Chapter XXXIV: Nero: Last Emperor of the House of Cæsar (2)

And this young lady, in her twentieth year, thrown among centurions and common soldiers, and already bereft of life under the presage of impending woes, did not, however, as yet enjoy the repose of death. After an interval of a few days she was ordered to die, when she protested,“she was now a widow, and only the emperor’s sister”; appealed to the Germanici, the common relatives of Nero and herself; and lastly invoked the name of Agrippina, observing, “that had she lived, her marriage-state would have been made wretched, but she would not have been doomed to destruction.” She was then tied fast with bonds, and her veins opened in every joint; and her death was accelerated by the vapour of a bath, heated to the highest point. A deed of still more atrocious brutality was added; her head was cut off and conveyed to the city for Poppæa to see it. Offerings at the temples were decreed by the fathers on account of these events; a circumstance which I have recorded in order that that all those who shall read the calamities of those times, as they are delivered by me or any other authors, may conclude by anticipation, that as often as a banishment or a murder was perpetrated by the prince’s orders, so often thanks were rendered to the gods; and those acts which in former times were resorted to to distinguish prosperous occurrences, were now made the tokens of public disasters. Still I will not suppress the mention of any decree of the senate which is marked by unheard-of adulation, or the extremity of abject servility.

Nero himself, to make it believed that he enjoyed himself nowhere so much as at Rome, caused banquets to be prepared in the public places, and used the whole city as his house. Remarkable above all others for the display of luxury and the noise it made in the world was the feast given by Tigellinus, which, (says Suetonius), I will describe by way of specimen, that I may not have to repeat the instances of similar prodigality. For this purpose, he built, in the lake of Agrippa, a raft which supported the banquet, which was drawn to and fro by other vessels, the vessels were striped with gold and ivory, and rowed by bands of pathics, who were ranged according to their age, and accomplishments in the science of debauchery. He had procured fowl and venison from remote regions, with sea-fish even from the ocean; upon the margin of the lake were erected brothels, filled with ladies of distinction; over against them naked harlots were exposed to view; now, were beheld obscene gestures and motions; and as soon as darkness came on, all the neighbouring groves and circumjacent dwellings resounded with music, and glared with lights. Nero wallowed in all sorts of defilements, lawful and unlawful, and seemed to leave no atrocity which could add to his pollution, till a few days afterwards he married, as a woman, one of this contaminated herd, named Pythagoras, with all the solemnities of wedlock. The Roman emperor put on the nuptial veil; the augurs, the portion, the bridal bed, the nuptial torches, were all seen; in fine, everything exposed to view which, even in a female, is covered by the night.

THE GREAT FIRE AT ROME; PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS

[Sidenote: [64 A.D.]]

There followed a dreadful disaster; whether fortuitously, or by the wicked contrivance of the prince, is not determined, for both are asserted by historians; but of all the calamities which ever befell this city from the rage of fire, this was the most terrible and severe. It broke out in that part of the Circus which is contiguous to mounts Palatine and Cælius; where, by reason of shops in which were kept such goods as minister aliment to fire, the moment it commenced it acquired strength, and being accelerated by the wind, it spread at once through the whole extent of the Circus; for neither were the houses secured by enclosures, nor the temples environed with walls, nor was there any other obstacle to intercept its progress; but the flame, spreading every way impetuously, invaded first the lower regions of the city, then mounted to the higher; then again ravaging the lower, it baffled every effort to extinguish it, by the rapidity of its destructive course, and from the liability of the city to conflagration, in consequence of the narrow and intricate alleys, and the irregularity of the streets in ancient Rome. Add to this, the wailings of terrified women, the infirm condition of the aged, and the helplessness of childhood; such as strove to provide for themselves, and those who laboured to assist others; these dragging the feeble, those waiting for them; some hurrying, others lingering; altogether created a scene of universal confusion and embarrassment. And while they looked back upon the danger in their rear, they often found themselves beset before, and on their sides; or if they escaped into the quarters adjoining, these too were already seized by the devouring flames; even the parts which they believed remote and exempt, were found to be in the same distress. At last, not knowing what to shun, or where to seek sanctuary, they crowded the streets, and lay along in the open fields. Some, from the loss of their whole substance, even the means of their daily sustenance, others, from affection for their relatives, whom they had not been able to snatch from the flames, suffered themselves to perish in them, though they had opportunity to escape. Neither dared any man offer to check the fire; so repeated were the menaces of many who forbade to extinguish it; and because others openly threw firebrands, with loud declarations that “they had one who authorised them”; whether they did it that they might plunder with the less restraint, or in consequence of orders given.

Nero, who was at that juncture sojourning at Antium, did not return to the city till the fire approached that quarter of his house which connected the palace with the gardens of Mæcenas; nor could it, however, be prevented from devouring the house and palace, and everything around. But for the relief of the people, thus destitute, and driven from their dwellings, he opened the Field of Mars and the monumental edifices erected by Agrippa, and even his own gardens. He likewise reared temporary houses for the reception of the forlorn multitude, and from Ostia and the neighbouring cities, were brought up the river household necessaries; and the price of grain was reduced to three sesterces the measure. All which proceedings, though of a popular character, were thrown away, because a rumour had become universally current, that “at the very time when the city was in flames, Nero, going on the stage of his private theatre, sang, ‘The Destruction of Troy,’ assimilating the present disaster to that catastrophe of ancient times.”

At length, on the sixth day, the conflagration was stayed at the foot of Esquiline, by pulling down an immense quantity of buildings, so that an open space, and, as it were, void air, might check the raging element by breaking the continuity. But ere the consternation had subsided, the fire broke out afresh, with no little violence, but in regions more spacious, and therefore with less destruction of human life; but more extensive havoc was made of the temples, and the porticoes dedicated to amusement. This conflagration, too, was the subject of more censorious remark, as it arose in the Æmilian possessions of Tigellinus; and Nero seemed to aim at the glory of building a new city, and calling it by his own name; for, of the fourteen sections into which Rome is divided, four were still standing entire, three were levelled with the ground, and in the seven others there remained only here and there a few remnants of houses, shattered and half consumed.

Nero appropriated to his own purposes the ruins of his city, and founded upon them a palace [the “Golden House”] in which the old-fashioned, and, in those luxurious times, common ornaments of gold and precious stones, were not so much the objects of attraction as lands and lakes; in one part, woods like vast preserves; in another part, open spaces and expansive prospects. The projectors and superintendents of this plan were Severus and Celer, men of such ingenuity and daring enterprise as to attempt to conquer by art the obstacles of nature, and fool away the treasures of the prince; they had even undertaken to sink a navigable canal from the lake Avernus to the mouth of the Tiber, over an arid shore, or through opposing mountains: nor indeed does there occur anything of a humid nature for supplying water, except the Pontine marshes; the rest is either craggy rock or a parched soil; and had it even been possible to break through these obstructions, the toil had been intolerable, and disproportioned to the object. Nero, however, who longed to achieve things that exceeded credibility, exerted all his might to perforate the mountains adjoining to Avernus: and to this day there remain traces of his abortive project.

But the rest of the old site not occupied by his palace was laid out, not as after the Gallic fire, without discrimination and regularity, but with the lines of streets measured out, broad spaces left for transit, the height of the buildings limited, open areas left, and porticoes added to protect the front of the clustered dwellings. These porticoes Nero engaged to rear at his own expense, and then to deliver to each proprietor the areas about them cleared. He moreover proposed rewards proportioned to every man’s rank and private substance, and fixed a day within which, if their houses, single or clustered, were finished, they should receive them. He appointed the marshes of Ostia for a receptacle of the rubbish, and that the vessels which had conveyed grain up the Tiber should return laden with rubbish; that the buildings themselves should be raised to a certain portion of their height without beams, and arched with stone from the quarries of Gabii or Alba, that stone being proof against fire; that over the water springs, which had been improperly intercepted by private individuals, overseers should be placed, to provide for their flowing in greater abundance, and in a greater number of places, for the supply of the public; that every housekeeper should have in his yard means for extinguishing fire; neither should there be party walls, but every house should be enclosed by its own walls. These regulations, which were favourably received, in consideration of their utility, were also a source of beauty to the new city; yet some there were who believed that the ancient form was more conducive to health, as from the narrowness of the streets, and the height of the buildings the rays of the sun were more excluded; whereas now, the spacious breadth of the streets, without any shade to protect it, was more intensely heated in warm weather.

Such were the provisions made by human counsels. The gods were next addressed with expiations; and recourse had to the Sibyl’s books. By admonition from them, to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpine supplicatory sacrifices were made, and Juno was propitiated by the matrons, first in the Capitol, then upon the nearest shore, where, by water drawn from the sea, the temple and image of the goddess were besprinkled; and the ceremony of placing the goddess in her sacred chair, and her vigil, were celebrated by ladies who had husbands. But not all the relief that could come from man, not all the bounties that the prince could bestow, nor all the atonements which could be presented to the gods, availed to relieve Nero from the infamy of being believed to have ordered the conflagration. Hence, to suppress the rumour, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished with the most exquisite tortures, the Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Accordingly, first those were seized who confessed they were Christians; next, on their information, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of hating the human race. And in their deaths they were also made the subjects of sport, for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when day declined, burned to serve for nocturnal lights. Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot. Whence a feeling of compassion arose towards the sufferers, because they seemed not to be cut off for the public good, but victims to the ferocity of one man.[c]

In order to compensate for his prodigality in games and spectacles; to cover the expense of his purposeless edifices, above all, of his golden house; of his festivals, one of which cost four million sesterces for perfume alone; his extravagance in furniture and in clothes, of which he wore new ones each day, his distributions of bread, meat, game, clothes, money, and even precious stones, among the populace in return for their applause for his verses and singing; finally, I say, to compensate for all this wild expenditure, he multiplied proscriptions and sentences which carried with them the confiscation of property. Even office became a source of revenue, for he only bestowed it on condition that he should have a share in the profits. The provinces were thus again pillaged. It was not for this they had so loudly saluted the establishment of the empire, and they came within a measurable distance of its dissolution in the last years of this reign.[b]

CONSPIRACY MET BY CRUELTY AND PERSECUTION

[Sidenote: [65 A.D.]]

Men, however, were grown weary of being the objects of the tyrannic caprice of a profligate youth; and a widely extended conspiracy to remove him and give the supreme power to C. Piso, a nobleman of many popular qualities, was organised (65). Men of all ranks, civil and military, were engaged in it,--senators, knights, tribunes, and centurions,--some, as is usual, on public, some on private grounds. While they were yet undecided where it were best to fall on Nero, a courtesan named Epicharis, who had a knowledge (it is not known how obtained) of the plot, wearied of their indecision, attempted to gain over the officers of the fleet at Misenum. She made the first trial of an officer named Volusius Proculus, who had been one of the agents in the murder of Agrippina, and who complained of the ill return he had met with, and menaced revenge. She communicated to him the fact of there being a conspiracy, and proposed to him to join in it; but Proculus, hoping to gain a reward by this new service, went and gave information to Nero. Epicharis was seized; but as she had mentioned no names, and Proculus had no witnesses, nothing could be made of the matter. She was, however, kept in prison.

The conspirators became alarmed; and lest they should be betrayed, they resolved to delay acting no longer, but to fall on the tyrant at the Circensian games. The plan arranged was that Plautius Lateranus, the consul-elect, a man of great courage and bodily strength, should sue to the emperor for relief to his family affairs, and in so doing should grasp his knees and throw him down, and that then the officers should despatch him with their swords. Meantime Piso should be waiting at the adjacent temple of Ceres; and when Nero was no more, the prefect Fenius Rufus and others should come and convey him to the camp.

Notwithstanding the number and variety of persons engaged in the plot, the secret had been kept with wonderful fidelity. Accident, however, revealed it as it was on the very eve of execution. Among the conspirators was a senator named Flavius Scevinus, who, though dissolved in luxury, was one of the most eager. He had insisted on having the first part in the assassination, for which purpose he had provided a dagger taken from a temple. The night before the attack was to be made he gave this dagger to one of his freedmen, named Milichus, to grind and sharpen. He at the same time sealed his will, giving freedom to some, gifts to others of his slaves. He supped more luxuriously than usual, and though he affected great cheerfulness, it was manifest from his air that he had something of importance on his mind. He also directed his freedman to prepare bandages for wounds. The freedman, who was either already in the secret, or had his suspicions now excited, consulted with his wife, and at her impulsion set off at daylight and revealed his suspicions to Epaphroditus, one of Nero’s freedmen, by whom he was conducted to the emperor. On his information Scevinus was arrested; but he gave a plausible explanation of everything but the bandages, which he positively denied. He might have escaped were it not that Milichus’ wife suggested that Antonius Natalis had conversed a great deal with him in secret of late, and that they were both intimate with Piso. Natalis was then sent for; and as he and Scevinus did not agree in their accounts of the conversation which they had, they were menaced with torture. Natalis’ courage gave way; he named Piso and Seneca. Scevinus, either through weakness or thinking that all was known, named several others, among whom were Annæus Lucanus the poet, the nephew of Seneca, Tullius Senecio, and Afranius Quinctianus. These at first denied everything. At length, on the promise of pardon, they discovered some of their nearest friends, Lucan even naming his own mother Atilla.

Nero now called to mind the information of Proculus, and he ordered Epicharis to be put to the torture. But no pain could overcome the constancy of the heroic woman; and next day, as from her weak state she was carried in a chair to undergo the torture anew, she contrived to fasten her belt to the arched back of the chair, and thus to strangle herself.

When the discovery was first made, some of the bolder spirits urged Piso to hasten to the camp or to ascend the rostra, and endeavour to excite the soldiers or the people to rise against Nero. But he had not energy for such a course, and he lingered at home till his house was surrounded by soldiers. He then opened his veins, leaving a will filled, for the sake of his wife, a profligate woman, with the grossest adulation of Nero. Lateranus died like a hero, with profound silence; and though the tribune who presided at the execution was one of the conspirators, he never reproached him.

But the object of Nero’s most deadly enmity was Seneca. All that was against this illustrious man was that Natalis said that Piso had one time sent him to Seneca, who was ill, to see how he was, and to complain of his not admitting him, and that Seneca replied that it was for the good of neither that they should meet frequently, but that his health depended on Piso’s safety. The tribune Granius Silvanus (also one of the conspirators) was sent to Seneca, who was now at his villa four miles from Rome, to examine him respecting the conversation with Natalis. He found him at table with his wife, Pompeia Paulina, and two of his friends. Seneca’s account agreed with that of Natalis; his meaning, he said, had been perfectly innocent. When the tribune made his report to Nero and his privy council--Poppæa and Tigellinus--he was asked if Seneca meditated a voluntary death. On his reply that he showed no signs of fear or perturbation, he was ordered to go back and bid him die. Silvanus, it is said, called on Fenius on his way and asked him if he should obey the orders; but Fenius, with that want of spirit which was the ruin of them all, bade him obey. Silvanus when he arrived sent in a centurion with the fatal mandate.

Seneca calmly called for his will, but the centurion would not suffer him to have it. He then told his friends that as he could not express his sense of their merits in the way that he wished, he would leave them the image of his life, to which, if they attended, they would obtain the fame of virtue and of constancy in friendship. He checked their tears, showing that nothing had occurred but what was to have been expected. Then embracing his wife, he began to console and fortify her, but she declared her resolution to die with him. Not displeased at her generous devotion, and happy that one so dear to him should not remain exposed to injury and misfortune, he gave a ready consent, and the veins in the arms of both were opened. As Seneca, on account of his age, bled slowly, he caused those of his legs and thighs to be opened also; and as he suffered very much, he persuaded his wife to go into another room; and then calling for amanuenses, he dictated a discourse which was afterward published. Finding himself going very slowly, he asked his friend the physician, Statius Annæus, for the hemlock juice which he had provided, and took it, but it had no effect. He finally went into a warm bath, sprinkling as he entered it the servants who were about him, and saying, “I pour this liquor to Jove the Liberator.” The heat caused the blood to flow freely, and his sufferings at length terminated. His body was burned without any ceremony, according to the directions which he had given when at the height of his prosperity.

Paulina did not die at this time; for Nero, who had no enmity against her and wished to avoid the imputation of gratuitous cruelty, sent orders to have her saved. She survived her husband a few years, her face and skin remaining of a deadly paleness in consequence of her great loss of blood.

The military men did not remain undiscovered. Fenius Rufus died like a coward; the tribunes and centurions, like soldiers. When one of them named Subrius Flavius was asked by Nero what caused him to forget his military oath: “I hated you,” said he, “and there was none of the soldiers more faithful while you deserved to be loved. I began to hate you when you became the murderer of your mother and wife, a chariot-driver, a player, and an incendiary.” Nothing in the whole affair cut Nero to the soul like this reply of the gallant soldier.

The consul Vestinus was not implicated by any in the conspiracy; but Nero hated him; and as he was sitting at dinner with his friends, some soldiers entered to say that their tribune wanted him. He arose, went into a chamber, had his veins opened, entered a warm bath, and died. Lucan when ordered to die had his veins also opened; when he felt his extremities growing cold, he called to mind some verses of his _Pharsalia_ which were applicable to his case, and died repeating them. Senecio Quinctianus and Scevinus and many others died; several were banished. Natalis, Milichus, and others were rewarded; offerings, thanksgivings, and so forth were voted in abundance by the senate.

This obsequious body, however, sought to avert the disgrace of the lord of the Roman world appearing on the stage at the approaching Quinquennial games, by offering him the victory of song and the crown of eloquence. But Nero said that there needed not the power nor the influence of the senate, that he feared not his rivals, and relied on the equity of the judges. He therefore sang on the stage, and when the people pressed him to display all his acquirements, he came forth in the theatre, strictly conforming to all the rules of his art, not sitting down when weary, wiping his face in his robe, neither spitting nor blowing his nose, and finally with bended knee and moving his hand, waited in counterfeit terror for the sentence of the judges.

At the end of the games, he in a fit of anger gave Poppæa, who was pregnant, a kick in the stomach, which caused her death. Instead of burning her body, as was now the general custom, he had it embalmed with the most costly spices and deposited in the monument of the Julian family. He himself pronounced the funeral oration, in which he praised her for her beauty, and for being the mother of a divine infant.

The remainder of the year was marked by the death or exile of several illustrious persons, and by a pestilence which carried off great numbers of all ranks and ages. “Of the knights and senators,” observes Tacitus, “the deaths were less to be lamented; they anticipated, as it were, by the common fate the cruelty of the prince.”

[Sidenote: [66 A.D.]]

The first deaths of the succeeding year (66) were those of P. Anteius, whose crime was his wealth and the friendship of Agrippina; Ostorius Scapula, who had distinguished himself in Britain; Annæus Mella, the father of Lucan; Anicius Cerealis, Rufius Crispinus, and others. They all died in the same manner, by opening their veins. The most remarkable death was that of C. Petronius, a man whose elegance and taste in luxury had recommended him to the special favour of Nero, who regarding him as his “arbiter of elegance,” valued only that of which Petronius approved. The envy of Tigellinus being thus excited, he bribed one of Petronius’ slaves to charge his master with being the friend of Scevinus. His death followed, of course; the mode of it however was peculiar. He caused his veins to be opened, then closed, then opened again, and so on. He meantime went on conversing with his friends, not, like a Socrates or a Seneca, on the immortality of the soul or the opinions of the wise, but listening to light and wanton verses. He rewarded some of his slaves, he had others flogged, he dined, he slept; he made, in short, his compulsive death as like a natural one as possible. He did not, like others, pay court to Nero or Tigellinus or the men in power, in his will, but he wrote an account of the vices and crimes of the prince and court under the names of flagitious men and women, and sent it sealed up to the emperor. He broke his seal-ring, lest it might be used to the destruction of innocent persons.

“After the slaughter of so many illustrious men,” says Tacitus, “Nero at length sought to destroy virtue itself by killing Thraseas Pætus and Bareas Soranus.” The former, a man of primitive Roman virtue, was hated by him not merely for his worth, but because he had on various occasions given public proof of his disapproval of his acts. Such were his going out of the senate house when the decrees were made on account of the murder of Agrippina, and his absence from the deification and funeral of Poppæa. Further than his virtue, we know of no cause of enmity that Nero could have against Soranus.

The accusers of Thraseas were Capito Cossutianus, whom he had made his enemy by supporting the Cilician deputies who came to accuse him of extortion, and Marcellus Eprius, a profligate man of eloquence. A Roman knight named Ostorius Sabinus appeared as the accuser of Soranus. The time selected for the destruction of these eminent men was that of the arrival of the Parthian prince Tiridates, who was coming to Rome to receive the diadem of Armenia, either in hopes that the domestic crime would be shrouded by the foreign glory, or, more probably, to give the Oriental an idea of the imperial power. Thraseas received an order not to appear among those who went to meet the king; he wrote to Nero, requiring to know with what he was charged, and asserting his ability to clear himself if he got an opportunity. Nero in reply said that he would convoke the senate. Thraseas then consulted with his friends, whether he would go to the senate house, or expect his doom at home. Opinions were as usual divided; he however did not go to the senate.

Next morning the temple in which the senate sat was surrounded with soldiery. Cossutianus and Eprius appeared as the accusers of Thraseas, his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus, Paconius Agrippinus, and Curtius Montanus. The general charge against them was passive rather than active disloyalty, Thraseas being held forth as the seducer and encourager of the others. Ostorius then came forward and accused Soranus, who was present, of friendship with Rubellius Plautus and of mal-conduct in the government of Asia. He added that Servilia, the daughter of the accused, had given money to fortune-tellers. Servilia was summoned. She owned the truth, that she had sold her ornaments and given the money to the soothsayers, but for no impious purpose, only to learn if her father would escape. Witnesses were then called, and among them, to the indignation of every virtuous man, appeared P. Egnatius, the client and friend of Soranus, and a professor of the stoic philosophy, who now had sold himself to destroy his benefactor by false testimony.

The accused were all condemned, of course; Thraseas, Soranus, and Servilia to death, the others to exile. Of the circumstances of the end of Soranus and his daughter, we are not informed. Thraseas having prevented his wife Arria from following the example of her mother of the same name, by entreating her not to deprive their daughter of her only remaining support, caused his veins to be opened in the usual manner; and as the blood spouted forth, he said to the quæstor who was present, “Let us pour out to Jove the Liberator. Regard this, young man. May the gods avert the omen; but you have been born in times when it is expedient to fortify the mind by examples of constancy.” He died after suffering much pain.[f]

Suetonius has left us an interesting picture of the personality of the perverted being who was the cause of all this suffering.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NERO, ACCORDING TO SUETONIUS

[Sidenote: [54-68 A.D.]]

In stature Nero was a little below the common size; his body spotted, and of a disagreeable appearance; his hair inclined to yellow; his countenance fair, rather than handsome; his eyes gray and dull, his neck fat, his belly prominent, legs very slender, but his constitution healthful. For, though extravagantly luxurious in his way of living, he had, in the course of fourteen years, only three fits of sickness, which were so slight, that he neither forbore the use of wine, nor made any alteration in his usual diet. In his dress, and the care of his person, he was so indecent, that he had his hair cut in rings one above another; and when he was in Achaia, let it grow long behind; and appeared abroad for the most part in the dress which he used at table, with a handkerchief about his neck, his coat loose upon him, and without shoes.

He was entered, when a boy, in almost all the liberal sciences; but his mother diverted him from the study of philosophy, as unsuitable to one who was to be an emperor; and his master Seneca discouraged him from reading the old orators, that he might keep him the longer in admiration of himself. He was much addicted to poetry, and composed verses both with pleasure and ease: nor did he, as some think, publish those of other authors for his own. I have had in my hands some little pocket-books of his, with some well-known verses, all of his own writing, and written in such a manner, that it was very evident from the blotting and interlining, that they had not been transcribed from a copy, nor dictated by another, but written by the composer of them.

He had likewise a great taste for painting, and moulding of images, but of all things an extravagant desire of popular applause, being a rival of every man who was upon any account admired by the people. It was the general belief, that, after the prizes he won by his performances upon the stage, he would the next lustrum have entered amongst the wrestlers at the Olympic games. For he was continually practising in that way; nor did he attend in Greece that kind of solemnity any otherwise, than as the judges used to do, sitting upon the ground in the Stadium. And if a pair of wrestlers happened to get without the limits assigned them, he would with his own hands bring them back into their proper place.

Towards the end of his life, he made a public vow, that if he continued in the peaceable enjoyment of the empire, he would, in the games which he intended to give for his success against the insurgents, appear upon the stage, to manage the water-organ, as also to play upon the flutes and bagpipe, and upon the day concluding those diversions, would act his part in a play, and dance to the story of Turnus in Virgil. And there are some who say, that he put to death the player Paris as a dangerous rival.

He had an invincible desire, but capriciously directed, of rendering himself famous through all succeeding ages. He therefore took from several things and places their former appellations, and gave them new names derived from his own. He called the month of April, too, Neroneus, and had a design to change the name of Rome into that of Neropolis.

He thought there was no other use of riches and money than to squander them away profusely; regarding all those as sordid wretches who kept their expenses within due bounds; and extolling those as truly noble and generous souls, who lavished away and wasted all before them. He never wore the same garment twice. He would game for four hundred thousand sesterces for every spot that came up upon the tali. He used to fish with a golden net, drawn by silken cords of the finest scarlet colour. It is said that he never travelled with less than a thousand carts attending him with his baggage: the mules being all shod with silver, and their drivers dressed in scarlet clothes of the finest wool; and a numerous train of footmen, and Africans, with bracelets on their arms, and mounted upon horses in splendid trappings.

He was a despiser of all religious worship, except that of the Syrian goddess; but at last he regarded her so little that he spurned her, being now engaged in another superstition, in which he invariably persisted. For having received from some obscure plebeian a little image of a girl, as a preservative against plots, and discovering a conspiracy immediately after, he constantly worshipped, and with three sacrifices a day, his imaginary protectress, as the greatest amongst the gods. He was likewise desirous to have it thought that he had from the information of that deity a knowledge of future events. A few months before he died, he offered several sacrifices, to consult the entrails of the victims; but could never obtain any favourable intimations from them.[d]

MERIVALE’S ESTIMATE OF NERO AND HIS TIMES

The youth who at the age of seventeen years had been called to govern the civilised world, is represented in his busts and medals as handsome in countenance, but, as Suetonius remarks, without grace or winningness of expression. His hair was not the bright auburn of Apollo, the delight of the Romans, to which it was so often likened, but yellowish or sandy; his figure, though of middle stature, was ill-proportioned, the neck was thick and sensual, the stomach prominent, the legs slender. His skin, it is added, was blotched or pimpled; but this, it may be supposed, was the effect of intemperance in his later years; his eyes were dark gray or greenish, and their sight defective, which may account perhaps for the scowl which seems to mark their expression. His health, notwithstanding his excesses, continued good to the end, and it was only from anxious concern for his voice that he wrapped his throat in kerchiefs, like a confirmed valetudinarian. In his dress there was a mixture of slovenliness and finery; in the arrangement of his cherished locks he was exceedingly careful, piling them in tiers above the crown, and letting them fall from thence over the shoulders, a fashion which was reputed not less indecent, or at least effeminate, than the looseness of his cincture, the bareness of his feet, and the lightness of the chamber-robe in which he did not scruple to appear in public.

We may trace perhaps to the character of his master, and to the kind of education he was likely to receive from him, the ardent love of admiration, ill-directed as it was, which distinguished the pupil of Seneca. To this constant anxiety to compete with rivals, and triumph over them, however trifling the objects on which it was exercised, may be ascribed the indifference Nero evidently felt to the title of divinity, which in his inordinate vanity he might have been expected to claim. He wanted to be admired as the first among men, not to be adored as a god. He could not be Apollo, and contend at the same time for the prize of the Pythian games; he could not be Hercules, and carry off the chaplet at Nemea; he could not be Jupiter, and gain the victory at the great contest of Olympia--distinctions on which his soul was bent from an early period of his career, and which, as we shall see, he lived eventually to achieve. His courtiers might, if they pleased, pronounce his likeness to these or any other divinities; but to make him actually divine was to rob him of the honours he so vehemently affected. The poets might predict his apotheosis after death, and doubtless the verses in which Lucan, at that time his friend and companion, challenged him to choose what godship he would assume in heaven, and where he would fix his throne, imploring him to take his seat in the middle of the universe, lest if he leaned ever so little from the centre the world should be thrown by his august weight from its eternal balance--such verses were doubtless accepted as a fitting tribute to the germ of a divine existence hereafter to blossom into flower. But the ardour with which Nero aspired to distinctions among mortal men was itself a guarantee against his usurping the character of the impassive godhead, which can neither enjoy a triumph nor suffer a disgrace.

Nor again, though described by Tacitus as _lusting after the incredible_, had Nero the same passion as Caligula for realising apparent impossibilities to prove his superhuman power. He was not impelled in a career of marvels by restless and aimless pride. Once removed from the sphere of theatrical shows and contests, he had no higher notion of his position than as enabling him to accumulate, to multiply, or to enlarge the commonest objects of luxury. He never travelled, it is asserted, with less than a thousand carriages in his train. His banquets were those of the noble debauchees of the day on a still vaster scale of expense; in the height of his extravagance, he would equip his actors with masks or wands covered with genuine pearls; he would stake four hundred thousand sesterces on a single cast of the dice; he bathed in unguents, and stimulated his friends to expend four millions on the perfumes alone of a single supper. His presents to favourites were sums of money many times greater than had ever been given to favourites before; his buildings were colonnades longer, halls wider, towers higher, than had been raised by his predecessors. His projected canal from Puteoli to Rome would only have been the longest of canals; the attempt he latterly made to cut through the isthmus of Corinth was only a repetition of previous attempts, neither better planned, nor more steadfastly persevered in.

In his schemes there was nothing new or original. Nero was devoid of the imagination which throws an air of wild grandeur over the character of Caligula. The notion that he burned Rome on purpose to have an opportunity of rebuilding it more magnificently would have been more applicable, as it seems to me, to his predecessor than to him. But within the paltry sphere of his degraded taste he claimed to be pre-eminent. As a mime or player he was not satisfied with any single class of parts, or any one department of exhibition. After rivalling Apollo in song and the Sun in charioteering, he aspired to display the courage and vigour of Hercules, and a lion was duly prepared, drugged or fed to stupor, to be strangled in his arms, or brained with a stroke of his club. He acted, he sang, he played, he danced. He insisted on representing men and heroes, gods and even goddesses. To affect the woman indeed, in dress, voice, and gesture, was a transformation in which he took a childish pleasure, restrained by no sense of dignity or decency. He adopted his superstitions, as well as his garb and habits, from Syria, from his Parthian and Armenian guests, or from the diviners and necromancers of the credulous East. To the art of magic he devoted wealth, energy, natural abilities, in short, all his resources; but Nature, says Pliny, was too strong for him. His failure to divine the future, or raise the spirits of the dead, was noted by the wise as a signal demonstration of the futility of magical pretensions. For none of the accustomed divinities of Rome did he evince any respect, nor for places consecrated by the national religion; but he reverenced the Syrian Astarte, till in a fit of vexation he renounced her protection, and insulted her image. At last his sole object of veneration was a little figure of a girl, which he always wore as a talisman about him, affecting to learn from it the secrets of futurity.

Such were the miserable interests of this infatuated creature, the victim of licentious indulgence, a child prematurely stunted both in mind and body, surrounded on the throne not by generals and statesmen, but by troops of slaves or freedmen, by players and dancers lost to all sense of decency themselves, and seeking only their advancement at the expense of their master and of mankind; surrendered by loose women to still more despicable minions, and ruled by the most cruel and profligate of ministers. Helius and Tigellinus, Doryphorus and Sporus, are among the most hateful names of the imperial history; into the abominations of their career it would be pollution merely to look. No wonder that, when encircled by so loathsome a crew he saw the proud citizens prostrate at his feet, he could exclaim that no prince before him had known the extent of his power. But though at their patron’s command statues and arches might rise in honour of these infamous companions, it may be said for the credit of the people, that they received much less of lip-worship than their predecessors, Sejanus, Pallas, and Narcissus.

There seems indeed to have risen, at least in the later years of this principate, a marked separation between the court and the nobility; the senators shrank from the presence of a man who so openly degraded his name and lineage; they fled the contact of his dissolute associates; they entered into widespread conspiracies against him, to which they had never been provoked by the tyranny of his predecessors; and they had the merit of incurring his petulant displeasure, with many a threat to extinguish their order altogether, and give the provinces to his knights and freedmen. “I hate you, Cæsar,” exclaimed the most refined of his flatterers, “because you are a senator.” Accordingly this emperor, notwithstanding the pomp and splendour of his shows and public appearances, seems to have been left for the most part to the mercenary attendance of his personal favourites, protected only by a troop of spies and informers, and the vilest portion of the pampered populace, from the general detestation of respectable citizens.[18]

The cruelties of Nero’s later years were the more fearful, perhaps, from their apparent caprice. He had no politic object, such as may be ascribed to Tiberius--of policy indeed he was incapable. Except that his murders were commonly prompted by need or fear, and therefore fell oftenest on the rich and powerful, it can hardly be said that one class suffered from them more terribly than another.

Undoubtedly, however, the senate furnished the longest list of victims to the tyrant’s barbarity. The greatest and noblest were the most exposed to the prince’s evil eye, which lighted upon them equally at public ceremonials and private receptions, and marked them for immolation at every fresh burst of ill-humour. The proscriptions to which this body was subjected under the four Claudian Cæsars reduced its numbers considerably, more, indeed, it may be imagined, than was replaced by the ordinary sources of replenishment. Claudius, among his other reforms, sought to restore the balance by a special measure, and such was probably the object of his revision of the senate, the last of the kind we read of; but the decline must have been accelerated under Nero, without check or counteraction. Nero, reckless equally of the past and future, felt no anxiety to maintain the numbers of that historic assembly; and the various causes, besides the emperor’s tyranny, which were always at work to extinguish the oldest families, must have acted with terrible force on the effete branches of the ancient aristocracy. But if its numbers were reduced, no less were its employments also diminished.

Under the lax discipline of Nero and of Tigellinus appointments to office abroad would be the prize of interest and favour, guided neither by routine nor by discretion; at home the boards and commissions established by Augustus would fall into disuse. Pensions and sinecures, though such corruptions are not known to us at Rome by name, would doubtless abound, but of real business there would be less and less. Intrigue and peculation would flourish in a soil protected from the air of public opinion, and the strong hand of central control.

The passive endurance which marked the conduct of the senate under the imperial persecutions seems to bespeak a consciousness of its own guilt towards the state, and it compounded for its monopoly of unquestioned abuses by bowing to the yoke of a jealous and domineering master. We discover in Seneca no reliance on the senate. He never speaks of it as a living guardian of the virtues of Roman society. And yet, notwithstanding this abandonment of its high prerogative, it still exercised a moral power. Its mere title could awaken associations which thrilled from pulse to pulse. It was still regarded by the men of ancient name and blood as the true head or heart of the empire, rather than the upstart Claudius or Domitius, who might wear the purple and wield the sword. To the men of words and phrases the emperor was still an accident,--the senate was an eternal fact,--at a time when rhetoric might make revolutions, though it could not regenerate society. To them it was still the symbol of liberty, at a time when liberty and Cæsar were regarded as two gladiators sword in hand, pitted against each other in mortal combat. This venerable image of its ancient majesty was preserved to it by the proscriptions themselves by which it suffered; for as often as a murdered Scribonius or Pompeius was replaced in the chairs of office by a Rubellius, a Lollius, or a Vitellius, the principle of its vitality was in fact invigorated by the infusion of new plebeian blood.

As fast indeed as the tyrant’s exigencies required the confiscation of the great estates of nobles, and the overthrow of great families, his caprice and favour were elevating new men from the inferior orders to succeed to their distinctions, and to rival them in their vast possessions. Nero never kept his money. All he robbed, all he extorted, was squandered as abruptly as it was acquired, and shrewd Roman money-makers were always waiting upon his necessities, and sweeping the properties of his victims into their stores for a small part of their value in specie. Of the vast sums amassed by the freedmen of Claudius and his successors some records have been preserved to us; but the freedmen were a class peculiarly obnoxious to remark, and it is probable that knights and senators were at the same time, and by similar compliances, raising fortunes not less enormous, who have escaped the designating finger of history. Though the grinding processes to which the colossal properties of the nobles were subjected must on the whole have broken down the average amount of their revenues far below the rate at which it figured under the republic and the first Cæsars, we must not suppose that the current set all in one direction, or that the age of Claudius and Nero was not also a period of great private accumulations. The wealth of individuals and of the upper ranks at Rome generally reached perhaps its greatest height at this culminating epoch.

Descending, however, from the high places of the Roman world, we find beneath them a commonalty suffering also a social revolution, undergoing a rapid transition, and presenting the elements of two rival classes, or even hostile camps, in the bosom of the city. The clients and retainers of the old nobility, whether freed or freeborn, still formed the pith and marrow of the commonwealth; still leaning their humble tenements against the great lords’ mansions, still respecting them as their patrons and advisers, still attending their levees, and waiting for the daily complement of the _sportula_ at their doors, they regarded them as the real chiefs of the state, and held them equals of Cæsar himself. The death or exile of their august protector might strike them with surprise and indignation; but when they looked around and counted their numbers, they felt their own insignificance, and quailed beneath the blow in silence. They saw that there was growing up beside them a vast class of patronless proletaries, the scum of the streets and lanes, slaves, freedmen, foreigners, men of base trades and infamous employments, or of ruined fortunes, who, having none but Cæsar himself to depend on, threw the weight of their numbers in his scale, and earned his doles and entertainments by lavish caresses, and deeds corresponding to their promises. These have been called the lazzaroni of ancient Rome; in idleness, indeed, and mendicancy they deserve the title; but they were the paupers of a world-wide empire, and the crumbs on which they fed fell from the tables of kings and princes. The wealth of millions of subjects was lavished on these mendicant masters. For days together, on the oft-recurring occasion of an imperial festival, valuables of all kinds were thrown pell-mell among them, rare and costly birds were lavished upon them by thousands, provisions of every kind, costly robes, gold and silver, pearls and jewels, pictures, slaves and horses, and even tamed wild beasts. At last, in the progress of this wild profusion, ships, houses, and estates were bestowed by lottery on these waiters upon Cæsar’s providence.

This extravagance was retained without relaxation throughout Nero’s reign; had he paused in it for a moment the days of his power would have been few. The rumour that he was about to quit Rome for the East caused murmurs of discontent, and forced him to consult the gods, and pretend to be deterred by signs of their displeasure from carrying his design into effect. When at last, as we shall see, he actually visited Greece, he left behind him a confidential minister, to keep the stream of his liberality flowing, at whatever cost and by whatever measures of spoliation. Absent or present, he flung to these pampered supporters a portion of every confiscated fortune; the emperor and his people hunted together, and the division of the prey was made apparently to the satisfaction of both equally. Capricious as were the blows he dealt around him, this class alone he took care never to offend, and even the charge of firing the city fell lightly on the ears of the almost houseless multitude, whose losses at least had been fully compensated by plunder. The clients of the condemned nobles were kept effectually in check by this hungry crowd, yelling over every carcass with the prospect of a feast. Nero, in the height of his tyranny and alarm, had no need to increase the number of his prætorians; the lazzaroni of Rome were a bodyguard surrounding him in every public place, and watching the entrances and exits at his palace gates.