_PRINCE BRITANNICUS._
‘We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.’
SHAKESPEARE, _The Winter’s Tale_, i. 2.
There were few youths in Rome more deserving of pity than the
son of Claudius. Britannicus saw himself not only superseded, but
deliberately neglected and thrust into the background. The intrigues
of his stepmother had succeeded, and he, the true heir to the Empire,
was a cipher in the Palace of the Cæsars. The suite of apartments
assigned to his use and that of his immediate attendants was in one
of the least frequented parts of the Palace. He often heard from the
banquet hall and reception rooms, as he passed by them unnoticed, the
sounds of revelry, in which he was only allowed on rare occasions to
participate. Agrippina, in her varying moods, treated him sometimes
with studied coolness and insulting patronage, sometimes with a sort
of burning and maudlin affection, as though she were touched by the
furies of remorse. The latter mood was more intolerable to him than
the former. Sometimes, when she strained him to her steely heart,
he felt as if he could have thrust her from him with loathing, and
he made his relations with her more difficult because he was too
little of an actor to conceal his dislike. Nero usually met him with
sneering banter, but he, too, at times, seemed as though he would
like to be treated by him with at least the semblance of brotherly
cordiality. He found his chief comfort in the society of Octavia. She
was, nominally, the Empress, and Nero, though he shunned her to the
utmost of his power, had not yet dared to rob her of the dignities
which surrounded her exalted rank. It was in the company of his
sister that Britannicus spent his happiest hours. Octavia, as often
as she dared, invited him to be present on festive occasions, and in
her apartments he could find refuge for a time from the most detested
of the spies with whom his stepmother had surrounded him from his
early boyhood.
There was but one person about him whom he really trusted and loved.
It was the centurion Pudens, who, being one of the imperial guard
called _excubitores_, was often stationed at one point or other of
the Palace. So vast was the interior of that pile of architecture,
so intricate its structure, owing to the numerous additions which had
been made to it by each succeeding Emperor, that for a boy bent, as
Britannicus was, on occasionally eluding the intolerable watchfulness
of his nominal slaves, it was not difficult to conceal his movements.
Happily, too, he had one boyish friend whom he loved, and who loved
him, with entire affection. It was Titus, the elder son of Vespasian.
Even as a boy he gave promise of the fine moral qualities by which
he was afterwards distinguished. His father was a soldier who had
risen by merit to high command, and had even been Consul; but his
grandfather was only a humble provincial, and, as his family was
poor, he little dreamed that he too was destined to the purple of
which his friend had been deprived. He was only a month or two older
than Britannicus. They shared the same studies and the same games,
and there was something contagious in his healthy vigour and
imperturbable good humour. It was at least some alleviation to the
sorrows of the younger boy that this manly and virtuous lad, with
his short curly hair and athletic frame, was always ready to exert
himself to brighten his loneliness and divert his thoughts. Painters
might have called the features of Titus plebeian, but in his eyes and
mouth there was an expression of honesty and sweetness which endeared
him to the heart of the lonely prince, who admired him far more than
any of the boys in the noblest families.
The political insignificance of the Flavian family had been one
reason why Agrippina had chosen Titus as a companion for the son of
Claudius, instead of some scion of the old aristocracy of Rome. It
was well for Britannicus that his fellow-pupil came of a race purer
and simpler than that of the youthful patricians.
The two boys had been educated together for some years; and Titus,
when he became Emperor, still retained a fond affection for the
companion of his youth, to whom he erected an equestrian statue.
There was a story, known to very few, which might have endangered the
life of Titus, had it been divulged. One day, when the two boys were
learning their lessons together, Narcissus had brought in one of the
foreign physiognomists who were known as _metoposcopi_, to look at
them from behind a curtain. The man did not know who they were; he
only knew that they were in some way connected with the Palace. After
carefully studying their faces, he said that the elder of the two,
Titus, should certainly become Emperor, but the younger as certainly
should not. At that time Britannicus was heir to the throne.
Narcissus was superstitious, and his heart misgave him; but he
derived some comfort from the absurd improbability of a prophecy
that a boy who had been born in so humble a house, and was only the
descendant of a Cisalpine haymaker, should ever wear the purple of
the Cæsars. He was too kind-hearted to let the anecdote be generally
known, for even as a boy Titus was liked by every one, if he was not
yet ‘the darling of the human race.’
One day, as Titus went across the viridarium, or chief green court
of the Palace, he saw a little slave-boy struggling hard to repress
his sobs. His kindly nature was touched by the sight. He had not
been trained in the school of those haughty youths who thought it a
degradation to speak to their slaves; his father, Vespasian, being
himself of lowly origin, held, with Seneca, that slaves, after all,
were men, and might become dear and faithful friends.
‘What is your name, and why do you weep, my little man?’ asked Titus.
‘They call me Epictetus,’ said the child; ‘and I am the slave of
Epaphroditus, the Emperor’s secretary. I fell and hurt my leg very
badly against the marble rim of the fountain. Don’t be angry with me.
I will bear the pain.’[15]
‘A born Stoic!’ said Titus, smiling. ‘But what is the matter with
your leg?’
‘I will tell you, sir,’ answered Epictetus. ‘Being deformed and
useless, as you see, my master thought that he might turn me to some
account by having me taught philosophy, and he made me _capsarius_[16]
to his son, who attends the lectures of Musonius Rufus. Musonius, who
is kind and good, let me sit in a corner and listen. I am not a Stoic
yet, but I shall try to be one some day.’
‘But even now you have not told me how you came to be lame.’
The young slave blushed. ‘Eight weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I was walking
past the door of the triclinium, when a slave came out with some
crystal vases on a tray. He ran against me, and one of the vases fell
and was broken. He charged me with having broken it, and Epaphroditus
ordered my leg to be twisted. It hurt me terribly, but Musonius had
taught me to endure, and I only cried out, “If you go on, you will
break my leg.” He went on, and broke it. I did not give way then,
and I am ashamed that you saw me crying now.’
‘Poor lad! Come with me to Prince Britannicus and tell him that
story. He is kind, and will pity you, and perhaps get the Empress
Octavia to do something for you.’
Epictetus limped after Titus, and Britannicus was pleased with the
slave-boy’s quaint fortitude and the preternatural gravity of his
face. He often sat on the floor while the two friends talked or
played at draughts, and would sometimes retail to them what he had
heard in the lectures of Musonius. They laughed at his _naïveté_, but
something of the teaching stuck. The Stoicism of Titus had its germ
in those boyish days.
One other friend, strange to say, Britannicus had near at hand,
though she could not openly have much conversation with him. It
was the fair freedwoman Acte. Her situation in the Palace did
not argue in her a depraved mind. She had not been trained in an
atmosphere which made her suppose that there was anything sinful in
her relations with the Emperor. Brought from Asia in early youth, she
was practically no more than a slave, though she had been emancipated
by Claudius. The will of a master, even if that master was far below
an Emperor, was regarded as a necessary law.[17] But Acte had a good
heart, and so far from being puffed up by the ardent affection of
Nero, her one desire was to use her influence for the benefit of
others. For Britannicus she felt the deepest pity. She had even
aroused the anger of her lover by pleading in his behalf, and though
it was impossible that she should do more than interchange with him
an occasional salutation, the boy gratefully recognised that Acte did
her best to gain for him every indulgence and relaxation in her power.
Britannicus had inherited some of his father’s fondness for history.
He was never happier than when Titus told him some of the stories
which he had heard from Vespasian about his campaigns in Britain.
He had even persuaded Pudens to go with him to visit the old British
chief, Caractacus--or, to give him his right name, Caradoc--who
had kept the Romans at bay for nine years, until he was betrayed
to them by the treacherous Queen Cartismandua. And much had come of
this visit; for there Pudens saw for the first time the daughter of
Caradoc, the yellow-haired British princess Claudia, and had fallen
deeply in love with her. The grey King of the Silures, whose manly
eloquence had moved the admiration of Claudius on the day when he
had been led along in triumph, was eating away his heart in a strange
land. He rejoiced to see the son of the Emperor who had spared his
life, and he delighted the boy’s imagination with many a tale of the
Druids, and Mona, and the wild Silurian hills and the vast rushing
rivers, and the hunting of the wolf and the wild-boar in the marshes
and forests of Caer Leon and Caer Went. While Caractacus was telling
these stories there was ample opportunity for Pudens to improve his
acquaintance with the fair Claudia, who talked to him with a yearning
heart of her home on the silver Severn, which Pudens had once visited
as a very young soldier.
These interviews made Britannicus eager to form the acquaintance
of Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of the southern part of that far
island. Plautius stood well at Court, and had been greatly honoured
by Claudius, who had condescended to walk by his side in the ovation
which rewarded the successful campaigns of four years. Britannicus
gained easy permission to visit the old general, and at his house
he met his wife, Pomponia Græcina.
This lady was regarded at Rome as a paragon of faithful friendship.
She had been deeply attached in early youth to her royal kinswoman
Julia, the granddaughter of Tiberius. Julia had been one of the
victims of the cruelty of Messalina, and from the day of her
execution, for forty years, Pomponia never appeared but in mourning
garments, and it was said, though without truth, that she never
wore a smile upon her face.
But though she smiled but rarely, the beauty of Pomponia was
exquisite from her look of serenity and contentment. She was unlike
the other ladies of Roman society. She never tinged her face with
walnut juice, or painted it with rouge and cerussa, or reared her
tresses into an elaborate edifice of curls, or sprinkled them with
gold dust, or breathed of Assyrian odours. Her life and her dress
were exquisitely simple. She wore no ornaments, or few. She rarely
appeared at any banquet, and then only with her husband at the houses
of the graver and more virtuous senators. Vice was involuntarily
abashed at her presence. The talk which Roman matrons sometimes
did not blush to hear was felt to be impossible where Pomponia was
present, nor would any one have dreamed of introducing loose gymnasts
or Gaditanian dancers as the amusement of any guests of whom she was
one. Hence she was more and more neglected by the jewelled dandies
and divorced ladies, who fluttered amid the follies of a heartless
aristocracy, and gradually the gossiping pleasure-hunters of
Rome came to hate her because her whole life was a rebuke of
the degradation of a corrupt society.
Hatred soon took the form of whispered accusations. The suspicion
was first broached by Calvia Crispinilla, a lady whose notoriously
evil character elevated her high in the confidence of Nero, and who,
in spite of her rank, was afterwards proud of the infamy of being
appointed keeper of the wardrobe of his favourite Sporus.
Talking one day to Ælia Petina, a divorced wife of Claudius and
mother of his daughter Antonia, she expressed her dislike of
Pomponia, and said, ‘It is impossible that any worshipper of our
gods should live a life so austere as Pomponia’s. Hark, in your ears,
Petina. She must be’--and sinking her voice to a tragic whisper she
said--‘she must be a secret Christian.’
‘Well,’ said Petina, ‘what does it matter? Nero himself worships the
Syrian goddess, and they say that the lovely Poppæa Sabina, the wife
of Otho, is a Jewess.’
‘A Jewess! oh, that is comparatively respectable,’ said Crispinilla.
‘Why, Berenice, the charming sister--ahem! the very deeply attached
sister--of Agrippa, you know, is a Jewess; and what diamonds that
woman has! But a Christian! Why, the very word has a taint of
vulgarity about it, and leaves a bad flavour in the mouth! None but
unspeakable slaves and cobblers and Phrygian runaways belong to those
worshippers of the god Onokoites and the head of an ass.’[18]
What malice had invented as a calumny happened in this instance to
be a truth. Pomponia was indeed a secret Christian. The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and none can tell whence it cometh or whither
it goeth. She had accompanied her husband when he had been sent
to subdue Britain, and had known the agonies of long and intensely
anxious separation from him, and during those periods of trial she
had been compelled to be much alone, and part of the time she had
spent in Gaul. Persis, her confidential handmaid, had met one of
the early missionaries of the faith, had heard his message, had been
converted. Accident had revealed the fact to the noble Roman lady;
and as she talked with Persis in many a long and lonely hour, her
heart too had been touched by grace, and a life always pure had now
become the life of a saint of God.
Plautius was glad to notice the manly interest taken by Britannicus
in the country from which his name had been derived, and in martial
achievements rather than in the debasing effeminacies of the Roman
nobles. He always welcomed the boy’s presence, and introduced him
to the kind hospitalities of his wife. Both parents were glad that
a scion of the Cæsars who seemed to show the old Roman virtues of
modesty and manliness should be a frequent companion of their own
son, the young Aulus. To Pomponia the son of Claudius felt strongly
drawn. She was wholly unlike any type of woman he had ever seen;
she seemed to be separated by whole worlds of difference from such
ladies as his own mother, Messalina, or his stepmother, Agrippina;
and though she only dressed in simple and sombre garments, yet the
peace and sweetness which breathed from her countenance made her more
lovely in his eyes than the great wives of Consuls and senators whom
he had so often seen sweeping through gilded chambers on the Palatine
in their gleaming and gold-embroidered robes. He noticed, too, that
his sister, the Empress Octavia, never visited her without coming
home in a happier and more contented mood.
One day, being more than ever filled with admiration for her
goodness, he had spoken to her freely of all his bitter trials, of
all his terrible misgivings. She had impressed on him the duties of
resignation and forgiveness; and had tried to show him that in a mind
conscious of integrity he might have a possession better and more
abiding than if he sat amid numberless temptations to baseness on an
uneasy throne.
‘You speak,’ he said, ‘like Musonius Rufus; for the young Phrygian
slave, Epictetus, whom Titus took compassion on and sometimes brings
to our rooms, has told me much about his Stoic lectures. But there is
something--I know not what--in your advice which is higher and more
cheerful than in his.’
Pomponia smiled. ‘Much that Musonius teaches is true and beautiful,’
she said; ‘but there is a diviner truth in the world than his.’
Britannicus was silent for a moment, and then, hesitatingly and with
reluctance, he said, ‘Will you forgive me, noble Pomponia, if I ask
you a question?’
The pale countenance of the lady grew a shade paler, and she replied,
‘You might ask me what I should not think it right to answer.’
‘You know,’ said the boy, ‘that at banquets and other gatherings I
cannot help hearing the gossip and scandal which they talk all the
day long. And all the worst ladies--persons like Crispinilla and
Petina and Silana--seem to hate you, I know not why; and they said
that you would be accused some day of holding a foreign superstition.’
Pomponia clasped her hands, and uttered a few words which Britannicus
could not hear. Then, turning to him, she said, ‘Perhaps Musonius has
quoted those lines of Cleanthes, “Lead me, O Father of the world. I
will follow thee, even though I weep.”[19] We can never prevent the
wicked from accusing us, but we can always give the lie to their
accusations by innocent lives.’
‘What they said besides, _must_ have been an absurd and wicked lie,’
continued Britannicus. ‘They said’--and here he made the sign of
averting an evil omen which has been prevalent in Italy from the
earliest days--‘that--you--were--dare I speak the vulgar word?--a
Christian.’
‘And what do you know about the Christians, Britannicus?’
‘In truth I know very little, for I am not allowed to go about much;
but Titus, who hears more than I do, tells me that they meet at
night, and kill a babe, and drink its blood; and bind themselves by
horrid oaths; and tie dogs to the lamp-stands, and hark them on to
throw over the lamps, and are afterwards guilty of dreadful orgies.
And they worship an ass’s head.’
‘What makes you believe that slanderous nonsense?’
‘Why, Titus is fond of scratching his name on the wall, and when we
were going out of the pædagogium in the House of Gelotius, which,
you know, is now used as a training school for the pages, he scrawled
_Titus Flavius Vespasianus leaves the pædagogium_, and then drew a
little sketch of a donkey, and underneath it _Toil, little ass, as I
have done, and it will do you good_. I laughed at him for scribbling
on the wall, and to make fun of him I wrote underneath--
‘“I wonder, oh wall, that your stones do not fall,
Bescribbled all o’er with the nonsense of all.”
And I told him that I should put up a notice like that at the Portus
Portuensis, which begs boys and idlers not to scarify (_scarificare_)
the walls. But while I was writing the lines, I caught sight of an
odd picture which some one had scratched there. It was a figure with
an ass’s head on a cross, and underneath it “Alexamenos adores God.”
I asked Titus what it meant, and suggested that it was a satire on
the worship of the Egyptian Anubis. But Titus said, “No! that is
intended to annoy the Christians.”’[20]
‘Well, Britannicus,’ said Pomponia, ‘I know something more about
these poor Christians than that. All these are lies. I dare say you
have read, or Sosibius has read to you, some of the writings of
Seneca?’
‘No,’ said Britannicus, reddening. ‘Seneca is my brother Nero’s
tutor. It is he, and Agrippina, and Pallas, who have done away with
the will of my father, Claudius. I don’t care to hear anything he
says. He is not a true philosopher, like Musonius or Cornutus. He
only writes fine things which he does not believe.’
‘A man may write very true things, Prince,’ said Pomponia, ‘yet not
live up to them. I have here some of his letters, which his friend
Lucilius has shown me. Let me read you a few passages.’
She took down the scroll of purple vellum, on which she had copied
some of the letters, and, unrolling it, read a sentence here and
there:--
‘“_God is near you, is with you, is within you. A sacred spirit
dwells within us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and our
good; there is no good man without God._”
‘“_What advantage is it that anything is hidden from man? Nothing is
closed to God._”
‘“_Even from a corner it is possible to spring up into heaven. Rise,
therefore, and form thyself into a fashion worthy of God._”
‘“_Do you wish to render the gods propitious? Be virtuous; to honour
them it is enough to imitate them._”
‘“_You must live for another, if you wish to live for yourself._”
‘“_In every good man, God dwells._”[21]
‘I could read you many more thoughts like these from Seneca’s
letters. Are they not true and beautiful?’
‘I wish his own acts were as true and beautiful,’ answered
Britannicus. ‘But what has this to do with the Christians?’
‘This: every one of those thoughts, and many much deeper, are
commonplaces among Christians; but the difference between them and
the worshippers of the gods is that they possess other truths which
make these _real_. They alone are innocent.’
‘And they do not worship an ass’s head? Well, at any rate, Christus
or Chrestus, whom they do worship, was crucified in Palestine by
Pontius Pilatus.’
‘And does suffering prevent a man from being divine? All Romans
worship Hercules, yet they believe, or profess to believe, that he
was burnt alive on Œta.’
Britannicus was silent, for he had always thought it a colossal
insanity on the part of the Christians to worship one who had been
crucified like a slave.
‘Tell me,’ said Pomponia, ‘when Epictetus reads you his notes of the
lectures of Musonius, does not the name of Socrates sometimes occur
in them?’
‘Yes,’ said the young prince; ‘it occurs constantly. Musonius talked
of Socrates as a perfect pattern, and all but divine.’
‘And how did Socrates die?’
‘He was poisoned by the Athenians with hemlock in their common
prison.’
‘As a malefactor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it, then, prove him to be worthless that he, too, died the
death of a felon? And are all philosophers fools for extending so
much reverence to a poisoned criminal?’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Britannicus.
‘And are all the other stories about these Christians lies?’ he asked
after a pause.
‘They are,’ said Pomponia. ‘Some day, perhaps, you shall judge for
your own self.’