Still more marvellous were the gardens. They covered a space so large

that a single lake on which imperial galleys were moored, sufficed,

when filled up, for the site of the Colosseum. They were full of

grottoes, and gardens for exotic plants, and waterfalls shaded with

masses of foliage, and pastures in which the sheep, with revolting

bad taste, were dyed blue or crimson. They also contained aviaries of

rare tropical birds, and dens for animals--among the rest a monster

which was said to be fed with human flesh. The palace-stables of

Nero’s favourite horse Asturco, and of the other horses which drew

his chariot, were in distant parts of these enchanting grounds, and

were far more magnificent in their appointments than the houses of

the poorer senators. The chief ornament of the garden was a temple

of Seia, the goddess who was propitious to harvests. It was built

of a newly discovered marble, so warm and glowing that, according

to Pliny, it seemed rather to enclose than to transmit the light.

But the splendour with which he had surrounded himself soon became

insupportably wearisome. It involved him further in pecuniary

anxieties. Buoyed up for a time by the chimera of a Roman knight,

who, giving credence to a dream, promised, at small expense,

to discover the legendary treasures which Dido had carried with

her from Troy, and which were supposed to be hidden in the caves

of Carthage, he was compelled, when that bubble burst, to have

recourse to expedients both pitiful and violent. With great peril

to himself he had to let the payments of his Prætorians fall into

arrears. Instead of half the patrimony left by his freedmen, he

now impropriated nine-tenths. Confiscations raged on every side.

Temples were plundered, and their statues--even those of the Roman

Penates--were sent to the melting-pot. A law was made against wearing

amethystine colours, and once when he saw a lady with the forbidden

colour at the games, he pointed her out to his Procurator, and

not only inflicted the fine, but forfeited her entire property. No

meanness was too base for him to practise, no wrong too cruel for

him to inflict. Italy, the provinces, the allied peoples, the free

states, groaned under intolerable burdens.

And while his bodily functions, disordered by riotous living, made of

his life a physical burden, he was distracted by daily superstitions.

In his theatric way he used to tell his intimates that he was haunted

by all the Furies. His effeminated intellect was constantly unnerved

by rumours of storms, and earthquakes, and strange births, and

comets, which the astrologers interpreted to imply change and

political disaster. A revolt of gladiators at Præneste threatened a

renewal of the devastations in the days of Spartacus. In consequence

of an ill-advised order of Nero, the whole fleet of triremes and

smaller vessels was hopelessly shipwrecked at Misenum, and he had

to bear the odium of the disaster.

While he was thus wearied and agitated, there burst upon him the

immense weight of Piso’s conspiracy, which afforded him a proof how

many and how varied were the forces of hatred and contempt which he

had kindled in the hearts of all.

Piso stood at the head of the great Calpurnian house, and was

connected by ties of relationship with many of the noblest families

in Rome. He was not himself the author of the conspiracy, for which,

indeed, his character was altogether too unstable and corrupt. He was

dragged into it by Subrius Flavus, a tribune, and Sulpicius Asper,

a centurion of the Prætorian guards. Fænius Rufus, the Prætorian

Præfect, approved of the plot, out of disgust for the machinations

of his rival, Tigellinus, who was constantly incriminating him to

the Emperor. Seneca lent a dubious sanction, which many believed

to be mixed up with personal designs. Lucan was goaded into

complicity by the wrongs heaped upon him by Nero’s jealousy.

Perhaps the most important, courageous, and disinterested adherent

was Plautius Lateranus, the consul-elect. He had no motive but a

noble patriotism which felt the shame of a Roman at being governed

by a histrionic debauchee. Joined to these were very unpromising

elements. No credit could accrue to any cause from the support

of such men as Flavius Scævinus, a man of dissolute character and

slothful life; Quintianus, stained with the same vices which made

Nero infamous; Senecio, a dandy long endeared to Nero by similarity

of tastes; Natalis, a confidential friend of Piso, who had probably

meditated treachery from the first; and Epicharis, a freed woman

of the lowest character, though for some unknown reason she proved

herself the most impassioned and the most courageous of them all.

The conspiracy was revealed through the fantastic and effeminate

folly of Scævinus, but not until it had left Nero almost wild with

terror. Natalis, Scævinus, Quintianus, Senecio, shrinking from the

thought of torture--which the poor freedwoman heroically braved, and

under which she expired--turned informers. The friends of Piso strove

in vain to awaken him to manly counsels. He went home, and lay hidden

there till the band of tiros arrived whom Nero--distrusting the

older soldiers--had sent to bid him kill himself. He opened his

veins, wrote a will full of the grossest flattery to the Emperor

and ignobly died.

More courageous was the death of Lateranus. When Epaphroditus came to

question him, he answered: ‘If I should have anything to say, I will

say it to your master.’ Nero did not allow him to choose his mode

of death, or to embrace his children. Hurried to a place of servile

execution, he maintained a disdainful silence, not even reproaching

the tribune Statius, an accomplice in the conspiracy, by whose

hand he was to die. He stretched out his neck without a word, and

stretched it out again when the first blow failed.

Fænius Rufus did not escape. He overdid his part by trying to terrify

the conspirators as he sat by Nero and Tigellinus before his own name

had been denounced. It was too much to expect that among that crowd

of cowards, dupes, and traitors no one would find it intolerable to

have the same man as both an accomplice and inquisitor. So, as he

browbeat and threatened Scævinus, he answered with a smile that no

one knew more than Rufus himself, and urged him to show his gratitude

to such an excellent Emperor. Rufus turned pale, stammered, and so

completely betrayed his guilt that Nero ordered a powerful soldier

to seize and bind him then and there. His death was pusillanimous.

He poured his lamentations even into his will.

Subrius Flavus was the next to be betrayed. ‘As if I, a soldier,

could ever have undertaken such work with such helpless women as

these!’ he exclaimed. But, pressed with questions, he confessed and

gloried in the deed.

‘What made you forget your oath of allegiance to me?’ asked Nero.

‘Because I hated you,’ he answered. ‘While you were worthy to be

loved, you had no more faithful soldier than myself. I began to hate

you when you displayed yourself as the murderer of your mother and

your wife, a jockey, a mummer, and an incendiary.’

The words struck the ears of Nero like a terrific blow. Familiar

with crime, he was unaccustomed to be charged with it. Indifferent

to the deeds, he shrank from the name of a criminal, and nothing

in the conspiracy caused him worse pain than this. He ordered the

tribune Veianus Niger to execute Flavus. To increase the terror of

the condemned it was customary to dig a grave before their eyes. The

grave was dug for Flavus in a field hard by. Looking at its shortness

and shallowness with contempt, as at a scamped piece of work, he

exclaimed with disdain, ‘You cannot even do a thing like that as a

soldier should.’

‘Stretch out your neck manfully,’ said Niger.

‘Would that you would strike as manfully!’ he replied.

Unwarned by the answer which he had received from Flavus, Nero, who

felt himself specially injured by the defection of his soldiers,

asked Sulpicius Asper also ‘why he had conspired to murder him.’

‘It was the only remedy left for so many infamies,’ answered the

centurion; and spoke no more.

After this Nero still continued to bathe in blood. The consul

Vestinus was his enemy, and a man of courage, but he had not engaged

in the plot. He had once been one of the Emperor’s intimate circle,

and Nero, who had felt the weight of his rough wit and shrunk from

its truthfulness, had cause to dread his spirit. Before the consul

had been accused or even mentioned, the Emperor sent a tribune with

a cohort to seize his best slaves, and take his house as it were

by storm. Vestinus was giving a banquet, and when summoned by the

soldiers, rose from the table without hesitation. He was immediately

shut up in his chamber, his veins were opened, and, without uttering

so much as a word of complaint, he was stifled in a bath. His

terrified guests were meanwhile kept in their places by the soldiers,

expecting that their fate would follow. It was late at night before

Nero, who had secretly gloated over the imagination of their terrors,

allowed them to be dismissed, with the remark that they had been

sufficiently punished for their consular banquet.

Nero seized the opportunity to get rid of all who were for any reason

obnoxious to him. Rufius Crispinus was banished because he had once

been Poppæa’s husband; Verginius, because he was an eloquent orator

and instructor of youth; Musonius Rufus, because he was a genuine

Stoic. There was no room for such eminence in such a Rome.

There was no room even for a Petronius Arbiter, by the side of a

Tigellinus. To pagan conceptions Petronius, despite his dissolute

life, was still a gentleman, and Tigellinus, whatever might be his

position, was the opposite. Petronius, however vicious, was the

reverse of cruel; Tigellinus, far blacker and baser in his vices,

superadded to them a savage ruthlessness. It was he who developed

this phase of Nero’s degradation, whereas Petronius entirely

disapproved of it. The Præfect felt, therefore, that Petronius must

be crushed. He suborned one of the household to give false witness

against him, permitted him no defence, and threw most of his slaves

into chains. Petronius had left home for Campania to pay his respects

to Nero. At Cumæ he was ordered to stop, and, not choosing to await

the tedious delays of hope and fear, he set the example of a death

as satirical as any which history records. There was nothing tragic

in it, nothing remotely serious. He treated death as a jest no less

contemptible than life, and died with complete coolness, effeminately

brave, and sincerely frivolous. If in the deaths of some of the

philosophic republicans of that day we see the theatric pomposity

of Stoicism, in that of Petronius we see the callous levity of the

infidel voluptuary.

Opening his veins, he discoursed with his friends, not on high

topics, but on trivial literature and _vers de société_. If he

felt interested, he had his veins bound up again, and banqueted,

and slept, to make his death seem a matter of freewill, not of

compulsion. He had his bad slaves scourged, his good slaves rewarded.

Instead of mentioning Nero and Tigellinus in his will with lying

adulation, he penned a scathing satire, in which he drew a vivid

picture of Nero’s infamies, and sent a sealed copy of the document

to the Emperor himself. Then he broke his signet ring, that it might

not, after his death, be abused for purposes of forgery and delation;

and dashed into shivers a myrrhine vase for which he had paid a

fabulous sum, that it might not fall into Nero’s hands. When Nero

received his satire, he writhed under it. He could not tell how

Petronius had become acquainted with some of those deeds which he

had concealed in the closet and the midnight, but which were here

blazoned in the noonday. Thinking that Petronius could only have

learnt them from an abandoned lady, named Silia, the wife of a

senator, he drove her into exile on the suspicion that she had

betrayed the secrets which she had shared and witnessed. At the same

time he banished the ex-Prætor Minucius Thermus, and tortured one

of his freedmen, because the latter had spread similar reports about

Tigellinus.

And so, day after day, ‘the hard reality of death was brushed by the

rustling masquerade of life,’ and society presented the spectacle of

a lascivious dance on the edge of a precipice, over which some dancer

or some indignant spectator from hour to hour was violently hurled.

CHAPTER LVIII

_THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA_

‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod

perseverandum est.’--SENECA.

The family of Spanish Romans from Cordova of which Seneca was the

head had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged through

deadlier overthrow; but the fate of their greatest scion, the poet

Lucan, was the most humiliating. He might seem to have been marked

out from infancy as the spoiled favourite of fortune. While little

more than a boy, he had gained such a reputation for ability, that

Nero had summoned him from Athens before his studies were completed.

For a year or two he was the Emperor’s intimate friend, and at the

same time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the day.

When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an astonishing

success. He was appointed augur and quæstor before the legal age,

and when, as quæstor, he exhibited games to the people, he was

received with thunders of applause as loud as those which had greeted

Virgil in the days of Augustus. It is impossible to imagine a giddier

pinnacle of temptation for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius,

who at the age of twenty could not have been a friend and courtier of

Nero without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation. Let

it be remembered in Lucan’s honour, that if he did not escape from

that furnace unscathed--if his hair had been singed and the smell

of fire had passed upon his garments--he yet never showed himself

lost to virtue. In the midst of deplorable weakness he retained his

conviction that freedom, and truth, and purity, were best.

Nero’s jealousy showed itself in the most public and insulting

manner, when one day he got up and went out of the room for no reason

whatever, in the middle of one of Lucan’s readings. It culminated in

a prohibition to Lucan to read or publish anything further. The young

poet, feeling within him the true fire of genius, nursed his rage

in secret, and changed the tone of the ‘Pharsalia’ from inflated

Cæsarism to savage denunciation. He mocks at the sham liberty which

it accorded; brands with satire its shameful flatteries; and treating

its apotheoses as a sacrilegious comedy, declares that the day would

come ‘when a freer and truer Rome would make a god, not of Cæsar,

but of Cato.’[110] Ten years earlier he had been writing of Nero as

a supreme divinity; now in his writing-desk lay the fierce complaint

that, as a consequence of the civil wars, men had come to worship

_shadows_ in the temples of the gods.[111] He consoled his seclusion

by living in virtuous union with the young wife whom he loved, and

as he poured forth the epic of a soul lacerated by indignation,

conscious of his future immortality, he wrote in secret--

‘Pharsalia nostra

Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabitur ævo.’

When Piso’s conspiracy began, Lucan became its passionate supporter.

Men might ask what was the use of substituting one actor like Piso

for another like Nero, but if a republic was impossible, Lucan felt

that no change of a Cæsar could be for the worse, and in his burning

hatred promised that he would slay the Emperor with his own hand.

Alas! when detection came; when he saw knights and senators and

soldiers sinking all around him into treacherous weakness; when the

grim executioner stood at his elbow pointing to the rack, Lucan had

none of the inward strength or ennobling convictions which might have

enabled him to retain his manhood. Sinking to an incredible depth

of baseness, he betrayed the name of his own mother as an accomplice

in the plot. His momentary infamy did not save his life, though it

must have cost him a pang worse than that of death. Bidden to die,

he opened his veins in four places, and went into a hot bath. His

last thoughts at the end of a life so brief, so full of glory, so

full of shame, are left unrecorded. Only as he watched the blood

flow, he was reminded of the fantastic lines of the ‘Pharsalia’ in

which he had described the similar death of a soldier on the field of

battle. He recited them with a feeble voice, and spoke no more. That

he should, at such a moment, have recalled verses so fantastic is

characteristic of a soul not naturally ignoble, but distorted and,

so to speak, encrimsoned by the horrors of life’s tragedies and

life’s amusements in the midst of which he lived.

The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour.

Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not even the death of

his glorious son could check Mela’s besetting vice. A nobler man

would have hid his head in shame as well as sorrow, but Mela showed

a discreditable eagerness in recovering the debts due to Lucan,

whose great wealth was now added to his own. Among other debtors, he

pressed hard on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan’s intimate friend.

What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of Rome

when we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence, that,

in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who had betrayed his

mother resorted to forgery in order to ruin his friend’s father! He

forged a letter of Lucan to prove an imaginary complicity in the plot

between him and his father. Mela knew that his wealth would be his

death warrant. Nero no sooner read the forged letter than he summoned

Mela to his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela saw

that the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after having

written a will which was doubly base. To save his estate from

confiscation, he left a large donation to Tigellinus, and his

worthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added spite to his

greed and baseness. ‘I am condemned to die,’ he said, ‘though I

have done nothing to deserve punishment; but Crispinus and Anicius

Cerealis live, though they are enemies of the Emperor.’ Anicius

Cerealis was the consul-designate who, after the conspiracy, had

proposed in the senate that a temple should with all speed be reared

at the public expense ‘to the Divine Nero.’ His abjectness did

not save him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela’s will he, too,

committed suicide.

The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous adulation.

They decreed supplications to the gods, and a special honour to

the Sun as the detector of the conspiracy, and a restoration of the

Temple of Fortune from which Scævinus had taken his dagger. Amid

these decrees, ‘the sweet Gallio’ pleaded humbly that his life might

be spared, although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca and

Lucan. Whereupon a senator got up and denounced him as an enemy and

a parricide. The rest had the decency to interfere on behalf of their

popular and distinguished colleague. They begged the accuser to let

sleeping dogs lie. But Gallio felt that his career of glory and

popularity was over, and he too committed suicide.

The city was full of deaths, and the streets witnessed the daily

spectacle of the stately funerals of these political victims, of whom

so many were judicially murdered for their wealth, or to gratify the

hatred of the Emperor. Yet such was the prevalent baseness, that men

whose sons, or brothers, or friends, or kinsmen had been thus slain,

returned thanks to the gods, adorned their doors with laurel as at

the news of a public victory, and rushed to fling themselves at the

knees of Nero, and cover his hand with their kisses! Many of the

people believed that the reign of terror had been enacted simply to

replenish the Emperor’s treasury, and pitied the murdered aristocrats

as though they had been as innocent as the murdered Christians.

No delation pleased Nero more than when Natalis coupled the name of

Seneca with the name of Piso. How far Seneca was really an accomplice

is doubtful. He had been cautious, but he can hardly have been

ignorant that Subrius Flavus had formed a design to set Piso aside

and elevate Seneca himself to the Empire. It was certainly suspicious

that on the eve of the conspiracy Seneca had returned from his

Campanian retreat, and stopped at one of his villas only four

miles from the city. There was no evidence against him except this:

--Natalis had been sent from Piso to complain that Seneca would never

see him, and to ask ‘why their friendship should thus be allowed to

drop.’ Seneca had replied ‘that frequent intercourse was inexpedient

for them both, but that his happiness depended on Piso’s safety.’ But

it was whispered among Seneca’s most intimate friends that he had,

in fact, assented to the assassination of Nero ‘in order to free Rome

from Nero, and Nero from himself.’ The glittering antithesis betrayed

its own authorship.

Nero sent a Prætorian tribune, named Silvanus--not knowing that

he too was one of the conspirators--to require an explanation from

Seneca. He found the philosopher at supper with his beloved wife,

Pompeia Paulina, and two friends.

Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he was

in weak health, and desired perfect quiet. ‘Why,’ he said, in reply

to the Emperor’s inquiry, ‘should I have preferred the fortunes of

a private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I should

have made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who has

experienced my boldness more often than my servility.’

When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting with

Poppæa and Tigellinus--a bad omen for Seneca’s safety.

‘Is he preparing to put himself to death?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ said the tribune. ‘He showed no sign of panic. His look and his

words were entirely cheerful.’

‘Go, bid him die,’ was Nero’s brief answer.

Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in person

to a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.

On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave,

‘Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those who

love me.’

‘I am sorry,’ said the centurion, ‘that the Emperor’s commands admit

of no such delay.’

‘Be it so,’ said Seneca, turning to his friends. ‘Since, then, I have

nothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession,

the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fame

of honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep.

Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid these

tears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Was

any one of us unaware of Nero’s cruelty? After murdering his mother

and his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?’

Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her

not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of

widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been

spent in virtue.

‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veins

as well as yours.’

‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your glorious

desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the endurance

of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance

of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater

distinction will be yours.’

In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable,

if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his

condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life

into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to

the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a

violent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though,

like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated

ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet

with the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’

Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’s

best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to

die’--

‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’[112]

The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but,

as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed

slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were

under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind

of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break

down Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room.

When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were

afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were

so well known that he would not record them. They probably added

little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in

his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his

physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison

failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of

blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him,

saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was

then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body

was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of

funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her

wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few years

of her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial of

those tragic hours.

That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those who

justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of

virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked

whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made

against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his

life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of

hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from

impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may

have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account

for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some

passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and

between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan

philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his

life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid

evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his

being; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute the

self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history.

A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed

philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of

those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did

little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were

the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the

Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted

the martyr’s crown.

CHAPTER LIX

_THE AGONY OF AN EMPRESS_

‘Satiety

And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,

Mock the tired worlding. Idle Hope

And dire Remembrance interlope,

And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:

The bubble floats before; the spectre stalks behind.’

COLERIDGE, _Ode to Tranquillity_.

In one of the most enchanting rooms of the Golden Palace, surrounded

by every object of beauty and splendour which the wealth of kingdoms

could supply, sat Poppæa, miserable in heart with a misery which

nothing could alleviate--no luxury of the present, no memory of the

past, no hope of the future. Like Agrippina, like Seneca, like Nero,

she had been ‘cursed with every granted prayer.’ Nothing which this

world could give was left for her to attain. Of the honours which

overpower, of the riches which clog, of the pleasures which inflame

the soul, she had unbounded experience. They had left her heart weary

and her life in ashes, and she had never dreamed of the secret which

had enabled so many thousands of humble Christians, whom she would

have regarded as the dust beneath her feet, to find exaltation in

abasement, wealth in penury, and joy in tribulation.

She was Empress; she was Augusta; she was mother of an infant who

had been deified; her smile meant prosperity, her frown was death.

Of what avail was it all? Could this awful power, could those

inestimable gems, could the gorgeousness of her Golden House fill

up the void in a heart numbed by satiety and chilled by despair? What

had she to aim at? Her enemies had been swept out of her path. What

had she left to hope for? There was no object of earthly wishes which

she had not attained. Ah! but what work worth doing could she find

to do in order to fill up the vacuity of aimless self-indulgence?

Who was there to love her, or whom she could love?

She thought of her early home, of her lovely mother, of her consular

and triumphant grandfather, of the adoration which had surrounded

her in the days of her own dawning beauty. She thought of Rufius

Crispinus, the bridegroom of her youth, who had loved her tenderly,

and whom she had loved, and of the little son whom she had borne him.

He had grown up into a beautiful and gallant child, and the mother

had always listened with pride to the anecdotes about him which were

secretly brought to her. One of the heaviest of the many afflicting

thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which

Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus

had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular

insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa’s

husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso’s conspiracy first to

banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his

life. How fatal had her love been to him! It had blighted his career;

it had stained his home; it had cut short his life. But what had her

poor boy done that he too should perish? She had heard only a few

days since that simply because in his games the high-spirited lad

had played at being general or emperor, Nero had given orders to his

slaves to drown him by suddenly pushing him into the sea while he

sat fishing on a rock. She knew that this crime had been committed,

and his bright young life sacrificed simply because he shared her

blood; and what maddened her most of all was that she dared make no

complaint, dared not even to reveal that she was aware of the murder,

because to allude to her first husband or her son was always to rouse

Nero into a paroxysm of fury. In the brightest and most luxurious

room of the Golden House she sat solitary, and sobbing as if her

heart would break.

Then she thought of Otho. Dandy as he was, and debauchee, to her at

least he had been passionately faithful. She had abandoned Crispinus

to live with Otho partly from a certain fascination which hung about

his wickedness, but even more from motives of ambition, and because

he was Nero’s most cherished favourite. She heard good accounts of

his administration in Lusitania. Her intrigues to entangle the love

of Nero had succeeded; but would she not have been incomparably more

happy if she had remained in the home of Otho, and still more if she

had lived as the virtuous wife of her first husband?

For with Nero she had long been disgusted, while she was obliged to

feed his gluttonous vanity with perpetual eulogies of his beauty.

And when in the close intercourse of daily life she saw to the

depths of the man’s nature, it was impossible for her to find any

words sufficiently bitter for the expression of her contempt. And

this wretched meticulous creature, with no manliness in him; this

tenth-rate singer and dilettante twangler on harps; this lump of

egregious vanity; this catspaw of Tigellinus, whose effeminacy

was steeped in the blood of the innocent which he had shed like

water--this womanish man, with none of the worth of Crispinus, and

none of the charm of Otho, was to be her husband and companion for

life! The day for other lovers, the day when she could have the

excitement of secret intrigues, was past, for anything of the kind

would mean instant death. And yet she felt more and more that it was

impossible to retain secure hold on such love as Nero’s. It was an

ignoble love, tigerish and animal, which would evanesce long before

her youth and beauty had faded away. If Nero had been a man--if

there had been in his passion for her a single ennobling element--she

might have retained him in her bondage for long years, as she could

certainly have retained Otho. But already Nero preferred to her

society the flattery of parasites and minions, and at this very time,

though she was very sick and languid with the approach of motherhood,

to which she looked forward with neither hope nor happiness, he had

left her to her weary solitude, and for days had scarcely so much as

seen or talked with her. Was some rival casting her spells over his

volatile and evil nature, and taking vengeance on her for the wrongs

of Octavia? The thought made her heart burn with a fury of impotent

indignation.

She was determined that she would sit up this night and await his

return in his own bedchamber; and, as opportunity occurred, would

either assail him by reproaches, or win him back by caresses. How

could she kill the interminable hours? She had no friend, no child,

no confidante--none near her but slaves who hated her and yet

trembled at her presence. She had no resources in herself, nothing

to occupy her but her own evil thoughts and deplorable regrets.

The Empress grew more and more weary, more and more tormented with

intolerable thoughts through the leaden hours. At length, long after

midnight, she heard the footsteps of the watch and of many slaves as

they conducted Nero to his chamber.

‘What! you here?’ he said with contemptuous indifference as he

dismissed his attendants.

She looked at him. He had evidently been drinking, and was fresh from

one of the scenes of debauchery which always formed the conclusion of

his charioteering displays. For he still wore the dress of a jockey

of the green faction, and its succinctness revealed his thin legs and

protuberant person. To her he looked a spectacle of ignominy. Where

was the passionate courtesy with which her Otho would have greeted

her? Where the fond caress which Crispinus would have printed on her

cheek? To think that this thing was the Emperor of Rome!

She half-rose from her couch, her pale face aflame with indignation.

‘Jockey!’ she hissed out. ‘Companion of base minions, comrade of

coarse gladiators, where have you been? Why do you thus steep manhood

in ignominy and drag the purple of Empire through the mud?’

It was the pent-up passion of her woman’s heart which thus burst

forth, and it came on Nero like an unexpected blow. He looked at her

for a moment with eyes opened to their fullest, and then, staggering

forwards, dealt her a brutal kick.

Poppæa, with a groan of anguish, sank swooning to the ground. She

lay on the floor as dead, her features white as marble, her hair

streaming from its bands and covering the floor with its gleaming

waves. The sight sobered Nero. Had he killed her? Furious as he

was, he had not intended that. He loudly summoned his slaves and

Poppæa’s attendants, and they bore her, still unconscious, to her

own apartments. Nero did not tell any one what had happened, but

when the physicians saw the bruise which his foot had made they

knew everything, and when she had awoke from her swoon Poppæa

disdainfully told them the simple truth. From the first they did

not conceal from her or from Nero that, in her delicate situation,

her life would be in extreme peril.

She lingered on in anguish for many days, her heart broken, her life

sacrificed. Nero would fain have testified his maudlin and unavailing

remorse. He passionately desired a child to continue his line, and

now he had shattered his own hopes. If he had ever loved any woman

with anything resembling real love, it was Poppæa. He had only

kicked her in the blind rage of ruthless egotism. Nothing had been

further from his intention than to murder her or even to cause her

excruciating pangs.

He asked to be admitted to her presence, but she refused to see him.

She sent to tell him that unless he wished to kill her, he would not

visit her. The physicians assured him that the mere suggestion of his

entering the room had thrown her into dangerous convulsions. As for

the expressions of regret which he had written to her, she was too

weak and ill to write any reply, and she deigned to send no message.

There was one person, and one only, whom she wished to see. It was

Pomponia Græcina. For her Poppæa had always felt an involuntary

respect, and had been deeply impressed by her words and bearing when

she came to plead for the Christians. If there were any one who could

bring healing to her wounded soul, or suggest one moment’s peace to

her tortured heart, it was the stainless wife of Aulus Plautius.

Pomponia had been sick nigh unto death. The prison fever which she

had caught in ministering to the Christians had been a virulent

typhoid, from which she would not have recovered but for her

untroubled conscience, her pure and simple life. For herself she

did not wish to live. Not only had her young Aulus been disgraced

and murdered, but what she had witnessed of the treatment of the

Christians, and what she had heard of their exterminating martyrdoms,

had ploughed up the depths of her soul with horror. She almost longed

that it could have been permitted her to share the fate of all those

dear men and women whom she had known, and who had now passed with

white robes and palms in their hands into the presence of their

Saviour. But her husband was falling into deep melancholy, and for

his sake she made every effort to recover. And because in all her

troubles the peace of God was with her, her constitution triumphed

over the ravages of the disease, and when she received a message

that Poppæa was lying on her death-bed and longed to see her, she

was daily regaining her strength in her villa at Tibur.

She did not hesitate;--for what purpose was there in life if it

were not to do deeds of helpfulness and love? She was carried in her

litter from Tibur to the Golden House, and conducted to the chamber

of the Empress. She was spared the trial of meeting Nero, who that

day was taking part in a contest of singing and harp-playing on the

public stage at the quinquennial Neronia. To prevent that disgrace,

the Senate had spontaneously offered him the crowns of eloquence

and song. But the _semblance_ of victory did not suit his vanity.

He played at being a fair competitor. The theatre was crowded to

suffocation, not only with Romans but with provincials, and several

knights and burghers had been trodden to death in the opening rush

to secure seats. And there stood Nero on the stage, harp in hand,

bowing and scraping to the assembly, and trembling with sham

nervousness before the adjudicators! It was an infinitely dreary

entertainment, for the soldiers stood in every gangway with batons,

beating those who did not applaud or who applauded in wrong places,

and as no one was allowed to leave the theatre on pain of death,

not a few were taken seriously ill, while some braved the risk of

dropping down from the outside, and some pretended to faint or

die that they might be carried out of the theatre. It was on this

occasion that poor Vespasian fell into new disgrace. Harp-playing

and singing, whether good or execrable, was not at all in his line,

and, do what he would, he found it impossible to prevent himself from

falling asleep, as he had already done in the villa at Subiaco. He

was caught in the act by Phœbus, the freedman of Nero, who roughly

shook him by the shoulder, and abused him without stint. He was very

near being condemned to death, but so many persons of distinction

interceded for him, that this time Nero spared him. He was, however,

forbidden ever again to appear at Court, and received a strong hint

that the more entirely he kept out of the way the safer it would

be for him. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked Phœbus, ‘and whither am I

to go?’ ‘_Abi Morboniam!_ Go to the dogs!’ answered the insolent

freedman. A few years later, when Vespasian wore the purple, the

freedman implored his pardon for the insult. ‘_Abi Morboniam!_ Go

to the dogs!’ was the only answer of the good-humoured Emperor.

While Nero was fooling away his Empire in such scenes Pomponia

entered the chamber of death. There lay Poppæa in the miserable

wreck of her youth and loveliness. Wicked she had been, and crowned

with every gift but that of virtue, yet Pomponia could not but pity

one so young and so lost, childless, hopeless, unloved, bereaved--

thrice wedded, though little more than girl, and now the victim of

her husband’s brutality.

Poppæa turned her languid glance towards the opening door, but when

she saw who her visitor was, the poor face, drawn and convulsed

with pain, brightened for an instant. The ‘amber’ tresses which

Nero had sung of had been cut off to relieve her feverish brows,

and Pomponia’s experienced eye detected on her countenance the seal

of death.

‘You think that there is no hope?’ whispered Poppæa as she saw the

look of compassion deepen on Pomponia’s face. ‘Ah, tell me the truth

as it is, and do not flatter me with false hopes as these slaves do.’

‘I fear that you will die, Augusta,’ answered Pomponia, solemnly yet

tenderly.

‘Call me not by that vain title. Would that I had never borne it!

Would that I had died in childhood, or in my first home! Had I done

so, loving faces might have been looking on me now.’

‘Linger not in the thoughts of the past, Poppæa; it is irrevocable.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is irrevocable; and I cannot bear the faces

which look upon me so reproachfully--the face of my murdered husband,

Crispinus; of my drowned son; worst of all the sad face of Octavia.’

A shudder ran through all her frame. ‘At every moment,’ she said,

‘directly I close my eyes, her head is before me, as I saw it in

all its ghastliness.’

‘Grieve not for Octavia,’ said Pomponia. ‘I have heard all about her

death. She died forgiving all her enemies, and in perfect peace.’

‘Peace? Where is it to be had?’ asked Poppæa. ‘It is not a pearl, I

think, of any earthly ocean.’

‘No,’ said Pomponia, ‘but of a heavenly.’

‘Heavenly? What is heaven?’ asked Poppæa, wearily. ‘All that we

know is life; and life has given me all that pleasure can give, and

rank and riches, and the adoration of self; and it has left me so

miserable that life itself has grown hateful to me, while yet I fear

death.’

Pomponia listened in profound sadness. ‘Poppæa,’ she said, ‘I need

not fear now to tell you that I am a Christian; and we Christians

have been taught that “he who saveth his life shall lose it, and he

who loseth it for Christ’s sake, shall find it.” It is too late for

you to redeem the life which you have flung away, or to find the

pleasure which you have slain in seeking for it. But while there is

life, there is hope. The God in whom we Christians believe is a God

of mercy, and we believe also that Christ, the Son of God, died for

our sins, and that by Him they may be washed away.’

‘All the waters of Adria would not wash mine away. Oh, Pomponia, do

you know that Seneca, and Octavia, and many others owed their deaths

to me?’

‘You have sinned deeply; but you have, I know, been taught about the

sacred books of the Jews, and have you not read there of a guilty

king, an adulterer and murderer, who yet prayed “Oh, pardon mine

iniquity, for it is great”? And has no Jewish teacher read you the

promise of God by His prophet, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they

shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they

shall be as wool”?’

‘I have heard those words,’ said Poppæa. ‘They were quoted to me

once by Helen, Queen of Adiabene, who is now living as a proselyte

at Jerusalem; and I have been taught that there is but one God.’

‘Oh, pray to Him, then,’ said Pomponia, ‘for He is abundant in

pardon.’

‘I know not how to pray,’ said the dying Empress; ‘pray for me.’

If Poppæa knew not, Pomponia knew well; for to her, as a Christian,

prayer had become the habit, the attitude of her life. Poppæa had

never before heard such words as those. She knew that when she died

she would be made a goddess by the Senate, as her infant child had

been; yet here by her bedside Pomponia was speaking of her as though

she were any other woman, speaking of her deep sinfulness, and not

making any difference between her case and that of the commonest

slave-girl who might have lived an evil life. And all that she

could do was to resign her soul, and suffer it to be borne along

unresisting on that stream of prayer.

And yet she felt, even in her misery, some dim sense of consolation,

some faint gleam of hope such as she had never felt before. She knew

that death was near, and urged Pomponia not to leave her. Pomponia

sat by the bedside, holding the weak hand, and doing every act of

tenderness, and speaking words of consolation, until the sinful

troubled life had ebbed away.

Such a mind as Nero’s had become was incapable of sorrow. He

announced, indeed, that he was overwhelmed with grief, and he

indulged in a certain amount of hysterical and theatric lamentation,

which interfered in no way with his follies or his appetites. A

funeral was decreed to Poppæa at the public expense, and Nero at

the Rostra pronounced a eulogy--not on her virtues, for there were

none on which he could speak, but on her beauty and high fortune,

and because she had been the mother of a divine infant. By her own

wish--learnt doubtless from the Jews--she was buried, and not burnt

as was the Roman custom. Nero had so many spices burnt at her funeral

that the learned doubted whether Arabia could furnish more in a

single summer. But not one genuine tear was shed upon her grave.

CHAPTER LX

_THE DOOM OF VIRTUE_

‘Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.’

SHAKESPEARE, _Macbeth_, iv. 3.

Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime.

One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid

his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the

half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer

of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the

unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor

then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he

had already killed.

In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering

from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ of

Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted

to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted

on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when

Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of

Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the

funeral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that he

was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the

charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius,

the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and

that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the

great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, Marcus

Silanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisoned

by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good

opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with false

charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old

man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his

death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him

open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike

docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered

his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his

unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his

task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to

his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the

command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. He

begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish

patience and pusillanimous acquiescence.[113] All that he can say is

that it was destiny--it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of

Rome.

We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape

from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the

world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by

Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood

of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the

same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was

in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents

and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the

birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers

places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic

phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though

the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous

births--which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as

signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which

it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which

we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused

untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and

orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine

and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful

malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor,

neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, the

roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little

more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung

into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after

them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round

the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and

burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the

plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it

seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by

imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome

alone.

Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his

distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco,

and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed.

He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his

Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues

and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own

dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to

strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours

when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of

adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in

the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over

him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never

knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or

poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in

his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had

not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and

Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor,

handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood,

looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the

bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in

the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base

origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was

probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith

to amuse him--no wit, no learning--nothing but the coarse satieties

of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great

writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and

poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret misery

and terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society,

a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberating

echoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderbolts

of heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden goblet

which he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table at

which he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for some

time grovelled there--a heap of abject terror. But the cup of his

iniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every other

warning was sent in vain.

Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reach

of all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing his

prosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in a

shipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them back

to him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised the

imagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour which

Augustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendant

of the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receive

from Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian,

he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore came

all the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont.

He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousand

horsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy

he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene

of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most

magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged

through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra,

among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal

insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero

raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then begged

that he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition was

repeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed the

diadem--a band of purple silk woven with pearls--upon the head of

Tiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had been

redecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding that

the day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over the

theatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the costume

of Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nero

sang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt of

the wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison with

the manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘in

Corbulo he had a good slave.’

The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largesse

before his departure were almost incredible. It was believed that

one motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire to

be initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, in

order to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made,

and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one of

the ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile,

and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to the

unworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like a

gorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds and

more than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might be

amassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, and

closed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.

But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed in

the pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commission

of further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false charges

the innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of the

aristocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he now

ventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, the

two most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doing

so, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.

The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treat

the accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longed

to hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggish

acquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bled

themselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friends

advised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches,

possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in that

degraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even the

good would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defence

would assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of his

wife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune Rusticus

Arulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancient

tribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thrasea

decided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generous

tribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his career

were over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to await

the decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friends

remonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘Œdipus’

of Seneca--

‘Tacere liceat; nulla libertas minor

A rege petitur.’

‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding my

tongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy which

might have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimity

which yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thrasea

might, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such a

murder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficent

revolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flash

nobleness into a host of slaves.

The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of Venus

Genetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who,

in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to the

assembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaints

were read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed against

senators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglecting

their legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and used

this charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated by

personal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Eprius

was still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, with

threatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazing

with fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of sedition

by impotent disdain for his clear duties. But if the senate was

terrified by this _lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia_,[114] it was

terrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms.

Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus,

was banished from Italy.

It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng of

illustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversation

with the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messenger

came to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends to

leave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by association

with one who had been condemned. In those days compassion was

dangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snapped

by fear.

He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wished

to die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband,

Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a dagger

into her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into the

hand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ The

daughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would not

let her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of their

child, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed more

cheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grieved

that he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said,

‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make me

do wrong.’

He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. The

indomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm his

resolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements,

and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted to

leave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-clad

philosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing.

On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmly

replied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. When

his blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, and

exclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter the

Liberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look,

young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are born

to times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples of

constancy.’

They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyre

burned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when they

had gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure the

anguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breaking

sorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the people

greeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of Venus

Genetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic--of a

tragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assembly

of woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had been

the Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime of

friendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered his

province rather with a view to his own glory than for the public

good. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in having

supported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedy

robbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These were

old charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that his

daughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money to

the diviners of horoscopes.

The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she was

practically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driven

into exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though no

evidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow--she

was not yet twenty years old--was falling sick with the intensity

of her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She had

merely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and the

inexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable,

and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or,

at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after accepting

large sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the two

consuls stood the hapless prisoners--the father grey with age, the

young daughter not even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face,

because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ he

asked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, did

you not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for your

magic incantations?’

Servilia prostrated herself upon the ground, and for some time could

find no voice to speak; then rising, and embracing the altar of

Venus Genetrix, ‘I invoked,’ she exclaimed, ‘no infernal deities;

I uttered no prayers of imprecation. The sole object of my ill-omened

supplications was that thou, O Cæsar, that ye, O senators, might

preserve to me this the best of fathers. I gave the Chaldeans my

gems, my robes, the adornment of my matronly dignity; I would have

given them, had they demanded it, my blood, my life. Let _them_

look to it; their very existence and the nature of their arts were

hitherto unknown to me. I never mentioned the name of the Emperor,

except among the deities. And of all that I did my father knew

nothing. If what I have done be a crime, I have sinned alone.’

‘Senators!’ exclaimed her father, Soranus, ‘let her be at once

acquitted. She is free from all the charges urged against me. She

did not accompany me to my province; she was too young to have known

Rubellius Plautus; she was in no way implicated in the accusations

against her husband. Her sole error has been her filial affection.

Separate her case from mine. She is still in early youth. Let one

victim suffice you. I am prepared to undergo whatever fate you

inflict upon me, but spare my child!’

At those tender words he opened his arms, and his daughter sprang

to his embrace, but the lictors lowered their cruel fasces, and

interposed between them.

Then the witnesses were called, and a murmur of contempt and

indignation broke out even among those abject senators when Publius

Egnatius Celer stepped out first among them. The lip of Soranus

curled in strong disdain, and he muttered the one word ‘Traitor!’

For Egnatius was a professed Stoic; he was a client of Soranus; he

had been his teacher in philosophy; he was old, and Soranus young;

he had received from his hands unnumbered kindnesses; he had himself

encouraged Servilia to consult the astrologers. He wore the dress of

a philosopher; he had trained his features to assume the aspect of

Stoic dignity. But on this day he tore the mask off his own face,

and revealed himself as what he was--a lecherous, treacherous,

avaricious, hypocritic villain, who, having concealed his leprous

character under the guise of honour, did not hesitate for a moment

to sell his friend for money in the hour of calamity, and thereby

dishonoured his grey hairs, and earned for himself the execration

of all time.[115] The wretch lived on in deserved and general

infamy. In better days he was accused by Musonius Rufus and himself

condemned. But to Soranus and Servilia were meted out such justice

as could alone be expected from such judges. The only mercy extended

to them was the permission to choose their mode of death.

Such was the state of things in the days of Nero. The aristocracy

were like men who live in an unknown land, glancing on every side

at the slightest sound. Seneca, who had lived through that reign

of terror, most truly depicts it. His sole remedy is stubborn

resignation. Even abstinence from action requires prudence, for you

may be condemned for what you do _not_ do. Above all must men shun

the Court, ‘that sad prison of slaves.’ But, after every precaution,

no one could be safe, and therefore, Stoic-fashion, men must accustom

themselves to regard all calamities as matters of indifference.

‘Above all, is not suicide always possible?’ Seneca asks; ‘and is

not that the best antidote to tyranny? The path of escape is open

everywhere. Do you see this precipice? It is the descent to Liberty!

Do you see this sea, this well, this river? Liberty lies hidden in

their depths! Do you see this little barren, distorted tree? Liberty

hangs from its branches!’[116] The historian is reminded of the

picture of Pascal. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned

to death, some of whom have their throats cut daily in sight of the

rest, while the survivors see in their fate their own condition, and

gaze one on another with sorrow, and without hope.’

CHAPTER LXI

_BEFORE THE LION_

Καὶ ἐῤῥύσθην ἐκ στόματος λέοντος.

S. Paul. ad Tim. β. iv. 17.

When Onesimus had succeeded in rescuing Nereus from the pitchy tunic

on the dreadful-glorious night of the Church’s martyrdom, the two

made their way through the darkness to Aricia, which they reached at

the earliest dawn. Old Dromo welcomed them, and Junia received her

father with transports of love and gratitude. Onesimus hung modestly

back during their meeting, but when the girl had ceased to weep

on her father’s neck, she turned to his deliverer, and thanked him

from her heart as one to whose courage and devotion she owed his

preservation from that death of agony.

During that day they arranged their plans. In the little farm and

vineyard of Pudens there was ample room for free labour, and it was

settled that Nereus and Junia should stay there for the present,

Nereus working in the vineyard, and Junia helping in the care of the

flocks and fowls, and in the management of the household. Among those

groves, in that remote and humble homestead, they were safe in their

obscurity, and there they could abide until some other opportunity

offered, or happier times came round.

Onesimus thought it his duty to return to the Apostle, to whose

service he had devoted his life. The generosity of Octavia had left

him with sufficient funds for his simple needs, and he prepared to

make his way to Crete, where he expected to find St. Paul. But before

he started he asked Nereus to sanction his marriage with Junia. Both

of them were baptised Christians, and Onesimus had now sufficiently

proved the sincerity of his faith, and the depth of his repentance

for former errors.

‘I am grateful to thee, youth,’ said the old man, ‘and I know that

thou art a brand plucked from the burning. But the coming of the

Lord draweth nigh, and the sky is red and lowering, and Antichrist is

striving to destroy the Church of God. Is it a time to marry and give

in marriage? Is it not rather a time for them who have wives to be

as though they had none, and for the unmarried to abide as virgins

because of the present necessity?’

‘I know it, my father,’ said Onesimus; ‘but thou mayst die, and Junia

be left an orphan in these evil days. Let us be married, and she will

have an earthly arm to defend her and toil for her. We will marry,

and will separate to-day. I will seek the Apostle, and if it be God’s

will He will make our way plain before our face.’

Nereus consented. At a little distance from Rome, in the loneliness

of the Campagna, the fossors had already begun to construct the

catacomb now known as that of St. Callistus, and there in a small

subterranean chapel in one of those dim galleries, the Christians

began to hold their evening or early morning assemblies. Thither

after sunset Nereus, Onesimus, and Junia made their way. They

found but a handful of Christians who had escaped the fury of the

persecution, and though these were, in one sense, deeply discouraged

by the shattering blow which had destroyed their Church, and almost

heartbroken at the agonising loss of their loved brethren, in another

sense they were full of hope and exalted courage, and uttered to one

another their watchword _Maranatha_, with more intense conviction.

And among them was Cletus, who had escaped as by miracle. His name

had been denounced, but being young and active, he had succeeded in

hiding himself and eluding research. He was now the humble bishop of

the ruined community. He it was who joined the hands of Onesimus and

Junia in the holy bond, and he it was who blessed the bread and wine

of which the little band of brethren partook in humble communion.

Marriage gladness, marriage festivities there were none. The Phrygian

freedman and the Roman maiden pledged their faith to each other under

the shadow of the Cross.

Before the dawn was red, Onesimus was making his way to Rhegium,

whence he purposed to get to Messana, and so by ship to Lasæa on

the stormy shores of Crete. On his arrival he found only Titus of

Corinth, whom St. Paul had left in charge of the young and struggling

Churches. He sailed in search of the Apostle, and his ship stopped

for a day at Patmos, where he found the Beloved Disciple in his

exile. The ascendency of St. John’s personality had overawed the

inhabitants of that rocky islet, and he was suffered to spend his

time in freedom. Onesimus sat with him under a grey olive tree, on

the grassy summit of a rock, the highest point of the island, and

discoursed with him for hours. The scene was lovely. The brilliant

sapphire of the sea lay beneath them in unbroken calm, rippled here

and there by the white wings of the beautiful seabirds. The crags

glowed a deep rich red, except when they were covered with grass,

on which the pink sea-thrift had already faded into white. On every

side the sea-line was broken by the fantastic contour of isles

and islets. Eastward on the Ionian shore, so rich in heroic and

philosophic memories, they saw the historic summit of Mount Mycale,

and northwards the island of Thera. A burning mountain, cast into

the midst of the sea, and at that time in a crisis of violent

eruption, it vomited, as though from the depths of the abyss, its

volumes of turbid smoke which hung like a cloud at one spot of the

far horizon.[117] It was here that St. John heard from Onesimus

the scenes which had followed his providential deliverance from the

boiling oil, the illumination of Nero’s gardens with living torches,

the orgies of the wild beast from the sea of nations as he wallowed

in the blood of the saints. His whole soul was already brooding

on the awful manifesto in which he answered the fury of the world,

and spoke of the impending destruction of the two great cities of

antiquity--Jerusalem, the metropolis of God’s olden Temple; Rome,

the metropolis of the dragon and the Antichrist. Here, too, he

entrusted to Onesimus--in whose youth, prudence, and courage he

was interested--some of the keys to that strange cryptogram of the

Apocalypse, which, if it had been written otherwise than in symbols,

might have involved the ruin of whole communities. Among other things

he told him that, by the cabbalistic system of Gematria, which the

Greeks called isopsephism, ‘Nero Cæsar’ in _Hebrew letters_ gave that

which he had called the number of the Beast, 666. It was necessary

that such secrets should be kept with care, for in the hands of an

informer they might lead to overwhelming disasters; yet Onesimus did

not wholly throw into the Mæander the key to the secret; but in due

time revealed enough to guide the guesses which Irenæus and others of

the ancient Christian Fathers had heard through the martyr Polycarp.

From Patmos Onesimus sailed to Ephesus, but did not overtake the

Apostle Paul till he had followed him to Nicopolis, in Epirus. After

a restful winter there St. Paul went through Macedonia to Troas.

There, in the hospitable house of Carpus, he was suddenly arrested at

the instance of Alexander the coppersmith, who was animated by trade

grudges, because that part of his work which was connected with small

images of Diana of the Ephesians had suffered from Paul’s preaching.

Paul was seized by night, and so suddenly that he had no time to take

with him his few precious books and documents and his large cloak. He

was hurried to Ephesus, and tried before the proconsul; but, knowing

that there he was little likely to obtain justice, he again appealed

to Cæsar. During his imprisonment at Ephesus he had been cheered by

Onesiphorus, and by the son of his heart Timotheus, who had shared

with him for so many years in the life of a despised and hunted

missionary. They parted with streaming tears which Paul long

remembered. With Onesimus as his attendant, and Luke, Demas,

Tychicus, Trophimus, and Erastus as his fellow-helpers, the glorious

prisoner set forth on his last journey. Trophimus fell ill at

Miletus; Erastus stayed at Corinth, of which city he had been

chamberlain. They went over the Diolkos to Lechæum, along the Gulf

of Corinth, and across the Adriatic to Brundisium. Thence they made

their dreary way to Rome. This time there were no rejoicing crowds of

Christians to meet them at Appii Forum or the Three Taverns, at sight

of whom he could thank God and take courage. He found the Church of

Rome in its ashes. No one could visit him without peril; and indeed

no Christian of rank was left at Rome. Clemens and his family shared

the disgrace into which Vespasian had fallen, and were living at

the Sabine farm. Pomponia, after her visit to Poppæa, had suffered

a severe relapse, and had been moved to a distant villa in the

Apennines. Every leader of the Christian Church except Cletus and

Hermas had perished in the persecution. Pudens was in Britain with

Caractacus and Claudia. In later days the devotion of Christians to

their imprisoned brethren struck Pagans with curious amazement, but

Paul himself discouraged visits which might so easily bring death to

the visitors. He was left, therefore, in painful loneliness, except

for the loving care of Luke and Onesimus. Of his companions, Demas

had forsaken him, and the presence of others had been necessary in

various Churches. He was imprisoned, as his brother Apostles had

been, in the Tullianum, and it was difficult to find out where he

was. The Ephesian Onesiphorus, who came to Rome for the purpose,

cheered his heart by fearlessly seeking him, and, unashamed of his

chain, refreshed him in this his seventh imprisonment with that sense

of human sympathy which he most required. But this one gleam of light

was speedily quenched, for Onesiphorus caught the prison fever, and

died at Rome.

Nero himself presided at the first trial of the Apostle. The crime

which the Emperor had committed against the Christians was so

enormous that the recollection of it haunted him, and intensified

his hatred. He would not lose the opportunity of condemning the

greatest of the Christian leaders. Paul was conducted to the basilica

in the Golden House. It was a hall of the utmost splendour. The floor

was of mosaic, in which porphyry, and serpentine, and giallo antico

blended their soft lustres in patterns of wonderful variety and

grace. The pillars were of light-green cipollino, the walls were

inlaid with pavonazzetto from the Apennines near Pisa, and their

cornices of alabaster were sculptured with animals and dolphins,

and winged figures. The Emperor sat in the centre of the apse,

which was divided from the body of the hall by a balustrade of

white marble. His gilded and ivory chair was elevated on an inlaid

pavement, approached by steps of porphyry. Round him stood a group of

Prætorians with their silver eagles and other military ensigns. The

lictors with their axed fasces stood at the back of his chair, and

near him on lower seats sat Tigellinus, Eprius Marcellus, Cossutianus

Capito, and other informers who had recently been enriched with the

spoils of the innocent. Not far from these were some of the leading

Jews, and conspicuous among them were the High Priest Ishmael, the

alabarch Tiberius Alexander the unworthy nephew of Philo, and the

foxy features of that arch-impostor, the magician Simon.

The great prisoner was made to stand in front of the balustrade on

the spot marked by a circle of giallo antico on the floor. His hands

were fastened together with a long coupling chain. The two chief

Ephesian accusers, Alexander the coppersmith, and Demetrius the

silversmith, were animated with the keenest hatred. And Paul was

left absolutely alone. Onesimus and Luke accompanied him to the

entrance, but they were both ‘suspects,’ and were not permitted to

enter. But there were Gentiles and soldiers who might have helped

him had they chosen, and the Apostle would not have been human if

he had not felt the bitterness of desertion. ‘At my first trial,’

he wrote to Timothy, ‘no man took his place at my side. All abandoned

me. God forgive them!’ In all that city, where his previous bonds

had made the Gospel known alike in the Palace and the camp; in that

world, for which he had sacrificed his life in loftiest services,

there was no patron to protect, no advocate to support him, no

favourable witness to plead extenuation. But he felt and said that

One more powerful than many legions stood by him--even the Lord whom

he had served.

Nero was in his most savage mood, and Tigellinus as always, added

fuel to his rage. He insulted Paul, he glared upon him, he roared

at him, he attempted to browbeat him, with utter violation of every

principle of justice. Paul was a man the very sight of whom naturally

inspired Nero with ferocity. For Nero, whom all the world knew to

be a robber, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide--a sensualist,

effeminate, degraded, and unutterably depraved--had become aware

that these Christians lived lives of purity and holiness, the

possibility of which he affected to deny. And his guilty splendour

and luxurious misery were forced at last to blush and tremble

before the irresistible weakness of that despised, ragged, fettered

prisoner. For Paul did not in the least fear him, and Paul’s courage

was so marvellous to those who were accustomed to the pusillanimity

of senators, who went away and committed suicide if Nero did but

frown at them, that the courtiers and soldiers turned their eyes

from the purple of the world’s master to gaze upon the rags of this

sick prisoner who stood there with his pale countenance, his stooping

figure and thin sable-silvered hair, more dauntless in chains, and

under the axe of doom, than the Emperor amid his guards.

The first trial turned on Ephesian accusations of riot and disorder,

and Paul, producing the diploma of his franchise, stood on his rights

as a Roman citizen. He demanded to answer for himself, and, in the

manly speech which he made, the chained ambassador of Christ struck

a feeling akin to terror into the heart of the deified autocrat

of heathendom. He was able to prove by the written evidence of the

Recorder of Ephesus, and of friendly Asiarchs, that the testimony

of the metal-workers was false, and that he had ever behaved as a

peaceable citizen. The calm dignity of his defence, and the perfect

courtesy and fearlessness which he had shown in his desperate

position, left a deep impression on the jurors. Eprius Marcellus

tried to cow him with that Hercules-Furens style of oratory which

had so often driven the blood from the cheeks of consulars and

generals. But when Paul turned on him his quiet glance, Eprius

Marcellus stopped short, stammered in the middle of a sentence, and

ignominiously sat down, muttering something about ‘the evil eye.’

In spite of Nero’s scorn and anger, the jurors voted in accordance

with their convictions. When the votes were counted in the urn there

were a few C.s for _Condemno_ dropped by Court sycophants, but most

of the tablets were A. for _Absolvo_ and N. L. for _Non Liquet_,

‘not proven.’ To the astonishment of all, this first offence ended

in acquittal on the first capital charge, and _ampliatio_--the

postponement of the trial--for the examination of the second count.

The second count was that Paul was a Christian, and, as such, the

adherent of an illegal religion. On this he knew that he could not

escape; but of the result of the first trial he wrote to Timothy with

heartfelt gratitude that ‘God had saved him out of the mouth of the

lion.’

There was nothing to cheer his cold and rocky prison except the light

within his soul, and that human tenderness which, when all others had

deserted him, was still lavished upon him by Onesimus and Luke. The

Evangelist did all that was in his power to keep alive in Rome the

flickering flame which the violence of persecution had overwhelmed.

In this way Onesimus could do but little. He regarded it as the

present work of his life to console and tend the Apostle, and he

devoted himself to this work with all the more thoroughness because,

when he was able to visit Aricia, Junia impressed him with its

necessity and sacredness. He had his reward; for day by day he

himself advanced in righteousness and knowledge, as he listened

to words which have helped forward the regeneration of the world.

BOOK III

* * * * *

‘_ATROPOS OCCAT_’

CHAPTER LXII

_NERO IN GREECE_

‘Hæc opera atque hæ sunt generosi Principis artes

Gaudentis fœdo peregrina ad pulpita cantu

Prostitui, Graiæque apium meruisse coronæ.’

JUV. _Sat._ viii. 224.

Nero grew weary of Rome. While he was there he could not wholly

exclude the voice of the conscience of mankind which awoke echoes

in his own. With art, and æsthetics, and the race-course, and the

theatre, he tried to create around him the elements of a sham and

shadowy world. It was a world filled with the ghosts of crime and

weird with insensate projects and monstrous revellings. He had

attempted everything, abused everything, polluted everything, and

‘the scoriac river of passion accursed,’ of which he drank so freely,

did but consume and burn up his powers. He had become like a dead

thing in a wilderness of dead capacities, inspired at once by

‘insatiable desires and incurable disgusts.’ While he played the

god he sank lower than Christian eye can follow him, into the beast.

With Domitian, Tiberius, Caligula, and Helagabalus--with Vitellius,

Commodus, and Maximin--he was one of a group of Cæsars who have been

set forth last on the stage of history, a spectacle to angels and

to men to show that human nature can sink into ‘half beast and half

devil’ when there are no restraints to save men from all that is most

abject. They became, as St. Paul said, inventors of evil; not only

doers of whatsoever things are vile, whatsoever things are infamous,

whatsoever things are of ill report, but also delighters in those

that do them.

But at Rome, even in his beloved theatre, Nero was not safe from

insults. They scorched him as with the touch of flame, and yet were

so impalpable that he could not avenge them unless he put a whole

population to death. Opposite his Palace, or on the outer circus,

were written, in chalk or coal, denunciations so stinging as to

show that if blank walls are the paper of fools they may also be the

avengers of tyrants. One of these pasquinades hailed him as the true

descendant of Æneas, since Æneas ‘took off’ his father, Nero his

mother. Another criticised the over-grown space of the Golden House,

and bade the Quirites to emigrate to Veii, if the House did not

forestall them by extending so far. Yet another reminded him that

the Parthian could be an Apollo with his arrows no less than Nero

with his harp.

He pretended indifference to these things, but he felt them, and

longed to find a fresh scene for display. At Rome he considered that

his musical talent, though he had exhibited it to the promiscuous

populace, was yet a flower which blushed unseen. The astute and

adulatory Greeks had sent him the crowns of all their citharœdic

contests. He was delighted, and asked their delegates to supper.

When they begged him to give them a specimen of his powers, they

went into such ecstasies over his performance that he said the

Greeks were the only connoisseurs who were worthy of his proficiency.

To Greece, therefore, he set forth with a retinue which would

have sufficed for the conquest of India, only that they were more

concerned with masks and robes and musical instruments than with

arms. He was accompanied, too, by all his train of minions, as well

as by an army of _claqueurs_. When he appeared at Naples he was

so enchanted by the ‘Kentish fire’ of some Alexandrians who were

present--a mode of applause which was new to him--that he took a

number of these Egyptians into his service. He had also trained a

band of youths of equestrian rank, and more than five thousand of

the lustiest plebeians to act together in bands and learn certain

modes of cheering, which were called ‘buzzings,’ ‘tiles,’ and ‘jars.’

They were mostly boys, and were arrayed in fine dresses, with their

thick hair shining with perfumes, and with rings on their left hands.

With such accompaniments he might feel tolerably secure of victory,

yet when he appeared at a contest he always felt or pretended a

girlish timidity. The Emperor of Rome might be seen on the stage

of Greek towns bending his knee before the mob, humbly adoring them

with his hands, assuring the judges that he had done his little best,

tremblingly solicitous to observe the slightest rules, and perspiring

with anxiety if he made the smallest mistake. Besides this, he

debased himself with all the pettiest intrigues of tenth-rate

theatrical life. He defamed his competitors, or bribed them not to

do their best, or cajoled them to cede the victory to him. When an

Epirot, with a fine voice, refused to cede the prize unless Nero paid

him ten talents, he was pushed against a column by Nero’s clique and

stabbed to death. It required the power of the Emperor to secure the

rewards of the comedian.

Without believing, or even alluding to, the deeds recorded of him

by Dion Cassius, it is clear that his plunderings, and crimes, and

secret orgies continued unabated. From the Thespians he stole the

Cupid of Praxiteles in Pentelic marble; from the Pisatans of Olympia

the statue of Ulysses among the Greek chiefs drawing lots to answer

the challenge of Hector. Rich men were proscribed in consequence of

secret delations, which often sprang from the greed of the detestable

Calvia Crispinilla, who was now the keeper of the wardrobe of Sporus.

They were struck down, unheard, and their possessions were divided.

Rome had been left under the government of two ex-slaves, Helius and

Polycletus, who were so rapacious that the people complained of being

under two Neros instead of one.

Amid such crimes little was thought of the fate of Paris. The poor

pantomime, whose beauty, grace, and skill had been the delight of

Rome, had excited the jealousy of Nero because he could not teach

him how to dance. Paris, like Aliturus, had been no better than a

slave, and we cannot blame him too severely if, in such an age and

such surroundings, he had been stained by the vices in the midst

of which he lived, and his nature, not originally ignoble, had been

‘subdued

To what it wrought in, like the dyer’s hand.’

But his death, like that of Roscius, ‘eclipsed the gaiety of

nations,’ and gave one warning more--had it been needed--to Aliturus,

that the friendship of tyrants means death.

But the worst of these Grecian enormities--many of which cannot be

narrated--involved the acme of treachery and ingratitude. No man had

shed a purer lustre over the age of Nero than the brave and honest

Corbulo. His life had been devoted to the service of the Empire. To

him had been due those splendid victories which kept the Parthians in

check, and induced Tiridates to put the colophon on Nero’s glory by

coming to receive at his hands before the Roman people the diadem

of Armenia. Well might the Arsacid tell Nero that in Corbulo he had

a good slave. The great victorious general had spent his life in

foreign service. He had never come near the Court; had received no

civil honours; had never returned to enjoy a triumph or an ovation.

He had been content to keep himself away from those scenes of gilded

slavery and miserable splendour, and perhaps anticipated the sole

reward which tyrants can give to true greatness. Now, however, that

Nero was in Greece, he wrote to Corbulo a letter of almost filial

reverence, and invited him to come and receive proofs of his

gratitude. To refuse would have been tantamount to rebellion, and

Corbulo had always been stainlessly loyal to his worthless master.

But good men invariably have their slanderers, and one of his

officers, Arrius Varus, had been whispering suspicions about him

into the Emperor’s ear. He was not granted so much as an audience.

No sooner had he landed at Cenchreæ than Nero sent him the command

to die. Corbulo wasted no words on execration or complaint. For a

moment, perhaps, it flashed across him that he would have been wiser

to listen to the voice of Rome and of the East, which had invited him

to be their liberator. But it was too late to repent of the fault of

putting trust in a monster. He drew his sword and stabbed himself

with the single word ‘Deserved!’[118]

We cannot wonder that Nero did not visit Sparta, because every

tradition of Sparta would have cried shame on his histrionic

effeminacy. He did not visit Athens, because Athens did not deign

to invite him, and because he shrank from eliciting a keenness of

wit which had not spared the bloodstained Sylla. But his chief reason

for avoiding ‘the Eye of Greece’ was because he dreaded the Temple

of the Furies, who had avenged the less guilty and more expiable

matricide of Orestes. Nor did he dare to visit Eleusis, because

the voice of the herald forbade the profane to be initiated into

its mysteries. He did not even venture to present himself to the

hierophants of the little mysteries of Agra on the banks of the

Ilissus. Visits opened to the humblest, and mysteries revealed to

the simplest of the pure, were barred to him.

And before his journey was over, amid his sham triumphs, he began to

be disturbed by disquieting rumours.

Judæa was in a state of violent revolt, and the presence of an able

general was urgently needed. Nero therefore appointed Vespasian to

the command. The old general was expiating in seclusion and obscurity

the crime of having snored while Nero sang. One day an Imperial

messenger was announced at his humble home. His blood ran cold, for

he made sure that the soldier brought him an order to die. Instead

of that he brought a nomination to the government of Judæa and the

command of the army. To these high offices Nero appointed him because

a man of valour and military ability was wanted. Nero overlooked what

he called his want of taste because, though eminent as a soldier, he

was a man of such humble name and origin that he could not possibly

be regarded as dangerous. But the revolt of the Jews, though it was

a serious matter, was far less alarming than the other news which now

reached Nero.

Helius wrote to say that affairs in the city urgently required his

presence. ‘You summon me back,’ he wrote in reply; ‘your wish ought

rather to be that I should return worthy of Nero.’ But the menace of

disaster was too grave to admit of its being neglected for a verbal

pomposity, and Helius hurried to Corinth in person to rouse the

Emperor from his insensate frivolity. The weather was so stormy

that his enemies fondly hoped for his shipwreck if he sailed. Delay,

however, was impossible. His day of doom was close at hand.

CHAPTER LXIII

_MUTTERING THUNDER_

Αἰεὶ τὸ μὲν ζῇ, τὸ δὲ μεθίσταται κακόν,

τὸ δ’ ἐκπέφηνεν αὖθιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς νέον.

EURIPIDES.

The insistency of Helius, and the alarming reports which reached

Nero from all quarters, roused him at last from his intoxication

of frivolous vanity and compelled him to cut short the ‘ignoble

masquerade with which he had soiled Greece.’ But he would not reveal

the least consciousness of alarm, and, indeed, in the madness of the

moment, he did not realise it. What did it matter if he was deposed?

‘All the world,’ he used to say, ‘supports art,’ and he could easily

gain his living as a favourite harpist or singer on the public

stage. The glory of the actor, won by his own talents, should be

more dazzling than the diadem of the Emperor, which was but the

heritage of his race!

He first entered Naples, because there he had made his first stage

appearance. He entered it as a _hieronices_, riding in a chariot

drawn by four milk-white steeds, through a breach made in the walls.

He made the same magnificent entry into Antium, dear to him as the

place of his birth, and into Alba, the city where the Temple of

Jupiter Latiaris was venerated by the entire Latin race. But he

reserved for Rome the fullest magnificence of a triumph heretofore

undreamed of, and such as might well cause every true Roman to blush

for shame. He degraded to his ignoble purpose the chariot in which

Augustus had triumphed after the battle of Actium. His robe was of

purple; over it flowed a chlamys gleaming with golden stars; on his

brow he wore the olive wreath of the Olympic victors; in his right

hand he carried the laurel crown of Pythia. Seated in the chariot by

his side was no brave soldier or noble statesman, but Diodorus the

harpist! Before him went a long procession of heralds, each carrying

some garland of victory, with tablets on which were inscribed the

names of those whom he had conquered, and the songs or tragedies in

which he had gained the prize. Thousands of the trained applauders

whom he called _Augustiani_, followed his chariot proclaiming

themselves the soldiers and comrades of his successes. An arch of

the Circus Maximus had been broken down for him, and through it he

made his way along the Velabrum and the Forum, not to the temple of

Jupiter on the Capitol, or to that of Mars the Avenger, but to the

Palace and the temple of his patron Apollo. The Senate had gone forth

in festal robes to meet and greet him. As the champing steeds tossed

their white manes and bore him slowly along, every door and window

and roof and lattice was crowded with spectators, and the air was

rent with shouts of ‘Hail, Olympic, hail, Pythic victor! Hail,

sole _periodonices_![119] Augustus, Augustus! Hail, Nero-Hercules!

Nero-Apollo! Hail, sacred voice! Happy are they who hear it!’ In

street after street victims were immolated as he passed; showers

of fragrant saffron were sprinkled down; the air was rich with the

perfume of incense burning on hundreds of altars; birds and little

ornaments, and jewels and flowers were scattered over him. It

rained roses from the balconies full of matrons and maidens. Of his

eighteen hundred and eight crowns he arranged the choicest in his own

bedchamber and around his bed. The rest he sent in masses to adorn

the great Egyptian obelisk which Augustus had reared to be the goal

of the Circus Maximus.

Such men as the consuls of the year--the dull poet Silius Italicus

and the orator Trachalus--might estimate highly the successes of a

comedian, but the indignant shade of Thrasea might have rejoiced in

its Elysian fields to have been spared the sight of such a triumph!

But so far from being ashamed, Nero henceforth made his celestial

voice his chief concern. As it was too precious to be wasted in

addressing crass Prætorians, he contented himself with sending

messages to them, or having his addresses read aloud in his presence.

What he had to say to the Senate was similarly read by one of the

consuls. An attendant whom he called a _phonascus_ stood constantly

at his side to warn him to be careful of his throat, and to keep a

handkerchief before his mouth. Whoever extolled his wretched voice

was his friend; whoever praised it insufficiently was his enemy.

It is part of the subtle irony of history that the zenith of apparent

prosperity is often the culminating moment of misfortune, and the

scene of most splendid exaltation is that in which the fingers of

a man’s hand steal forth and write on the palace-wall the flashing

messages of doom. The triumph of the sole _periodonices_ whom the

world had ever seen was the last hour of his sham glory. The patience

of God and man was exhausted, and ‘down rushed the thunderbolt.’

Romans might be too deeply abased to avenge the degradation of their

name by the latest of those triumphs which seemed to cover with

ridiculous parody the three hundred which had preceded it. But there

was yet a Gaul brave enough to arouse the Empire from its fatal

apathy.

His name was Julius Vindex, and he was the Proprætor of Gaul. He

was rich, and he was a senator, as his father had been before him,

for Claudius had granted this distinction to the descendant of the

ancient kings of Aquitania. Nero envied his wealth, but Vindex, in

order to make the greedy parasites of the Court think that he would

soon die and leave them his possessions, drank cumin-water and made

himself artificially pale. In Gaul he received constant news of

Nero’s villanies both paltry and heinous, and his soul burned within

him. He sounded the legionaries to discover whether they were as

much ashamed and weary as himself of the tyranny of a comedian and

a monster. He found them ripe for rebellion. He had no personal

objects. He knew that a Gaul could hardly be Emperor, and he secretly

offered the Empire to Galba. On March 16, A.D. 68, he gave, a little

too prematurely, the signal of revolt. Nero had gone to Naples to

refresh himself and to rest his precious voice, and there he received

the news of the insurrection on March 19, the anniversary of the

murder of his mother.

The idiotic frivolity with which he acted upon such serious

intelligence astonished even his courtiers. He only laughed, and

pretended to rejoice at the opportunity which would thus be afforded

him of spoiling the wealthiest of the provinces. He went into the

gymnasium, and watched with affected transport the contests of the

athletes. At supper still more perilous tidings reached him, but he

contented himself with saying, ‘Woe to the rebels!’ Meanwhile the

walls of Rome were scrawled over with satirical inscriptions. Yet

for eight days he took no step whatever, answered no letters, gave

no orders, attempted to get over the peril by calmly ignoring it.

His long impunity had made him a fatalist. Had not Britain been lost

and recovered? Had not Armenia been lost and recovered? Whatever

happened, was he not promised an Eastern kingdom, or could he not

support himself by his voice and lyre?

A few days later came an edict of Vindex, in which he spoke of Nero

as Ahenobarbus, which angered Nero as much as it angered Henry VII.

to be described by Richard III. as ‘one Henry Tidder or Tudor.’

Vindex also described Nero as a wretched twangler on the harp. Now

indeed he was furious. To call him a wretched twangler! Did any of

his friends know of a better harpist than himself? Was not such a

criticism a proof of ignorance and bad taste? Let the Senate rouse

itself to avenge him! He would come in person, but that he felt a

certain weakness in his throat.

Messenger after messenger came spurring to Naples, and Nero was

compelled to hurry back in alarm to Rome. Vindex was by this time

at the head of a hundred thousand men, yet Nero quite recovered his

spirits when, on his road to Rome, he saw the statue of a Gaulish

soldier subdued and dragged by the hair by a Roman knight. At the

sight of it he leapt up for joy, and adored heaven. When he reached

Rome, instead of summoning an assembly of the Senate and the people

to meet him, he only invited a few leading men to the Palace, and

after a brief consultation, spent the afternoon in showing them

new kinds of hydraulic organs. ‘I intend to display them all on the

stage,’ he said--with the affected afterthought ‘if Vindex will let

me.’

When Galba first received the secret overtures of Vindex he

temporised. He had only preserved his life under various tyrants

by consummate care, and by affecting a policy of submission and

indifference. Vindex implored him to constitute himself ‘the

leader and avenger of the human race,’ but he took no step until

he discovered that Nero had sent secret orders that he was to be

murdered, and found that he had only escaped very narrowly and by

the merest accident. Besides, as his officer T. Vinius reminded him,

he had hesitated in his allegiance, and to hesitate was to be lost.

He must either assume the purple or prepare to die.

The fresh intelligence that Galba and the two provinces of Spain had

also revolted, struck Nero with panic. He swooned away, and remained

for some time speechless and motionless. On recovering his senses he

tore his robe, and beat his head, with the cry, ‘I am ruined!’ His

nurse tried to console him with the remark that other Princes had

suffered similar calamities. ‘Nay,’ he answered, ‘my fate is more

unheard of than that of all others, for _I_ lose the Empire while

yet I live.’ Some steps were suggested to him. He recalled some

troops from Illyria, and put Petronius Turpilianus at the head of

such forces as he could secure. He set a price on the head of Vindex,

and Vindex replied with the ‘sublime gasconade,’ ‘Nero promises ten

million sesterces to any one who will bring him my head. I promise

my head to any one who will bring me his.’ But scarcely a single plan

occurred to Nero which was not puerile; not one measure which was not

monstrous. He would execute the provincial governors, and appoint new

ones. He would send round to the islands and kill all the exiles, for

they might join the revolters. He would order a general massacre of

all the Gauls in Rome, for they might favour their countrymen. He

would give up the Gallic provinces to be plundered by the soldiers.

He would invite the whole Senate to a banquet, and poison them. He

deposed the two consuls, appointed himself sole consul, and as he

left the banquet, leaning on the shoulders of his intimates, he

declared that he would present himself before the legions unarmed

and weeping; and, when he had melted their hearts by his tears, he

would sing strains of victory to the rejoicing soldiers--which he

must immediately compose. Above this ‘lugubrious buffoonery’ he

could not rise!

His other preparations to meet the crisis--such as they were--bore

the same stamp of infructuous folly. They were all tainted with

vanity, imbecility, and corruption. In choosing vehicles for his

expedition, his chief care was about those which were necessary for

his stage properties. The women who were to accompany him had their

hair cut short to make them look like Amazons, and were armed with

axes and targets. In raising money he was very fastidious that

the silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine. Many flatly

refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get back the sums

with which the informers had been gorged to repletion. He was made

daily to feel that his power was gone. When he summoned the city

tribes to renew their oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves

as soldiers, the result was such a failure that he had to order each

household to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these he

would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting stewards and

secretaries.

But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The people were

suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of an Alexandrian

corn-vessel was announced. This always gave an occasion for

rejoicing, but when it turned out that the vessel was only laden

with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle over the arena, there was an

outburst of rage and contumely. Scoffs at his chariot-racing and

singing were heard everywhere. Burghers pretended to get up quarrels

with their slaves at night, and then shouted _Vindex! Vindex!_ as

though they were merely appealing to the police. Nor was this all.

He was tormented with dreams and portents of every description, which

made his days and nights hideous. He dreamt that he was steering a

ship, and that some one wrenched the helm out of his hand; that his

murdered wife Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss; that

he was covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was

a stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his

dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey’s theatre

sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path. It was rumoured

that on the first day of the year, the Lares had fallen down in the

middle of a sacrifice, and that the great gates of the mausoleum of

his family had opened spontaneously, while a voice came from their

awful recesses which summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to

be performed at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found. When

his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the Senate, and he said

that ‘criminals should soon meet the end they had deserved,’ the

senators had joined in an ill-omened shout of approval. It was

noticed, too, that the last tragedy which he had chanted in public

was that of ‘Œdipus in Exile,’ and that the last verse which he had

spoken was--

‘Wife, Mother, Father, join to bid me die.’

If, on receiving the news of the revolt of Vindex, he had put

himself, like a true Roman Emperor, at the head of his legions,

the terrible prestige of a Cæsar, the remembered failure of previous

conspiracies, and the disunion of his enemies, might have secured

his triumph. For the German legions of Verginius Rufus disdained

to follow the initiative of the Gauls. Their own general refused

the Empire, and declared for Galba; but an unhappy and accidental

collision between the jealous cohorts led to a battle in which twenty

thousand Gauls were left dead upon the field. Vindex, in despair,

stabbed himself with his own sword. Galba, in scarcely less despair,

meditated suicide at Clunia, hearing that the soldiers of Verginius

were anything but favourable to his claims. If but one pulse of true

blood of his brave patrician ancestors had stirred in the veins of

Nero, if he could have shown but one momentary flash of their spirit,

he would have been gloriously saved. But his abuse of passion,

his disgraced manhood, his polluted mind, his enervated frame,

stamped upon him the curse of nullity, and the infamous throng of

contaminated courtiers who formed his band of intimates were as empty

and effeminate as himself. No strength was left among them to evoke

the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity

in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them

to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.

And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling

him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the

last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared

against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more

or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it

was not passed. In petulant passion he tore the letters to pieces.

Then, like a spoilt boy in a rage, he seized from the table two

crystal cups, of priceless value, of which he was specially fond,

and which were embossed with scenes from Homer, and dashed them to

shivers on the marble floor.

More wild and wicked follies suggested themselves to his diseased

and whirling brain. Why should he not again set fire to the city,

and prevent all attempts to extinguish the flames, by sending to the

vivaria of the amphitheatre, and letting loose all the wild beasts

among the people? What a scene it would be! Lions, and tigers, and

bears, and panthers, growling, leaping, roaring, amid the streets of

a city bursting everywhere into conflagration, and--while themselves

wild with terror--striking fresh terror into a screaming populace!

Incapable of consecutive thought, he had not even considered what

would come of this. Suffice it that it would be a magnificent

excitement, a thrilling and supreme sensation! He did not repent

of this design; he was not appalled by the stupendous and selfish

wickedness; he was only deterred by the impossibility of carrying it

out. It may be said that such schemes betray the madman; but Nero’s

brain was undisturbed by any madness except that which consists in,

and is the Nemesis of, a soul eaten away by conceit, selfishness, and

lust. Caligula, it has been truly said, would, in modern days, have

found his way to Bedlam; but Nero to Tyburn. His hour was come. He

sent his most trusted freedman to Ostia to prepare the fleet. He

sounded the tribunes and centurions of the Prætorian guard to see if

they would share his flight. Some of them made excuses; some flatly

refused; one of them even dared to quote to him the line: ‘Is it so

very difficult to die?’ As for his Præfects--Tigellinus, whom he had

laden with wealth and honours; Nymphidius, the son of a slave-woman--

creatures who had crawled and sunned themselves in the noon of his

prosperity, they shamelessly and without hesitation betrayed and

abandoned him. The poisonous sunlight of his favour had bred no

creature nobler than adders. What should he do? Should he array

himself in his tragic robe and present himself as a suppliant

before the Parthians, or before Galba, moving them to tears by his

histrionic skill? But how could he get so far in safety? No; he would

clothe himself in black garments, would go to the Forum, and there

would weep before the Rostra, imploring pardon for the past, and

begging the people--if only he succeeded in moving their minds--at

least to allow him to be Præfect of Egypt in place of Tiberius

Alexander! He even wrote the oration which he intended to deliver on

the occasion, and it was found in his writing-desk after his death.

His one dread was that, if he so much as ventured outside the gates

of the Golden House, he would be torn to pieces before he could

make his way to the Forum. He postponed the decision, and, summoning

Locusta, obtained from her a poison which he placed in a golden

box. Then he passed over to his favourite retreat in the Servilian

gardens, and slept as well as he could his last wretched sleep on

earth.

CHAPTER LXIV

_AT THE THREE FOUNTAINS_

‘For out of prison he cometh to reign.’--ECCL. iv. 14.

‘Lieblich wie der Iris Farbenfeuer

Auf der Donnerwolke duft’gem Thau

Schlimmert durch der Wehmuth düstern Schleier

Hier der Ruhe heitres Blau.’--SCHILLER.

After his first defence, the Apostle Paul had lived on in his narrow

prison, indomitably cheerful though death stood almost visibly

beside him. Himself undaunted, he strove to kindle the same faith

and courage in those whom he loved. He had heard that Timothy was

sad and despondent, and had not got over the grief of being separated

from him. The Apostle had a deep human yearning to see once again

the dear companion of his earlier conflicts. He wrote to him the

beautiful, pathetic letter which contains for us his last words. He

exhorted him to strenuous cheerfulness, and urged him to face the

shame of the Gospel at Rome, and to come and share his sufferings.

‘Come, my child’--such was the burden of his message--‘come before

winter; come quickly; come, or it will be too late.’ And when he

comes let him send to Carpus at Troas for the large cloak which Paul

had left at his house in the hurry and tumult of his arrest, and the

books, especially the parchments. It is often cold in his prison,

and that old ‘dreadnought,’ which he had woven with his own hands out

of the black goat’s-hair of his native province, old as it was, and

often whitened with the dust of the long Roman roads, and drenched

in the water-torrents of the Taurus, and stained with the brine of

Adria, would yet be a comfort to him as he sat on the rocky floor.

And the papyrus books and the parchments--few and worn as they

were--would help to while away the monotonous hours, and were very

dear to him. With some of them he had been familiar ever since he

was a happy boy in the dear old Tarsian home. So when Timothy comes

to shed the last rays of life’s sunshine on Paul’s prison, let

him bring the old cloak and the books--poor inventory of a saint’s

possessions after unequalled labours for mankind! And let him, if

possible, bring Mark the Evangelist with him; for Peter, with whom

Mark had travelled, had now sealed his testimony by martyrdom, and

Mark’s knowledge of Latin might be serviceable, and his personal

tendence would be very dear. The immediate danger of arrest would

not be great, for the rage of the informers had now been glutted

to repletion, and the State and the Emperor had more than enough to

occupy their thoughts. Pudens and Claudia had written to him with all

affection from their British home, and had sent to minister to his

necessities. He gives to Timothy the greetings which they had sent

supposing him to be at Rome. Linus had also sent greetings, in a

letter dictated from his bed of death. As for himself, he was more

than ready to die. He had finished his course; he had kept the faith;

henceforth there was laid up for him the crown of righteousness.

Thinking, perhaps, how Pætus Thrasea and Seneca had sprinkled their

blood as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator, he wrote the striking

words, ‘I am being already poured out in libation, and the time of

my setting sail is close at hand.’ Was he heavy at the thought? Not

so. He quotes a fragment of a fine early Christian hymn which had

consoled many a martyrdom:--

‘If we died, we shall also live with Him;

If we endure, we shall also reign with Him;

If we deny Him, He will deny us.

If we are faithless, He abideth faithful.

He is not able to deny Himself.’

And thus the old man’s soul was joyful in the Lord.

Did Mark, did Timothy come to him

‘Before the white sail of his soul had rounded

The misty cape, the promontory Death’?

Mark was at Alexandria, and Timothy did not see him. The Lycaonian

hastened to Rome the moment he had received Paul’s letter, but he

came too late--came to be himself imprisoned, though happily only

for a time. The Apostle was not mistaken in saying that his death was

imminent. During Nero’s absence in Greece he had been summoned before

the two wretched freedmen, Helius and Polycletus, on the second

ground of his indictment--that he was a Christian, and therefore the

preacher of a forbidden religion. That cause needed no trial. The

accused not only confessed, but gloried in the accusation. Defence,

therefore, was superfluous, since no apology for Christianity could

alter the now established law that its practice was prohibited on

pain of death. He would have been put to death at once, but Nero in

a letter from Greece had expressed some wish to see him, and to ask

him some further questions about the Christians before he attached

his sign manual to the order of execution.

The truth was that Nero was half mad with anxiety, and as all magic

incantations had failed to give him the least inkling of the future,

he desired to learn something from the Christians. Among the slaves

in the Palace who had been denounced as Christians by the informers,

Herodion only had been spared, not only because of his age and

blameless fidelity, but also because, in a household where the buzz

of incessant gossip made it impossible to keep anything secret, it

had been generally rumoured that he possessed the gift of prophecy.

Nero therefore summoned Herodion into his presence. But Herodion

refused to speak, and Nero, in a transport of fury, unsheathed his

dagger, and held it over the poor old slave with his uplifted hand.

But Herodion’s countenance did not blench, and he said with perfect

calmness--

‘O Cæsar, thou canst not kill me if thou wilt.’

‘How? _canst_ not?’ said the Emperor, stooping to pick up the dagger,

which had dropped from his astonished grasp. ‘_Canst_ not? One step,

one thrust, and thou art a dead man.’

‘Canst not,’ said Herodion, with unmoved serenity. ‘I shall die,

indeed, but it is not thus, nor by thy hand, that I shall die.’

‘Lead him off to death,’ said Nero. ‘These fanatics are inexplicable.’

But his yearning to divine the future was only intensified, and

Simon Magus persuaded him that he might learn it from the imprisoned

Apostle, whom he represented as a powerful sorcerer.