AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO.
Scarcely had the grave closed over Messalina when the court was plunged
into the most violent factions about the appointment of her successor.
There were three principal candidates for the honour of the aged
Emperor's hand. They were his former wife, Aelia Petina, who had only
been divorced in consequence of trivial disagreements, and who was
supported by Narcissus; Lollia Paulina, so celebrated in antiquity for
her beauty and splendour, and who for a short time had been the wife of
Caius; and Agrippina the younger, the daughter of the great Germanicus,
and the niece of Claudius himself. Claudius, indeed, who had been as
unlucky as Henry VIII. himself in the unhappiness which had attended his
five experiments of matrimony, had made the strongest possible
asseverations that he would never again submit himself to such a yoke.
But he was so completely a tool in the hands of his own courtiers that
no one attached the slightest importance to anything which he had said.
The marriage of an uncle with his own niece was considered a violation
of natural laws, and was regarded with no less horror among the Romans
than it would be among ourselves. But Agrippina, by the use of means the
most unscrupulous, prevailed over all her rivals, and managed her
interests with such consummate skill that, before many months had
elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and the Empress of Rome.
With this princess the destinies of Seneca were most closely
intertwined, and it will enable us the better to understand his
position, and his writings, if we remember that all history discloses to
us no phenomenon more portentous and terrible than that presented to us
in the character of Agrippina, the mother of Nero.
Of the virtues of her great parents she, like their other children, had
inherited not one; and she had exaggerated their family tendencies into
passions which urged her into every form of crime. Her career from the
very cradle had been a career of wickedness, nor had any one of the many
fierce vicissitudes of her life called forth in her a single noble or
amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum (afterwards called in her honour
Colonia Agrippina, and still retaining its name in the form Cologne),
she lost her father at the age of three, and her mother (by banishment)
at the age of twelve. She was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and
wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she detested. At the age of
fourteen she was married to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most
worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles of his day. The
gossiping biographies of the time still retain some anecdotes of his
cruelty and selfishness. They tell us how he once, without the slightest
remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on the Appian Road; how on
another occasion he knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had given
him a hasty answer; and how, when his friend congratulated him on the
birth of his son (the young Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor
Nero), he brutally remarked that from people like himself and Agrippina
could only be born some monster destined for the public ruin.
Domitius was forty years old when he married Agrippina, and the young
Nero was not born till nine years afterwards. Whatever there was of
possible affection in the tigress-nature of Agrippina was now absorbed
in the person of her child. For that child, from its cradle to her own
death by his means, she toiled and sinned. The fury of her own ambition,
inextricably linked with the uncontrollable fierceness of her love for
this only son, henceforth directed every action of her life. Destiny had
made her the sister of one Emperor; intrigue elevated her into the wife
of another; her own crimes made her the mother of a third. And at first
sight her career might have seemed unusually successful, for while still
in the prime of life she was wielding, first in the name of her husband,
and then in that of her son, no mean share in the absolute government of
the Roman world. But meanwhile that same unerring retribution, whose
stealthy footsteps in the rear of the triumphant criminal we can track
through page after page of history, was stealing nearer and nearer to
her with uplifted hand. When she had reached the dizzy pinnacle of
gratified love and pride to which she had waded through so many a deed
of sin and blood, she was struck down into terrible ruin and violent
shameful death, by the hand of that very son for whose sake she had so
often violated the laws of virtue and integrity, and spurned so often
the pure and tender obligations which even the heathen had been taught
by the voice of God within their conscience to recognize and to adore.
Intending that her son should marry Octavia, the daughter of Claudius,
her first step was to drive to death Silanus, a young nobleman to whom
Octavia had already been betrothed. Her next care was to get rid of all
rivals possible or actual. Among the former were the beautiful Calpurnia
and her own sister-in-law, Domitia Lepida. Among the latter was the
wealthy Lollia Paulina, against whom she trumped up an accusation of
sorcery and treason, upon which her wealth was confiscated, but her life
spared by the Emperor, who banished her from Italy. This half-vengeance
was not enough for the mother of Nero. Like the daughter of Herodias in
sacred history, she despatched a tribune with orders to bring her the
head of her enemy; and when it was brought to her, and she found a
difficulty in recognizing those withered and ghastly features of a
once-celebrated beauty, she is said with her own hand to have lifted one
of the lips, and to have satisfied herself that this was indeed the head
of Lollia. To such horrors may a woman sink, when she has abandoned the
love of God; and a fair face may hide a soul "leprous as sin itself."
Well may Adolf Stahr observe that Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and
husband-murdering Gertrude are mere children by the side of this awful
giant-shape of steely feminine cruelty.
Such was the princess who, in the year A.D. 49, recalled Seneca from
exile.[33] She saw that her cruelties were inspiring horror even into a
city that had long been accustomed to blood, and Tacitus expressly tells
us that she hoped to counterbalance this feeling by a stroke of
popularity in recalling from the waste solitudes of Corsica the
favourite philosopher and most popular author of the Roman world. Nor
was she content with this public proof of her belief in his innocence
of the crime which had been laid to his charge, for she further procured
for him the Praetorship, and appointed him tutor and governor to her
youthful son. Even in taking this step she did not forget her ambitious
views; for she knew that Seneca cherished a secret indignation against
Claudius, and that Nero could have no more wise adviser in taking steps
to secure the fruition of his imperial hopes. It might perhaps have been
better for Seneca's happiness if he had never left Corsica, or set his
foot again in that Circean and bloodstained court. Let it, however, be
added in his exculpation, that another man of undoubted and scrupulous
honesty,--Afranius Burrus--a man of the old, blunt, faithful type of
Roman manliness, whom Agrippina had raised to the Prefectship of the
Praetorian cohorts, was willing to share his danger and his
responsibilities. Yet he must have lived from the first in the very
atmosphere of base and criminal intrigues. He must have formed an
important member of Agrippina's party, which was in daily and deadly
enmity against the party of Narcissus. He must have watched the
incessant artifices by which Agrippina secured the adoption of her son
Nero by an Emperor whose own son Britannicus was but three years his
junior. He must have seen Nero always honoured, promoted, paraded before
the eyes of the populace as the future hope of Rome, whilst Britannicus,
like the young Edward V. under the regency of his uncle, was neglected,
surrounded with spies, kept as much as possible out of his father's
sight, and so completely thrust into the background from all observation
that the populace began seriously to doubt whether he were alive or
dead. He must have seen Agrippina, who had now received the
unprecedented honour of the title "Augusta" in her lifetime, acting
with such haughty insolence that there could be little doubt as to her
ulterior designs upon the throne. He must have known that his splendid
intellect was practically at the service of a woman in whom avarice,
haughtiness, violence, treachery, and every form of unscrupulous
criminality had reached a point hitherto unmatched even in a corrupt and
pagan world. From this time forth the biography of Seneca must assume
the form of an apology rather than of a panegyric.
[Footnote 33: Gallio was Proconsul of Achaia about A.D. 53, when St.
Paul was brought before his tribunal. Very possibly his elevation may
have been due to the restoration of Seneca's influence.]
The Emperor could not but feel that in Agrippina he had chosen a wife
even more intolerable than Messalina herself. Messalina had not
interfered with the friends he loved, had not robbed him of the insignia
of empire, had not filled his palace with a hard and unfeminine tyranny,
and had of course watched with a mother's interest over the lives and
fortunes of his children. Narcissus would not be likely to leave him
long in ignorance that, in addition to her other plots and crimes,
Agrippina had been as little true to him as his former unhappy wife. The
information sank deep into his heart, and he was heard to mutter that it
had been his destiny all along first to bear, and then to avenge, the
enormities of his wives. Agrippina, whose spies filled the palace, could
not long remain uninformed of so significant a speech; and she probably
saw with an instinct quickened by the awful terrors of her own guilty
conscience that the Emperor showed distinct signs of his regret for
having married his niece, and adopted her child to the prejudice, if not
to the ruin, of his own young son. If she wanted to reach the goal which
she had held so long in view no time was to be lost. Let us hope that
Seneca and Burrus were at least ignorant of the means which she took to
effect her purpose.
Fortune favoured her. The dreaded Narcissus, the most formidable
obstacle to her murderous plans, was seized with an attack of the gout.
Agrippina managed that his physician should recommend him the waters of
Sinuessa in Campania by way of cure. He was thus got out of the way, and
she proceeded at once to her work of blood. Entrusting the secret to
Halotus, the Emperor's _praegustator_--the slave whose office it was to
protect him from poison by tasting every dish before him--and to his
physician, Xenophon of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of
the period of this classical King James, as to the poison best suited to
her purpose. Locusta was mistress of her art, in which long practice had
given her a consummate skill. The poison must not be too rapid, lest it
should cause suspicion; nor too slow, lest it should give the Emperor
time to consult for the interests of his son Britannicus; but it was to
be one which should disturb his intellect without causing immediate
death. Claudius was a glutton, and the poison was given him with all the
more ease because it was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was
extravagantly fond. Agrippina herself handed him the choicest mushroom
in the dish, and the poison at once reduced him to silence. As was too
frequently the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and was
carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened. A violent colic
ensued, and it was feared that this, with a quantity of wine which he
had drunk, would render the poison innocuous. But Agrippina had gone too
far for retreat, and Xenophon, who knew that great crimes if frustrated
are perilous, if successful are rewarded, came to her assistance. Under
pretence of causing him to vomit, he tickled the throat of the Emperor
with a feather smeared with a swift and deadly poison. It did its work,
and before morning the Caesar was a corpse.[34]
[Footnote 34: There is usually found among the writings of Seneca a most
remarkable burlesque called _Ludus de Morte Caesaris_. As to its
authorship opinions will always vary, but it is a work of such undoubted
genius, so interesting, and so unique in its character, that I have
thought it necessary to give in an Appendix a brief sketch of its
argument. We may at least _hope_ that this satire, which overflows with
the deadliest contempt of Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote
for Nero his funeral oration. It has, however, been supposed (without
sufficient grounds) to be the lost [Greek: Apokolokuntoois] which Seneca
is said to have written on the apotheosis of Claudius. The very name is
a bitter satire. It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a God,
but into a gourd--one of those "bloated gourds which sun their speckled
bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants." "The Senate decreed his
_divinity_; Seneca translated it into _pumpkinity_" (Merivale, _Rom.
Emp_. v. 601). The _Ludus_ begins by spattering mud on the memory of the
divine Claudius; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glory of
the diviner Nero!]
As has been the case not unfrequently in history, from the times of
Tarquinius Priscus to those of Charles II., the death was concealed
until everything had been prepared for the production of a successor.
The palace was carefully watched; no one was even admitted into it
except Agrippina's most trusty partisans. The body was propped up with
pillows; actors were sent for "by his own desire" to afford it some
amusement; and priests and consuls were bidden to offer up their vows
for the life of the dead. Giving out that the Emperor was getting
better, Agrippina took care to keep Britannicus and his two sisters,
Octavia and Antonia, under her own immediate eye. As though overwhelmed
with sorrow she wept, and embraced them, and above all kept Britannicus
by her side, kissing him with the exclamation "that he was the very
image of his father," and taking care that he should on no account
leave her room. So the day wore on till it was the hour which the
Chaldaeans declared would be the only lucky hour in that unlucky
October day.
Noon came; the palace doors were suddenly thrown open: and Nero with
Burrus at his side went out to the Praetorian cohort which was on guard.
By the order of their commandant, they received him with cheers. A few
only hesitated, looking round them and asking "Where was Britannicus?"
Since, however, he was not to be seen, and no one stirred in his favour,
they followed the multitude. Nero was carried in triumph to the camp,
made the soldiers a short speech, and promised to each man of them a
splendid donative. He was at once saluted Emperor. The Senate followed
the choice of the soldiers, and the provinces made no demur. Divine
honors were decreed to the murdered man, and preparations made for a
funeral which was to rival in its splendour the one which Livia had
ordered for Augustus. But the will--which beyond all doubt had provided
for the succession of Britannicus--was quietly done away with, and its
exact provisions were never known.
And on the first evening of his imperial power, Nero, well aware to whom
he owed his throne, gave to the sentinel who came to ask him the pass
for the night the grateful and significant watchword of "Optima
Mater,"--"the best of mothers!"