THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Nor was it unnatural that it should be. Moral precepts, philosophic
guidance were no longer possible to one whose compliances or whose
timidity had led him so far as first to sanction matricide, and then to
defend it. He might indeed be still powerful to recommend principles of
common sense and political expediency, but the loftier lessons of
Stoicism, nay, even the better utterances of a mere ordinary Pagan
morality, could henceforth only fall from his lips with something of a
hollow ring. He might interfere, as we know he did, to render as
innocuous as possible the pernicious vanity which made Nero so ready to
degrade his imperial rank by public appearances on the orchestra or in
the race-course, but he could hardly address again such noble teachings
as that of the treatise on Clemency to one whom, on grounds of political
expediency, he had not dissuaded from the treacherous murder of a
mother, who, whatever her enormities, yet for his sake had sold her
very soul.
Although there may have been a strong suspicion that foul play had been
committed, the actual facts and details of the death of Agrippina would
rest between Nero and Seneca as a guilty secret, in the guilt of which
Seneca himself must have his share. Such a position of things was the
inevitable death-blow, not only to all friendship, but to all
confidence, and ultimately to all intercourse. We see in sacred history
that Joab's participation in David's guilty secret gave him the absolute
mastery over his own sovereign; we see repeatedly in profane history
that the mutual knowledge of some crime is the invariable cause of
deadly hatred between a subject and a king. Such feelings as King John
may be supposed to have had to Hubert de Burgh, or King Richard III. to
Sir James Tyrrel, or King James I. to the Earl of Somerset, such
probably, in still more virulent intensity, were the feelings of Nero
towards his whilome "guide, philosopher, and friend."
For Nero very soon learnt that Seneca was no longer _necessary_ to him.
For a time he lingered in Campania, guiltily dubious as to the kind of
reception that awaited him in the capital. The assurances of the vile
crew which surrounded him soon made that fear wear off, and when he
plucked up the courage to return to his palace, he might himself have
been amazed at the effusion of infamous loyalty and venal acclamation
with which he was received. All Rome poured itself forth to meet him;
the Senate appeared in festal robes with their wives and girls and boys
in long array; seats and scaffoldings were built up along the road by
which he had to pass, as though the populace had gone forth to see a
triumph. With haughty mein, the victor of a nation of slaves, he
ascended the Capitol, gave thanks to the gods, and went home to betray
henceforth the full perversity of a nature which the reverence for his
mother, such as it was, had hitherto in part restrained. But the
instincts of the populace were suppressed rather than eradicated. They
hung a sack from his statue by night in allusion to the old punishment
of parricides, who were sentenced to be flung into the sea, tied up in a
sack with a serpent, a monkey, and a cock. They exposed an infant in the
Forum with a tablet on which was written, "I refuse to rear thee, lest
thou shouldst slay thy mother." They scrawled upon the blank walls of
Rome an iambic line which reminded all who read it that Nero, Orestes,
and Alcmaeon were murderers of their mothers. Even Nero must have been
well aware that he presented a hideous spectacle in the eyes of all who
had the faintest shade of righteousness among the people whom he ruled.
All this took place in A.D. 59, and we hear no more of Seneca till the
year 62, a year memorable for the death of Burrus, who had long been his
honest, friendly, and faithful colleague. In these dark times, when all
men seemed to be speaking in a whisper, almost every death of a
conspicuous and high-minded man, if not caused by open violence, falls
under the suspicion of secret poison. The death of Burrus may have been
due (from the description) to diphtheria, but the popular voice charged
Nero with having hastened his death by a pretended remedy, and declared
that, when the Emperor visited his sick bed, the dying man turned away
from his inquiries with the laconic answer, "I am well."
His death was regretted, not only from the memory of his virtues, but
also from the fact that Nero appointed two men as his successors, of
whom the one, Fenius Rufus, was honorable but indolent; the other and
more powerful, Sofonius Tigellinus had won for himself among cruel and
shameful associates a pre-eminence of hatred and of shame.
However faulty and inconsistent Seneca may have been, there was at any
rate no possibility that he should divide with a Tigellinus the
direction of his still youthful master. He was by no means deceived as
to the position in which he stood, and the few among Nero's followers in
whom any spark of honour was left informed him of the incessant
calumnies which were used to undermine his influence. Tigellinus and his
friends dwelt on his enormous wealth and his magnificent villas and
gardens, which could only have been acquired with ulterior objects, and
which threw into the shade the splendour of the Emperor himself. They
tried to kindle the inflammable jealousies of Nero's feeble mind by
representing Seneca as attempting to rival him in poetry, and as
claiming the entire credit of his eloquence, while he mocked his divine
singing, and disparaged his accomplishments as a harper and charioteer
because he himself was unable to acquire them. Nero, they urged was a
boy no longer; let him get rid of his schoolmaster, and find sufficient
instruction in the example of his ancestors.
Foreseeing how such arguments must end; Seneca requested an interview
with Nero; begged to be suffered to retire altogether from public life;
pleaded age and increasing infirmities as an excuse for desiring a calm
retreat; and offered unconditionally to resign the wealth and honours
which had excited the cupidity of his enemies, but which were simply due
to Nero's unexampled liberality during the eight years of his
government, towards one whom he had regarded as a benefactor and a
friend. But Nero did not choose to let Seneca escape so lightly. He
argued that, being still young, he could not spare him, and that to
accept his offers would not be at all in accordance with his fame for
generosity. A proficient in the imperial art of hiding detestation under
deceitful blandishments, Nero ended the interview with embraces and
assurances of friendship. Seneca thanked him--the usual termination, as
Tacitus bitterly adds, of interviews with a ruler--but nevertheless
altered his entire manner of life, forbade his friends to throng to his
levees, avoided all companions, and rarely appeared in public--wishing
it to be believed that he was suffering from weak health, or was wholly
occupied in the pursuit of philosophy. He well knew the arts of courts,
for in his book on Anger he has told an anecdote of one who, being asked
how he had managed to attain so rare a gift as old age in a palace,
replied, "By submitting to injuries, and _returning thanks for them_."
But he must have known that his life hung upon a thread, for in the very
same year an attempt was made to involve him in a charge of treason as
one of the friends of C. Calpurnius Piso, an illustrious nobleman whose
wealth and ability made him an object of jealousy and suspicion, though
he was naturally unambitious and devoid of energy. The attempt failed at
the time, and Seneca was able triumphantly to refute the charge of any
treasonable design. But the fact of such a charge being made showed how
insecure was the position of any man of eminence under the deepening
tyranny of Nero, and it precipitated the conspiracy which two years
afterwards was actually formed.
Not long after the death of Burrus, when Nero began to add sacrilege to
his other crimes, Seneca made one more attempt to retire from Rome; and,
when permission was a second time refused, he feigned a severe illness,
and confined himself to his chamber. It was asserted, and believed, that
about this time Nero made an attempt to poison him by the
instrumentality of his freedman Cleonicus, which was only defeated by
the confession of an accomplice or by the abstemious habits of the
philosopher who now took nothing but bread and fruit, and never quenched
his thirst except out of the running stream.
It was during those two years of Seneca's seclusion and disgrace that an
event happened of imperishable interest. On the orgies of a shameful
court, on the supineness of a degenerate people, there burst--as upon
the court of Charles II.--a sudden lightning-flash of retribution. In
its character, in its extent, in the devastation and anguish of which it
was the cause, in the improvements by which it was followed, in the
lying origin to which it was attributed, even in the general
circumstances of the period and character of the reign in which it
happened, there is a close and singular analogy between the Great Fire
of London in 1666 and the Great Fire of Rome in 64. Beginning in the
crowded part of the city, under the Palatine and Caelian Hills, it
raged, first for six, and then again for three days, among the
inflammable material of booths and shops, and driven along by a furious
wind, amid feeble and ill-directed efforts to check its course, it burst
irresistibly over palaces, temples, and porticoes, and amid the narrow
tortuous streets of old Rome, involving in a common destruction the most
magnificent works of ancient art, the choicest manuscripts of ancient
literature, and the most venerable monuments of ancient superstition. In
a few touches of inimitable compression, such as the stern genius of the
Latin language permits, but which are too condensed for direct
translation, Tacitus has depicted the horror of the scene,--wailing of
panic-stricken women, the helplessness of the very aged and the very
young, the passionate eagerness for themselves and for others, the
dragging along of the feeble or the waiting for them, the lingering and
the hurry, the common and inextricable confusion. Many, while they
looked backward, were cut off by the flames in front or at the sides; if
they sought some neighboring refuge, they found it in the grasp of the
conflagration; if they hurried to some more distant spot, that too was
found to be involved in the same calamity. At last, uncertain what to
seek or what to avoid, they crowded the streets, they lay huddled
together in the fields. Some, having lost all their possessions, died
from the want of daily food; and others, who might have escaped died of
a broken heart from the anguish of being bereaved of those whom they had
been unable to rescue; while, to add to the universal horror, it was
believed that all attempts to repress the flames were checked by
authoritive prohibition; nay more, that hired incendiaries were seen
flinging firebrands in new directions, either because they had been
bidden to do so, or that they might exercise their rapine undisturbed.
The historians and anecdotists of the time, whose accounts must be taken
for what they are worth, attribute to Nero the origin of the
conflagration; and it is certain that he did not return to Rome until
the fire had caught the galleries of his palace. In vain did he use
every exertion to assist the homeless and ruined population; in vain did
he order food to be sold to them at a price unprecedentedly low, and
throw open to them the monuments of Agrippa, his own gardens, and a
multitude of temporary sheds. A rumour had been spread that, during the
terrible unfolding of that great "flower of flame," he had mounted to
the roof of his distant villa, and delighted with the beauty of the
spectacle, exulting in the safe sensation of a new excitement, had
dressed himself in theatrical attire, and sung to his harp a poem on the
burning of Troy. Such a heartless mixture of buffoonery and affectation
had exasperated the people too deeply for forgiveness, and Nero thought
it necessary to draw off the general odium into a new channel, since
neither his largesses nor any other popular measures succeeded in
removing from himself the ignominy of this terrible suspicion. What
follows is so remarkable, and, to a Christian reader, so deeply
interesting, that I will give it in the very words of that great
historian whom I have been so closely following.
"Therefore, to get rid of this report, Nero trumped up an accusation
against a sect, detested for their atrocities, whom the common people
called Christians, and inflicted on them the most recondite punishments.
Christ, the founder of this sect, had been capitally punished by the
Procurator Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius; and this damnable
superstition, repressed for the present, was again breaking out, not
only through Judaea, where the evil originated, but even through the
City, whither from all regions all things that are atrocious or shameful
flow together and gain a following. Those, therefore, were first
arrested who confessed their religion, and then on their evidence a vast
multitude were condemned, not so much on the charge of incendiarism, as
for their hatred towards the human race. And mockery was added to their
death; for they were covered in the skins of wild beasts and were torn
to death by dogs, or crucified, or set apart for burning, and after the
close of the day were reserved for the purpose of nocturnal
illumination. Nero lent his own gardens for the spectacle, and gave a
chariot-race, mingling with the people in the costume of a charioteer,
or driving among them in his chariot; by which conduct he raised a
feeling of commiseration towards the sufferers, guilty though they were,
and deserving of the extremest penalties, as though they were being
exterminated, not for the public interests, but to gratify the savage
cruelty of one man."
Such are the brief but deeply pathetic particulars which have come down
to us respecting the first great persecution of the Christians, and such
must have been the horrid events of which Seneca was a contemporary, and
probably an actual eye-witness, in the very last year of his life.
Profoundly as in all likelihood he must have despised the very name of
Christian, a heart so naturally mild and humane as his must have
shuddered at the monstrous cruelties devised against the unhappy
votaries of this new religion. But to the relations of Christianity with
the Pagan world we shall return in a subsequent chapter and we must now
hasten to the end of our biography.