his mother was dead, and that he was free to celebrate a criminal
marriage. The escaped murderers soon brought the news so impatiently
expected--but Nero's joy was short. At dawn, a freedman of Agrippina
arrived at the Emperor's villa. Agrippina, picked up by a boat, had
succeeded in reaching one of her villas near by; she sent the freedman
to tell the Emperor about the accident and to assure him of her
safety. Agrippina alive! It was like a thunderbolt to Nero, and he
lost his head: he saw his mother hurrying on to Rome, denouncing
the abominable attempt to Senate and people, rousing against him the
Prætorian guard and the legions. Thoroughly frightened, he summoned
Seneca and Burrhus and laid before them the terrible situation. It
is easy to imagine the shock of the old preceptors. How could he
risk such a grave imprudence? And yet there was no time to lose in
reproaches. Nero begged for advice: Seneca and Burrhus were silent,
but they, also frightened, asked of themselves what Agrippina would
do. Would she not provoke a colossal scandal, which would ruin
everything? An expedient, the same one, occurred to both of them:
but so sinister was the idea that they dared not speak it. This time,
however, both the philosopher and the general were deceived as well as
Nero: Agrippina had guessed the truth and given up the struggle. What
could she, a lone woman do against an Emperor who did not stop even
at the plan of murdering his mother? She realised, during that awful
night, that only one chance of safety was left to her--to ignore what
had taken place; and she sent her freedman with the message that
meant forgiveness. But fear kept Nero and his counsellors from
understanding; and when they could easily have remedied the preceding
mistake, they compromised all by a supreme error. Finally Seneca, the
pacificator and humanitarian philosopher, thought he had found the way
of making half-openly the only suggestion which seemed wise to him: he
turned to Burrhus and asked what might happen, if an order were given
the Prætorians to kill Nero's mother. Burrhus understood that his
colleague, although the first to give the fatal advice, was trying
to shift upon him the much more serious responsibility of carrying it
out; since, if they reached the decision of having Agrippina disposed
of by the Prætorians, no one but he, the commander of the guard, could
utter the order. He therefore protested with the greatest energy that
the Prætorians would never lay murderous hands on the daughter of
Germanicus. Then he added cogitatively that, if it were thought
necessary, Anicetus and his sailors could finish the work already
begun. Thus Burrhus gave the same advice as Seneca, but he, like his
colleague, meant to pass on to some one else the task of execution. He
chose better than Seneca: Anicetus, if Agrippina lived, ran a serious
risk of becoming the scapegoat of all this affair. In fact, as soon as
Nero gave his assent, Anicetus and a few sailors hastened to the villa
of Agrippina and stabbed her.
The crime was abominable. Nero and his circle were so awed by it that
they attempted to make the people believe that Agrippina had
committed suicide, when her conspiracy against her son's life had been
discovered. This was the official version of Agrippina's death,
sent by Nero to the Senate. But this audacious mystification had no
success. The public divined the truth, and roused by the voice of
their age-long instincts, they cried out that the Emperor no less than
any peasant of Italy must revere his father and his mother. Through a
sudden turn of public feeling, Agrippina, who had been so much hated
during her life, became the object of a kind of popular veneration;
Nero, on the other hand, and Poppæa inspired a sentiment of profound
horror.
If Nero had found the living Agrippina unbearable, he soon realised
that his dead mother was much more to be feared. In fact, scared as he
was by the popular agitation, not only had he temporarily to give up
the plan of divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppæa, but felt obliged
to stay several months at Baiæ, not daring to return to Rome. He was,
however, no longer a child: he was twenty-three years old and had some
talent. Men of intelligence and energy were also not wanting in his
_entourage_. The first shock once over, the Emperor and his coterie
rallied. The first impression had indeed been disastrous, but had
brought about no irreparable consequences--the only consequences that
count in politics. One could therefore hope that the public
would gradually forget this murder as they had forgotten that of
Britannicus. One only needed to help them forget. Nero resolved to
give Italy and Rome the administrative revolution that had found in
Agrippina so determined an opponent, the easy, splendid, generous
government that seemed to suit the popular taste.
He began by organising among the _jeunesse dorée_ of Rome the
"festivals of youth." In these true demonstrations against the old
aristocratic education, now in the house of one and then in the garden
of another, the young patricians met under the Emperor's directions.
They sang, recited, and danced, displaying all the tendencies that
tradition held unworthy of a Roman nobleman. Later, Nero built in
the Vatican fields a private stadium, where he amused himself with
driving, and invited his friends to join him. He surrounded himself
with poets, musicians, singers; enormously increased the budget
of popular festivals; planned and started immense constructions;
introduced into all parts of the administration a new spirit of
carelessness and ease. Not only the sumptuary laws, but all laws
commanding the fulfilment of human duties toward the species, such as
the great laws of Augustus on marriage and adultery, were no longer
applied; the surveillance of the Senate over the governors, that of
the governors over the cities, slackened. In Rome, in all Italy, in
the provinces, the treasuries of the Republic, the possessions and
the funds of the cities, were robbed. In the midst of this unbridled
plundering, which appeared to make every man rich quickly, and without
work, a delirium of luxury and pleasure reigned: in Rome especially,
people lived in a continuous orgy; the nobility answered in crowds
the invitations of Nero; the Senate, the great houses, where the
conquerors of the world had been born, swarmed with young athletes and
drivers, who had no other ambition but that of adding the prize of a
race to the war trophies of their ancestors; the imperial palace was
invaded by a noisy horde of zitherists, actors, jockeys, athletes,
among whom Burrhus and, still more, Seneca, were beginning to feel
most ill at ease.
Agrippina's death, even though it had yet deferred Nero's marrying
Poppæa, had made possible the change in the government that a part of
the people wished. We owe to this new principle the immense ruins of
ancient Rome; but this fact does not authorise us to consider it a
Roman principle: it was, instead, a principle of Oriental civilisation
which had forced itself upon the Roman traditions after a long and
painful effort. The revolution, however, had been long preparing and
corresponded to the popular aspirations. It would, therefore, have
redounded to the advantage of the Emperor, who had dared to break
loose from a superannuated tradition, had not Agrippina's spectre
still haunted Rome. To their honour be it said, the people of Rome and
Italy had not yet become so corrupted by Oriental civilisation as to
forget parricide in a few festivals.
The party of tradition, though weakened, existed. They began a brave
fight against Nero, using the assassination of Agrippina as the
adverse party had exploited the antifeminist prejudices of the masses
against Agrippina herself. They denounced the parricide to the people,
in order to attack the champion of Orientalism and irritate against
him the indifferent mass, which, not understanding the great struggle
between the Orient and Rome, remained unstirred. Hoping the excitement
of spirit had somewhat subsided, Nero had finally carried out his old
plan of divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppæa; but the divorce caused
great popular demonstrations in Rome in favour of the abused wife and
against the intruder.
Moreover, thanks to his extravagance, Nero made things very easy for
his enemies, the defenders of tradition. His habits of dissipation
exaggerated all the faults of his character, chiefly his morbid need
of showing himself off, of defying the public, their prejudices, their
opinions. It is difficult to discern how much is true and how much is
false in the hideous stories of debauchery handed down to us by the
ancient writers, particularly Suetonius.
Although one might believe--and I believe it for my part--that there
is a great deal of exaggeration in such tales, it is certain that
Nero's personality played too conspicuous a part in his administrative
revolution. Ready as the people were to admire a more generous and
luxurious government than that of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius,
they still liked to look to the chief of State as to a man of gravity
and austerity, who let others amuse themselves, though he himself be
bored. The vain and bizarre young man, who was always the guest of
honour at his own _fêtes_, who never hesitated to satisfy his most
extravagant caprices, who spent so much money to divert himself,
shocked the last republican susceptibilities of Italy. The wise felt
alarmed: with such expenses, would it not all end in bankruptcy?
For all these causes, they soon began to reproach Nero for his
prodigality, although the people enjoyed it, just as they had been
malcontent with Tiberius for his parsimony. His caprices, ever
stranger, little by little roused even that part of the public which
was not fanatically attached to tradition. At that time Nero developed
his foolish vanity of actor, his caprice for the theatre, which soon
was to become an all-absorbing mania. The chief of the Empire, the
heir of Julius Cæsar, dreamed of nothing else than descending from
the height of human grandeur to the scene of a theatre, to experience
before the public the sensations of those players whom the Roman
nobility had always regarded as instruments of infamous pleasure!
Disgusted with Nero's mismanagement and follies, Seneca took the death
of Burrhus as an opportunity to retire. Then Nero, freed from the
last person who still retained any influence over him, gave himself
up entirely to the insane swirl of his caprices. He ended one day by
presenting himself in the theatre of Naples. Naples was yet then a
Greek city. Nero had chosen it for this reason; he was applauded with
frenzy. But the Italians of the other cities protested: the chief of
the Empire appearing in a theatre, his hand on the zither and not
on the sword! Imagine what would be the impression if some day a
sovereign went on the stage of the _folies Bergères_ as a "number" for
a sleight-of-hand performance!
Public attention, however, was turned from this immense scandal by a
frightful calamity--the famous conflagration of Rome, which began the
nineteenth of July of the year 64 and devastated almost all quarters
of the city for ten days. What was the cause of the great disaster?
This very obscure point has much interested historians, who have tried
in vain to throw light on the subject. As far as I am concerned, I
by no means exclude the hypothesis that the fire might have been
accidental. But when they are crushed under the weight of a great
misfortune, men always feel sure that they are the victims of human
wickedness: a sad proof of their distrust in their fellow men. The
plebs, reduced to utter misery by the disaster, began to murmur
that mysterious people had been seen hurrying through the different
quarters, kindling the fire and cumbering the work of help; these
incendiaries must have been sent by some one in power--by whom?
A strange rumour circulated: Nero himself had ordered the city to be
burned, in order to enjoy a unique sight, to get an idea of the fire
of Troy, to have the glory of rebuilding Rome on a more magnificent
scale. The accusation seems to me absurd. Nero was a criminal, but he
was not a fool to the point of provoking the wrath of the whole people
for so light a motive, especially after Agrippina's death. Tacitus
himself, in spite of his hatred of all Cæsar's family and his
readiness to make them responsible for the most serious crimes, does
not venture to express belief in this story--sufficient proof that
he considers it absurd and unlikely. Nevertheless, the hatred that
surrounded Nero and Poppæa made every one, not only among the ignorant
populace, but also among the higher classes, accept it readily. It was
soon the general opinion that Nero had accomplished what Brennus and
Catiline's conspirators could not do. Was a more horrible monster ever
seen? Parricide, actor, incendiary!
The traditionalist party, the opposition, the unsatisfied, exploited
without scruple this popular attitude, and Nero, responsible for a
sufficient number of actual crimes, found himself accused also of
an imaginary one. He was so frightened that he decided to give the
clamouring people a victim, some one on whom Rome could avenge its
sorrow. An inquiry into the causes of the conflagration was ordered.
The inquest came to a strange conclusion. The fire had been started
by a small religious sect, recently imported from the Orient, a
sect whose name most people then learned for the first time: the
Christians.
How did the Roman authorities come to such a conclusion? That is one
of the greatest mysteries of universal history, and no one will ever
be able to clear it. If the explanation of the disaster as accepted by
the people was absurd, the official explanation was still more so. The
Christian community of Rome, the pretended volcano of civil hatred,
which had poured forth the destructive fire over the great metropolis,
was a small and peaceful congregation of pious idealists.
A great and simple man, Paul of Tarsus, had taken up again among them
the great work in which Augustus and Tiberius had failed: he aimed at
the remaking of popular conscience, but used means until then unknown
in the Græco-Latin civilisation. Not in the name of the ancestors, of
the traditions, of ideals of political power, did he seek to persuade
men to work, to refrain from vice, to live honestly and simply; but
in the name of a single God, whom man had in the beginning offended
through his pride, in the name of the Son of God, who had taken human
form and volunteered to die as a criminal on the cross, to appease
the Father's wrath against the rebellious creature. On the Græco-Roman
idea of duty, Paul grafted the Christian idea of sin. Doubtless the
new theology must have seemed at first obscure to Greeks and Romans;
but Paul put into it that new spirit, mutual love, which the dry Latin
soul had hardly ever known, and he vivified it with the example of an
obscure life of sacrifice.
Paul was born of a noble Hebrew family of Tarsus, and was a man of
high culture. He had, to use a modern expression, simplified himself,
renounced his position in a time when few could resist the passion for
luxury, and taken up a trade for his living; with the scanty profit
from his work as a tent-maker, alone and on foot he made measureless
journeys through the Empire, everywhere preaching the redemption of
man. Finally, after numberless adventures and perils, he had come to
Rome and had, in the great city frenzied by the delirium of luxury and
pleasure, repeated to the poor, who alone were willing to hear him:
"Be chaste and pure, do not deceive each other, love one another, help
one another, love God."
If Nero had known the little society of pious idealists, he surely
would have hated it, but for other motives than the imaginary
accusations of his police. In this story St. Paul is exactly the
antithesis of Nero. The latter represents the atrocious selfishness of
rich, peaceful, highly civilised epochs; the former, the ardent moral
idealism which tries to react against the cardinal vices of power and
wealth through universal self-sacrifice and asceticism. Neither of
these men is to be comprehended without the other, because the moral
doctrine of Paul is partly a reaction against, the violent folly for
which Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophical
considerations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rage
against the Christians. The problem, I repeat, is insoluble. However
this may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; a
great number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed in
different ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the people
to appease them. Possibly Paul himself was one of the victims of this
persecution.
This diversion, however, was of no use. The conflagration definitely
ruined Nero. With the conflagration begins the third period of
his life, which lasts four years. It is characterised by absurd
exaggerations of all kinds, which hastened the inevitable catastrophe.
One grandiose idea dominates it: the idea of building on the ruins a
new Rome, immense and magnificent, a true metropolis for the Empire.
In order to carry out this plan, Nero did not economise; he began to
spend in it the moneys laid aside to pay the legions. The people of
Italy, however, and even of Rome, which grew rich on these public
expenditures, did not show themselves thankful for this immense
architectural effort. Every one was sure that the new city would be
worse than the old one!
Nero himself, exasperated by this invincible hate, exhausted by his
own excesses, lost what reason he had still left, and his government
degenerated into a complete tyranny, suspicious, violent, and cruel.
Piso's conspiracy caused him to order a massacre of patricians, which
left terrible rancour in its wake; in an access of fury, he killed
Poppæa; he began to imagine accusations against the richest men of the
Empire, in order to confiscate their estates. His prodigality and the
general carelessness had completely disorganised the finances of the
Empire; he had to recur to all kinds of expedients to find money.
Finally he undertook a great artistic tour in Greece--that province
which had been the mother of arts--to play in its most celebrated
theatres. This time indignation burst all bounds. The armies of Gaul
and Spain, for a long time irregularly paid, led by their officers,
revolted. This act of energy sufficed. On the 9th of June, 68 A.D.,
abandoned by all the world, Nero was compelled to commit suicide.
So the family of Julius Cæsar disappears from history. After so much
greatness, genius, and wisdom, the fall may seem petty and almost
laughable. It is absurd to lose the Empire for the pleasure of singing
in a theatre. And yet, bizarre as the end may seem, it was not the
result of the vices, the follies, and the crimes of Nero alone. In his
way, Nero himself was, like all members of his family, the victim of
the contradictory situation of his times.
It has been repeated for centuries, that the foundation of monarchy
was the great mission of Cæsar's family. I believe this to be a great
mistake. The lot of the family would have been simple and easy, if it
had been able to found a monarchy. The family of Cæsar had to solve
another problem, much more difficult,--in fact insoluble; a problem
that may be compared, from a certain point of view, to that which
confronted the Bonapartes in the nineteenth century. The Bonapartes
found old monarchical, legitimistic, theocratic Europe agitated by
forces which, although making it impossible for the ancient regime
to continue, were not yet able to establish a new society, entirely
democratic, republican, and lay. The family of Cæsar found the
opposite situation: an old military and aristocratic republic, which
was changing into an intellectual and monarchical civilisation, based
on equality, but opposing formidable resistance to the forces of
transformation. In these situations the two families tried in all ways
to reconcile things not to be conciliated, to realise the impossible:
one, the popular monarchy and imperial democracy; the other, the
monarchical republic and Orientalised Latinity. The contradiction
was for both families the law of life, the cause of greatness; this
explains why neither was ever willing to extricate itself from it, in
spite of the advice of philosophers, the malcontent of the masses, the
pressure of parties, and the evident dangers. This contradiction
was also the fatality of both families, the cause of their ruin; it
explains the shortness of their power, their restless existence, and
the continuous catastrophes that opened the way to the final crash.
Waterloo and Sedan, the exile of Julia and the tragic failure of
Tiberius's government, all the misfortunes great and small which
struck the two families, were always consequences of the insoluble
contradiction they tried to solve. You have had a perfectly
characteristic example of it in the brief story I have been telling
you. Agrippina becomes an object of universal hatred and dies by
assassination because she defends tradition; her son disregards
tradition and, chiefly for this very reason, is finally forced to kill
himself. Doubtless the fate of the Bonapartes is less tragic, because
they, at least, escaped the infamous legend created by contemporary
hatred against Cæsar's family, and artfully developed by the
historians of successive generations. I hope to be able to prove
in the continuation of my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, that
the history of Cæsar's family, as it has been told by Tacitus and
Suetonius, is a sensational novel, a legend containing not much more
truth than the legend of Atrides. The family of Cæsar, placed in the
centre of the great struggle going on in Rome between the old Roman
militarism, and the intellectual civilisation of the Orient,
between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between Asiatic mysticism
and traditional religion, between egoism over-excited by culture and
wealth, and the supreme interests of the species, had to injure too
many interests, to offend too many susceptibilities. The injured
interests, the offended susceptibilities, revenged themselves through
defaming legends.
The case of Nero is particularly instructive. He was half insane and
a veritable criminal: it would be absurd to attempt in his favour
the historical rehabilitation to which other members of the family,
Tiberius for instance, have a right. And yet it has not been enough
for succeeding generations that he atoned for his follies and crimes
by death and infamy. They have fallen upon his memory: they have
overlooked that extenuating circumstance of considerable importance,
his age when elected; they have gone so far as to make him into a
unique monster, no longer human and even the Antichrist!
Surely he first shed Christian blood; but if we consider the tendency
he represented in Roman history, we can hardly classify him among the
great enemies of Christianity. Unwittingly, Augustus and Tiberius were
two great enemies of the Christian teachings, because they sought
by all means to reinforce Roman tradition, and struggled
against everything that would one day form the essence of
Christianity--cosmopolitism, mysticism, the domination of intellectual
people, the influence of the philosophical and metaphysical spirit
on life. Nero, on the contrary, with his repeated efforts to
spread Orientalism in Rome, and chiefly with his taste for art, was
unconsciously a powerful collaborator of future Christian propaganda.
We must not forget this: the masses in the Empire became Christian
only because they had first been imbued with the Oriental spirit.