Chapter XXXIV: Nero: Last Emperor of the House of Cæsar (3)

Such were the chief distinctions of class at this period among the Roman people, the so-called lords of mankind, and beyond them lay the great world of the provincials, their subjects. But if these were subjects in name, they were now become in fact the true Roman people; they alone retained real freedom of action within the limits of the empire; they were allowed to labour, and they enjoyed the bulk at least of the fruits of industry; they rarely saw the hateful presence of the emperor, and knew only by report the loathsome character of his courtiers and their orgies. And if sometimes the thunderbolt might fall among them, it struck only the highest eminences; the multitude was safe as it was innocent. The extortion of the proconsul in the province was not to be compared in wantonness or severity with the reckless pillage of the emperor in the capital, nearer home. The petulance of a proconsul’s wife was hardly tolerated abroad, while at home the prince’s worst atrocities were stimulated by female cupidity. The taxation of the subject, if heavier in some respects than that of the citizen, was at least tolerably regular; the extraordinary demands which Nero made towards the rebuilding of Rome were an exception to the routine of fiscal imposts. But, above all, the provincials had changed place with their masters in being now the armed force of the empire.

The citizen had almost ceased to wield the sword. Even the prætorians were recruited from Italy, not from Rome herself; and among them thousands were doubtless foreign born, the offscourings of the provinces, who had thrown themselves on the shores of Italy to seek their fortunes in a sphere abandoned by the indolence of their masters. The prætorian, like the proletary of the city, was highly cherished by the emperor. He had his rights and privileges which raised him above every other military conscript. While the legionary served at ten _asses_ a day for thirty or forty years, exposed to the risks of war, fatigue, and climate, nor regained his liberty and safety till age had blanched his hair and stiffened his limbs, the prætorian lived quietly at Rome under the lax discipline of a stative camp; he enjoyed double pay, and claimed dismissal after sixteen years’ service. He had his regular dole of corn, his occasional largess, his extraordinary donative whenever an opportunity had occurred to prove his fidelity. Tiberius, on the fall of Sejanus, had given him 1000 _asses_; Claudius had paid for the purple with a sum of 150,000,000 of sesterces; Nero had followed these examples, and established them as the rule of the succession; on the overthrow of Piso’s conspiracy he had requited his prætorians with 2000 sesterces apiece. Thus caressed, the favoured cohorts of the guard became the firmest support of the prince, their creature, and under the sway of military traditions, from which even they were not exempt, regarded their oath of allegiance with strict fidelity. This fidelity, indeed, they considered due to the imperator himself rather than to the senate and people, whom they equally despised; they were satisfied with the power of making the Cæsars, and as yet were far from conceiving in their minds the idea of unmaking them again.

But far different was the case with the legions in the provinces. The legionary was still less Roman than the prætorian. If to a great extent the recruits for the frontier camps were still levied from the class which possessed the nominal franchise of the city, yet these citizens were themselves, for the most part, new-enfranchised provincials; they had received Latin or Roman rights as a boon from the emperor, or perhaps purchased them for the sake of their fiscal immunities. Romans in blood or even Italians the legionaries no longer were. They were supported by ample levies of auxiliaries, avowedly of foreign extraction, generally transferred from their homes to a camp at a far distant station; Silures and Brigantes to the Danube; Tungri and Suevi to the borders of Wales; Iberians to the Euphrates; Numidians to the Rhine. Amidst the clang of dissonant languages that resounded through the camp the Latin was the least heard and understood.

Yet the word of command was still Roman, and the chief officers were Roman also; the affections of this soldiery, long estranged from the emperor and the senate, were attached to the tribune and the legatus; and the murmurs of the nobles at home, which moved the sympathy of their kinsmen on the frontier, met a deep response in the devotion of these sons of the eagles to their accustomed leaders. The vast distance of the great camps of the empire from one another, and the frequent change of their officers, together with the motives of jealousy which the emperors nourished between them, helped to prevent these legions from joining in a common cause when disaffection menaced an outbreak in any particular quarter. They made some partial attempts to supplant the prætorians by carrying one of their own chiefs to power; but every endeavour of the kind had been hitherto baffled by the want of concert among them. More success was to attend the efforts in the near future.

In the year 63 A.D., Nero, we are told, was preparing to visit the East in person. Some indeed asserted that his object was only to behold the wonders of Egypt, and the interest of the citizens was just then directed towards that mysterious region by the discoveries of an exploring party, which had recently ascended the Nile nine hundred miles above Syene. Others believed that he had no intention of proceeding beyond Greece; but it seems probable that his views were really more extensive, and that he contemplated throwing himself into the quarters of the Syrian legions, and checking by his presence the ambition of the proconsul, perhaps seizing an opportunity to overthrow him. But, whatever Nero’s project may have been, it was frustrated, as we have seen, by the occurrence of the fire at Rome. The affairs of the next three years have been already related: the conspiracies which were concerted against the emperor at home, his redoubled efforts to secure the favour of the populace, and his cruel precaution of destroying every man of eminence who might become the centre of fresh machinations to his prejudice. In the year 66 he at last found leisure to execute his scheme of travel, so far, at least, as to visit Greece; where he presented himself at the public spectacles, and gratified his passion for dancing and singing before promiscuous assemblages, with still less reserve than at home. All the states which held musical contests had hastened, even before his arrival, to humour him with the offer of their prizes, and Nero had received their envoys with the highest honours, and invited them to his table. When one of them begged him to give a specimen of his singing, and his skill was rapturously applauded, he declared that the Greeks alone had ears, and alone deserved the honour of hearing him.

NERO IN GREECE

[Sidenote: [66-68 A.D.]]

Nero remained in Greece to the beginning of the year 68. He was attended by courtiers and court-followers of all descriptions, and many, it was affirmed, of the chief nobility were invited to accompany him, that he might slay them more securely at a distance from the city. However this may be, the ministers of his luxury and panders to his vices formed the most conspicuous portion of his escort; for he seems to have prosecuted his enormities among the despised Greeks more shamelessly than ever. The great ambition of the imperator, now following in the track of Mummius, Flamininus, Agrippa, and Augustus, was to gain the distinction of a Periodonicus, or victor in the whole circle of the games; for in compliment to him, the contests which recurred in successive years at Olympia, Nemea, Delphi, and Corinth were all to be enacted during his residence in the country. Nor was this the only irregularity admitted. At Olympia he demanded a musical contest, such as had never been practised there before; at the isthmus he contended in tragedy and comedy, which also was contrary to the local usage. The exertions of Nero were not confined to playing, singing, and acting. He presented himself also as a charioteer, nor was he ashamed to receive the prize even when he had fallen with car and horses to the ground. Wherever he went he challenged the most famous artists to contend with him, and extorted every prize from every competitor. A Roman consular enacted the part of herald, and proclaimed in the astonished ears of Greece, “Nero the Emperor is Victor, and he crowns the People of Rome, and the World which is his own.”

The flattery of the Greeks deserved substantial acknowledgment, and Nero was prepared to make a sacrifice for the purpose. He negotiated an exchange of provinces for the senate, resigning the imperial prison-house of Sardinia, and receiving in its place the prefecture of Achaia. He then proclaimed, in the Forum at Corinth, the freedom and immunity of the province, while he awarded to his judges the honour of Roman citizenship, together with large presents in money. Another project ascribed to him, magnificent and useful in itself, may have had no other object in his mind than to render him famous in history; in almost any other human being we should look for some worthier motive for it. This was the cutting of the isthmus of Corinth, a measure often before proposed and attempted but never achieved. The work was commenced, convicts were condemned to labour upon it, and among them the learned stoic Musonius Rufus, removed from Gyarus, whither he had been banished as an accomplice in Piso’s conspiracy, was seen by another philosopher handling the spade and pick-axe. But men of science from Egypt assured the emperor that, if the work were effected, the waters of the Corinthian Gulf, being higher than the Saronic, would submerge the island of Ægina, and after Nero’s departure the design was promptly abandoned. The Romans regarded its frustration as a judgment perhaps on his unnatural pride. In commencing the work with a sacrifice, it had been remarked, as an instance of the hatred he bore the senate, that he had prayed simply that it might turn out well for the emperor and the people of Rome.

It is not impossible, however, that there may have been a politic motive in this visit to Greece, such as has been suggested for the expedition of Caius into Gaul. Fresh disturbances had broken out in Judea; the cruelties of Gessius Florus had excited a sedition, which Cestius Gallus advanced to Jerusalem from Antioch to repress. But here he had encountered the people in arms, and had been suddenly overpowered and slain. The Jews were elated with success and hopeless of pardon; it was soon evident that the great war which must decide the fate of their country, and with it of the Roman Empire in the East, so often threatened, so long delayed, had commenced. But Corbulo was almost on the spot; his legions were mighty, his name still mightier; such forces under such a leader might be trusted to do the work of Rome thoroughly in any quarter. Nevertheless the jealousy of the wretched prince prevailed over all concern for the interests of his country. He trembled at the increase of influence this new war might bring to his formidable proconsul. This was the moment he chose for repairing in person to the threshold of his province, and summoning the man he feared to attend upon him in Greece. At the same time he ordered Vespasian, who had already distinguished himself in the British war, but had acquired as yet no dangerous pre-eminence, to take command of the forces destined for Palestine. Corbulo must have known that he was superseded; he must have felt his summons as a disgrace; he must have apprehended personal danger. Yet had he known that every step he took westward was bringing him straight to his doom, such was his fidelity as a soldier that he would have obeyed without hesitation. No sooner had he arrived at Cenchreæ, the port of Corinth, than he was met by emissaries from Nero bearing him the order to despatch himself. Without murmur, he plunged a sword into his heart, exclaiming as he struck the blow, “Rightly served!” [67 A.D.].

Nor was the gallant Corbulo the tyrant’s only victim. At the same time he summoned two brothers, Rufus and Proculus, of the great Scribonian house, who commanded in the two Germanies, to meet him in Greece, under pretence of conferring with them on state affairs. The summons was in fact a recall, and the pretence which accompanied it could hardly have deceived them; yet they too obeyed with the same alacrity as Corbulo, and fell, perhaps not unwittingly, into the same snare. Some specific charges were laid against them; but no opportunity was given them of meeting them, nor were they allowed to see the emperor. They killed themselves in despair.

Although, during his sojourn in Greece, Nero traversed the province in every direction, it was observed that he refrained from visiting either Athens or Sparta. With respect to the city of Lycurgus it was affirmed merely that he kept aloof from it lest the austerity of its usages should prove irksome to him; but he dared not enter the abode of the Erinyes, from dread of their vengeance on his crimes. Another account said that he was deterred from initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis, which was denied, under direst imprecations, to the impious and impure. Of these awful legends of Grecian antiquity but a faint and confused echo resounded in Italy. To the Latin or the Sabine it little mattered whether the murderer shrank from Athens or Eleusis, whether it was the avenging Furies or the pure goddess of the mysteries before whom he trembled to appear. Give but freedom to the people, they said, to declare what they really think, and who so base as to hesitate between Seneca and Nero--Nero, who more than once deserved the sack, the serpent, and the ape, the instruments of death for parricide. True, Orestes by divine command had slain his mother; but he at least avenged the death of a father--Nero had assisted at the slaughter of Claudius; Orestes spared at least his wife and sister--Nero had murdered both; Orestes had not poisoned a kinsman--Nero had mingled aconite for many: above all, Orestes had never sung upon the stage, nor chanted, like Nero, the fall of Ilium. This it seems was the crown and climax of his crimes, the last and worst of the indignities he heaped on Rome; this was the deed for which the sword of the avenger was most fitly drawn. “For such,” exclaims Juvenal, “forsooth, were the acts, such were the arts of our high-born prince, proud to degrade himself on a foreign stage, and earn the paltry chaplets of the Grecian games. Let him lay before the image of Domitius the mantle of Thyestes, the mask of Antigone or Melanippe; let him hang his votive lyre on the marble statue of Augustus.”

Beneath this veil of rhetoric lies a truth which it is the province of history to remark. The Romans, from age to age, viewed their own times in a very different light from that in which they have appeared to posterity. The notion of Juvenal that the acting and singing of Nero were in fact his most flagrant enormities was felt no doubt, even in his own day, as a wild exaggeration; nevertheless it points to the principle, then still in vigour, of the practical religion of antiquity, the principle of faith in its social traditions. With cruelty and oppression the Romans were so familiar that Nero’s atrocities in this respect, so harrowing to our feelings, made little impression upon them; but his desecration of their national manners, his abandonment of the _mos majorum_, the usage of his ancestors, startled them like impiety or sacrilege. They were not aware how far they had really drifted from the habits of antiquity, how much of foreign poison they had admitted into their veins. Theoretically they still held in sanctimonious horror the customs of the stranger; foreign usages might be innocent, nay, laudable, in their own place, but to introduce them into Rome was a monstrous sin, a sin, not against the gods in whom they no longer believed, but against the nation, in which they believed more intensely perhaps than ever. The state or nation was itself gradually assuming in their eyes the personality of a distinct divinity, in which all other divinities were absorbed; the Hellenism which Nero vaunted was apostasy from the goddess Roma.

The Greeks on the other hand would regard, we may suppose, with more indulgence the caprices of their imperial visitor; they were accustomed to flatter, and in this instance there was some excuse for flattering a humour so flattering to themselves. The miserable vices he paraded before them were too like their own, at least in their period of corruption, to elicit strong moral reprobation. Nevertheless, if we may credit our accounts, he found more effectual means of disgusting them. The imperial tyranny was always pursued, as by its shadow, by profuse and fatal expenditure. It seemed unable to move without the attendance of a crowd of harpies, ever demanding their prey with maw insatiable. Every day required fresh plunder; every day proscriptions and confiscations revealed the prince’s necessities, and if these for a moment slackened for want of victims, his hands were laid on the monuments of art, on every object on which money could be raised throughout the devoted land. The temples as well as the dwellings and the forums of Greece were ransacked again for the costliest and most cherished treasures, to be sold by auction to the highest bidder, or redeemed at exorbitant prices by their unhappy owners. Greece was powerless to resist, and her murmurs were drowned in the acclamations of the hired applauders; but she felt her wrongs deeply, and the pretended boon of freedom, accompanied by a precarious immunity, was regarded perhaps as an insult rather than a favour.

Rome at least, it might be hoped, would breathe again during the absence of her hateful tormentor. But this, we are assured, was as far from her as ever. Her condition had become even more miserable. The emperor had given the government of Italy to a freedman named Helius, and this minion exercised cruelty and rapine at his own caprice, not even deigning to ask the prince’s pleasure beforehand on the executions and confiscations he commanded. Yet Helius was not unfaithful to his master’s interests. On the first symptoms of danger from discontent in the city or the provinces, for such symptoms began at last to threaten, he urged him to hasten back to the seat of government, and it was Nero’s obstinacy alone that postponed his return for some months. “You admonish me, you entreat me,” replied the infatuated wretch, “to present myself again at Rome; nay, but you should rather dissuade me from returning, until I have reaped my full harvest of laurels.” This harvest was not yet gathered in, and the cries of the keeper of the city, already trembling for the fate of the empire, were disregarded, while there yet remained a stadium to be trodden, or a chaplet to be won, in Greece. At the commencement, however, of the year 68 the aspect of affairs had become still more serious. Plots for the subversion of the government were believed to be rife in the armies of the West. The heads of administration at Rome knew not whom of their officers in Gaul or Spain to trust. Deep gloom had settled down on the upper classes in the capital; the temper of the populace itself, so long the stay of Nero’s tyranny, was uncertain. Helius again urged him to hasten his return. He crossed over to Greece to confer with him in person. He repeated his instances with increasing fervour. At last, when there seemed no more of fame or booty to be wrung from Greece, Nero deigned to take ship, though the season of navigation had not yet commenced, and urged his prow through stormy seas to the haven of Puteoli.

NERO’S RETURN TO ITALY AND TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO ROME

At Delphi he had consulted the oracle about his future fortunes, and had been warned, we are told, against the seventy-third year, a response which seemed to the youth of thirty to portend a great length of days, but was found in the sequel to have another and a fatal signification. Fortified, however, by this delusion, he had returned to Italy with little anxiety, and when some of the precious objects that followed in his train were lost by shipwreck, he vaunted in the plenitude of his self-assurance that the fishes themselves would restore them. After losing and again recovering both Britain and Armenia, his confidence in his good fortune had become, it is said, unbounded. It was at Naples, he remembered, that he had commenced his long course of artistic victories. Now arrived at the height of his glory, he determined to celebrate his successes by a triumphal entry into the Campanian capital, with a team of milk-white horses. The walls were broken down to admit the chariot of the Hieronicus, and the same extravagance was repeated when he entered Antium, his native place, and the Albanum, his favourite residence, and once more, when he presented himself before Rome. He drove in pomp through the city, in the chariot in which Augustus had triumphed, with the flutist Diodorus by his side, arrayed in a purple robe, and a mantle blazing with golden stars, wearing on his head the Olympian coronal, and waving the Pythian in his hand. He was preceded by a long train of attendants bearing aloft his other chaplets and the titles of all his victories; he was followed by his five thousand _augustani_, with loud and measured acclamations, as the soldiers who shared his glory. The procession passed through the Circus, some arches of which were demolished to admit it, and thence to the Velabrum and the Forum, skirting the base of the Palatine to the Porta Mugionis, the chief ascent to the hill and the temple of Apollo on its summit. The sacrifice of victims, the flinging of odours, and every other accompaniment of a military triumph, were duly observed in this mock solemnity; the statues of the emperor were decked with crowns and lyres; the citizens hailed their hero with the titles of Nero-Apollo and Nero-Hercules, invoking his divine voice, and pronouncing all who heard it blessed. The affair was concluded by the striking of medals, on which Nero was represented, to the shame and horror of all genuine patriots, in the garb of a flute-player.

DISCONTENT IN THE PROVINCES

[Sidenote: [68 A.D.]]

But the hour of retribution was at hand. Notwithstanding the servile flattery of the senate, and the triumphs and supplications it had decreed, Nero felt uneasy at the murmurs no longer stifled, and the undissembled gloom which now surrounded him in his capital, and withdrew himself from Rome to the freer air of Campania. Meanwhile the discontent repressed in the city was finding vent in the provinces, and the camps, thronged as they were with kinsmen of the mocked and injured senators, were brooding over projects of revenge. Among the most distinguished of the officers who at this time held commands and enjoyed the confidence of their soldiers, was Servius Sulpicius Galba, who for several years had governed the Hither Spain. Connected with the first families of Rome, and descended from many heroes of the camp and Forum, this man stood high in public regard, and in the admiration of the emperors themselves, for his courage, his skill, and his austerity. He had deserved well of Caligula for the vigour with which, at a critical moment, he drew up the reins of discipline in the Rhenish camps; still better of Claudius for refusing the offer of his own soldiers to raise him to empire on Caligula’s death. He had held command in Aquitania, and was for two years proconsul of Africa; he had received the triumphal ornaments, and had been admitted to the priestly colleges of the Titii, the Quindecemvirs, and the Augustales. Full of years and honours, he had retired from public employment through the first half of Nero’s principate, till summoned to preside over the Tarraconensis. He exercised his powers with vigilance and a harshness which perhaps was salutary, until the emperor’s growing jealousy warned him to shroud his reputation under the veil of indolence or even neglect, and thus he escaped the fate of Corbulo, and lived to avenge it. Galba was in his seventy-third year. In his childhood he had been brought, it was reported, with others of the young nobility, to salute the aged Augustus; and the emperor, taking him playfully by the cheek, had said, “And thou too, child, shalt one day taste our empire.” Tiberius, it was added, had learned from the diviners the splendid destiny that awaited his old age, but had remarked complacently that to himself it could not matter. Nero, it seems, whom these prognostications touched more nearly, either forgot, or was lulled to false security about them.

Early in the winter of 68, while Nero was still absent in Greece, Galba received overtures from C. Julius Vindex, prefect of the Farther Gaul, for a simultaneous rising. Vindex was himself a Gallico-Roman, scion of a royal house in Aquitania, adopted into the imperial gens; but while he imbibed the pride of a Roman, he retained the impetuous spirit of his ancestors; and the enormities of Nero, aggravated no doubt in his esteem by his exactions in Gaul itself, roused his determination to overthrow him without a view to personal aggrandisement. The time indeed was yet far distant when a foreigner could even conceive the idea of gaining the purple. But he fixed his eyes on Galba, as the ablest of the class from which fortune could make an emperor, and it was with vexation that he found the old chief too cautious to be driven headlong into a revolt, the event of which might seem so doubtful.

Galba indeed had good reason to hesitate. Nero set a price on the head of Vindex, whose designs were speedily revealed to him, and though the forces of the Gaulish province were disposed to follow their chief, the more powerful legions of lower Germany, under Virginius Rufus, were in full march against them. The armies met at Vesontio, and there Vindex and Virginius, at a private interview, agreed to conspire together, but their troops could come to no such understanding; the Virginians attacked the soldiers of Vindex, and almost cut them to pieces. Vindex thereupon, with the haste and levity of his race, threw himself on his sword, and the rebellion seemed for a moment to be crushed.

GALBA IS SALUTED IMPERATOR BY HIS SOLDIERS

But Galba had become alarmed for his own safety. He had received communications from a rebel, all whose acts were well known to the government. He had been urged to proclaim himself emperor, and no refusal on his part could efface the crime of having been judged worthy of such a distinction. Indeed, so at least he pretended, he had already intercepted orders from Nero to take his life, and a plot for his assassination was opportunely detected among a company of slaves presented him by a freedman of the emperor. Thus impelled to provide for his own safety, he called his troops together, and setting before them the images of the tyrant’s noblest victims, harangued them on the state of public affairs. The soldiers saluted him as imperator, but he would only allow himself to be styled Legatus of the senate and the people. He proceeded, however, at once to prorogue all civil business, and provide for immediate war by raising forces, both legionary and auxiliary, from the youth of the province. At the same time he convened the notables of the country, to give perhaps a civil colour to his military enterprise. The Gallic and Germanic legions, now reunited, after the death of Vindex, had offered to raise Virginius to the purple; they conjured him to assume the title of imperator, and inscribed on his busts the names of Cæsar and Augustus. But he steadily refused the honours thrust upon him, erased the obnoxious letters, and at length persuaded his admirers to leave the decision of affairs to the authorities at home. He entered, however, into communication with Galba, who had now, it seems, determined on the attempt, and the news was bruited far and wide that Gaul and Spain had revolted, and that the empire had passed irrevocably from the monster Nero.

At once it appeared how many pretenders to power might exist in the bosom of the provincial camps. The fatal secret of the empire, that a prince might be created elsewhere than at Rome, so long undiscovered, so alien, as was supposed, from the sentiments of the age, was revealed in more than one quarter. Not in Gaul and Spain only, but in Africa and lower Germany, the legions were ready to make an emperor of their own chief. Clodius Macer in the one, Fonteius Capito in the other, were proclaimed by the soldiers. At the same time Salvius Otho, Nero’s ancient favourite, who was weary of his long oblivion on the shores of the Atlantic, declared himself a supporter of Galba, and lent him his own slaves and plate, to swell his retinue and increase his resources. The civil wars had again begun.

Such was the march of disaffection, the first anticipations of which had been revealed to Helius before the end of 66, and had induced him to urge the emperor, first by letter and afterwards in person, to hasten home. Nero, as we have seen, could not be persuaded to regard them seriously, or postpone to their consideration his paltry gratifications and amusements. After his return to Rome he had again quitted it for Naples in March, 68, and it was on the 19th of that month, the anniversary of Agrippina’s murder, while presiding at a gymnastic exhibition, that he received the news of the revolt of Vindex. Still he treated the announcement with contempt, and even expressed satisfaction at the prospect of new confiscations. He witnessed the contests with unabated interest, and retired from them to a banquet. Interrupted by fresh and more alarming despatches, he resented them with petulant ill-humour; for eight days he would neither issue orders nor be spoken to on the subject. Finally arrived a manifesto from Vindex himself, which moved him to send a message to the senate, requiring it to denounce the rebel as a public enemy; but he excused himself from appearing in person, alleging a cold or sore throat, which he must nurse for the conservation of his voice. Nothing so much incensed him as Vindex calling him Ahenobarbus instead of Nero, and disparaging his skill in singing. “Had they ever heard a better performer?” he asked peevishly of all around him. He now hurried trembling to Rome; but he was reassured, we are told, on the way by noticing a sculpture which represented a Gallic soldier dragged headlong by a Roman knight. Accordingly, with his usual levity, instead of consulting in full senate, or haranguing on the state of affairs in the Forum, he held a hasty conversation with a few only of his nobles, and passed the day in explaining to them a new water-organ, on which he proposed, he said, “with Vindex’s good leave,” to perform in public. He completed and dedicated a temple to Poppæa: once more he celebrated the games of the circus, once more he played and sang, and drove the chariot. But it was for the last time. Vindex had fallen, but Galba, it was now announced, had raised the standard of revolt. The rebel’s property in Rome was immediately confiscated, to which he replied by selling under the spear the emperor’s estates in Spain. The hour of retribution, long delayed, was now swiftly advancing; courier after courier was dashing through the gates, bringing news of the defection of generals and legions. The revolt of Virginius was no longer doubtful. At this intelligence the puny tyrant fainted; coming to himself he tore his robes and smote his head, with pusillanimous wailings. To the consolations of his nurse he replied, with the cries of an infant, “never was such ill-fortune as his; other Cæsars had fallen by the sword, he alone must lose the empire still living.” At last he recollected himself sufficiently to summon troops from Illyricum for the defence of Italy; but these, it was found, were in correspondence with the enemy. Another resource, which served only to show to what straits he was driven, was to land sailors from the fleet at Ostia, and form them into a legion. Then he invoked the pampered populace to arise in his behalf, and dressed up courtesans and dancers as Amazons to attend his march; next moment he exclaimed that he would take ship for Alexandria, and there earn subsistence by singing in the streets. Again he launched into invectives against the magistrates abroad, threatening to recall and disgrace them throughout his dominions; the provinces he would give up to pillage, he would slay every Gaul in the city, he would massacre the senate, he would let loose the lions on the populace, he would lay Rome in ashes. Finally, the tyrant’s vein exhausted, he proposed in woman’s mood to meet the rebels unarmed, trusting in his beauty, his tears, and the persuasive tones of his voice, to win them to obedience.

Meanwhile the excitement among the knights and senators at the prospect of deliverance kept pace with the progress of revolt abroad. Portents were occurring at their doors. Blood rained on the Alban Mount; the gates of the Julian sepulchre burst open of their own accord. The Hundred Days of Nero were drawing rapidly to a close. He had landed in Italy about the end of February, and now at the beginning of June his cause had already become hopeless. Galba, though steadfast in his resolution, had not yet set his troops in motion; nevertheless, Nero was no longer safe in the city. The people, at first indifferent, were now clamouring against him; for there was a dearth of provisions, and a vessel, just arrived from Alexandria, was found, to their disgust, to bear not grain, but fine sand for the wrestlers in the amphitheatre. The prætorians had been seduced by their prefect Nymphidius, to whom the camp was abandoned by the flight of Tigellinus. Nero was left without advisers; the senators stood aloof; of Helius, lately so powerful and energetic, we hear nothing. Terrified by dreams, stung by ridicule or desertion, when his last hope of succour was announced to have deceived him the wretched tyrant started from his couch at supper, upset the tables, and dashed his choicest vessels to the ground; then taking poison from Locusta and placing it in a golden casket, he crossed from the palace to the Servilian gardens, and sent his trustiest freedmen to secure a galley at Ostia. He conjured some tribunes and centurions, with a handful of guards, to join his flight; but all refused, and one blunter than the rest exclaimed tauntingly, “Is it then so hard to die?”

THE DEATH OF NERO

At last at midnight, finding that even the sentinels had left their posts, he sent or rushed himself to assemble his attendants. Every door was closed; he knocked, but no answer came. Returning to his chamber, he found the slaves fled, the furniture pillaged, the case of poison removed. Not a guard, not a gladiator, was at hand, to pierce his throat. “I have neither friend nor foe,” he exclaimed. He would have thrown himself into the Tiber, but his courage failed him. He must have time, he said, and repose to collect his spirits for suicide, and his freedman Phaon at last offered him his villa in the suburbs, four miles from the city. In undress and bare-footed, throwing a rough cloak over his shoulders, and a kerchief across his face, he glided through the doors, mounted a horse, and, attended by Sporus and three others, passed the city gates with the dawn of the summer morning. The Nomentane road led him beneath the wall of the prætorians, whom he might hear uttering curses against him, and pledging vows to Galba; and the early travellers from the country asked him, as they met, “What news of Nero?” or remarked to one another, “These men are pursuing the tyrant.” Thunder and lightning, and a shock of earthquake, added horror to the moment. Nero’s horse started at a dead body on the roadside, the kerchief fell from his face, and a prætorian passing by recognised and saluted him.

At the fourth milestone the party quitted the highway, alighted from their horses, and scrambled on foot through a cane-brake, laying their own cloaks to tread on, to the rear of the promised villa. Phaon now desired Nero to crouch in a sand-pit hard by, while he contrived to open the drain from the bathroom, and so admit him unperceived; but he vowed he would not go alive, as he said, underground, and remained trembling beneath the wall. Taking water from a puddle in his hand, “This,” he said, “is the famous Drink of Nero.” At last a hole was made, through which he crept on all fours into a narrow chamber of the house, and there threw himself on a pallet. The coarse bread that was offered him he could not eat, but swallowed a little tepid water. Still he lingered, his companions urging him to seek refuge, without delay, from the insults about to be heaped on him. He ordered them to dig a grave, and lay down himself to give the measure; he desired them to collect bits of marble to decorate his sepulchre, and prepare water to cleanse and wood to burn his corpse, sighing meanwhile, and muttering, “What an artist to perish!”

Presently a slave of Phaon’s brought papers from Rome, which Nero snatched from him, and read that the senate had proclaimed him an enemy, and decreed his death, in the ancient fashion. He asked what that was; and was informed that the culprit was stripped, his head placed in a fork, and his body smitten with the stick till death. Terrified at this announcement, he took two daggers from his bosom, tried their edge one after the other, and again laid them down, alleging that the moment was not yet arrived. Then he called on Sporus to commence his funeral lamentations; then he implored some of the party to set him the example; once and again he reproached himself with his own timidity. “Fie! Nero, fie!” he muttered in Greek, “courage, man! come, rouse thee!” Suddenly was heard the trampling of horsemen, sent to seize the culprit alive. Then at last, with a verse of Homer hastily ejaculated, “Sound of swift-footed steeds strikes on my ears,” he placed a weapon to his breast, and the slave Epaphroditus drove it home.

The blow was scarcely struck, when the centurion rushed in, and, thrusting his cloak against the wound, pretended he was come to help him. The dying wretch could only murmur, “Too late,” and, “Is this your fidelity?” and expired with a horrid stare on his countenance. He had adjured his attendants to burn his body, and not let the foe bear off his head, and this was now allowed him; the corpse was consumed with haste and imperfectly, but at least without mutilation.

Nero perished on the 9th of June, 68 A.D., at the age of thirty years and six months, in the fourteenth year of his principate. The child borne him by Poppæa had died in infancy, and a subsequent marriage with Statilia Messallina had proved unfruitful. The stock of the Julii, refreshed in vain by grafts from the Octavii, the Claudii, and the Domitii, had been reduced to his single person, and with Nero the adoptive race of the great dictator was extinguished. The first of the Cæsars had married four times, the second thrice, the third twice, the fourth thrice again, the fifth six times, and lastly, the sixth thrice also. Of these repeated unions, a large number had borne offspring, yet no descendants of them survived. A few had lived to old age, many reached maturity, some were cut off by early sickness, the end of others was premature and mysterious; but a large proportion were victims of domestic jealousy and politic assassination.

With Nero we bid farewell to the Cæsars, at the same time we bid farewell to the state of things which the Cæsars created and maintained. We turn over a page in Roman history. On the verge of a new epoch we would treat with grave respect even the monster with whom the old epoch closes; we may think it well that the corpse even of Nero was unmutilated; that he was buried decently in the Domitian gardens on the Pincian; that though the people evinced a thoughtless triumph at his death, as if it promised them a freedom which they could neither use nor understand, some unknown hands were found to strew flowers on his sepulchre, and the rival king of Parthia adjured the senate to do honour to his memory.

Undoubtedly the Romans regarded with peculiar feeling the death of the last of the Cæsars. Nero was cut off in early youth; he perished in obscurity; he was entombed in a private sepulchre, with no manifestation of national concern, such as had thrown a gleam of interest over the least regretted of his predecessors. Yet these circumstances would not have sufficed to impart a deep mystery to the event, without the predisposition of the people to imagine that the dynasty which had ruled them for four generations could not suddenly pass away, finally and irrevocably. The idea that Nero still survived, and the expectation of his return to power, continued long to linger among them. More than one pretender arose to claim his empire, and twenty years later a false Nero was protected by the Parthians, among whom he had taken refuge, and only surrendered to the repeated and vehement demands of the Roman government. This popular anticipation was the foundation, perhaps, of the common persuasion of the Christians, that he should revisit the earth in the character of Antichrist; and possibly that Jerusalem itself would be the scene.[e]

FOOTNOTES

[18] [Apologists are not wanting who assert that it was chiefly Nero’s contempt for Roman customs which alienated the “respectable citizens”; that these citizens were really more brutal than Nero; and that the emperor’s chief fault was criminal indulgence towards his courtiers, rather than cruelty. Such views illustrate the curious oscillations of historical criticism, to which we have so often had occasion to refer. Even the most sympathetic and flattering view of Nero presents him as at least reflecting the conditions of a society in some respects monstrous.]