CHAPTER VI THE ACCESSION OF NERO

‘Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!’

‘Agrippina terris alterum venenum, sibique ante omnes, Neronem suum dedit.’—Pliny, N. H. xxii. 46.

Agrippina did not attend any longer to the children of Claudius; she threw off the mask. For by this time the sundial on the wall marked the hour of noon, and the Chaldæans were satisfied with the auspices. Her quickened sense of hearing caught the sounds for which she had long been listening. She heard the Palace doors thrown open. She heard the voice of Burrus commanding the soldiers to salute their Emperor. She heard shout on shout, ‘Nero Emperor! Nero Emperor! Long live Nero! Long live the grandson of Germanicus!’

She sprang out into the balcony, and there caught one glimpse of her son. His fair face was flushed with pride and excitement; the sun shone upon his golden hair which flowed down his neck; his slight but well-knit limbs were clothed in the purple of an Emperor. She saw him lean on the arm of the Prætorian Præfect as, surrounded by some of the chief military tribunes, he walked to the guard-house of the cohort which protected the imperial residence.

‘Prætorians,’ said Burrus, in a loud voice, ‘behold your Emperor, Nero Claudius Cæsar.’

‘Nero?’ asked one or two voices. ‘But where is Britannicus?’

They looked round. No one was visible but Nero, and their question was drowned in the cheers of their comrades.

‘Bring out the richest lectica,’ they cried; and it was ready in an instant. Nero was placed in it, and Burrus, springing on his war-horse, and followed by the select cohort of imperial cavalry, rode by his side. The Præfect was in full armour, and his cuirass was enriched with gems and gold. He held his drawn sword in his hand, lifting it again and again to excite the soldiers to louder cheers.

Then followed the very delirium of Agrippina’s triumph. Messenger after messenger entered to tell her that the air was ringing with endless acclamations in honour of her son. The beautiful and happy youth promised to the soldiers the same donative of fifteen sestertia to each man which Claudius had given at his succession, and the guardsmen accepted him with rapture, and hastily swore to him their oaths of allegiance.

Then with gleaming ensigns, and joyous songs, and shouting, and clapping of hands, they bore him in long procession to the Senate House, to obtain the ratification which the Conscript Fathers dared not refuse. At first, indeed, there had been a few shouts, ‘Britannicus! Where is Britannicus? Where is the true son of Claudius?’ And she inwardly made a note of the fact that the centurion Pudens and the knight Julius Densus had been among the number of those who raised the shout. Britannicus, too, had heard the cry, faint as it was by comparison; but when he attempted to escape out of the room, Agrippina imperiously waved him back, and Pallas detained him by the arm. He sat down in despair, and once more covered his face with his hands, while now it was the turn of Octavia to caress and comfort him. But the plot was already accomplished. The few who would have favoured his cause seemed to be swept away by the general stream. The boy had been kept so designedly in the background, that many of the people hardly knew whether he was alive or dead. He felt that he was powerless, and he had heard among the shouts of the soldiers the cry, ‘All hail, Augusta! All hail, the daughter of our Germanicus!’ He resigned himself to his fate, and Agrippina, intent on her own plans, and absorbed in the intensity of her emotions, no longer noticed his presence.

Suddenly, however, he started from his seat, and stood before her. His face was pale as death, but his eyes shone with indignant light.

‘Why am not I, too, proclaimed Emperor?’ he exclaimed. ‘I do not believe that my father meant to rob me of my inheritance. I am his son, not his adopted son. This is a conspiracy. Where is my father’s will? Why is it not taken to the senate, and there recited?’

The Empress was amazed at the sudden outburst. Was this the boy who seemed so meek and so helpless? This must be seen to!

‘Foolish boy,’ she said; ‘you are but a child. You have not yet assumed the manly garb. How can a boy like you bear the burden of the world’s empire? Fear not; your brother Nero will take care of you.’

‘Take care of me!’ repeated Britannicus, indignantly, restraining with difficulty the torrent of wild words which sprang to his lips. ‘It is a conspiracy!’ he cried. ‘You have robbed me of my inheritance to give it to your son Ahenobarbus.’

Agrippina lifted up her arm as if she would have struck him, but Pallas interposed. Firmly, but not ungently, he laid his hand on the young prince’s mouth.

‘Hush,’ he said, ‘ere you do yourself fatal harm. Boy, these questions are not for you or me to settle. They are for the Senate, and the Prætorians, and the Roman people. If the soldiers have elected Nero, and the senators have confirmed their choice, he is your Emperor, and you must obey.’

‘It is useless to resist, my brother,’ said Octavia, sadly. ‘Our father is dead. Narcissus has been sent away. We have none to help us.’

‘None to help you, ungrateful girl!’ said Agrippina. ‘Are not you now the Empress? Have you not the glory of being Nero’s bride?’

Octavia answered not. ‘Our father is dead,’ she said again. ‘May we not go, Augusta, and weep by his bedside?’

‘Go!’ answered Agrippina; ‘and I for my part will see that he is enrolled among the gods, and honoured with a funeral worthy of the House of Cæsar.’ Then, turning to her attendants, she issued her orders.

‘Put a cypress at the door of the Palace. Let the body be dressed in imperial robes, and incense burned in the chamber. See that every preparation is made for a royal funeral, and that the flute-players, the wailing-women, the designatores, with their black lictors, be all in readiness.’

But while Agrippina was giving directions to the archimimus who was to represent the dead Emperor at the funeral, and was examining the waxen masks of his ancestral Claudii, which were to be worn in the procession, the boy and girl were permitted to visit the chamber of the dead. They bent over the corpse of their father, and fondled his cold hands, and let their tears fall on his pale face, and felt something of the bitterness of death in that sudden and shattering bereavement, which changed for ever the complexion of their lives.

Nero, meanwhile, was addressing the Senate amidst enraptured plaudits in the finely turned and epigrammatic phrases of Seneca, which breathed the quintessence of wise government and Stoic magnanimity. He would rule, he said, on the principles which guided Augustus; and the senators seemed as if they would never end their plaudits when to the offer of the title ‘Father of his Country’ he modestly replied, ‘Not till I shall have deserved it.’

Agrippina, after having ordered the details of the funeral procession, finally dismissed her murdered husband from her thoughts, and gave directions that her son, on his return to the Palace, should be received with a fitting welcome. She summoned all the slaves and freed men of that mass of dependants which made of the Palace not a household, but a city. They were marshalled in throngs by their offices and nationalities in the vast hall. They were arrayed in their richest apparel, and were to scatter flowers and garlands under the feet of the new Emperor as he advanced. The multitudes of the lowest and least distinguished slaves were to stand in the farther parts of the hall; next to them the more educated and valuable slaves, and next to them the freedmen. In the inner ring were placed all the most beautiful and accomplished of the pages, their long and perfumed curls falling over their gay apparel, while some who had the sweetest voices were to break out into a chorus of triumphal songs. Then Nero was to be conducted to the bath, and afterwards a sumptuous banquet was to be served to a hundred guests. There was but a short time for these preparations; but the wealth of the Cæsars was unbounded, and their resources inexhaustible, and since the slaves were to be counted by hundreds, and each had his own minute task assigned to him, everything was done as if by magic.

The afternoon was drawing in when new bursts of shouting proclaimed that, through the densely crowded streets, in which every lattice and balcony and roof was now thronged with myriads of spectators, Nero was returning from the Curia to the Palace with his guard of Prætorians.

Walking between the two Consuls, with Burrus and Seneca attending him in white robes, followed by crowds of the greatest Roman nobles, and by the soldiers clashing their arms, singing their rude songs, and exulting in the thought of their promised donative, the young ruler of the world returned. The scene which greeted him when the great gates of the Palace were thrown open was gay beyond description. The atrium glowed in zones of light and many-coloured shadow. The autumnal sunbeams streamed over the gilded chapiters, glancing from lustrous columns of yellow and green and violet-coloured marble, and lighting up the open spaces adorned with shrubs and flowers. The fountains were plashing musically into marble and alabaster basins. Between rows of statues, the work of famed artificers, were crowded the glad and obsequious throngs of the rejoicing house.

Agrippina was seated on a gilded chair of state at the farther end of the hall, her arms resting on the wings of the two sphinxes by which it was supported. She was dressed in the chlamys, woven of cloth of gold, in which Pliny saw her when she had dazzled the spectators as she sat by the side of Claudius in the great festival at the opening of the Emissarium of the Fucine Lake. Beneath this was her rich stola, woven of Tarentine wool and scarlet in colour, but embroidered with pearls. It left bare from the elbow her shapely arms, which were clasped with golden bracelets enriched with large stones of opal and amethyst.

The moment that she caught sight of her son she descended from her seat with proud step, and Nero advanced to meet her. He was bending to kiss her hand, but the impulses of nature overcame the stateliness of Roman etiquette, and for one instant mother and son were locked in each other’s arms in a warm embrace, amid the spontaneous acclamations of the many spectators.

That evening Agrippina had ascended to the giddiest heights of her soaring ambition. Her son was Emperor, and she fancied he would be as clay in her strong hands. Alone of all the great Roman world it would be her unspeakable glory that she was not only the descendant of emperors, but the sister, the wife, and the mother of an Emperor. She was already Augusta and Empress in title, and she meant with almost unimpeded sway to rule the world. And while she thus let loose every winged wish over the flowery fields of hope, and suffered her fancy to embark on a sea of glory, the thought of her husband lying murdered there in an adjoining room did not cast the faintest shadow over her thoughts. She was about to deify him, and to acquire a sort of sacredness herself by becoming his priestess—was not that enough? She sat revolving her immense plans of domination, when Nero joined her, flushed from the banquet, and weary with the excitement of the day. While he was bidding her good night, and they were exchanging eager congratulations on the magnificent success of his commencing rule, the tribune of the Palace guard came to ask the watchword for the night.

Without a moment’s hesitation Nero gave as the watchword, The Best of Mothers.

But late into the darkness, in the room of death, unnoticed, unasked for, Britannicus and Octavia mingled their sad tears and their low whispers of anguish, beside the rapidly blackening corpse of the father who had been the lord of the world. Yesterday—though his impudent freedmen had for years been selling, plundering, and murdering in his name—two hundred millions of mankind had lifted up their eyes to him as the arbiter of life and death, of happiness and misery. By to-morrow nothing would be left but a handful of ashes in a narrow urn. Of all who had professed to love and to adore him, not one was there to weep for him except these two; for their half-sister, Antonia, had been content merely to see the corpse, and had then retired. No one witnessed their agony of bereavement, their helplessness of sorrow, except the dark-dressed slave who tended the golden censer which filled the death chamber with the fumes of Arabian incense. And for them there was no consolation. The objects of their nominal worship were shadowy and unreal. The gods of the heathen were but idols, of whom the popular legends were base and foolish. Such gods as those had no heart to sympathise, no invisible and tender hand to wipe away their orphan tears.