Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER XX

  _BROTHER AND SISTER_

  ‘Hopes have precarious life: They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth, and turned to rottenness; But faithfulness can feed on suffering And knows no disappointment.’

  GEORGE ELIOT.

  Far different was the way in which Britannicus had spent thememorable evening of Otho’s supper.

  He was thrown largely upon himself and his own resources. If Titushappened to be absent; if Epaphroditus did not chance to bringwith him the quaint boy Epictetus; if the duties of Pudens summonedhim elsewhere, he had few with whom he could converse in his ownapartments. Sometimes Burrus visited him, and was kind; but he couldhardly forgive Burrus for his share in Agrippina’s plot. Senecaoccasionally came to see him, and Seneca felt a genuine wishto alleviate the boy’s unhappy lot. But Seneca had been Nero’ssupporter, and Britannicus could not quite get over the misgivingthat his fine sentences were insincere. And at last an incidentoccurred which made it impossible for him ever to speak to Senecawithout dislike. One day Nero had sent for his brother, andBritannicus, entering the Emperor’s room before he came in, sawa copy of[*6] the _Ludus de morte Claudii Cæsaris_ lying on thetable. Naturally enough he had not heard of this ferocious satireupon his unhappy father. Attracted by the oddness of the title‘_Apokolokyntosis_,’ which the librarian had written on the outercase, he took up the book, and had read the first few columnswhen Nero entered. As he read, his soul burned with inexpressibleindignation. His father had received a sumptuous Cæsarean funeral;he had been deified by the decree of the Senate; a grand templehad been reared in his honour on the Cœlian hill; priests andpriestesses had been appointed to worship his divinity. He knew verywell that this might be regarded as a conventional officialism; butthat the writer of this book should thus openly laugh in the faceof Rome, her religion, and her Empire; that he should class Claudiuswith two miserable idiots like Augurinus and Baba; that he shouldbrutally ridicule his absence of mind, his slavering lips, hisungainly aspect, and represent the Olympian deities in consultationas to whether he was a god, a human being, or a sea-monster--thisseemed to him an act of shameless hypocrisy. He had seen how theRomans prostrated themselves in the dust before his father in hislifetime, as it were to lick his sandals; how Seneca himself hadblazoned his earthly godship in paragraphs of sonorous eloquence.Yet here, on the table of his successor and adopted son, was a satirereplete in every line with enormous slanders. And who could havewritten it? Britannicus could think of no one but Seneca; and allthe more since the marks on the manuscript showed that Nero had readit, and read it with amused appreciation.

  When Nero entered he found Britannicus standing by the tabletransfixed with anger. His cheeks were crimson with shame andindignation. Panting with wrath, he was unable even to return thegreeting of Nero, who looked at him with astonishment till he saw thescroll from which he had been reading. Nero instantly snatched it outof his hand. He was vexed that the boy had seen it. It had not beenintended for his eyes. But now that the mischief was done he thoughtit better to make light of it.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see that you have been reading that foolish satire.Don’t be in such a state of mind about it. It is meant for a merejest.’

  ‘A jest!’ exclaimed Britannicus, as soon as he found voice to speak.‘It is high treason against the religion of Rome, against the majestyof the Empire.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Nero, with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘If I don’tmind it, why should you? You are but a boy. Leave such matters tothose who understand them, and know more of the world.’

  ‘Why do you always treat me as a child?’ asked Britannicusindignantly. ‘I am nearly fifteen years old. I am older than youwere when my father allowed you to assume the manly toga.’[50]

  ‘Yes,’ said the Emperor; ‘but there are differences. I am Nero, andyou are--Britannicus. I shall not let you have the manly toga justyet; the golden bulla and the prætexta suit you a great deal better.’

  Britannicus turned away to conceal the emotion which pride forbadehim to show. He was about to leave the audience-room when Nero calledhim.

  ‘Listen, Britannicus,’ he said. ‘Do not provoke me too far. Do notforget that I am Emperor. When Tiberius came to the throne there wasa young prince named Agrippa Posthumus. When Gaius came to the thronethere was a young prince named Tiberius Gemellus.’

  ‘The Emperor Gaius adopted Tiberius Gemellus, and made him Prince ofthe Youth,’ said Britannicus; ‘you have never done that for me.’

  ‘You interrupt me,’ said Nero. ‘Do you happen to remember what becameof those two boys?’

  Britannicus remembered only too well. Through the arts of Livia,Agrippa Posthumus, accused of a ferocious temperament, had been firstbanished to the Island Pandataria, then violently murdered. TiberiusGemellus had not been murdered, because the news of such a deathwould have sounded ill; but he had had the sword placed against hisheart, and had been taught to kill himself, so that his death mightwear the semblance of suicide.

  Nero left time for such recollections to pass through his brother’smind, and then he slowly added, ‘And now that Nero has come to thethrone, there happens to be a young prince named Britannicus.’

  Britannicus shuddered. ‘Do you menace me with murder?’ he asked.

  Nero only laughed. ‘What need have I to menace?’ he asked. ‘Do younot know that I have but to lift a finger, if it so pleases me, andyou die? But don’t be alarmed. It does not please me--at present.’

  Britannicus turned very pale. He knew that Nero’s words conveyedno idle boast. He was but a down-trodden boy--the orphan sonof a murdered mother; of a father foully dealt with, infamouslycalumniated. What cared the Roman world whether he perished or not,or how he perished? He choked down the sob which rose, and left hisbrother’s presence in silence; but, as he traversed the long corridorto the room of Octavia, he could not help asking himself, with dreadforebodings, what would be his fate? Would he be starved, like theyounger Drusus? or poisoned, like the elder? or bidden to end hisown life, like poor young Tiberius Gemellus? or assassinated byviolence, like Agrippa Posthumus? How was he better than they? And ifhe perished, who would care to avenge him? But, oh God! if there weresuch a God as He in whom the Christians believed, what a world wasthis into which he had been plunged! What sin had he or his ancestorscommitted, that these hell-dogs of wrong and murder banned his stepsfrom birth? The old Romans had been strong and noble and simple. Evenin the days of Augustus they could thrill to the lesson of Virgil:

  ‘Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hæ tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.’

  Whence the present dearth of all nobleness? What creeping paralysisof immoral apathy had stricken this corrupt and servile aristocracy,this nerveless and obsequious Senate? From what black pit of Acheronhad surged up the slime of universal corruption which polluted everyclass around him with ignoble debaucheries? He saw on every sideof him a remorseless egotism, an unutterable sadness, the fatalismof infidelity and despair. A poisoning of the blood with physicaland moral madness seemed to have become the heritage of the rulingCæsars. Where could he look for relief? Men had ceased to believe inthe gods. The Stoics had nothing better to offer than hard theoriesand the possibility of suicide--and what a thing must life be if ithad no more precious privilege than the means of its own agonisingand violent suppression!

  Britannicus was intelligent beyond his years, and thoughts like thesechased each other through his mind as he made his way with slow andpainful steps to the rooms of his sister. For an instant the thoughtof a rebellion flashed across his mind, but it was at once rejected.What could he do? He was but a friendless boy. He felt as if he hadheard the sentence of early death; as if his innocence were nothingto such gods as those whom his childhood had been taught to name; asif the burden of an intolerable world were altogether too heavy forhim to understand or to bear.
And yet he was not unsupported by somevague hope in the dim, half-explored regions of that new gospel ofwhich he now had heard.

  To Octavia the visits of her brother were almost the only happinessleft. As he entered she dismissed the slaves, for she saw at a glancethat some profound emotion had swept over his mind, and longed togive him consolation.

  In their forlornness the brother and sister always tried to spareeach other any needless pang. Octavia had never hinted to Britannicusthat Nero’s base hand had often been lifted to strike her. She didnot tell him that on that morning he had seized her by the hair, andin the frenzy of his rage had almost strangled her. Nor would he tellher about the infamous attack on their father’s memory which he hadseen on Nero’s table. He little dreamt that she knew of it already,nay, even that, with coarse malice, Nero had shown it to her, andread passages aloud in her tortured hearing on purpose to humiliateand trouble her. Still less would he reveal the threat which seemedto give fresh significance to the feline gleam which he had caught afew days before in the eyes of the horrible Locusta.

  Yet by secret intuition each of them divined something of what was inthe heart of the other.

  When Britannicus entered he found his sister gazing with a sad smileat a gold coin of the island of Teos, which lay on the palm of herhand.

  ‘What amuses you in that coin?’ he asked.

  ‘Look at it,’ she said, pointing to the inscription ???? ????????--‘the _goddess_ Octavia.’[51] ‘I was thinking, Britannicus, that ifthe other goddesses are as little happy as I am, I should prefer tobe a mortal!’

  Her brother smiled too, but remained silent. He dreaded to deepen hersorrow.

  ‘Have you nothing to tell me, Britannicus?’ she asked. ‘What is itwhich makes you so much sadder than your wont?’

  ‘Nothing that I _can_ tell you,’ he answered. ‘But oh, Octavia, whatthoughts strike you when you look round upon this Palace and society?Is there no such thing as virtue?’ he asked impetuously. ‘The Romansused to honour it. Who cares for virtue now, except one or twophilosophers ? and--’

  ‘Speak on, Britannicus,’ she said. ‘Agrippina is less our enemy thanshe was. She has withdrawn her spies. We are not worth the hatredof any one else. Of the slaves who chiefly wait on me, most arefaithful, and some are Christians.’

  ‘You have guessed my meaning, Octavia. Of the men and women aroundus, how very few there are, except the Christians, who are pure andgood. How comes it?’

  ‘Their strange faith sustains them.’

  ‘But does it not seem inconceivable that the gods--or that God, ifthere be but one, should have revealed the truth to barbarian Jews?’

  ‘I don’t know, Britannicus. Who is the most virtuous person youknow--I mean, excepting the Christians?’

  ‘Have we met any--except perhaps Persius and my Titus? and--well,perhaps the most virtuous of all is that little slave, Epictetus.’

  ‘Yet Epictetus is a Phrygian, and a slave, and deformed, and lame.And as for the Jews, you know that your friend Titus thinks them themost interesting people in the world; and it is whispered that someof the noblest ladies in Rome--Otho’s wife among them--have secretlyembraced Judaism.’

  ‘Poppæa does little credit to their religion if all be true that issaid of her. But Pomponia is a Christian, and Claudia, the fairestmaiden in Rome. Whether they hold truth or falsehood I know not, butif religion has anything to do with goodness there seems to be noreligion like theirs.’

  ‘Britannicus,’ she answered, ‘like you, I am deeply interested inall that Pomponia has told me; but I will tell you what has struckme most. Nero, and Seneca, and Agrippina, and all the rest of them,are full of misery and despair, though they are rich, and praised,and powerful; but these Christians, on the other hand, are paupers,hated, persecuted--and yet happy. It is that which amazes me most ofall.’

  Britannicus sighed. ‘Octavia,’ he said, ‘I would gladly know more ofthis foreign superstition, which makes men good amid wickedness, andjoyful amid afflictions; which makes women like Pomponia, and girlslike Claudia, and boys like Flavius Clemens.’

  ‘Let us, then, sup to-night with Pomponia,’ said Octavia. ‘Sheknows that I am lonely, and she has told me that her old general andherself will always delight to see us, if I will come without stateand share their simplicity. Nero sups to-night with Otho. No one willprevent us from going together to the house of one whose loyalty isso little suspected as that of Aulus Plautius.’

  And thus it was that while Nero revelled, and drank, and made thestreets of his capital unsafe with riot and assault, Britannicus waspresent at the first Christian assembly which he had ever witnessed.