CHAPTER XIV MOTHER AND SON

‘Asper et immitis, breviter vis omnia dicam?
Dispeream si te mater amare potest.’

Sueton. Tib. 59.

Nero was now firmly seated on the throne of the Empire. Its cares sat lightly on him. The government went on admirably without him. He had nothing to do but to glut himself with enjoyments, and to make what he could of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.

At first, like one dazed with a sudden outburst of light, he had been unable to understand the immensity of his own power. For the first month of his reign he could hardly realise that he was more than a boy. He had always been passionately fond of chariot races, which as a boy he had not been permitted to frequent. One day, while at his lessons, he had been deploring to his companions the fate of a charioteer of the green faction who had been thrown out of his chariot and dragged to death by his own horses. His master, overhearing the conversation, reproved him, and the boy, with a clever and ready lie, said, ‘I was only talking about Hector being dragged round the walls of Troy by Achilles.’ And now he might watch the races all day long and plunge into the hottest rivalry of the factions, and neither in this pursuit nor in any other was there a single human being to say him nay.

The only thing which troubled him was the jealous interference of his mother. Agrippina still clutched with desperate tenacity at the vanishing fruits of the ambition for the sake of which all her crimes had been committed. She had sold her soul, and was beating back the conviction that she had sold it for nought. How could that slight boy of seventeen, whom as a child she had so often chastised with her own hand, dream of resisting her? Was not her nature, compared with his, as adamant to clay? She had been a princess of the blood from infancy, surrounded by near relatives who had been adored in life and deified after death; she had enjoyed power during two reigns, and now at last she had fancied that she would control the Empire for the remainder of her life. Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia? Was not her indomitable purpose even more intense? She forgot that Livia had been, what Caligula called her, Ulysses stolatus, ‘a Ulysses in petticoats,’ a woman with absolute control over her own emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of a wild passion which ruined her caution and precipitated her end.

And she forgot, more fatally, the total collapse of all Livia’s soaring ambitions. Livia had procured the death of prince after prince who stood between her son Tiberius and the throne. Tiberius did indeed become Emperor, but ‘had Zimri peace who slew his master’? Pliny calls Tiberius ‘confessedly the gloomiest of men.’ He himself wrote to the Senate that he felt himself daily destroyed by all the gods and goddesses. And, after all, his only son died, and he was succeeded by Caligula, the bad and brutal son of the hated and murdered Germanicus and the hated and murdered Agrippina the elder. He might have said with the bloodstained usurper of our great tragedy:—

‘Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,

And put a barren sceptre in my gripe;

Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand,

No son of mine succeeding.’

Was it likely to be otherwise with her son Nero?

Nero—slight boy as she thought him—had hardly been seated on the throne when he began to slip out of her control. Pallas, her secret lover, her chief supporter, was speedily ejected and disgraced. Seneca and Burrus were both opposed to her influence, and neither of them dreaded her vengeance. Suitors for favours were more anxious to secure the intercession of Acte than hers. Nero, surrounded by dissolute young aristocrats, and also by adventurers, buffoons and parasites, was daily showing himself more indifferent to her threats, her commands, even her reasonable wishes. He liked to parade his new-born freedom. She felt sure that among the circle of his familiar companions, she and her pretensions were turned into ridicule. Her proud cheek flushed even in solitude to think that she, who, for Nero’s sake, had dared all, should have been superseded in her influence by such curled and jewelled weaklings as Otho, and ousted from her son’s affections by a meek freedwoman like Acte. How terribly had she miscalculated! In the reign of Claudius she had been the mightiest person in the Court and in the State. Had she become the murderess of her husband only to transfer from herself into the hands of men whom she despised too much to hate, the power which was once her own? Had she flung away the substance and only grasped a flickering shadow?

A thousand plans of revenge crossed her mind, only to be rejected. The die was cast. The deeds done were irrevocable. It only remained for her to dree the judgment for her crimes, and to take such few steps as still were possible to her along the precipice’s edge. She had plucked a tempting fruit, and she found that its taste was poison; she had nursed a serpent in her bosom, and its sting was death.

But she would not resign her power without at least one mad struggle to retain it. She still had access to the Emperor whenever she desired, and many a wild scene had occurred between the mother and the son. In such interviews she let her tongue run riot. She refrained from nothing. She no longer attempted to conceal from him that Claudius had died by her hand. She wrapped the youth round in the whirlwind of her sulphurous passion; she raised her voice so loud in a storm of reproaches and recriminations that sometimes even the freedmen and soldiers outside the imperial apartments heard the fierce voices of altercation, and were in doubt whether they should not rush in and interfere. And often the feeble nature of Nero cowered before her menaces as she poured on him a flood of undisguised contempt. Sometimes she wrapped him in a storm of satire and sarcasm. She upbraided him with his unmanliness; she contrasted him unfavourably with Britannicus; she told him that he was more fit to be an actor of melodrama, or a tenth-rate charioteer, or a fiftieth-rate singer, than to be the Emperor of Rome.

‘To think,’ she said, raising her voice almost to a scream, as he sat before her in sullen silence—‘to think that the blood of the Domitii and of the Neros and of the Cæsars is in your veins! You an emperor! Yes; an emperor of pantomime! You have nothing of the Roman, much less of the ruler, nay, not even of the man, in you. Who made you Emperor? Who but I?’

‘I wish you had left me alone, then,’ he answered, desperately. ‘It is no such pleasure to be Emperor with you to spy on me and domineer over me.’

‘Spy on you? Domineer over you? Ungrateful! Infamous! You, who have made a slave-girl the rival of your mother! Let me tell you, Ahenobarbus, that I at least am the daughter of Germanicus, though you are wholly unworthy to be his grandson. Whence did you get your pale and feeble blood? Not from me, coward and weakling as you are; not from your father Domitius, who, if he was cruel, was at least a man! He would not have chosen such creatures as Otho and Senecio for his friends. He had a man’s taste and a man’s ambition. He would have blushed to be father of a singing and painting girl like you! But beware! You are an agrippa; you were born feet-foremost—a certain augury of future misery.’36

Stung to the quick by these reproaches, trembling with impotent anger to hear his effeminate vanity—to which his comrades burnt daily incense—thus ruthlessly insulted, and angry, above all, that his mother dared to pour contempt on his cherished accomplishments, Nero’s timid nature at last turned in self-defence.

‘I am Emperor now, at any rate,’ he said; ‘and ere now the wives and sisters, if not the mothers, of the Cæsars have had to cool their rage on the rocks of Gyara or Pontia!’

‘You dare to threaten me?’ she cried. ‘You to threaten me; me, your mother; me, who have toiled and schemed, aye, and committed crimes for you, from a child; me, whose womb bare you, whose hand has often beaten you; me, to whom you owe it that you are not at this moment a disgraced and penniless boy!’

‘You call me an actor. Are not you more than half an actress?’ he said, in a sneering tone.

Agrippina sprang from her seat in a burst of passion.

‘Oh, if there be gods!’ she exclaimed, uplifting her hands, ‘let them hear me! Infernal Furies at least there are, for I have felt them! Oh! may they avenge on you my wrongs!’

Nero cared but little for the curse. He was not superstitious. He thought how Senecio and Petronius would laugh at the notion of there being real Furies or subterranean gods!

‘You know more of the Furies than I do, then,’ he said, in a mocking tone. ‘Besides, I have an amulet. Look at this!’

He handed to her the icuncula puellaris—the wooden doll which had been given him in the streets, with the mysterious promise that it would prove to be a charm against every malignant influence. He honoured it as Louis XI. did the little leaden saint which he wore in his hat when he had ceased to honour anything else. She glanced at it with utter scorn; then, to his horror, flung it on the ground and spurned it away.

‘And you are Pontifex Maximus!’ she said, concentrating into the words a world of unmitigated scorn.

Nero was silent, but his look was so dark that, fearing lest she should have gone too far, she said in calmer tones, ‘You have a better amulet than that paltry image, and one which your mother gave you. But your follies render it unavailing.’

She pointed to a golden armlet, in which was set the skin of a serpent, which he wore on his right arm. The serpent had been found gliding in his room near his cradle; or, perhaps, according to another story, its cast-off skin had been found beside his pillow. Many legends had sprung up about it. The populace believed that it was a sacred spirit which had protected him, and had driven from his infant cradle the murderers sent by Messalina to destroy him. But, while Nero was yet a child, Agrippina had had the skin of the serpent curiously set in a jewelled armlet of great value, with rubies for its eyes, and emeralds marking the traces of its scales, and had clasped it on Nero’s arm, and bidden him to wear it forever. And as his life advanced in golden prosperity she had come to believe, or to half believe, that there was some mysterious charm about it—for a mind may be atheistical and yet profoundly superstitious.

But as she gazed at it with a sort of fascination, she was seized by one of the violent reactions of feeling which often sweeps over a mind untrained in the control of its passions. It brought before her the image of a little boy, whose sweet and sunny face looked the picture of engaging innocence; whose golden hair, when it caught the sunlight, shone like an aureole round his head; whose blue eyes danced with childish glee at the sight of what was beautiful; to whom his mother was all in all; who had often flung his arms round her neck, in joy and in sorrow, with the fondness of a loving child. That child stood before her—through her crimes Emperor of Rome. He stood there, hateful and hating her—on his lips the flickering smile of mockery; on his once bright forehead the scowl of anger. Yet whom had she in all the world besides? Her father had been murdered; her mother murdered; three of her brothers murdered; her sisters were dead, and had died in shame; her first husband dead; two others of her husbands poisoned—and by her; her lovers dead, or banished far away. She knew that a chaos of hatred yawned wide and deep around her; she knew that in all the wide world no single person, except possibly one or two of her freedmen, cared for her. In her agony, in her loneliness, she had tried of late to win something like forgiveness, something like tolerance, if not affection, from the deeply injured Britannicus and Octavia. She pitied the sorrows and wrongs which she had herself inflicted on them. She had even learnt to admire some gracious quality in them both, for which she could find no name. But, alas! she soon found that, while they were perfect in courtesy, they could never love her. The life, the affection of her son was the sole thing left her; and he was turning against her with a feeling akin to loathing stamped upon his face.

All these thoughts rushed over her mind like a tornado. Unable to bear them, she ended the interview by a passion of uncontrollable weeping. And, as she wept, she held out her appealing arms to her son, and wailed:

‘Oh, Nero, forgive my wild words. Whom have we but one another? In this drowning sea must we not sink or rise together? My son! my son! your mother pleads with you. Forgive me—kiss me; let Agrippina feel once more that she has the love of the son for whose sole sake she has lived—for whom she would gladly die!’

A noble nature would have been moved by the tragic appeal of so proud a mother; but the nature of Nero, essentially mean, had become constantly meaner. He trembled before those who confronted him with boldness; but he triumphed over all who showed that they feared him. He wanted to feel perfectly independent. The only person whose power he feared was his mother. And here was this all-dreaded mother pleading with him, at whose lightest look he had been accustomed for years to tremble! He was not in the least moved; he only intended to secure the ascendency of which, in that struggle, he had won the first step.

‘You curse me,’ he said, ‘one moment, and the next you are all tears and entreaties. Do you think that it is only your amulet that keeps me from your Furies? You have dishonoured my image; see how much I care for your amulet. I will never wear it again.’

He unclasped the armlet from his wrist, and flung it to the other end of the room.

‘There!’ he said. ‘You may have it; I have done with it!’ And with these words he turned his back upon her, and went out without a farewell.

It seemed a small matter, and what else could she expect from such a being as her son—a youth soft without tenderness, caressing without affection, cruel without courage?

She stood and looked towards the curtain through which he had disappeared. She stood with gleaming eyes and dilated nostrils, and firm-set lips. Every tear was dried up in her burning glance, as she outstretched her clenched hand and vowed a terrible vengeance.

‘O wronged Britannicus!’ she murmured; ‘O wronged Octavia! cannot I even now redress your wrongs? Alas! it cannot be. Their first act would be to avenge the injured manes of Claudius. But does not Rubellius Plautus live, and Cornelius Sulla? Could I not even yet brush this mean and thankless actor like an insect from my path—son though he be—and seat one of them upon the throne of the Cæsars?’

She picked up the armlet with the serpent’s skin. ‘It shall be as he said,’ she murmured; ‘he shall never wear or see it more.’

When his hour of doom had come, Nero searched for that amulet in vain!