idle vaunt. That secret lay in a spiritual conviction, an indomitable faith, above all, in an In-dwelling Presence which breathed into their souls a peace which the world could neither give nor take away. The life which was to most of their contemporaries a tragedy without dignity, or a comedy without humour, was to them a gift sweet and sacred, a race to be bravely run under that lucent cloud which shone with the faces of angel witnesses,—a mystery indeed, yet a mystery luminous with a ray which streamed to them out of God’s Eternity from the Glory of their Risen Lord.