CHAPTER XXXVII VICTOR OVER THE PUBLIC SERVITUDE

‘Palliduamque visa

Matris lampade respicis Neronem.’

Stat. Sylv. II. vii. 118.

‘Prima est hæc ultio, quod se

Judice nemo nocens absolvitur.’

Juv. Sat. xiii. 2.

There is a marvellous force of illumination in a great crime, but it is the lurid illumination of the lightning-flash, revealing to the lost Alpine wanderer the precipices which yawn on every side of him. While the murder was yet to do, Nero could talk of it lightly and eagerly among the accomplices who were in the secret. To the irresponsible Emperor of the world it did not seem so great a matter to order the murder of a mother. But when the deed was done, when he had got back to his Baian villa, when the pale face flecked with crimson bloodstains came hauntingly back upon his memory, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. Then first he realised the atrocious magnitude of his crime, and every moment there rang in his ears a damning accusation. The very birds of the air seemed to flit away from him, twittering ‘Matricide! matricide!’ He drank more Falernian from the glittering table, on which yet lay the remains of the banquet, but it seemed as if all his senses were too preternaturally acute with horror to be dulled by wine. He lay down to sleep, but strange sounds seemed to be creeping through the dead stillness of the night, which made him shudder with alarm. If he closed his eyes, there flashed at once upon them the pale face, the firm-set lips, the splashes of blood. The dead eyes of his mother seemed to open upon him with a gleam of vengeance. Till that night he had never known what it was to dream. He started up with a shriek and summoned his attendants round him, and paced up and down in a frenzy of delirium, declaring that when the dawn came he would certainly be slain. They persuaded him to lie down again, but scarcely had he dropped into an uneasy sleep when it seemed to him as though he saw the three Furies sweeping down upon him with the blue snakes gleaming in their hair and the torches shaken in their hands, while his mother, who pointed them to him, shrieked aloud, ‘Ho! murderer of thy mother! no sleep henceforth for thee!’

Leaping once more from that couch of agony, he sat mute, and trembling in every limb, his clenched hands buried in his hair, waiting in anguish the break of day. When the first beam of dawn lit the east, it showed a youth whose pallid features were haggard with agonies of fear.

If there had been a spark of nobleness in the Roman world, the indignation of a people’s moral sense might have sprung to arms and smitten the tyrant while he was yet red-handed from his crime. Nothing was farther from the general intention. The universal desire was to ‘skin and film the ulcerous place’ with adulation and hypocrisy. Men, not naturally evil or case-hardened, were carried away by the tide of complaisance to the imperial murderer. As though to leave no chance for any feelings of penitence to work, all classes began to flood him with congratulations. The fears which at the moment he half mistook for remorse vanished like the early dew, for society seized upon the convention that Agrippina, detected in a plot against the life of her son, had been justly executed. The tribunes and centurions of the Prætorians, Burrus at their head, came to Nero that morning, poured their felicitations upon him, pressed his hands, expressed their effusive joy that he had escaped from so sudden a peril created by his mother’s crime. His friends crowded to the temples to thank the gods for his safety. There was scarcely a town of Campania which did not express its joy by sending deputations and offering victims. Distant provinces caught the infection, and Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul surpassed all the rest by the fulsome entreaty which they sent by their ambassador, Julius Africanus, ‘that Nero would endure his felicity with fortitude!’ Certainly it did not seem as if there were much cause for fear! In a few days Nero became an adept at the counter-hypocrisy with which he feigned to weep over the fate of his mother, and to be grieved by his own deliverance!

But places cannot change their aspect as do the looks of men. From the windows and gardens of Nero’s villa were always visible the sea which he had attempted to pollute, the long line of shore which he had stained with a mother’s blood. The aspect of nature in that lovely spot had lost its fascination. It seemed to be eloquent with mute reproach. And what were those sounds which assailed his ears at the dead of night? What meant that blast of a solitary trumpet, blown by no earthly breath, from the promontory of Misenum? What meant those ghostly wailings which seemed to shriek around his mother’s grave? He could not endure this haunted place. He fled to Naples.

From thence he despatched to the Senate a letter, of which the conceits betrayed, alas! the hand of Seneca. ‘As yet,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot believe, I do not rejoice, that I am safe.’ Men of letters admired the euphuistic phrases and despised their author. The letter did not mention any details, but left it to be inferred that Agrippina, detected in an attempt to murder her son, had committed suicide. And then with unmanly malignity it dwelt on the long catalogue of her crimes—her bitter enmities, her immense ambition, her unscrupulous intrigues. To her it attributed all the cruelties of the reign of Claudius, and it ended by saying that her death was a public blessing. The more cynical of the senators laughed at the absurdities of this missive, for it narrated Agrippina’s shipwreck as though it had been accidental, and tried to gain credence for the gross absurdity that a woman barely saved from drowning had chosen the moment of her rescue to send off to murder her only son in the midst of his fleets and cohorts!

But though men shook their heads at Seneca, they plunged no less emulously into the vortex of criminal adulation. Public thanksgivings were decreed to all the gods; annual games at the Quinquatrus; a golden statue to Minerva in the senate-house, with a statue of the Emperor beside it. The birthday of Agrippina was pronounced accursed. Such abject servility was too much for the haughty spirit of Pætus Thrasea. He rose from his seat and left the senate-house in silence, and a blush rose to the cheek of not a few who did not dare to follow him.

Yet, after all, Nero was so timid that six months elapsed before he ventured once more to face the people of his capital. An eclipse of the sun had happened during the thanksgiving decreed by the Senate. Fourteen regions of the city had been struck by lightning. Would these portents of heaven awaken the tardy indignation of men? Every piece of news, however trivial, frightened him. He was told the ridiculous story that a woman had given birth to a snake. Was that meant by the gods, if there were any, for a scornful symbol of himself? There were hours in which it seemed to him as if the Empire itself would be a poor price for the purchase of one day of the innocence which he had so frightfully sacrificed.

But the foul creatures who swarmed about him assured him with the effrontery of experienced villany that he need not be in the least anxious as to the obsequiousness of the Senate and the zeal of the people.

‘You will find yourself more popular than before,’ they said. ‘Every one detested Agrippina. Go to Rome with confidence, and you will see that you are as much adored as ever.’

They were right in their conjectures. Even Nero was amazed at the abandon of welcome, the delirium of ostentatious applause with which he was received, while his hands were still red-wet with his mother’s blood. The people thronged forth by their tribes to greet him. The senators were in festal array. They were surrounded by their wives and children. Stages had been built all along the road, in which the spectators had purchased their places to look on as at a triumph. Incense burned in the streets; the shouts of myriads of voices rent the air. Rome received him not as a murderer, but rather as a great conqueror or a human god. And he, as he rode in his gilded chariot through those serried files of cheering flatterers, proudly upheld his head, tossed back the curls from his forehead, smiled, and bent low, and, accepting these greetings as a tribute to his merits, drowned deep within his heart all sense of shame. With long retinue and dazzling pomp he visited the Capitol, gave thanks to Jupiter, best and greatest, and returned to the Palace ‘a victor over the public servitude.’

Yet even so he could not escape. He dared not be left alone. The manes of his mother haunted him by day and by night. In vain he practised the old expiatory rites to rid himself of the menacing phantom. On the night of May 13, two months after Agrippina’s death, he determined to go through the mummery of the Lemuralia, which some of his credulous advisers had told him would be efficacious. At midnight, amid the dead silence, he stole with naked feet to the water of the fountain in the atrium, and there, trembling with excitement, washed his hands thrice. Then with his thumb and finger, he filled his mouth with nine black beans, and, full of superstitious horror, flung them one by one behind him over his shoulder, saying each time, ‘With these beans redeem me and mine.’ Arrived at his chamber he again dipped his hands in water, and beat a great brazen gong to terrify the pursuing ghost.73 Then he turned round, and peered with a frightened glance into the darkness; and as he peered—was even this expiation all in vain?—what were those glimmering lights? What was that white and wavy form? A shriek rang through the villa, and Nero sank fainting into the arms of the timid minions who had awaited the result of the expiation and rushed forward at his cry.

The following year, when he had returned to the city, he repeated this antiquated rite, and he commanded the vestals to bear him specially in mind when, on the Ides of May, they flung from the Sublician Bridge into the Tiber the thirty little figures called argei, made of bulrushes, which were supposed to be in lieu of human sacrifices.

Then he tried yet further forms of magic and yet darker rites of propitiation to the infernal powers, in which it was whispered that human blood—the blood of murdered infants—formed part of the instruments of sorcery. But he could learn no secrets of the future; he could evoke no powers who could ward away that white menacing spectre which gleamed upon him if at any moment he found himself alone in the hours of night.

Nero became a haunted man. The whole earth seemed to him to be ‘made of glass’ to reveal his turpitude. He knew in his miserable heart that the very street boys of Rome—the ragged urchins of the slaves and gladiators—were aware of the crime which he had committed. Kind friends kept him informed, under pretence of officious indignation, that one night an infant had been found exposed in the Forum with a scrap of parchment round its neck, on which was written, ‘I expose you, lest you should murder your mother;’ and that, another night, a sack had been hung round the neck of his statue as though to threaten him with the old weird punishment of parricides. Once, when he was looking on at one of the rude plays known as Atellane, the actor Datus had to pronounce the line,

‘Good health to you, father; good health to you, mother;’

and, with the swift inimitable gestures of which the quick Italian people never missed the significance, he managed to indicate Claudius dying of poison and Agrippina swimming for her life. The populace roared out its applause at an illusion so managed that it could hardly be resented; and once again, when coming to the line,

‘Death drags you by the foot.’

Datus indicated Nero’s hatred to the Senate by pointing significantly to Nero at the word ‘death’ and to the senatorial seats as he emphasized the word ‘you.’

But Nero was liable to insults still more direct. Could he not read with his own eyes the graffito scrawled upon every blank space of wall in Rome: ‘Nero, Orestes, Alcmæon, matricidæ’? He could not detect or punish these anonymous scrawlers, but he would have liked to punish men of rank, whom he well knew to have written stinging satires against him, branding him with every kind of infamy.

Two resources alone were adequate to dissipate the terrors of his conscience—the intoxication of promiscuous applause and the self-abandonment to a sensuality which grew ever more shameless as the restraints of Agrippina’s authority and Seneca’s influence were removed.

Nero had long delighted to sing to the harp at his own banquets in citharœdic array. To the old Roman dignity such conduct seemed unspeakably degrading in the Emperor of the legions. Yet Nero divulged his shame to the world by having himself represented in statues and on coins in the dress of a harpist, his lips open as though in the act of song, his lyre half supported on a baldric embossed with gems, his tunic falling in variegated folds to his feet, and his arms covered by the chlamys, while with his delicate left hand he twanged the strings, and with his right struck them with the golden plectrum. The pains which he took to preserve his voice, which after all was dull and harsh, were almost incredible. Following the advice of every quack who chose to pass himself off as an expert, he used to walk about with his thick neck encircled in a puffy handkerchief, to sleep with a plate of lead on his chest, and to live for a month at a time on peas cooked in oil.

To give him more opportunities for display he instituted the Juvenalia to celebrate his arrival at full manhood, as marked by the shaving of his beard. His first beard was deposited in a box of gold, adorned with costly pearls, and he dedicated it to the Capitoline Jupiter. But even this event in his life was accompanied by a crime. Shortly before he laid aside his beard he paid a visit to his aunt Domitia, who was ill.

Laying her hand on the soft down, she said to him in her blandishing way, ‘As soon as I have received this, I am ready to die.’

Nero turned round to the loose comrades who usually attended him and whispered, with a coarse jest, ‘Then I will shave it off at once.’

From that sick-bed Domitia, who was almost the last of Nero’s living relatives, never rose again. The Roman world suspected foul play on the part of the physicians at Nero’s order. Certain it is that he seized all her ample possessions, and suppressed her will.