_AGRIPPINA AT BAY_
‘Caritas quæ est inter natos et parentes dirimi nisi
detestabili scelere non potest.’--CIC. _Læl._ viii. § 28.
There were some who thought it an unparalleled tragedy that
Britannicus should not only have died so young, but also at a
banquet, and so suddenly, and by the hand of a bitter enemy, and
under his very eyes. There were few in the Pagan world who realised
the truth that he who needed their shuddering pity was not the boy
who perished, but the youth who murdered him.
At first Nero was alarmed by what he had done. He thought that he
would be haunted by the manes of the wronged Britannicus. He shunned
Octavia, and if he met her was forced to avert his glance. He faced
his mother with shy moroseness. He never dared to sleep alone. The
sound of a shaken leaf terrified him. A thunderstorm, which happened
a few days later, drove him into a paroxysm of terror, during which,
like Gaius before him, he hid himself under a bed, and sent for the
skin of a seal as a fancied protection against the flame of heaven.
But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God. The doom
was past, but the punishment deferred. The most terrible part of his
retribution was that he was let alone to fill to the brim the cup
of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the punishment of sin, and the
avenging scourge was put into the hand of his own vices. The first
fearful crime which he had committed ought to have lit up his dark
conscience with its fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for
a moment, but only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense
was hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into
the execration of mankind.
What helped him to this rapid obduracy was the vileness and hypocrisy
of the world around him.
The death of Britannicus had to be announced to the Senate. The eyes
of Nero had to weep crocodile tears, and the pen of Seneca to be
employed in venal falsities. No one could doubt the hand of Seneca in
the elegant pathos of the sentence which told the Conscript Fathers
that deaths so immature as that of Britannicus were subjects of such
bitter grief that his funeral had been hurried over in accordance
with the ancestral custom which forbade the protraction of anguish
by public oration or funeral obsequies.
‘I have lost the aid of my brother,’ continued the specious oration
which Nero learnt by heart; ‘no hopes are left to me save in the
commonwealth. A prince like myself, who is now the sole survivor of
a family born to the supremest dignity, needs all the love and all
the help of the Senate and the people.’
Even the semblance of sorrow was abandoned almost before the cypress
had been moved from the doors of the Palatine. Nero was anxious to
implicate others as far as possible in the frightful responsibility
which he had himself incurred. Britannicus had left a considerable
heritage in houses, villas, and personal possessions, which
had come to him from his father and mother. Nero, who as yet
had not squandered a treasure which might well have been deemed
inexhaustible, had no need of these things, and was eager to get
rid of them. He therefore distributed them among leading senators,
giving a pleasant villa to Seneca and a town house to Burrus. He
thought that gifts would serve as a sort of hush-money, and both
statesmen felt with inward anguish that they were the price of blood.
Seneca was specially humiliated. He knew what men thought and said
of him in secret, and his own conscience could not accept the facile
excuse that it would have been fatal to refuse a largesse which was
meant to bind his destiny irrevocably with that of the guilty Emperor.
He thanked Nero for his munificence, and acted as if nothing had
happened. Yet the inward voice spoke to him with unmistakable
clearness. He called himself a Stoic: he wrote grand eulogies of
virtue and simplicity. Ought he to have entered the magic circle of
a court steeped in licentiousness and blood? Ought he to have yielded
to the avarice which made his usury so notorious? Would Pætus Thrasea
have accepted gifts intended to screen complicity with murder? Would
such gifts have been offered to the modest poverty of Cornutus or
Musonius? or, if so, would they not have faced exile or death rather
than accept them? Conscience worked so painfully that he could not
induce himself to visit the villa which had been presented to him on
the death of Britannicus. ‘Alas!’ he moaned sadly to himself in the
watches of the night, ‘it is a _viscosum beneficium_,--a kindness
smeared with birdlime.’
But the great mass of the Roman world, lying as it did in wickedness,
was pleased rather than otherwise to hear of the death--which
they all knew to have been the murder--of the son of Claudius. The
horrors of the civil wars were still vivid in many recollections, and
knowing that rival princes rarely lived in concord, they hailed with
satisfaction the bold iniquity which had succeeded in ridding them
of a nightmare of the future. The story of the murder of a young and
innocent prince, the only son of their late deified Emperor, sounded
rather ugly, no doubt; but did not nine-tenths of them expose their
own superfluous children? Had not Claudius himself exposed the infant
of his wife Petina? And what was death? Was it not a dreamless sleep,
which anyone might be glad to exchange for the present state of
things, and which many of them would probably seek by suicide?
And why should Nero trouble himself any more about a death which
scarcely caused so much as a ripple on the bitter and stagnant pool
of Roman society? On the contrary he and all Rome felt a glow of
conscious virtue when, a few days later, an order was given to
execute a knight, named Antonius, as a poisoner, and publicly to burn
his poisons. When Locusta heard that fact she smiled grimly. But what
had she to fear?
There was one breast in which the earthquake of excitement, caused
by the murder of Britannicus, did not soon subside. Octavia, in
the depth of her anguish, had known where to find something of
consolation. Not so Agrippina. To her also Nero had offered presents,
which she refused with disdainful sullenness. Her soul was full of
madness. Was she to be totally defeated by the slight, contemptible
son on whom she had built all her hopes?
Not without a struggle would she abandon the power which it had been
the object of her life to attain, and the fabric of which she had
with her own hand shattered to the dust.
Suddenly as the Nemesis had come upon her, she would not yet admit
herself to be defeated. She was rich; she would be yet richer. She
had friends, and she held many a secret interview with them. Octavia
might still become in her hands an engine for political purposes,
and Agrippina constantly embraced and consoled her. Every tribune
and centurion who attended her levées was received with extreme
graciousness. She paid her court to all the nobles of high birth and
promising ability. She thought that even now it was not too late to
create a conspiracy, and put a fitting leader at the head of it.
But all her efforts were broken like foam on the rock of the
Emperor’s deified autocracy and the unscrupulous wickedness of the
favourites by whom he was surrounded. At the suggestion of Otho and
Tigellinus, Nero dealt blow after blow at the dignity of his mother.
One day she no longer saw the two lictors who attended her litter,
and was told that they had been discharged by the Emperor. Soon
afterwards she missed the accustomed escort of soldiers who guarded
her chambers, and heard with sinking heart that they had been
removed. Worst of all, she was suddenly deprived of the body-guard
of tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired Germans, to whom she had grown
attached, and who were the most splendid outward sign of her imperial
station. And, as though all this were not enough, at last the final
thunderbolt was launched. She received a message from her son that he
had assigned to her, as her residence, the house of his grandmother
Antonia. She was dismissed from the Palace in which so many of her
years had been spent in order that the courtiers who thronged the
audience-hall of the Emperor might have no excuse for paying their
respects at the same time to her.
Her feelings, as she left the chambers of the Palatine for a private
residence, must be imagined rather than described. Her heart was too
dry for tears. She felt humiliated to the very dust, and tasted the
bitterness of a thousand deaths. All hope of re-establishing her
empire over the heart of her son was gone. Thenceforth he scarcely
saw her. If he came to visit her, he came, as though to evidence his
distrust, amid a throng of soldiers and centurions, did not speak
to her in private, and departed after a cold, hurried, and formal
interview.
She felt how poisonous was the fruit of ambition by which she had
been allured. Her power had never been more than the pale reflection
of the imperial despotism, and after her breach with Nero it crumbled
to ashes.
From that moment she felt that the coloured bubble of her life had
burst. Never had she been so wretched. Her exile at Pandataria had
been but brief, and she was then young, and she had many schemes
on hand, and might hope for immeasurable success. But now her last
arrow had sped from the string, and had fallen useless to the ground.
The cold shadow of her son’s displeasure blighted her whole being.
She--in whose honour coins had been struck; in whose name decrees
had run; under whose auspices colonies had been founded; to whom
kings and governors had once made their appeal, and for whose
ambition kingdoms had been too small--suddenly found she was nothing
and nobody. Even such a creature as Calvia Crispinilla had more
influence, and was more sought after than she. The house of Antonia,
in which she lived, was shunned like a lazar-house by all who wished
to stand well with Nero. No one visited her, no one consoled her, no
one helped to dissipate her weariness. The only exceptions were a few
ladies whom she knew too well to trust. They did not come to see her
out of affection, but because they hated her, and liked to annoy her
with the cold curiosity of an insulting pity. Among these was Junia
Silana. In old days she had been a bosom-friend of the Augusta, but
the ostensible friendship gave ample opportunity for feline amenities
on both sides. Junia had been the wife of the handsome Silius, who
had fallen a victim to the love of Messalina. In her early widowhood
she had been sought in marriage by Sextius Africanus, but Agrippina,
not wishing to see him made too powerful by the ample wealth of the
childless Silana, had confidentially dissuaded him from the marriage,
by telling him that Silana was a woman of dissolute character, and
was now getting on in years. The secret had reached the ears of
Silana, and while openly she continued to speak of her ‘sweetest and
dearest Agrippina,’ she vowed an exemplary revenge.
And now that the time seemed ripe, she matured her plans.
It would be useless to trump up the old charges that Agrippina
mourned the murder of Britannicus, or spread abroad the wrongs of
Octavia. She determined to devise something entirely new, and to
charge Agrippina with the design of marrying and forming a conspiracy
with Rubellius Plautus, who, like Nero, was, on the mother’s side, a
great-great-grandson of the deified Augustus. Silana sent two of her
freedmen, Iturius and Calvisius, with this intelligence to Atimetus,
a freedman of Domitia, Nero’s aunt. Atimetus had once been a
fellow-slave with Paris. He went to his old friend, and urged him
to go at once to Nero, and to denounce the supposed plot with all
his consummate vehemence and skill.
The actor was not naturally a villain, but he had been trained in an
abominable school, and had erased the words ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’
from his vocabulary as completely as most of his contemporaries.
That night, at a late hour, he hurried to the Emperor, not in the
glittering dress which usually set off his perfect beauty, but in
dark and disordered array. His familiarity with Nero procured him
at all times a ready entrance into the Palace. He found the Emperor
still carousing amid his favourites, and he was received with a burst
of welcome by the flushed and full-fed guests.
‘Now this is good of you, Paris,’ said Nero. ‘You alone were wanting
to our mirth. Come, brim this crystal vase with our best Falernian,
and then let us see a spectacle which would thrill the Muses and the
Graces even if Apollo were with them. But--can this be Paris?--our
bright, gay, lovely Paris? Why, what is the matter?’
‘Matter enough,’ said Paris, in such accents of woe, and with such
a flood of tears, that the guests could not help weeping with him.
‘Dare I speak, Cæsar?’
‘Tell us all,’ said Nero, raising himself on his elbow in agitation.
‘What has happened? Have the legions revolted? Is the prætorium in an
uproar?’
‘Not yet,’ said Paris; ‘but--Agrippina--’
‘Ha!’ said Nero. ‘Go on’--for the actor’s voice seemed to be
speechless with emotion.
‘Agrippina--and--Rubellius Plautus--’
Nero was listening with painful interest; and, pretending to recover
himself with a great effort, Paris told them the fictitious plot,
and succeeded in rousing the Emperor to such a pitch of terror that
he started from his couch and tore his hair.
‘Agrippina shall die!’ he exclaimed; ‘and Rubellius Plautus shall
die. Here, give me my tablets. Despatch instant orders for their
arrest and execution. And send for Burrus--no! he is the creature of
my mother; she made him Prætorian Præfect. My foster-brother Cæcina
Tuscus shall command the Prætorians, and Burrus shall die. Quick,
quick, send for Seneca; not a moment is to be lost!’
Late as was the hour, one of the centurions on guard was despatched
to the Palace of Seneca. He was reading the ‘Republic’ of Plato to
his wife, Paulina, and his friend Fabius Rusticus, after a frugal
supper in a modestly furnished room. When the slave announced that
he was summoned by soldiers from the Palace, Paulina and Rusticus
grew deadly pale; and Seneca, though he strove to conceal his emotion,
trembled in every limb. He ordered the centurion to be admitted, and,
striving to conceal the agitation of his voice, asked if he knew why
the Emperor desired his presence at so late an hour. The centurion
did not know, but said that the Emperor seemed to be alarmed about
something, and needed the advice of his minister. Seneca demanded
his toga, and hastened to the Palace. Nero told him what Paris had
disclosed. He did not believe in the reality of the plot, but in
those days anything was possible. He, however, pledged his own life
on the fidelity of Burrus, and urged the Emperor to summon him into
his presence. Burrus came, and listened gravely.
‘It is a serious matter,’ he said, ‘to order the execution of anyone
without allowing an opportunity for defence. It would be still more
serious to execute without a trial an Augusta, and your own mother.’
‘Think again,’ said Nero. ‘Rubellius Plautus has the blood of the
Cæsars in his veins, and my mother is capable of anything to get
power.’
‘I need not think again,’ answered Burrus, bluntly. ‘When once I have
made up my mind, I do not alter it.’
Nero frowned, but Burrus only added: ‘There are no accusers. You are
relying on the sole voice of Paris, a freedman of a hostile family,
and you have only heard his story late at night during a drinking
bout. Surely the life of even a common citizen ought not to be sworn
away so cheaply, much less the life of an Empress.’
Nero, sobered by the gravity of these considerations, still kept a
sullen silence; but Burrus would not yield.
‘Cæsar, we will examine her at earliest dawn. If we find her guilty
she shall die.’
By this time the Emperor’s terror had exhausted itself, and he was
weary. Agrippina’s residence was surrounded with a guard, and at
daylight Seneca and Burrus went together to question her. They were
accompanied by a number of Nero’s most trusted freedmen, who were to
report the trial, and to act as spies both on the ministers and the
Augusta.
To be summoned from her sleep into such a presence--to see her house
surrounded with soldiers--to be aware that some unknown crisis of
the utmost gravity was at hand, might well have shaken the strongest
nerves. But, in spite of the horror of this unknown mystery, the
indomitable woman swept into the presence of the two statesmen with a
demeanour not only undaunted, but conspicuously haughty. The soldier
and the philosopher rose at her entrance, and the freedmen bowed low.
The freedmen she did not deign to notice, but slightly inclined her
head as she motioned the two ministers to be seated, and herself sat
down on a stately chair covered with purple cushions.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘as this seems to be a solemn audience, I
am informed that the Emperor has sent you two, and these other--
persons’--glancing at the freedmen--‘to speak with me. What may be
my son’s pleasure?’
‘Augusta,’ said Burrus in his sternest tones, ‘this is, as you have
said, a serious occasion; you are accused of nothing short of high
treason.’
The charge in days like those was awful enough to have forced back
the blood into her heart, and for one instant she felt as if the
solid earth were about to yawn beneath her feet. But in that instant
she rallied all the forces of her nature. She looked, indeed, pale as
a statue, but not the faintest tremor was perceptible in her accents
as she exclaimed in a tone of the most freezing irony,--
‘Indeed? _I_ am accused? and of high treason?’
‘You are accused,’ said Burrus, ‘of desiring to form a party among
the legionaries to raise Rubellius Plautus to the throne and then to
marry him.’
Agrippina’s only answer was a scornful laugh.
‘Poor Rubellius Plautus! the “golden sheep” of my brother Gaius!’
‘You will find it no matter for laughter. The Emperor is seriously
alarmed,’ said Burrus.
‘I have no other answer to an accusation so ridiculous.’
‘The Augusta has not been so careful as she might have been,’ said
Seneca, in his mildest manner. ‘Those frequent secret meetings with
her friends; that courting of senators of influence; those attentions
to military personages; those open complaints about the children of
Claudius, have aroused suspicion.’
Agrippina turned upon the speaker her flashing glance, and he quailed
beneath it. ‘Is this your philosophic gratitude?’ she said. ‘But for
me, you might have been dying of malaria in Corsica; and you, Burrus,
might have remained a tenth-rate tribune.’
‘We are but obeying the Emperor’s behests,’ said Burrus, in a less
threatening tone.
‘And, pray, who are my accusers?’
‘Late last night this charge was laid before the Emperor by Paris--’
‘By Paris!’ said Agrippina, in tones of crushing scorn. ‘Paris is
an actor, a buffoon, a pantomime, a thing of infamy whom I scarcely
brook to name. Pray, go on.’
‘He had been sent by Atimetus, the freedman of Domitia.’
‘Domitia--and her slave concubine!’ said Agrippina. ‘Of him I deign
no word; but she--what has she been doing all these years? While I
was arranging the adoption of Nero, his marriage with Octavia, his
promotion to the proconsular dignity, his nomination as a future
Consul, all that led to his imperial elevation--what was _she_ doing?
Improving her fishponds! And now she wants to rob me of my Nero,
and for that purpose gets up a pantomime with her paramour and her
dancer! Pray, is that all?’
‘The sources of the information were Iturius and Calvisius.’
‘Iturius and Calvisius!--ex-slaves, spendthrifts, debauchees, the
scum of the earth, who want to repair their squalid bankruptcies by
the gain of turning informers. They are nobodies; poor pieces on the
draughts-board. Who moved them?’
‘Junia Silana.’
‘Junia Silana! Ah! now I understand it all--the whole vile plot from
beginning to end! Silana--false wife, false friend, evil woman--what
does she know of the sacredness of motherhood? Children cannot be got
rid of by their mother so easily as lovers are by an adulteress. So!
I am to be branded with the fictitious infamy of parricide, and Nero
with its actual guilt, that two broken-down freedmen may repay their
debts to the old woman their mistress?
‘And you, sirs,’ she said, raising herself to the full height of her
stature, ‘ought you not to blush for the sorry part you have played?
Instead of repaying me the gratitude which you owe to one who
recalled you, Seneca, from your disgraceful exile, and raised
you, Burrus, from the dust--instead of making the Emperor ashamed
of attaching a feather’s-weight of importance to this paralytic
comedy of pantomimes, scoundrels, and rancorous old women--you have
encouraged him to try and humiliate me! I am ashamed of you,’ she
cried, with the imperious gesture which had often made bold men
tremble; ‘for as for these--gentlemen’--and she glanced at the
freedmen--‘they, of course, must do as they are bid. And so, _such_
are my accusers! Who will bear witness that I have ever tampered
with the city cohorts? who that I have intrigued in the provinces?
who that I have bribed one slave or one freedman? They charge me
with mourning for the death of Britannicus. Why, had Britannicus
become emperor, whose head would have fallen sooner than that of
his mother’s enemy and his own? And Rubellius Plautus--if he were
emperor--would he be able for a single month to protect me from
accusers who, alas! would be able to charge me, not with the
incautious freedom of a mother’s indignant utterance, but with deeds
from which I can be absolved by no one but that son for whose sake
they were committed.’
For one moment her nature broke down under the rush of her emotion,
and her glowing cheek was bathed in tears; but, recovering herself
before she could dash the tears aside, she repudiated the awkward
attempts at consolation offered by her judges, who themselves were
deeply moved.
‘Enough!’ she said. ‘Sirs, I have done with you. By the claims of
the innocent and the calumniated, if not by the rights of a mother, I
demand an interview with my son this very day--this very hour.’
While yet the two ministers, and even the freedmen--in spite of the
open scorn which she had manifested towards them--were under the
spell of her powerful ascendency, they declared to Nero her complete
innocence of the charges laid against her. Relieved from his alarm,
Nero came to her. Receiving him with calm dignity, she said not a
word about her innocence, which she chose to assume as a matter of
course; not a word about the gratitude which he owed to her, lest
she should seem to be casting it in his teeth. She only begged
for rewards for her friends, and the punishment of her defeated
adversaries. Nero was unable to resist her demands. Silana was
banished from Italy; Calvisius and Iturius were expelled from Rome;
Atimetus was executed. Paris alone was spared, because he was too
dear to the Emperor to permit of his being punished. The men for
whom Agrippina asked favours were men of honour. Fænius Rufus was
made commissioner of the corn market; Arruntius Stella was made
superintendent of the games which Nero was preparing to exhibit;
the learned Balbillus was made governor of Egypt. Nero was intensely
jealous of Rubellius Plautus, but his hour had not yet come.
It was the last flash of Agrippina’s dying power, and it encouraged a
few to visit her once more. One or two independent senators, pitying
her misfortunes, came to salute her, and some of the Roman matrons.
Yet among these women there was not one whom she could either respect
or trust. She had sinned so deeply in her days of power that women
like the younger Arria, wife of Pætus Thrasea, and Servilia, the
daughter of Barea Soranus, and Sextia, the mother of Antistius Vetus,
held aloof from her. Paulina, the wife of Seneca, cordially disliked
her, and the Vestal Virgins had never lent her the countenance of
their private friendship.
But one noble lady came to her, who had never paid her the least
court in the days of her splendour. It was Pomponia Græcina. She
came on the evening of that memorable trial, and found the Empress
prostrate with the reaction which followed the tumultuous passion
of the scenes through which she had passed. She lay on her couch
an object for even her enemies to pity. The strong, imperial,
ambitious princess was utterly broken down in her--only the weeping,
broken-hearted woman remained. In spite of her apparent victory, her
life, and all its aims, and all it held dear, lay in ruins around
her. Even hope was gone. What remained for her but remorse, and
anguish, and the cup of humiliation, and the agonising recollection
of a brilliant past which she had herself destroyed? There were no
loyal friends around her. No children’s faces smiled upon her. There
was no brother, or sister, or daughter to comfort her. Those to whom
she had been a benefactress either felt no gratitude, or did not dare
to show it, or deemed that she had forfeited it by crimes. Homeless,
desolate, unloved, left like a stranded wreck by the ebbing tide upon
a naked shore, she lay there weeping like a child. Oh! that she had
been innocent, like her own mother--like one or two whom she had
known;--but, alas! she could only look back upon a life of guilt,
flecked here and there with blood which nothing could wash out. And
now the Retribution which she had doubted and defied--the Retribution
which had been stealing with silent footstep behind her--had broken
upon her crowned with fire, and had smitten her into the dust with a
blow from which she never could uprise.
And while her head burned and throbbed, and her veins seemed to be
full of liquid flame, and ghosts of those who had perished by her
machinations glimmered upon her haunted imagination in the deepening
gloom, her lady in waiting, Acerronia, came to announce a visitor.
‘Did I not say that I would see no one else to-day?’ said Agrippina,
wearily. ‘I am worn out, and fain would sleep.’
‘It is Pomponia Græcina. She told the janitor that though you might
not see others who belong to the Court, perhaps you would see her.’
‘Yes; I will see _her_. She is not like the rest of them. She is
sincere, and her presence is like balm.’
Pomponia entered, and could scarcely believe that the lady who lay
there, with her dress disregarded, her face haggard and stricken, her
eyes dim, her cheeks stained with tears, her hair dishevelled, and,
as Pomponia thought, of a perceptibly greyer tinge than when she
had seen her last--was indeed the once magnificent and all-powerful
Augusta.
An impulse of pity overcame her, and she knelt down by the couch of
the unhappy Empress, who pressed her fevered lips to her cheeks, and
then wept uncontrollably with her head on Pomponia’s shoulder.
The two ladies presented a strange contrast, not only in their
dress, but in their entire aspect. Agrippina was still arrayed in
the magnificent robes in which she had received her son, and which,
irksome as they were, she had been too weary to lay aside. Pomponia
was in the dark mourning dress which she had worn for so many
years since the death of the friend of her childhood, Julia, the
grand-daughter of Tiberius and mother of Rubellius Plautus. The
tresses of Agrippina, though disarranged, showed the elaborate
care of the ornatrix. Pomponia wore her dark hair, now beginning to
silver, in the simplest bands, and without an ornament. But the chief
difference was in their faces. Pride and cruel determination, as well
as calamity, had left their marks on the noble lineaments of the
daughter of Germanicus; over the calm face of the wife of Plautius it
was evident that the shadows of many a sorrow had been cast, but the
sorrow was irradiated by hope and gladness, and in her eyes was the
sweet light of the Peace of God.
‘Augusta,’ she said, ‘I have come to congratulate you on the defeat
of a nefarious conspiracy. I thought I should find you happier after
many trials. Pardon me if I have thrust myself too presumptuously
upon your sorrow.’
‘Not so,’ said Agrippina. ‘You are always welcome; and more so now
than ever. You sought me not in my hour of prosperity. No one would
come to me in my hour of ruin who did not wish me well.’
‘It is not, I trust, an hour of ruin. The plot against you has been
ignominiously defeated. You may have many happy days in store.’
‘Nay, Pomponia; happiness can never be linked again with the name
of Agrippina. It is a dream. I did not find it in the days of my
splendour; it is little likely that I should find it when all desert
me and I am brought low. I know no one who is happy. We are the
slaves and playthings of a horrible destiny, which is blind and
pitiless and irresistible. Are you happy?’
‘Yes, Augusta, I am happy, though hardly, perhaps, in the sense you
mean. To me, as to all of us, life has brought bitter trials. These
dark robes tell of the loss of one whom I loved as my own soul, and
even at this moment I am threatened with terrible calamity--perhaps
with exile, perhaps with death. On all sides, there are terrors and
anxieties, and the state of society seems to portend catastrophe and
the vengeance of heaven, for wickedness can hardly go to any greater
lengths than now. Yet I am happy.’
‘Oh, that you would give me your secret!’ said the Empress. ‘I can
read character; I can detect the accents of sincerity. These words of
yours are no pompous and hollow Stoic paradox.’
Pomponia hesitated. The woman before her was, as she well knew,
steeped in crime from her childhood. Of what avail would it be,
without any of the evangelic preparation, to tell her of Jesus and
the Resurrection? Could there be the remotest possibility of exciting
in her mind anything but contempt by telling her at that moment of
the Cross which was to the Romans something between a horror and a
jest?
‘Agrippina,’ she answered, ‘the day may come when I may tell you more
of the strange secret. It is not mine only; it is meant for all the
world. But it cannot be attained, it cannot be approached, without
humility and repentance for wrong-doing, and the love of virtue, and
of something higher than virtue, and the lifting to heaven of holy
hands.’
‘Alas!’ said Agrippina; ‘you speak to me in a strange language. The
Greek tragedians are always telling us that when blood has fallen to
the ground it has fallen for ever. Can wrong be atoned for? Can guilt
be washed away?’
‘It can,’ said Pomponia, gently; and she longed to speak the words
which lingered in her memory from the letter of Peter of Bethsaida--
‘Redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and
without spot, even the blood of Christ.’ But to Agrippina they would
at that time have been simply meaningless.
‘I have heard of the mysteries,’ said the Empress, ‘and of the
taurobolies. Would it be of any avail if I too were to crouch in a
hollow, and let the blood of a bull which has been sacrificed to the
gods drop over me?’
‘It would not,’ said Pomponia. ‘God does not require of us things so
revolting, nor any mere external ceremonies and superstitions. What
that sacred and supreme Majesty requires of us is innocence alone.[64]
Can you not pray to Him, Augusta? You have read Homer, and you know
how the old poet sings about _Atè_, and the _Litai_, the Prayers
which follow in her path.’
‘Atè? Ah! I know that fearful deity,’ groaned Agrippina. ‘She is the
Fury Megæra. I have seen her petrifying face turned towards me. She
is the Harpy Celæno. I have often heard her in the banquet-halls of
the Palatine, and thought of Phineus and his polluted feasts. But
the Prayers--will you not repeat me the lines, Pomponia?’
Pomponia repeated the famous lines of the old bard of Chios:--
‘The gods (the only great and only wise)
Are mov’d by offerings, vows, and sacrifice;
Offending man their high commission wins,
And daily prayers atone for daily sins.
Prayers are Jove’s daughters of celestial race,
Lame are their feet, and wrinkled is their face;
With humble mien, and with dejected eyes
Constant they follow, where Injustice flies.
Who hears these daughters of almighty Jove,
For him they mediate to the throne above;
When man rejects the humble suit they make
The Sire revenges for the daughters’ sake.’[65]
‘Alas! they have been strangers to me, those Prayers,’ said
Agrippina; ‘and though you have spoken truth to me, I see that
you have not told me all.’
‘There are times for all things,’ said Pomponia, as she rose to
leave; ‘and perhaps, if you will think of what we have said, the day
may come when you will be able to bear more. Farewell, Augusta; you
need rest and quiet. Pardon me if I have wearied you.’
‘Farewell, Pomponia,’ said the Empress; ‘you are good and true. Your
words have been to me as soft and pure as the falling snow. I know
not whether the Litai of whom Homer speaks may plead for us through
another.’
‘They may.’
‘Then will you ask them to say something which may avert the fury
of Atè from one who, to you, is not ashamed to confess that she is
wretched above all women?’
‘May you find peace!’ murmured the noble lady, as the Empress once
more kissed her, and pressed her to her heart. ‘All may find it who
seek it rightly from the Heavenly Powers.’