THE EMPRESSES OF THE TRANSITION
The house of Cæsar had perished with Nero, and few sober folk can have
regretted that it had no living representative to win the fancy of the
frivolous people or the blind cupidity of the Guards. There must have
been men living in Rome who had witnessed the whole of that appalling
degradation, so swift it had been. The Cæsars had sunk in little over
forty years from the sobriety of Octavian to the insanity of Nero;
their consorts had fallen from the strong standard of Livia to the
insipidity of Poppæa; the resources of the Empire had been squandered
in spectacles that had left its people nerveless and debauched; the old
Roman ideal of character had been almost obliterated in the Imperial
city. It was our concern to see what part the Empresses played in this
lamentable history of four decades. It is, on the whole, one that their
biographer must blush to acknowledge. We must remember, however, that
corrupt rulers would necessarily choose weak or corrupt wives, and we
cannot affect surprise or disappointment when we find them floating in
the swift current.
We have now to open a new and more attractive gallery of Imperial
portraits, to pass in review the wives of those great Emperors who
restored the high character of Rome and strengthened anew the fabric
of the Empire. A very brief summary of events will suffice to link the
Cæsars with the Antonines, and introduce to us one or two curious types
of Empresses who dimly figure in the transition.
For a year after the fall of Statilia Messalina the throne of the
Empress was vacant, and that of the Emperor had three successive
occupants. Galba was a widower at the time of his elevation to the
throne. We saw in an earlier chapter that Agrippina had wished to marry
him twenty-six years earlier, and he had refused. His wife, Lepida, was
a delicate woman, of high character, and he refused to divorce her. She
had an energetic champion in her mother, who fought Agrippina sturdily
and, if the story be true, laid fair patrician hands on her. But Lepida
died long before her husband was made Emperor, and he refused to marry
again. His reign was brief. Tradition has blamed him for an excessive
sternness and parsimony. They were not inopportune vices, but Rome had
been too long habituated to indulgence, and Galba was too confident.
The discontent at Rome was inflamed by the news of the revolt in the
provinces, and within a few weeks the Guards, to whom he had refused
the customary donation, set up a new Emperor, and put Galba to death.
The new ruler was no other than the first husband of Poppæa, the
companion of Nero’s revels, Salvius Otho. Rome acclaimed the choice,
and expected that the circus and theatre were about to reopen their
doors. But Otho, who had matured during his years of office in Spain,
turned from them in disgust. He did, it is true, restore the statues of
Poppæa, and contemplated restoring the discarded statues of Nero, but
the alienation of Roman feeling from him is a proof that he intended
to rule with sobriety. The same spirit is seen in the fact that he
corresponded affectionately with Statilia Messalina, and apparently
thought of marrying her. But the legions in the provinces almost
immediately rebelled against him, and, in the midst of the struggle, he
committed suicide.
There had been no Empress of Rome for twelve months. With the death of
Otho, and the accession of Vitellius, we come to the eleventh Empress,
Galeria Fundana, a very new and incongruous type in the series of
Imperial women.
The name of Vitellius is already familiar to us. His father was the
fulsome courtier who had inspired Caligula with the idea that he was
a god, and who had worn one of Messalina’s little silk shoes under
his tunic. His wife, Sextilia, was a woman of strict morality and
unambitious temper, but their son, the younger Vitellius, lived in
too tainted an atmosphere to prefer the plainness of his mother to
the craft and greed of his father. He had learned vice in the band of
young men who brought so evil a fame on Tiberius’s villa at Capri, and
had made his way astutely through the successive reigns of Caligula,
Claudius, and Nero. He had made a considerable fortune as proconsul of
Africa, and had, on his return to Rome, married Petronia, the daughter
of a wealthy consul. She settled her large fortune on her son, and when
Vitellius, having consumed his own wealth in luxury and riot, went on
to sacrifice his son for the purpose of securing the fortune held in
his name, Petronia angrily remonstrated, and was divorced.
He then married Galeria Fundana. She was, says Tacitus, “a pattern of
virtue,” and since this defect--as Vitellius would find it--was united
with plainness of person, modesty of taste, and dull, if not defective,
conversation, the match was a singularly unhappy one. Vitellius had
so far squandered his money that he was unable to pay his expenses to
Lower Germany when Galba gave him the command of the troops there.
How he obtained that important appointment is not clear. Some say
that Galba selected him because he was not ambitious; others that he
secured it through the influence of the “blue” faction at the Circus,
of which he was a partisan. He mortgaged his house, and Sextilia sold
her jewels, to obtain funds for the journey. Fundana and her child were
left in a poor tenement at Rome, little dreaming that they would be
summoned from it to Nero’s “golden house” in a few weeks.
It is expressly recorded that Sextilia and Fundana had no ambition, and
dreaded lest Vitellius should aspire to reach the dizzy heights which
some early prophet had promised him. They were, therefore, dismayed
to hear, shortly after his arrival on the Rhine, that the troops
were offering to secure the throne for him. His genial and indulgent
treatment of the soldiers was a betrayal of his trust to the stern
Galba, and may have been deliberately effected to win their support.
He became very popular, and was hailed as a second “Germanicus.” Galba
was presently murdered, and, as the German legions had had no part in
the choice of Otho, they urged Vitellius to lead them against him.
Vitellius wavered for a time between the safe and considerable means
of self-indulgence, which he had as commander, and the uncertain,
but immeasurably greater, prospect which the throne suggested to his
sensual dreams. The officers conquered his hesitation, and he set out
for Rome in the rear of the eight legions who had declared for him.
Sextilia and Fundana seemed to be in peril when the news came to Rome
that Vitellius was marching upon the city. It is said that Vitellius
threatened reprisals if his family were injured, but there is no
indication that Otho would stoop to take a revenge on women and
children. They saw him march out at the head of his troops to give
battle to Vitellius, and waited anxiously, with all Rome, to hear the
issue of the civil war. And while Senate and people were enjoying the
mummery of the theatre, a horseman rode in with the news that Otho
had taken his own life, and Vitellius was leading his German troops
upon Rome. Senate and people united at once to receive him, and sent
him the title of Augustus. He politely declined it for the time, and
continued his leisurely march upon the city. There had been many a
triumphant march over the roads of Italy in the annals of Rome, but
never one so singular as that of the new monarch. “The roads from sea
to sea groaned with the burden of his luxuries,” says Tacitus; and, if
we distrust Tacitus, as an admirer of Vitellius’s rival and successor,
all the Roman writers agree that his first use of supreme power was
to command a stupendous ministration to his sensual appetites. He
ordered his legions to move slowly southward, while he, in their train,
exhausted each successive region of its delicacies, and filled the days
and nights with his princely feasting. His example encouraged his wild
German troops, and their line of march could be traced across Gaul and
Italy by their pillage, cruelty, and debauchery.
The repeated messages from the provinces filled Rome with laughter,
in spite of its anxiety. People remembered this princely epicure
sheltering, a few months before, in the poorer quarter of the town and
evading the duns. The modest and virtuous Sextilia and Fundana shrank
in pain from the hollow flattery which was paid them, and followed
the march of the Emperor with disgust. He was approaching Rome at
the head of sixty thousand men. Legions of tall, fierce, fur-clad
Germans, with heavy javelins, were thundering along the Italian
roads and terrifying the peasantry. In their rear was a vast army of
slaves, cooks, comedians, charioteers, and other ministers to the
Imperial appetite. He had sent for the whole of Nero’s servants and
appointments. It was said that he even intended to outrage one of the
most sacred traditions of the city by entering it in full armour, at
the head of an army with drawn swords; but the friends who met him at
the Milvian Bridge persuaded him to change his costume, and sheathe
the swords of his soldiers. He entered, in civil toga, at the head
of the terrible Germans, his officers clad in white as they bore the
eagles. After visiting the Capitol, and addressing the Senate in terms
of pleasant submissiveness to that body and of somewhat nauseating
praise of himself, he settled in Nero’s magnificent palace with Fundana
and her child. His troops, debauched with the license of their march,
scattered in disorder through the city; and Rome resigned itself to the
inauspicious rule of its eighth Emperor.
We may dismiss the nine months in which Galeria Fundana was Empress
of Rome in a phrase: she was a helpless and disgusted spectator of
the most imperial debauch that Rome had yet witnessed. Dio strangely
accuses her of haughtily complaining of the poverty of the robes she
found in Nero’s golden house, but the testimony to her modesty is
too strong for us to admit this. A more credible statement in the
chroniclers is that she begged to be allowed to retire to a humble
dwelling of her own, and Vitellius refused. His mother did not long
survive her mortification. One rumour preserved in Suetonius is that
Vitellius had her starved to death, as it was predicted that she would
outlive him; another version says that he sent her poison, at her own
request. Fundana was left alone to bewail his colossal gluttony. She
saw his chief officers encourage him in his stupefying orgies, while
they enriched themselves; and she had to submit in silence while his
sister-in-law, Triaria, “a woman of masculine fierceness,” goaded him
to continued excesses. During the few months of his reign he spent
900,000,000 sesterces (about £7,000,000) in eating, drinking, and
entertainment. He had three meals during the day, and ended with a
costly and drunken supper. His brother one day entertained him at a
banquet, at which two thousand choice fishes and seven thousand rare
birds were served. Vitellius in return gave a banquet, at which one
dish--a compound of the livers of pheasants, the tongues of flamingoes,
the brains of peacocks, the entrails of lampreys, and the roes of
mullets--cost more than the whole of his brother’s dinner.
From this loathsome and stupid dream of Imperial power Vitellius was
at length awakened by the echoes of rebellion in the provinces. After
a few futile executions, and several relapses into his besetting
gluttony, he was forced to set out for the north. He quickly returned,
however, and wandered about Rome in hysterical impotence, while the
followers of Vespasian closed upon the city. Civil war had broken out,
and the Romans gazed with horror on the sacred Capitol besieged by the
German troops and bursting into flames. At last Vitellius came out with
Fundana and her child, in mourning dress, and announced that he would
resign. The consul refused his sword, and the mournful procession
directed its steps towards his brother’s house. He was persuaded to
return to the palace, but the Vespasianists captured Rome, and he was
taken to Fundana’s house on the Aventine. From this he somehow wandered
back to the palace. “The awful silence terrified him; he tried the
closed doors, and shuddered at the empty chambers,” says Tacitus. Dazed
and incapable of flight, he hid in the sordid room where the dogs were
kept. Here the soldiers found him, torn and bleeding, and forced him
to walk the streets, while they kept his head erect with the point of
a sword, and the people flung filth and epithets at him. They then
inflicted on him a slow and painful death, and flung his remains in the
Tiber.
Fundana was spared, and her daughter honourably given in marriage, by
his magnanimous successor. From the brief and unwelcome splendour of
the “golden house” she passed into private life, and lived only to
bemoan the cruel fate that had lifted her husband to the intoxicating
height of the Roman throne.
There was no Empress in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, but a word
may be said of the two remarkable women who shared their power to some
extent. Vespasian, whose sober and solid administration it would be
pleasant to contrast with the orgiastic reigns of his predecessors, was
a rough soldier, of humble extraction and homely ways. He had, in the
time of Caligula, married the mistress of a knight, Flavia Domitilla,
who remains little more than a name in the chronicles. He had won
distinction under Narcissus, but the triumph of Agrippina drove him
and Domitilla into exile. Nero employed him to crush the rebellion in
Judæa, and it was during this campaign that his wife died, leaving
him with her two sons--his successors--Titus and Domitian. He was,
therefore, a widower when the Eastern troops made him Emperor, but he
took into his palace, and treated as Empress, an emancipated slave of
the name of Cænis.
The mistress of Vespasian has the distinction of being
associated--actively and usefully associated--with him in one of the
soundest attempts to restore the decaying Empire. She had been in the
service of Antonia, the grandmother of Agrippina, and is said to have
been the one who first disclosed to Tiberius the perfidy of Sejanus.
From the first she was a dangerous rival of Domitilla, and, when his
wife died, Vespasian entered into the quasi-matrimonial relation with
her which is known in Roman law as _contubernium_. She would probably
have been Empress if the law had permitted him to contract a solemn
marriage with her. She had considerable ability, but an unhappy
reputation for extortion and the sale of offices. It is not clear,
however, that the wealth she obtained did not contribute to Vespasian’s
rehabilitation of the resources of the Empire. They abandoned and
destroyed the golden house of Nero, the central site of which is now
marked by the Flavian Amphitheatre, or Coliseum. In their quiet gardens
in the Quirinal they received any citizen who cared to visit them, and
maintained no timorous hedge of soldiers between themselves and their
people. They wished to see money spent on public purposes, or hoarded
for public emergencies, rather than squandered. “My hand is the base of
the statue: give me the money,” Cænis is said to have told a wealthy
man who proposed to raise a statue to her; but Dio informs us that this
and other stories of Cænis’s avarice properly belong to Vespasian. She
died, however--if the date assigned in Dio is correct--in the second
year of Vespasian’s reign, and must not be credited with too large a
share in that great purification of Rome and reinvigoration of its life
with healthy provincial blood which Tacitus regards as the beginning of
the recovery of the Empire.
Titus, who succeeded his father in the year 79, and reigned for two
years, threatened at one time to give Rome an even more singular and
unwelcome type of Empress. He had in early youth married Arricidia
Tertulla, who died soon afterwards, and then Marcia Furnilla, a lady
of illustrious family. He left his wife in Rome when he took command
under his father in Judæa, and became infatuated with a brilliant
princess of the Herod family, Berenice. He divorced Furnilla, and
brought Berenice to live with him at Rome. But the Romans resented the
prospect of a Jewish Empress, and she was forced to return. On his
accession to the throne he made no attempt to enforce her on them. He
reigned alone for two years, “the love and delight of the human race,”
and maintained the sober administration of his father.
With the accession of his younger brother, Domitian, Rome received
a new Empress, and, by an unhappy coincidence, saw the imperial
palace return to the evil ways of the Cæsars. Those of our time who
attach almost the entire importance to stock or birth, and little to
circumstances, in the formation of character, will find a peculiar
problem in Domitian and his wife. The Emperor was the second son of
the “plain Sabine burgher” and sturdy soldier, Vespasian, and of the
lowly provincial woman, Flavia Domitilla. The Empress, Domitia Longina,
was the daughter of Domitius Corbulo, one of the strongest and ablest
generals that Rome produced in the first century. Yet of these sound
and vigorous stocks came, in one generation, one of the most morbid of
the Emperors and an Empress who, in some respects, rivalled Messalina.
Rome knew them both, and had no false hope.
Domitia--as she is usually called--makes her first appearance as a
young girl of great beauty and promise, caressed and protected by the
wealth and prestige of her distinguished father, who, it is interesting
to note, was a brother of Caligula’s masculine wife Cæsonia. She was
married to a noble of distinction and character, Lucius Ælius Lamia
Æmilianus, and she seems to have been an estimable young matron until
her father incurred the anger of Nero and was forced to commit suicide.
Procopius and Josephus, indeed, represent her as virtuous to the end,
but there seems to be little room for doubt that the nearer and less
indulgent authorities are correct. Her young mind opened on the sordid
scenes of the closing part of Nero’s reign and the folly of Vitellius.
She then met the fascinating and effeminate Domitian, and very speedily
capitulated to his assaults.
[Illustration: DOMITIA
BUST IN UFFIZI GALLERY, FLORENCE]
Gibbon speaks of him as “the timid and inhuman Domitian,” while Dio
opens his biographical sketch of the Emperor with the deliberate
epithet, “bold and wrathful.” We shall find a very natural dread
of assassination in Domitian’s later years, but he was undoubtedly
bold and crafty in the service of Venus, and a stranger to moral
sentiment. His elder brother Titus had developed the manly qualities
of their father on the battlefields of Judæa, and had proved strong
enough to crush his irregular feelings on his accession to the throne.
Domitian had remained at Rome, discharging only civic duties, and had
become one of the most heartless dandies in the group of degenerate
young patricians. During the civil strife of the Vitellianists and
Vespasianists on the streets of Rome he had made his escape in the
fitting disguise of a priest of Isis. Titus knew his vicious and
luxurious ways, and endeavoured to check him by offering him his own
charming daughter Julia in marriage; but Domitian was engaged in
fascinating the pretty and accomplished wife of Lamia Æmilianus, and
refused. Titus, on his accession, associated him in the government, and
his first act was to separate his mistress from her husband, and marry
her.
Domitia’s triumph was quickly tempered with mortification. Julia
married her cousin Sabinus, and, out of pique or devilry, Domitian
now discovered her charm and seduced her. To such a pair as these the
attainment of supreme power meant an occasion of Imperial license, and
sober Romans saw their community rapidly lose the ground that had been
won in the previous reigns. It was even rumoured that Domitian had
hastened his brother’s death by putting him in a box of snow during
his last illness, though this remains no more than an idle rumour.
At all events, Domitia soon discovered the despicable character for
whom--or for whose prospects--she had abandoned her saner husband.
While the affairs of the Empire needed his most strenuous attention,
he would spend hours catching flies and spitting them with a bodkin;
and from the spitting of flies he presently passed to the larger
sport of murdering men. He conducted his little frontier-wars from
safe and luxurious quarters, and came home to enjoy a triumph and
erect a colossal bronze memorial of his valour. He banished eunuchs
from Rome, and kept them in his palace; waged war against vice in
all forms, and practised it in all forms. In the general relaxation
of Roman manners even the Vestal Virgins had been for some decades
permitted an alleviation of their onerous vows. Domitian posed as
a moralist, on no other apparent ground than that he was closely
acquainted with every shade of immorality, and drastically punished
them. He raised fine public buildings, and depleted the public treasury
by reckless expenditure and incompetent administration; prosecuted
officials for extortion, and put men to death for their wealth; gave
brilliant entertainments, and darkened the city and the Empire with his
sanguinary brooding.
If we were to accept Josephus’s estimate of the virtue of Domitia, we
should conceive her as living in melancholy isolation in the gloomy
palace, an outraged spectator of her husband’s relations with Julia.
But there is good evidence that she sought relief with something of
the freedom of a Messalina. An authentic occurrence in the third year
of Domitian’s reign puts her guilt beyond question. He had the actor
Paris murdered in the street, and divorced Domitia. The people boldly
sympathized with her, and covered with flowers the spot on which Paris
had been killed. The Emperor had a number of them executed, but public
feeling seems to have been expressed so strongly that he was forced to
recall Domitia to the palace, and the sordid comedy ran on amid the
jeers of Rome. A poet was put to death for making it the theme of his
verse; Domitia’s former husband and others were executed for their
freedom of speech. Then the beautiful and captivating Julia perished
miserably in an attempt of Domitian’s to destroy the too obvious proof
of their incest, and he became more sombre than ever.
This is not the place to tell the long and dreary story of the reign
of Domitian, of which, for twelve further years, the Empress remains
an inconspicuous, and perhaps a sobered, spectator. For a few years he
maintained his singular and obscure mixture of good and evil, but the
brighter features of his administration gradually faded, and a horrible
gloom settled on the palace and the city. Hosts of spies and informers
sprang up; large numbers of nobles, of both sexes, were executed or
banished, on the slightest suspicion, and their wealth divided between
the informers and the Emperor’s shrinking treasury. So great was his
dread of assassination that he lined the portico at the palace, in
which he used to walk, with white glazed tiles that would reflect the
approach of any person behind him. But an extraordinary incident that
Dio relates will suffice to give some idea of the reign of terror under
which the Empress and all Rome suffered.
A number of the leading citizens of Rome were summoned to a banquet
at the palace at a late hour of the night. They were frozen with
horror when they found that the entire dining-room--walls, ceiling,
and floor--was draped in black, and a miniature tombstone, with his
name engraved on it, was placed opposite each guest. As they gazed, a
number of nude boys, whose bodies were washed with ink, burst into the
room and danced amongst them, and then the dishes of a funeral banquet
were served. The guests sat silent and shivering; the Emperor grimly
discoursed to them of deaths and executions. When the banquet was over,
they were relieved to find themselves dismissed. They found, however,
that their litters had been sent away, and they were put into strange
vehicles, with strange servants. The gloomy journey ended at their own
houses, and they were beginning to breathe, when they were thrown into
fresh alarm by the news that a messenger had come from the palace. The
messenger to each guest was one of the dancing boys, now cleaned,
perfumed, and clothed with flowers, bearing the gold and silver vessels
which the guest had used at the banquet. The boys and the dishes were
presented to them with the Emperor’s greeting.
Unhappily, Domitian did not confine himself to intimidation. The
heads of the wealthier nobles fell in quick succession, and, in great
secrecy, amid an army of spies, the Empress and a few others came to an
understanding. The story of the actual fall of the tyrant has clearly
been embroidered with a good deal of unauthentic detail in popular
gossip, but even in its most sober version it does not lack romance.
The version which Dio assures us he “had heard” is one that the
conscientious historian must hesitate to accept. The Emperor, he says,
had been informed of the conspiracy, and had drawn up a list of those
who were to be executed for taking part in it. He put the list under
his pillow, with the sword which he always kept there, and went to
sleep. We have previously seen something of the bejewelled boys who
used to run with great freedom about the palaces of the Romans of the
first century. Domitian, the great censor of other people’s vices, had
a number of them, and the legend is that one of them, playing in his
bedroom, noticed the parchment under his pillow, and took it out into
the palace. Domitia met the boy, and idly glanced at the parchment.
She saw her own name at the head of the list of the condemned, and at
once summoned the other conspirators. They entered the Emperor’s room,
snatched the sword from under his pillow, and despatched him.
Pretty as the story is, we must prefer the more prosaic account given
us by Suetonius, who lived in the next generation. Domitia felt that
the Emperor had at last conceived a design on her life, and she sent
her steward to despatch him. He offered Domitian a fictitious report
of a plot, and stabbed him while he read it. Other servants rushed in
at the signal, and completed the assassination. It is the one action
that historians have recorded to the honour of the twelfth Empress of
Rome, and we leave her company with little regret. She was an ordinary
woman of the patrician world at the time--fair, frail, accomplished,
and luxurious. With the death of her husband she merges in the
indistinguishable crowd of selfish and wayward ladies on whom Juvenal
was then beginning to pour his exaggerated rhetoric.
It remains to describe very briefly how the sceptre passes into the
nobler hands of the Stoic Emperors and their wives. The throne was
offered to, and accepted by, M. Cocceius Nerva, an aged noble of known
moderation and long public service. He at once removed all traces of
the hateful reign of his predecessor, and entered upon a sober and
useful administration of the Empire. He was in the later sixties of
his age, and we find no mention of a wife. But the task of enforcing
sobriety on so corrupted a population was too great for his age and
moderate ability. A conspiracy against him was discovered. He disarmed
the conspirators by inviting them to sit by him in the theatre, and
even putting a sword in their hands and asking them what they thought
of its keenness; but he saw that a stronger man was needed, and he
chose as his colleague Marcus Ulpius Nerva Trajanus, a Spaniard of
great military ability and commanding personality, who was then at the
head of the troops in Germany. Nerva died soon afterwards, and, with
the accession of Trajan, we come to the thirteenth Empress of Rome and
the commencement of a new and more splendid chapter in the story of the
Empire.