What was to be done? The majority was inclined to restore the former
republican government by abolishing the imperial authority, and to give
back to the senate the supreme direction of the state, which little by
little had passed into the hands of the emperor. But many recognized
that this return to the ancient form of government would be neither
easy nor without danger. Could the senate, neglected, divided, and
disregarded as it was, succeed in governing the immense empire? On the
other hand, it was not much easier to find an emperor, granted that an
emperor was henceforth necessary. In the family of Augustus there was
only Claudius, too foolish and ridiculous for them to think of making
him the head of the state. It seems that some eminent senator offered
his candidacy, but the senate hesitated in perplexity, on the ground
that if the authority of the members of the family of Augustus was
already so uncertain, so debatable, and so darkly threatened, what
would happen to a new emperor, unknown to the legions and the
provinces, and unsupported by the glory of his ancestors? While the
senate was debating in such uncertainty, the pretorians discovered
Claudius in a corner of the imperial palace, where he had been cowering
through fear lest he too be killed. Recognizing in him the brother of
Germanicus, the pretorians proclaimed him emperor. An act of will is
always more powerful than a thousand scruples or hesitations: the
senate yielded to the legions, and recognized Claudius the imbecile as
emperor.
[Illustration: Claudius.]
But Claudius was not an imbecile, although he appeared such to many.
Instead, he was, so to speak, a man half-grown, in whom certain parts
of the mind were highly developed, but whose character had remained
that of a child, timid, capricious, impulsive, giddy, and incapable of
self-mastery. In intellect he was learned, even cultivated; he was
fond of studies, of history, literature, and archaeology, and spoke and
wrote well. But Augustus had been forced to give up the attempt to
have him enter upon a political career because he had been unable to
make him acquire even that exterior bearing which confers the necessary
dignity upon him who exercises great power, to say nothing of the
firmness, precision, and force of will required in governing men.
Credulous, timorous, impressionable, and at the same time obstinate,
gluttonous, and sensual, this erudite, overgrown boy had become in the
imperial palace a kind of plaything for everybody, especially for his
slaves, who, knowing his defects and his weaknesses, did with him what
they wished.
He did not lack the intellectual qualities necessary for governing
well, but of the moral qualities he had none. He was intelligent, and
he looked stupid: he was able to consider the great questions of
politics, war, and finance with breadth of view, with original and
acute intelligence, but he never succeeded in having himself taken
seriously by the persons who surrounded him. He dared undertake great
projects, like the conquest of Britain, and he lost his head at the
wildest fable about conspiracy which one of his intimates told him; he
had mind sufficient to govern the empire as well as Augustus and
Tiberius had done, but he could not succeed in getting obedience from
four or five slaves or from his own wife.
Such a man was destined to turn out a rather odd emperor, at once great
and ridiculous. He made important laws, undertook gigantic public
works and conquests of great moment; but in his own house he was a weak
husband, incapable of exercising any sort of authority over his wife.
With these conjugal weaknesses he seriously compromised the imperial
authority, while at the same time he was consolidating it and rendering
it illustrious with beautiful and wise achievements, especially in the
first seven years of his rule, while he lived with Valeria Messalina.
We must admit in his justification that in this matter he had not been
particularly fortunate; for fate had given him to wife a lady who,
notwithstanding her illustrious ancestors,--she belonged to one of the
greatest families of Rome, related to the family of Augustus,--was not
exactly suited to be his companion in the imperial dignity. Every one
knows that the name of Valeria Messalina has become in history
synonymous with all the faults and all the vices of which a woman can
be guilty. This, as usual, is the result of envy and malevolence which
never offered truce to the family of Augustus as long as any of its
members lived. Many of the infamies which are attributed to her are
evidently fables, complacently repeated by Tacitus and Suetonius, and
easily believed by posterity. But it is certain that if Messalina was
not a monster, she was a beautiful woman, capricious, gay, powerful,
reckless, avid of luxury and of money, who had never scrupled to abuse
the weakness of her husband in any way either by deceiving him or by
obliging him to follow her will and her caprice in everything. She was
a woman, in short, neither very virtuous nor serious. There are such
women at all times and in all social classes, and they are generally
considered by the majority not as monsters, but as a pleasing, though
dangerous, variety of the feminine sex. Under normal conditions,
nevertheless, when the husband exercises a certain energy and sagacity,
even the danger which may result from them is relatively slight.
But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not a
sufficiently intelligent or serious woman to understand that if she had
been able to abuse the weakness of Claudius with impunity while he had
been the most obscure member of the imperial family, it was a much more
difficult matter to continue to abuse it after he had become the head
of the state. It was from this error that all their difficulties
arose. Elated by her new position, Messalina more than ever took
advantage of her husband's infirmity. She began by starting new
dissensions in the imperial family. Claudius had recalled to Rome the
two victims of Caligula's Egyptian caprices, Agrippina and Julia
Livilla; but if the latter no longer found a brother in Rome to
persecute them, they did find their aunt, and they had gained but
little by the exchange. Messalina soon took umbrage at the influence
which the two sisters acquired over the mind of their weak-willed
uncle, and it was not long before Julia Livilla was accused under the
_Lex de adulteriis_, and exiled with Seneca, the famous philosopher,
whom they wished rightly or wrongly to pass off as her lover.
Agrippina, like her mother, was a virtuous woman, as is proved by the
fact that she could not be attacked with such weapons and was enabled
to remain in Rome; though she also had to live prudently and beware of
her enemy, and much the more as she had only recently become a widow
and could therefore not even count upon the protection of a husband.
Though Agrippina remained at Rome, she was isolated and reduced to a
position of helplessness.
Messalina alone, together with four or five intelligent and
unscrupulous freedmen, hedged Claudius about, and there began the
period of their common government--a government of incredible waste and
extortion. Among these freedmen there were, to be sure, men like
Narcissus and Pallas, intelligent and sagacious, who did not aim merely
at putting money into their purses, but who helped Claudius to govern
the empire properly. Messalina, on the other hand, thought only of
acquiring wealth, that she might dissipate it in luxury and pleasures.
The wife of the emperor had been selling her influence to the sovereign
allies and vassals, to all the rich personages of the empire, who
desired to obtain any sort of favor from the imperial authority; she
had been seen bartering with the contractors for public works, mingling
in the financial affairs of the state every time that there was any
occasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulged
in ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the
_Lex sumptuaria_, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it is
easy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtues
she set. Claudius either knew nothing of all this or else submitted
without protest.
Messalina then, with her peculiar levity of character and violence of
temperament, continued to emphasize the modernizing Asiatic tendency
introduced by Caligula into the state, and was influential in
destroying the puritanic traditions of Rome and replacing them by the
corruption and pomp of Asia. Her rôle was exactly the opposite of that
of Livia. The latter had been the embodiment of the conservative
virtues of traditionalism: the former by her egoism, her extravagance,
and her wantonness was in a fair way to destroy all such traditions.
Livia had been almost a vestal in her fight for the puritanism of old
Rome: Messalina most ardently and violently fought to destroy it.
Such an empress, however, could hardly please the public. While those
who profited by her dissipations greatly admired Messalina, a lively
movement of protest was soon started among the people, for they, unlike
many of the aristocrats, who affected modern views and who pretended to
scorn the traditions of ancient Rome, were faithful to all such
puritanical traditions and wished to see at their emperor's side a lady
adorned with all the fairer virtues of the ancient matron--with those
virtues, in short, which Livia had personified with such dignity. How
could they tolerate this sort of dissipated Bacchante, who should have
been condemned to infamy and exile with the many other Roman women who
had been faithless to their husbands; who with the effrontery of her
unpunished crimes dishonored and rendered ridiculous the imperial
authority?
To the middle classes the emperor was a semi-sacred magistrate, charged
with maintaining by law and example the purity of the family, fidelity
in marital relations, and simplicity of customs. Now, to their
amazement, they saw in the person of the empress all the dissipations,
corruptions, and perversions of the woman who wished to live only for
her pleasure, to enjoy her beauty, and to have others enjoy it,
enthroned, to the scandal of all honest minds, in the palace of the
emperor. Furthermore, it seemed to every one a scandal that one who
was an emperor should at the same time be a weak husband; for the
simple good sense of the Latin would not admit that a man who could
govern an empire should not be able to command a woman. It soon became
the general opinion of all reasonable people that Messalina, in the
position of Livia upon the Palatine, and with so weak a husband, was
not only a scandal, but also a continual menace to the public.
[Illustration: The Emperor Claudius.]
Nevertheless, it would now have been no easy matter, even if the
emperor had wished it, to convict an empress of infidelity and
disobedience to one of the great laws of Augustus. Caligula was a
madman and had been able to secure three divorces, but a wiser emperor
would have to think for a long time before rendering public the shame
and scandals of his family, especially when confronted with an
aristocracy which was as eager to suspect and calumniate as was the
aristocracy of Rome. But the problem became hopeless as soon as the
emperor did not see or did not wish to see the faults of his wife.
Would any one dare to step forward and accuse the empress?
The situation gradually became grave and dangerous. The state,
governed with intelligence, but without energy, with vast
contradictions and hesitations, was being strengthened along certain
lines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortions
of the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both through
what she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalina
was being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whose
infamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all in vain.
It now became quite evident that an empress was virtually invulnerable,
and that, once enthroned upon the Palatine, there was no effective
means of protesting against the various ways in which she could abuse
her lofty position unless the emperor wished to interfere. In its
exasperation, the public finally vented upon Claudius the anger which
the violence and misconduct of Messalina had aroused. They declared
that it was his weakness which was responsible for her conduct; and
intrigues, deeds of violence, conspiracies, and attempts at civil war
became, as Suetonius says, every-day occurrences at Rome.
A sense of insecurity and doubt was spreading throughout the state as a
result of the indecision of the emperor, and all began to ask
themselves how long a government could last which was at the mercy of a
wanton. The violent death of Caligula, which was still fresh in the
minds of the people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurity
and alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness of
his person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody,
in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, it
seemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the case
of Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government be
overturned,--in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had been
overturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, and
alarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded in
ridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius.
[Illustration: Messalina, third wife of Claudius.]
So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of a
government which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things.
Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainly
the one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because of
his wife. Such a situation could not endure.
It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could
believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most
monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could
have abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at a
loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her
head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love,
who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the
consul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the
imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did
marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius
was at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting that
Messalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reason
would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very
heart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina
certainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing to
admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would
have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting
farce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they acted
through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could
constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.
This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius
by chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidem
excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat,
tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass all
belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted with
the adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed the
figures for the dowry"). If Claudius himself gave a dowry to the
bride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius was
to take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredible
to Suetonius. But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man could
give away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in
this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to
Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The
deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre
marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground
in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the
prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as
the middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded in
imposing upon it their ideas and sentiments. The passage in Suetonius
proves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, and
it is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it. Nor is
it improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of the
contemporaries of Claudius. We could therefore explain how, not really
understanding what had happened, the historians of the following
century should have believed that Messalina had married Silius while
she was still the wife of Claudius.
In short, Claudius had been persuaded to divorce Messalina and to marry
her to Silius. The passage from Suetonius, if carefully interpreted,
clearly tells us this. What means were employed to persuade Claudius
to consent to this new marriage we do not know. Suetonius refers to
this, but he is not clear. In any case, this point is less important
than that other question: Why was Messalina, after seven years of
empire, willing to divorce Claudius and marry Silius? The problem is
not an easy one, but after long examination I have decided to accept
with slight modification the explanation given by Umberto Silvagni in
his beautiful work, "The Empire and the Women of the Caesars," a book
which contains many original ideas and much acute observation.
[Illustration: The philosopher Seneca.]
Silvagni, who is an excellent student of Roman history, has well
brought out how Silius belonged to a family of the aristocracy famous
for its devotion to the party of Germanicus and Agrippina. His father,
who had been a great friend of Germanicus, had been one of the victims
of Sejanus, and accused in the time of Tiberius under the law of high
treason, he had committed suicide. His mother, Sosia Galla, had been
condemned to exile on account of her devotion to Agrippina. Starting
out with these considerations, and examining acutely the accounts of
all the ancient historians, Silvagni concluded that behind this
marriage there lay a conspiracy to ruin Claudius and to put Caius
Silius in his place. Messalina must sooner or later have felt that the
situation was an impossible one, that Claudius was not a sufficiently
strong or energetic emperor to be able to impose the disorganized
government of himself and his freedmen upon the empire, and that any
day he might fall a prey to a plot or an assassination. What would
happen, she must have asked herself, if Claudius, like Caligula, should
some day be despatched by a conspiracy? The same fate would doubtless
be waiting for her, for, having killed him, the conspirators would
certainly murder her also. Consequently she entertained the idea of
ruining the emperor herself in order to contribute to the elevation of
his successor, and thus to preserve at his side the position which she
had occupied in the court of Claudius. But once Claudius had been
slain, there would be no other member of the family of Augustus old
enough to govern. She therefore decided to choose him in a family
famous for its devotion to Germanicus and the more popular branch of
the house, thus hoping the more easily to win over the legions and the
pretorians to the cause of the new emperor, Since the descendants of
Drusus were dead, what other option remained to her than to choose a
successor in the families of the aristocracy who had shown for them the
greatest devotion and love?
Thus, for the first time, a woman was placed at the head of a really
vast political conspiracy destined to wrest the supreme power from the
family of Augustus; and this woman proved her sagacity by knowing how
to organize this great plot so well and so opportunely that the most
intelligent and influential among the freedmen of Claudius debated for
a long time whether they would join her or throw in their lot with the
emperor. So doubtful seemed the issue of this struggle between the
weak husband and the energetic, audacious, and unscrupulous wife! They
allowed Messalina and Silius to enlist friends and partisans in every
part of Roman society, to come to an understanding with the prefect of
the guards, to obtain the divorce from Claudius, even to celebrate
their marriage, without opening the eyes of the emperor. Claudius
would probably have been destroyed if at the last moment Narcissus had
not decided to rush to the emperor, who was at Ostia, and, by
terrifying him in some unspeakable way, had not induced him to stamp
out the conspiracy with a bold and unexpected stroke. There followed
one of those periods of judicial murder which for more than thirty
years had been costing much Roman blood, and in this slaughter
Messalina, too, was overthrown.
After the discovery of the conspiracy, Claudius made a harangue to the
soldiers, in which he told them that as he had not been very successful
in his marriages he did not intend to take another wife. The proposal
was wise, but difficult of execution, for there were many reasons why
the emperor needed to have a woman at his side. We very soon find
Claudius consulting his freedmen on the choice of a new wife. There
was much discussion and uncertainty, but the choice finally fell upon
Agrippina. That choice was significant. Agrippina was the niece of
Claudius, and marriages between uncle and niece, if not exactly
prohibited, were looked upon by the Romans with a profound revulsion of
feeling. Claudius and his freedmen could not have decided to face this
repugnance except for serious and important reasons. Among these the
most serious was probably that after the experience with Messalina, it
seemed best not to go outside the family. An empress belonging to the
family would not be so likely to plot against the descendants of
Augustus as had been this strange woman, who belonged to one of those
aristocratic families who deeply hated the imperial house. Agrippina,
furthermore, was the daughter of Germanicus. This was a powerful
recommendation with the people, the pretorian cohorts, and the legions.
In addition, she was intelligent, cultured, simple, and economical; she
had grown up in the midst of political affairs, she knew how the empire
was governed, and up to this point she had lived a life above reproach.
She seemed to be the woman above all others destined to make the people
forget Messalina and to reestablish among the masses respect for the
family of Augustus, now seriously compromised by many scandals and
dissensions. Furthermore, she did not seem to suffer too much by
comparison with Livia.
Claudius asked the senate to authorize marriages between uncles and
nieces, as he did not dare to assume the responsibility of going
counter to public sentiment. And thus the daughter of Germanicus and
the sister of Caligula became an empress.
VI
AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO
It is possible, as Tacitus says, that marriage with Claudius was the
height of Agrippina's ambition, but it is also possible that it was an
act of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of a woman who had been
educated in the traditions of the Roman aristocracy, and who therefore
considered herself merely a means to the political advancement of her
relatives and her children.
I am rather inclined to accept this second explanation. When she
married Claudius, Agrippina not only married an uncle who was much
older than herself, and who must necessarily prove a rather difficult
and disagreeable husband, but she bound up her fate with that of a weak
emperor whose life was continually threatened by plots and revolts, and
whose hesitations and terrors plainly portended that he would one day
end by precipitating the imperial authority and government into some
bizarre and terrible catastrophe. For Agrippina it meant that she was
blindly staking her life and her honor, and that she would lose them
both should she fail to compensate for the innumerable deficiencies of
her strange husband through her own intelligence and strength of will.
Every one will recognize how difficult was the task which she had
undertaken.