CHAPTER XVIII VESPASIAN’S FARM

‘At secura quies, et nescia fallere vita,
Dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis,

Mugitusque boum, mollesque sub arbore somni,

Et patiens operum exiguoque assueta juventus,
Sacra Deum, sanctique patres.’

Virg. Georg. ii. 467.

Octavia was left in the comparative desertion of the Villa Castor, without even the homely companionship of Vespasian’s wife. The respectable guests had departed. There was scarcely a person about her to whom she could speak. As for her young husband, he treated her with habitual neglect and open scorn. His conduct towards her was due partly to the indifference which he had always felt, partly to jealousy—lest he should be thought to owe the Empire to his union with her. He therefore followed his own devices; and she desired no closer intercourse with him, for she shrank from the satyr which lay beneath his superficial graces. She was best pleased that he should be out of her sight. The void of an unloved heart was preferable to the scenes which took place between them when Nero’s worst qualities were evoked by the repulsion which she could not wholly conceal. Accustomed to hourly adulation, it was intolerable to him that from those who constituted his home circle he never received the shadow of a compliment. He was disturbed by the sense that those who knew him most intimately saw through him most completely. His mother did not abstain from telling him what he really was with an almost brutal frankness; his wife seemed to shrink from him as though there were pollution in his touch.

As there was little occasion for him to pay any regard to conventionalities in the retirement of Subiaco, he rarely paid the Empress even a formal visit—rarely even crossed the bridge which divided one villa from the other.

Octavia spent the long hours in loneliness. She sometimes relieved the tedium of her days by sending loving letters to her brother at Phalacrine, and sometimes summoned one of the young slave-maidens to sit and read to her. While Nero associated with the most worthless slaves, Octavia selected for her attendants the girls whose modest demeanour had won her notice, and whom she generally found to be Christians. Christianity, though overwhelmed with slanders, was not yet suppressed by law; and in the lowest ranks of society, where no one cared what religion any one held, the sole reason which induced the slaves to conceal their faith was the ridicule which the acknowledgment of it involved. The cross, which was in those days the gibbet of the vilest malefactors, was to all the world an emblem only of shame and horror. It was a thing scarcely to be mentioned, because its associations of disgrace and agony were so intense as to disturb the equanimity of the luxurious. And when a Christian slave was taunted with the gibe that he worshipped ‘a crucified malefactor,’ how could he explain a truth which was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness?

Octavia, whom sorrow had taught to be kind, was gentle in her demeanour to her slaves. The multitude of girls who waited on a patrician matron had a terrible time of it when their mistresses happened to be in an ill-humour. The gilded boudoirs of the Aventine not unfrequently rang with shrieks. As one entered the stately hall one heard the clanking chain of the ostiarius, who, with his dog and his staff, occupied the little cell by the entrance; and if a visitor came a little too soon for the banquet he might be greeted by the cries which followed the whistling strokes of the scourge, or might meet some slave-girl with dishevelled hair and bleeding cheeks, rushing from the room of a mistress whom she had infuriated by the accidental displacement of a curl. The slaves of Octavia had no such cruelties to dread. Lydus, who kept her chair; Hilara, who arranged her robes; Aurelia, who had charge of her lap-dog; Aponia, who adorned her tresses; Verania, who prepared her sandals, had nothing to fear from her. There was not one of her slaves who did not love the young mistress, whose lot seemed less happy than that of the humblest of them all.

And thus it happened that Tryphæna and others of her slaves were not afraid to speak freely, when she seemed to invite their confidence. From Britannicus she had heard what Pomponia had taught him; she had found from these meek followers of the ‘foreign superstition,’ that their beliefs and practice were inconceivably unlike the caricatures of them which were current among the populace. Because all men hated them, they were accused of hating all men; but Octavia found that love, no less than purity and meekness, was among their most essential duties. She was obliged to exercise the extremest caution in the expression of her own opinions, but she felt an interest deeper than she could express in all that Tryphæna told her of the chief doctrines of Christianity. And though she could scarcely form any judgment on what she heard, she felt a sense of support in truths which, if they did not convince her reason, yet kindled her imagination and touched her heart. One doctrine of the Christians came home to her with quickening power—the doctrine of the life everlasting. In Paganism that doctrine had no practical existence. The poets’ dream of meadows of asphodel and islands of the blest, where Achilles and Tydides unbound the helmets from their shadowy hair, and where the thin eidola of kings and heroes pursued a semblance of their earthly life, had little meaning for her. Like Britannicus, she was fond of reading the best Greek poets. But there was no hopefulness in them. In Pindar she read—

‘By night, by day,

The glorious sun

Shines equal, where the blest,

Their labours done,

Repose forever in unbroken rest.’43

And in Homer—

‘Thee to the Elysian plain, earth’s farthest end,

Where Rhadamanthus dwells the gods shall send;

There mortals easiest pass the careless hour,

No lingering winter there, nor snow, nor shower;

But Ocean ever, to refresh mankind,

Breathes the shrill spirit of the western wind.’

But she had only to unroll the manuscript a little further, and was chilled to the heart by the answer of Agamemnon to the greeting of Ulysses:—

‘Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom,

Nor think vain words, he cried, can ease my doom

Better by far laboriously to bear

A weight of woe, and breathe the vital air,

Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread,

Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead!’

And though Cicero had written his Tusculan disputations to prove the doctrine of immortality, had he not, in his letters and speeches, spoken of that doctrine as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with interest, but which no one practically held? Yet to these good Christians that doctrine was an unshakable conviction, a truth which consoled their heaviest afflictions. To them the eternal, though unseen, was ever present. It was not something future, but a condition of which they breathed the atmosphere both here and now. To them the temporal was the shadowy; the eternal was the only real.

While Octavia was thus silently going through the divine education which was to prepare her for all that was to come, Britannicus was supremely happy in the Sabine farm. Its homeliness and security furnished a delightful contrast to the oppressive splendour of the Palace at Rome. There, in the far wild country, he had none but farm labourers about him, except the members of the Flavian family, who, on the father’s side, rose but little above the country folk. He was as happy as the day was long. He could lay aside all thoughts of rank and state, could dress as he liked, and do as he liked, and roam over the pleasant hills, and fish in the mountain streams, with no chance of meeting any one but simple peasant lads. With Titus and his two cousins, young Flavius Sabinus and Flavius Clemens, he could find sympathy in every mood, whether grave or gay. Titus with his rude health, his sunny geniality, his natural courtesy—a boy ‘tingling with life to the finger tips’—was a friend in whose society it was impossible to be dull. Flavius Clemens was a youth of graver nature. The shadow of far-distant martyrdom, which would dash to the ground his splendid earthly prospects, seemed to play over his early years. He had already been brought into contact with Christian influences, and showed the thoughtfulness, the absence of intriguing ambition, and the dislike to pagan amusements, which stamped him in the vulgar eyes of his contemporaries as a youth of ‘most contemptible indolence.’ A fourth boy was often with them. It was Domitian, the younger brother of Titus, destined hereafter to be the infamy of his race. He was still a child, and a stranger unable to read the mind’s construction in the face would have pronounced that he was the best-looking of the five boys. For his cheeks wore a glow of health as ruddy as his brother’s, and his features were far softer. But it was not a face to trust, and Britannicus, trained in a palace to recognize what was indicated by the expression of every countenance, never felt any liking for the sly younger son of Vespasian.

Vespasian was proud of his farm, and was far more at home there than in the reception-rooms of Nero. He was by no means ashamed of the humility of his origin. As he sat in his little villa, he used to tell people that his ancestor was only one of the Umbrian farmers, who, during the civil war between Marius and Sylla, had settled at Reate and married a Sabine maiden. Amazed indeed would those humble progenitors have been if they had been told that their great-grandson would be an Emperor of Rome! Nothing made him laugh more heartily than the attempt of his flatterers to deduce his genealogy from a companion of Hercules. He had not a single bust or waxen image of any illustrious ancestor to boast of, but was proud that the cities of Asia had reared a statue to his father, Sabinus, with the inscription, ‘To the honest publican.’

He delighted to recall the memories of Cincinnatus and Fabricius and the old dictators, who had been taken from the plough-tail, and to whom their wives had to bring the single toga they possessed in order that they might meet the ambassadors of the Senate when they were summoned to subdue the enemies of Rome. He was never happier than when he took the boys round with him to visit his horses and his cows, and even Domitilla’s hens. He delighted in the rude plenty of the house, the delicious cream, the fresh eggs, the crisp oat-cakes, the beautiful apples at breakfast, the kid and stewed fruits of the midday meal. Any one who watched those rustic meals would little have conjectured that, in that low, unadorned room, with the watch-dogs slumbering before the hearth, they saw before them three emperors, two consuls and a princess. Still less would he have dreamed that one of them only would die peacefully in his bed; that, of those five boys, four would be the victims of murder, and one of martyrdom; and that the younger Domitilla, though she did not share her husband’s martyrdomT5 would die in a bleak and lonely island as a confessor of the faith. Our life lies before us, and the mercy of Divine Providence hides its issues in pitchy night.

Vespasian alone of that little company was old enough to feel in all its fulness the blessing of a temporary escape from the horrible world of Rome, which tossed like a troubled sea whose waters cast up mire and dirt. He knew, as those lads could hardly know, that it was a world of insolence and passion, of treachery and intrigue, of ruthless cruelty and unfathomable corruption. He had seen the government of it pass from a madman like Caligula to a half-dazed blunderer like Claudius, and knew that the two had been preceded by a Tiberius, and succeeded by a Nero. One morning, when the weather did not permit them to go out to their usual outdoor sports, the boys had amused themselves with a genealogy of the Cæsars, in which they had become interested in consequence of some questions about the descendants of Augustus. As the blunt soldier looked at them while they bent over the genealogy, he became very thoughtful. For that stem of the Cæsars had something portentous in its characteristics. It was a grim reflex of the times. Here were emperors who had married five or six wives, and empresses who had married four or five husbands, and some of these marriages had been fruitful; and yet the Cæsars were hardly Cæsars at all, but a mixed breed of ancient Claudii, Domitii, Silani, and of modern Octavii and Agrippas. The genealogy showed a confused mass of divorces and adoptions, and neither the men nor the women of the royal house were safe. Many of the women were adulteresses; many of the men were murderers or murdered victims. Out of sixteen empresses, six had been killed and seven divorced. Julia, daughter of Augustus, after three marriages, had been banished by her father for shameless misconduct, and Tiberius had ordered her to be starved to death at Rhegium. Could Augustus have felt no anguish in his proud spirit, when he had to write to a young patrician ‘You have committed an indiscretion in going to visit my daughter at Baiæ’? or when on hearing that Phœbe, Julia’s freedwoman, had hanged herself, he cried ‘Would that I had been the father of that Phœbe’? And, alas! what multitudes of his descendants had equalled Julia alike in misery and shame! Death and infamy had rioted in that deplorable family. Well might Augustus exclaim, in the line of Homer:

‘Would I had died unwed, nor been the father of children!’

When the people demanded the recall of the two Julias, after five or six years of exile, he exclaimed in a burst of indignation and anguish, ‘I wish you similar wives and similar daughters.’ He described his wife Scribonia, his daughter Julia, and his granddaughter Julia the younger as ‘his three cancers.’44

But while the boys were eagerly talking together, and discussing those Cæsars, and members of their family, who from the time of Julius Cæsar downward had been deified, Vespasian suddenly grew afraid lest the same thought which struck him should strike them. In those days he did not dream that he too should wear the purple and die the apparent founder of a dynasty. He was not, indeed, unaware of various prognostics which were supposed to portend for him a splendid fate. At Phalacrine, his native hamlet, was an ancient oak sacred to Mars, which had put out a new branch at the birth of each of the three children of his father, Sabinus. The third, which represented himself, grew like a great tree. Sabinus, after consulting an augur, told his mother, Tertulla, that her grandson would become a Cæsar. But Vespasian shared the feelings of the old lady, who had only laughed immoderately at the prophecy, and remarked, ‘How odd it is that I am in my senses, while my son has gone raving mad!’

Seeing that the boys were fascinated by the grandeur of Cæsarism, he rolled up the stemma. ‘Do not be ambitious, lads,’ he said. ‘Could the name of Imperator or the sight of your radiated heads upon a coin, give you more happiness than you are enjoying here and now?’

The advice of Vespasian was perfectly sincere. In his homely way he saw too deeply into the heart of things to care for the outside veneer. It was his mother, Vespasia Polla—the daughter of the military tribune—who, led on by dreams and omens, had forced him into the career of civil honours. His brother obtained the right to wear the laticlave, or broad purple stripe on the toga, and the silver C on the boots, which marked the rank of senator. Vespasian was unwilling to lay aside the narrow stripe, the angusticlave, which showed him to be of equestrian rank. He only yielded to the pressure, and even to the abuse, of his mother, who asked him how long he meant to be the lacquey—the anteambulo—of his brother. He had nearly thrown up his public life in disgust, when during his ædileship Gaius had ordered the soldiers to cover him with mud, and to heap mud into the folds of his embroidered magisterial robe, because he found the roads insufficiently attended to. He had practised the advice he was now giving.

‘My head has been struck on coins,’ said Britannicus, with a sigh; ‘but I can’t say that it has made me much happier.’

‘You are as happy as Nero is,’ said Titus. ‘I am quite sure that all the revels at Subiaco will not be worth the boar-hunt we mean to have to-morrow.’

‘Clemens,’ said Vespasian, ‘Domitilla tells me that yesterday morning you were learning my favourite poem, the “Epode” of Horace about the pleasures of country life, and the lines of Virgil on the same subject. As we have nothing special to do this morning, suppose you repeat the poems to us, while the boys and I make a formido for our next deer-hunt.’

The boys got out the long line of string, and busied themselves with tying to it, at equal distances, the crimson feathers which were to frighten the deer into the nets; while Flavius, standing up, recited feelingly and musically the well-known lines of the Venusian poet, whose Sabine farm lay at no great distance from the place where they were living—

‘Blessed is he—remote as were the mortals

Of the first age, from business and its cares—

Who ploughs paternal fields with his own oxen,

Free from the bonds of credit or of debt.

No soldier he, roused by the savage trumpet,

Not his to shudder at the angry sea;

His life escapes from the contentious Forum,

And shuns the insolent thresholds of the great.’45

And when, to the great delight of his uncle, he had finished repeating this poem, he repeated the still finer lines of Virgil, who pronounces ‘Happy above human happiness the husbandmen for whom far beyond the shock of arms earth pours her plenteous sustenance.’46

The boys talked together on all sorts of subjects; only if Domitian was with them, they were instinctively careful about what they said. For Domitian could never forget that Britannicus was a prince. If Britannicus became Emperor he might be highly useful in many ways, and it was worth Domitian’s while to insinuate himself into his favour. In this he soon saw that he would fail. The young prince disliked him, and could not entirely conceal his dislike under his habitual courtesy. Domitian then changed his tactics. He would try to be Nero’s friend, and if he could find out anything to the disadvantage of Britannicus, so much the better. He had already attracted the notice of two courtiers—the dissolute Clodius Pollio, who had been a prætor, and the senator Nerva, both of whom stood well with the Emperor. Already this young reprobate had all the baseness of an informer. But in this direction also his little plans were defeated, for in his presence Britannicus was as reticent as to Titus he was unreserved.

Britannicus was to have had a room to himself, in consideration of his exalted rank, but he asked to share the sleeping-room of Titus and Clemens. They went to bed at an early hour, for Vespasian was still a poor man, and oil was expensive. But they often talked together before they fell asleep. Titus would rarely hear a word about the Christians. He declared that they were no better than the worshippers of the dog-headed Anubis, and he appealed to the caricature of the Domus Gelotiana as though it proved the reality of the aspersions against them. He was, however, never tired of talking about the Jews. He had seen Agrippa; he had been dazzled into a boyish love by the rich eastern beauty of Berenice. The dim foreshadowing of the future gave him an intense interest in the nation whose destiny he was to affect so powerfully in after years. Stories of the Jewish Temple seemed to have a fascination for him. But he was as credulous about the Jews as the rest of his race, and believed the vague scandals that they were exiles from Crete, and a nation of lepers, and about Moses and the herd of asses—which afterwards found a place in Tacitus and later historians.

Another subject about which he liked to talk was Stoicism. He thought nothing so grand as the doctrine that the ideal wise man was the most supreme of kings. He was full of high arguments, learnt through Epictetus, to prove that the wise man would be happy even in the bull of Phalaris, and he quoted Lucretius and Virgil to prove that he would be always happy—

‘If to know

Causes of things, and far below

His feet to feel the lurid flow

Of terror, and insane distress,

And headlong fate, be happiness.’

At all of which propositions Britannicus was inclined to laugh good-naturedly, and to ask—much to the indignation of his friend—if Musonius was happy when he had a bad toothache.

Finding him unsympathetic on the subject of the Christians, Britannicus ceased to speak of them. On the other hand, he soon discovered that Clemens knew more about them than himself.

‘Are you a Christian, Flavius?’ asked Britannicus, when they were alone, after one of these conversations.

‘I have not been baptised,’ he answered. ‘No one is regarded as a full Christian until he has been admitted into their church by baptism.’

‘Baptism? What is that?’

‘It is the washing with pure water,’ said Clemens. ‘Our Roman ceremonies are pompous and cumbersome. It is not so with the Christians. Their symbols are the simplest things in the world. Water, the sign of purification from guilt; bread and wine, the common elements of life, taken in remembrance of Christ who died for them.’

‘And are the elders of these Christians—the presbyters, as they call them—the same sort of persons as our priests?’

‘I should hope not!’ said Clemens. ‘They are simple and blameless men—more like the best of the philosophers, and more consistent, though not so learned.’

The entrance of Domitian—whom they more than suspected of having listened at the door—stopped their conversation. But what Britannicus had heard filled him with deeper interest, and he felt convinced that the Christians were possessors of a secret more precious than any which Seneca or Musonius had ever taught.

But the happy days at the Sabine farm drew to an end. When November was waning to its close it was time to return from humble Phalacrine and its russet hills, to the smoke and wealth and roar of Rome.