_MOTHER AND SON_
‘Asper et immitis, breviter vis omnia dicam?
Dispeream si te mater amare potest.’
SUETON. _Tib._ 59.
Nero was now firmly seated on the throne of the Empire. Its cares sat
lightly on him. The government went on admirably without him. He had
nothing to do but to glut himself with enjoyments, and to make what
he could of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.
At first, like one dazed with a sudden outburst of light, he had been
unable to understand the immensity of his own power. For the first
month of his reign he could hardly realise that he was more than
a boy. He had always been passionately fond of chariot races, which
as a boy he had not been permitted to frequent. One day, while
at his lessons, he had been deploring to his companions the fate
of a charioteer of the green faction who had been thrown out of
his chariot and dragged to death by his own horses. His master,
overhearing the conversation, reproved him, and the boy, with a
clever and ready lie, said, ‘I was only talking about Hector being
dragged round the walls of Troy by Achilles.’ And now he might watch
the races all day long and plunge into the hottest rivalry of the
factions, and neither in this pursuit nor in any other was there a
single human being to say him nay.
The only thing which troubled him was the jealous interference of
his mother. Agrippina still clutched with desperate tenacity at the
vanishing fruits of the ambition for the sake of which all her crimes
had been committed. She had sold her soul, and was beating back the
conviction that she had sold it for nought. How could that slight boy
of seventeen, whom as a child she had so often chastised with her own
hand, dream of resisting her? Was not her nature, compared with his,
as adamant to clay? She had been a princess of the blood from infancy,
surrounded by near relatives who had been adored in life and deified
after death; she had enjoyed power during two reigns, and now at last
she had fancied that she would control the Empire for the remainder
of her life. Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia?
Was not her indomitable purpose even more intense? She forgot that
Livia had been, what Caligula called her, _Ulysses stolatus_, ‘a
Ulysses in petticoats,’ a woman with absolute control over her own
emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of a wild passion
which ruined her caution and precipitated her end.
And she forgot, more fatally, the total collapse of all Livia’s
soaring ambitions. Livia had procured the death of prince after
prince who stood between her son Tiberius and the throne. Tiberius
did indeed become Emperor, but ‘had Zimri peace who slew his master’?
Pliny calls Tiberius ‘confessedly the gloomiest of men.’ He himself
wrote to the Senate that he felt himself daily destroyed by all the
gods and goddesses. And, after all, his only son died, and he was
succeeded by Caligula, the bad and brutal son of the hated and
murdered Germanicus and the hated and murdered Agrippina the elder.
He might have said with the bloodstained usurper of our great
tragedy:--
‘Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe;
Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding.’
Was it likely to be otherwise with her son Nero?
Nero--slight boy as she thought him--had hardly been seated on the
throne when he began to slip out of her control. Pallas, her secret
lover, her chief supporter, was speedily ejected and disgraced.
Seneca and Burrus were both opposed to her influence, and neither
of them dreaded her vengeance. Suitors for favours were more anxious
to secure the intercession of Acte than hers. Nero, surrounded by
dissolute young aristocrats, and also by adventurers, buffoons and
parasites, was daily showing himself more indifferent to her threats,
her commands, even her reasonable wishes. He liked to parade his
new-born freedom. She felt sure that among the circle of his familiar
companions, she and her pretensions were turned into ridicule. Her
proud cheek flushed even in solitude to think that she, who, for
Nero’s sake, had dared all, should have been superseded in her
influence by such curled and jewelled weaklings as Otho, and ousted
from her son’s affections by a meek freedwoman like Acte. How
terribly had she miscalculated! In the reign of Claudius she had
been the mightiest person in the Court and in the State. Had she
become the murderess of her husband only to transfer from herself
into the hands of men whom she despised too much to hate, the power
which was once her own? Had she flung away the substance and only
grasped a flickering shadow?
A thousand plans of revenge crossed her mind, only to be rejected.
The die was cast. The deeds done were irrevocable. It only remained
for her to dree the judgment for her crimes, and to take such few
steps as still were possible to her along the precipice’s edge.
She had plucked a tempting fruit, and she found that its taste was
poison; she had nursed a serpent in her bosom, and its sting was
death.
But she would not resign her power without at least one mad struggle
to retain it. She still had access to the Emperor whenever she
desired, and many a wild scene had occurred between the mother
and the son. In such interviews she let her tongue run riot. She
refrained from nothing. She no longer attempted to conceal from him
that Claudius had died by her hand. She wrapped the youth round in
the whirlwind of her sulphurous passion; she raised her voice so
loud in a storm of reproaches and recriminations that sometimes
even the freedmen and soldiers outside the imperial apartments heard
the fierce voices of altercation, and were in doubt whether they
should not rush in and interfere. And often the feeble nature of
Nero cowered before her menaces as she poured on him a flood of
undisguised contempt. Sometimes she wrapped him in a storm of satire
and sarcasm. She upbraided him with his unmanliness; she contrasted
him unfavourably with Britannicus; she told him that he was more
fit to be an actor of melodrama, or a tenth-rate charioteer, or a
fiftieth-rate singer, than to be the Emperor of Rome.
‘To think,’ she said, raising her voice almost to a scream, as he sat
before her in sullen silence--‘to think that the blood of the Domitii
and of the Neros and of the Cæsars is in your veins! You an emperor!
Yes; an emperor of pantomime! You have nothing of the Roman, much
less of the ruler, nay, not even of the man, in you. Who made you
Emperor? Who but I?’
‘I wish you had left me alone, then,’ he answered, desperately. ‘It
is no such pleasure to be Emperor with you to spy on me and domineer
over me.’
‘Spy on you? Domineer over you? Ungrateful! Infamous! You, who
have made a slave-girl the rival of your mother! Let me tell you,
Ahenobarbus, that I at least am the daughter of Germanicus, though
you are wholly unworthy to be his grandson. Whence did you get your
pale and feeble blood? Not from me, coward and weakling as you are;
not from your father Domitius, who, if he was cruel, was at least a
man! He would not have chosen such creatures as Otho and Senecio for
his friends. He had a man’s taste and a man’s ambition. He would have
blushed to be father of a singing and painting girl like you! But
beware! You are an _agrippa_; you were born feet-foremost--a certain
augury of future misery.’[36]
Stung to the quick by these reproaches, trembling with impotent
anger to hear his effeminate vanity--to which his comrades burnt
daily incense--thus ruthlessly insulted, and angry, above all, that
his mother dared to pour contempt on his cherished accomplishments,
Nero’s timid nature at last turned in self-defence.
‘I am Emperor now, at any rate,’ he said; ‘and ere now the wives and
sisters, if not the mothers, of the Cæsars have had to cool their
rage on the rocks of Gyara or Pontia!’
‘You dare to threaten me?’ she cried. ‘_You_ to threaten _me_; me,
your mother; me, who have toiled and schemed, aye, and committed
crimes for you, from a child; me, whose womb bare you, whose hand
has often beaten you; me, to whom you owe it that you are not at this
moment a disgraced and penniless boy!’
‘You call me an actor. Are not you more than half an actress?’ he
said, in a sneering tone.
Agrippina sprang from her seat in a burst of passion.
‘Oh, if there be gods!’ she exclaimed, uplifting her hands, ‘let them
hear me! Infernal Furies at least there are, for I have felt them!
Oh! may they avenge on you my wrongs!’
Nero cared but little for the curse. He was not superstitious. He
thought how Senecio and Petronius would laugh at the notion of there
being real Furies or subterranean gods!
‘You know more of the Furies than I do, then,’ he said, in a mocking
tone. ‘Besides, I have an amulet. Look at this!’
He handed to her the _icuncula puellaris_--the wooden doll which
had been given him in the streets, with the mysterious promise that
it would prove to be a charm against every malignant influence. He
honoured it as Louis XI. did the little leaden saint which he wore
in his hat when he had ceased to honour anything else. She glanced at
it with utter scorn; then, to his horror, flung it on the ground and
spurned it away.
‘And you are Pontifex Maximus!’ she said, concentrating into the
words a world of unmitigated scorn.
Nero was silent, but his look was so dark that, fearing lest she
should have gone too far, she said in calmer tones, ‘You have a
better amulet than that paltry image, and one which your mother gave
you. But your follies render it unavailing.’
She pointed to a golden armlet, in which was set the skin of a
serpent, which he wore on his right arm. The serpent had been found
gliding in his room near his cradle; or, perhaps, according to
another story, its cast-off skin had been found beside his pillow.
Many legends had sprung up about it. The populace believed that it
was a sacred spirit which had protected him, and had driven from his
infant cradle the murderers sent by Messalina to destroy him. But,
while Nero was yet a child, Agrippina had had the skin of the serpent
curiously set in a jewelled armlet of great value, with rubies for
its eyes, and emeralds marking the traces of its scales, and had
clasped it on Nero’s arm, and bidden him to wear it forever. And as
his life advanced in golden prosperity she had come to believe, or
to half believe, that there was some mysterious charm about it--for
a mind may be atheistical and yet profoundly superstitious.
But as she gazed at it with a sort of fascination, she was seized
by one of the violent reactions of feeling which often sweeps over
a mind untrained in the control of its passions. It brought before
her the image of a little boy, whose sweet and sunny face looked
the picture of engaging innocence; whose golden hair, when it caught
the sunlight, shone like an aureole round his head; whose blue eyes
danced with childish glee at the sight of what was beautiful; to whom
his mother was all in all; who had often flung his arms round her
neck, in joy and in sorrow, with the fondness of a loving child. That
child stood before her--through her crimes Emperor of Rome. He stood
there, hateful and hating her--on his lips the flickering smile of
mockery; on his once bright forehead the scowl of anger. Yet whom
had she in all the world besides? Her father had been murdered; her
mother murdered; three of her brothers murdered; her sisters were
dead, and had died in shame; her first husband dead; two others of
her husbands poisoned--and by her; her lovers dead, or banished far
away. She knew that a chaos of hatred yawned wide and deep around
her; she knew that in all the wide world no single person, except
possibly one or two of her freedmen, cared for her. In her agony,
in her loneliness, she had tried of late to win something like
forgiveness, something like tolerance, if not affection, from the
deeply injured Britannicus and Octavia. She pitied the sorrows and
wrongs which she had herself inflicted on them. She had even learnt
to admire some gracious quality in them both, for which she could
find no name. But, alas! she soon found that, while they were perfect
in courtesy, they could never love her. The life, the affection of
her son was the sole thing left her; and he was turning against her
with a feeling akin to loathing stamped upon his face.
All these thoughts rushed over her mind like a tornado. Unable to
bear them, she ended the interview by a passion of uncontrollable
weeping. And, as she wept, she held out her appealing arms to her
son, and wailed:
‘Oh, Nero, forgive my wild words. Whom have we but one another? In
this drowning sea must we not sink or rise together? My son! my son!
your mother pleads with you. Forgive me--kiss me; let Agrippina feel
once more that she has the love of the son for whose sole sake she
has lived--for whom she would gladly die!’
A noble nature would have been moved by the tragic appeal of so
proud a mother; but the nature of Nero, essentially mean, had become
constantly meaner. He trembled before those who confronted him with
boldness; but he triumphed over all who showed that they feared
him. He wanted to feel perfectly independent. The only person whose
power he feared was his mother. And here was this all-dreaded mother
pleading with him, at whose lightest look he had been accustomed for
years to tremble! He was not in the least moved; he only intended
to secure the ascendency of which, in that struggle, he had won the
first step.
‘You curse me,’ he said, ‘one moment, and the next you are all tears
and entreaties. Do you think that it is only _your_ amulet that keeps
me from your Furies? You have dishonoured my image; see how much I
care for your amulet. I will never wear it again.’
He unclasped the armlet from his wrist, and flung it to the other end
of the room.
‘There!’ he said. ‘_You_ may have it; I have done with it!’ And
with these words he turned his back upon her, and went out without
a farewell.
It seemed a small matter, and what else could she expect from such a
being as her son--a youth soft without tenderness, caressing without
affection, cruel without courage?
She stood and looked towards the curtain through which he had
disappeared. She stood with gleaming eyes and dilated nostrils, and
firm-set lips. Every tear was dried up in her burning glance, as she
outstretched her clenched hand and vowed a terrible vengeance.
‘O wronged Britannicus!’ she murmured; ‘O wronged Octavia! cannot I
even now redress your wrongs? Alas! it cannot be. Their first act
would be to avenge the injured manes of Claudius. But does not
Rubellius Plautus live, and Cornelius Sulla? Could I not even yet
brush this mean and thankless actor like an insect from my path--son
though he be--and seat one of them upon the throne of the Cæsars?’
She picked up the armlet with the serpent’s skin. ‘It shall be as he
said,’ she murmured; ‘he shall never wear or see it more.’
When his hour of doom had come, Nero searched for that amulet in vain!