While Nero followed Seneca’s advice, Rome enjoyed tranquillity. This
emperor, who was tyrannical to a proverb, commenced his reign by acts of
clemency, his sole object seemed to be the good of his people. When
required to sign a list of malefactors, authorizing their execution, he
exclaimed, “I wish to heaven I could not write.” He rejected flatterers;
and when the senate commended the justice of his government, he desired
them to keep their praises till he deserved them. Such conduct and
sentiments were worthy the pupil of Seneca, and the Romans imagined
their happiness secure. But Nero’s sensual and tyrannical disposition,
which had been repressed only for a time, soon broke forth in acts of
monstrous cruelty. He caused his mother Agrippa to be assassinated, and
divorced his wife Octavia, whom he banished to Campania. The people,
enraged at his injustice toward the empress, so openly expressed their
indignation that he was compelled to recall her, and she returned to the
capital amidst shouts of exultation.
[Illustration: ~The Empress Octavia’s return from Exile.~]
The popular triumph was of short duration. Scarcely had Octavia resumed
her rank, when Nero, under colour of a false and infamous charge, again
banished her. Never exile filled the hearts of the beholders with more
affecting compassion. The first day of Octavia’s nuptials was the
commencement of her funeral. She was brought under a sad and dismal
roof, from whence her father and brother had been carried off by poison.
Though a wife, she was treated as a slave, and now she suffered the
imputation of a crime more piercing than death itself. Add to this, she
was a tender girl in the twentieth year of her age, surrounded by
officers and soldiery devoted to her husband’s will, and whom she viewed
as sad presages of his ferocious purposes. Almost bereft of life by her
fears, and yet unwilling to surrender herself to the rest of the grave,
she passed the interval of a few days in unspeakable terror. At length
it was announced to her that she must die; but while she implored that
at least her life might be spared, and conjured Nero to remember the
relationship which before marriage they had borne to each other, by
descent from a revered ancestor, she only exemplified the utter
inefficacy of crouching to a truculent tyrant. Her appeals were answered
by the seizure of her person, and the binding of her limbs; her veins
were opened, but her blood, stagnant through fear, issued slowly, and
she was stifled in the steam of a boiling bath. “For this execution the
senate decreed gifts and oblations to the temples; a circumstance,” says
Tacitus, “which I insert with design, that whoever shall, from me or any
other writer, learn the events of those calamitous times, he may hold it
for granted, that as often as sentences of murder and banishment were
pronounced by the prince, so often were thanksgivings by the fathers
paid to the deities.” Every decree of the senate was either a new flight
of flattery, or the dregs of excessive tameness and servitude.
[Illustration: ~Nero and the Roman Senate.~]
From this moment Nero butchered without distinction all he pleased, upon
any idle pretence, and after an indiscriminate slaughter of men signal
in name and quality, he became possessed with a passion to hew down
virtue itself. His crimes would be incredible if they were not so
enormous that it is scarcely possible imagination could invent
atrocities of so foul a nature. He had attained to such indulgence in
bloodshed, that the dagger itself was dedicated by him in the capitol,
and inscribed to _Jupiter Vindex_, Jove the Avenger. Yet to this monster
one of the consuls elect proposed that a temple should be raised at the
charge of the state, and consecrated to the deified Nero as to one who
soared above mortality, and was therefore entitled to celestial worship.
This, though designed as a compliment to the tyrant, was construed into
an omen of his fate, “since to princes,” says Tacitus, “divine honours
are never paid till they have finally forsaken all commerce with men,”
or, in other words, have ceased to be useful to them. Suetonius relates,
that somebody in conversation saying, “When I am dead let fire devour
the world”--“Nay,” rejoined Nero, “let it be whilst I am living;” and
then he set Rome on fire, in so barefaced a manner, that many of the
consular dignitaries detected the incendiaries with torches and tow in
their own houses, and dared not touch them because they were officers of
Nero’s bedchamber. The fire, during six days and seven nights, consumed
a prodigious number of stately buildings, the public temples, and every
thing of antiquity that was remarkable and worthy of preservation. The
common people were driven by this conflagration to the tombs and
monuments for shelter; and Nero himself beheld the flames from a tower
on the top of Mæcenas’s house, and sung a ditty on the destruction of
Troy, in the dress which he used to perform in on the public stage. This
atrocious want of feeling occasioned the saying--“Nero fiddled while
Rome was burning.” To divert the hideousness of this crime from
himself, he transferred the guilt to the Christians. To their death and
torture were added cruel derision and sport; “for,” says Tacitus,
“either they were disguised in the skins of savage beasts, and exposed
to expire by the teeth of devouring dogs; or they were hoisted up alive
and nailed to crosses; or wrapt in combustible vestments, and set up as
torches, that when the day set, they might be kindled to illuminate the
night.” For this tragical spectacle Nero lent his own gardens, and
exhibited at the same time the public diversions of the circus,
sometimes driving a chariot in person, and at intervals standing as a
spectator amongst the vulgar in the habit of a charioteer; and hence
towards the miserable sufferers popular commiseration arose, as for
people who were doomed to perish to gratify the bloody spirit of one
man. At length, while plotting new and uncommon barbarities, an
insurrection broke out amongst the troops, and the senate, who had
truckled to his wishes, and made him a tyrant by submitting to be
slaves, took heart and issued a decree against him. He committed
suicide, under circumstances of such mental imbecility, that his death
was as ludicrous as his life was horrible.
1765. Dr. Edward Young, author of the “Night Thoughts,” died.
1782. Admiral Rodney defeated the French fleet under count de Grasse, in
the West Indies.
1814. A general illumination in London, on three successive nights, for
the termination of the war with France.
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