by F. W. Farrar
CHAPTER XLIX
_THE DEPTHS OF SATAN_
‘He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers-- No easier nor no quicker passed The impracticable hours.’
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It became daily more difficult for Nero to stimulate the jaded pulseof appetites at once sated and insatiable; but in the year A.D. 64 anew and immense sensation broke the tedious monotony of a life cursedwith the gratification of every desire. The influence of Poppæa grewirresistible when it became evident that she was about to make Nero afather. In due time she gave birth to a daughter, who seemed destinedto continue the imperial line. Nero went wild with joy. The childwas born in the villa at Antium, where he himself had first seen thelight. The highest of all titles, that of Augusta, was immediatelyconferred not only upon Poppæa, but even on the unconscious infant.Public vows, which had already been undertaken for her safety, werepaid and multiplied. Thanksgivings on the most superb scale weregiven to the gods. A temple was reared to the goddess Fecundity.Golden statues of the Antian goddesses of Fortune were placed on thethrone of the Capitoline Jupiter. Coins were struck on which the babywas glorified under the names of Claudia Augusta. The entire Senateset forth in long procession from Rome to congratulate the Emperorand Empress. Nero seized the opportunity to indulge his hatredagainst Pætus Thrasea. When the other senators were received into hispresence, he sent an order that Thrasea was not to be admitted. Everyone understood the significance of the message. It was a presage ofcertain doom. But Thrasea received it with unmoved countenance, andset out on his return to Rome with undiminished cheerfulness. To anoble and virtuous Roman all life was at that time the valley of theshadow of death.
The birth of Nero’s child greatly strengthened his position asEmperor. While he remained childless there was the possibility thatwhen he died, or was swept away, the Senate might be able to summonto the purple some worthier successor. That hope was now cut off.Seneca withdrew himself to the utmost from public notice. The fate ofPallas was an additional warning to him. The boundless extravagancesof Nero were rapidly exhausting a treasure which would have sufficedfor anything except a superhuman rapacity. The wealth of Pallasproved too strong a temptation for Nero. He had the freedmanpoisoned, and seized his ill-gotten gains. To avoid a similar fate,Seneca entreated the Emperor to accept all his possessions and tosuffer him to retire. Nero received the request with hypocriticalassurances. How, he asked, could Seneca possibly suspect a princewho was so deeply indebted to his care? But, though Nero refused toaccept either his resignation or his property, the philosopher didnot deceive himself. He shut himself up in a seclusion into whichhe suffered none but his most intimate friends to intrude. He foundhis sole relief in writing to his friend Lucilius letters which weremeant to console those who were living like himself under the dailypressure of agonising anticipations.
But the extravagant joy of Nero was rudely quenched. Before fourmonths had ended the infant Claudia Augusta died, and Nero wasplunged in a grief as extravagant as had been his delight. Thebirth of his child was to him a proof that the gods had avertedtheir wrath, by omens of which he was frequently terrified. To trainyouths for the Neronian games, he had built a gymnasium, in whichwas placed a bronze statue of himself. The gymnasium had been struckby lightning, and the statue had been fused and disfigured into amass of shapeless metal. The omen was horrific, and was followed bythe news that the bright and wanton little cities of Pompeii andHerculaneum had been shaken almost into ruins by an earthquakeof unusual severity. The safe birth of a child had alleviated thehaunting fears which these events had excited in his mind; but theyreturned when the little Claudia died, nor were they greatly eased bymaking her a goddess, by striking coins with the inscription ‘_DivaClaudia Neronis_,’ and by appointing in her honour a pulvinar, atemple, and a priest!
Those who understood his needs and his character saw that life couldonly be made tolerable for him by excitements still more intense,and crimes still more colossal, than those to which he had grownaccustomed. It had become his constant boast that the Emperor coulddo anything he chose, and that he had been the first Emperor to findout the fact. He therefore never hesitated to secure the death ofany one whom he disliked. If they were insignificant persons, he hadthem poisoned and seized their goods. As no instinct of gratitudeprevented him from thus murdering Pallas, who had been the chiefagent in procuring his adoption and his succession to the Empire,he had the less hesitation in sacrificing others of less fame.Since Torquatus Silanus was the great-great-grandson of Augustus, hedetermined to get rid of him on charges of ostentation and seditiouspractices. When he had driven him to suicide he proclaimed that hehad intended to forgive him. Against the Senate he cherished so deepa grudge that with his intimates he discussed the plan of puttingall the members of the order to death and distributing its functionsamong the knights and freedmen. Cruelty had not been among hisnatural vices, but he now became athirst for blood.
But hatred could only be gratified by spasms of brief indulgence,and the animal passions also required something ever new to galvanisetheir decrepitude. No one understood this better than Tigellinus.Himself a voluptuary, who had exhausted the resources of everybase pleasure, he sought to supply by effrontery the lack of newsensations. With this view he organised continuous revelries whichshould be unparalleled either for costly extravagance or foroutrageous infamy.
Ruinous to the well-being of the State as were these portents ofmaterialism, they were innocent in comparison with the deliberatecorruption of public morals. Things are at their worst when viceis so hardened that, instead of seeking concealment, it courtsnotoriety. All Rome, even her ordinarily vicious population, recalledwith shame the orgies, at once monstrous and vulgar, which wereplanned and paid for by Tigellinus to please his patron. Happily theworld has never seen or heard of an entertainment more abominable. Inthe centre of the Campus Martius, near the Pantheon, was the Lake ofAgrippa, surrounded by a park full of groves, gardens, and shrines.On the lake Tigellinus had constructed a raft for the guests. Thegondolas moored by the margin to convey the banqueters to the raftwere decorated with gilding, and vermilion, and silken streamers, androwed by boy-slaves from Britain, Greece, and Asia, with long curledhair and bracelets of gold on their bare arms and ankles. On theraft were erected pavilions, filled with delicacies, and furnishedas luxuriously as the tents of Eastern kings. When the actualfeasting was over the whole of the gardens were filled with choirsof musicians, and all the varletry of either sex that could beassembled from the confines of Rome. Not one honest or honourableperson was invited. It was to be a banquet of reprobates. Slaves, andgladiators, and nobles, and women of consular families, and soldiers,and men who had held high offices, and the gilded youth of Romaneffeminacy, and Greeklings skilled in all refinements of evil, roamedpromiscuously under the light of numberless cressets, their headscrowned with roses, their hearts inflamed with wine. It was a chaosof abomination, such as would not have been possible in any otherage than the first century after Christ, or in any other place thanimperial Rome. No Christian pen can paint that revelry of Antichrist,or do more than distantly allude to the scenes which followed, whenNero, disguised in the skin of a bear, crawled on all fours among thevilest of those wretches, and gave to him ‘who saw the Apocalypse’the image of the wild beast who sprang from the foul scum of theworld’s most turbid sea.
Yet though there was no truce to such scenes of darkness, exceptsuch as was imposed by the premature paralysis of excess, they wereinsufficient to occupy Nero’s tedium, or fill to the brim the cup ofhis desires. To be an actor, to be a public singer--that seemed tohim to be the culmination of earthly bliss. Nothing would satisfyhis burning caprice but to appear before the multitude as Paris andAliturus did. But he dared not as yet insult the majesty of Rome withthe spectacle of a stage Augustus, and therefore determined to singfirst before an enchanted provincial audience, and thence to proceedto Greece, not displaying himself in the theatr
e of the capitaltill he could return as a victor in the Olympic and Pythian games.But when he had got as far as Beneventum he changed his mind, anddetermined to visit Egypt and the Eastern provinces instead ofGreece. In Egypt he meant to re-enact with unheard-of splendour theold revelries of Antony and Cleopatra, and thought that in the hot,luxurious valley of the Nile he might hear of new forms of pleasureand luxury. Magnificent preparations were set on foot for hisreception, and his foster-brother, Cæcina Tuscus, was sent tosuperintend them. Tuscus ventured to bathe in a sumptuous bathconstructed for Nero’s use, and for this harmless act Nero sentencedhim to exile. But the visit to Egypt was never paid. On his returnto the Palace, he entered the Temple of Vesta, beside the Forum.Whether he was suddenly smitten with superstitious dread from therecollection of his crimes or from some other cause, he was thereseized with a violent fit of shivering. His conscience smote him,not for other enormities, but for a crime which, in mere wantonwickedness, he had committed against the majesty of Vesta and themost sacred beliefs of Rome. In defiance of every law, human anddivine, he had recently seized Rubria, one of the vestal virgins. Ithad become one of the horrible characteristics of his mind that halfthe fascination of wickedness consisted for him in the scandal whichit caused. His rank elevated him above human vengeance, but in thatcircular shrine, and in presence of the ever-burning fire, he feltas if he were in the power of the goddess, and swooned away. The omenfrightened him. Pretending that he could not endure to see his peoplesaddened by the thought of his absence, he abandoned his journey, andannounced that he would not leave them.
What new thing could be devised to dispel his weariness? Hepassionately longed for some tremendous sensation to dissipate hislassitude. If the hours had passed with leaden pace when he firsttasted the sweets of autocracy, how unutterably weary had they nowbecome!
‘Tigellinus, cannot you invent for me some new excitement?’ he asked.‘I shall commit suicide from sheer fatigue. Tiberius went to Capri,but a rock like that would not suit me. I cannot live in the vulgarrespectability of an Augustus or a Claudius.’
‘Shall I give you another feast like that at the Lake of Agrippa?’
‘That was all very well,’ said Nero, ‘but things grow tedious byrepetition. Petronius used to be suggestive, but even he has longago exhausted his inventiveness.’
‘I never knew why you gave up going to Greece,’ said the Præfect.
‘I thought it better to put it off till my voice was still moreperfect. But what am I to do now? I am dying for a new experience.Of what use is life except to concentrate its essence into thrillingsensations?’
‘Was it not a new sensation, Cæsar, when the elephant walked on thetight rope with the knight Julius Drusus on his back?’
‘It amused me for once,’ said Nero. ‘It would be stale a second time.’
‘Well, then, when you had the “Conflagration” of Afranius put on thestage, and let the actors pillage the burning house?’
‘Aye,’ said Nero, ‘that was worth seeing. It gave me a hint or twofor my poem on the “Taking of Troy.” What might not art gain, and howmight not my poem be enriched, if I had an actual scene to draw from!’
‘You would hardly like to see Rome in flames, Cæsar?’
‘Indeed I should. It would be worth living for. Happy Priam, who_saw_ the Burning of Troy, about which I can only _write_.’
‘But Rome is something different from Troy,’ said Tigellinus.
‘Rome!’ answered the Emperor. ‘I am sick of it. Look at these close,narrow, crowded streets. I should like to see a city of broad streets,and palaces, and gardens, like Thebes, or Memphis, or Babylon. Ninusand Sardanapalus had cities worth living in.’
Their conversation was held in a spacious room of the _DomusTransitoria_, with which Nero had filled up the whole space fromthe Palatine to the Esquiline.
‘Does not this Palace suffice you?’ asked the Præfect.
‘Not at all,’ replied Nero. ‘Many of the neighbouring[*13] houses andtemples are in my way, and I should like to clear them off, and givemyself air to breathe.’
‘Are you serious, Cæsar?’
‘Of course I am,’ he answered, petulantly.
Tigellinus shrugged his shoulders, and quoted a line from theBellerophon of Euripides:--
‘When I am dead, let earth be rolled in flame.’
‘Nay, while I _live_ let earth be rolled in flame,’ answered theEmperor, altering the iambic. ‘Anything would be better than tosmoulder to death for want of something to amuse me.’
Nero was _not_ altogether in earnest. His conversation was habituallygrandiose, because he fed a perverse imagination with phantasmagoriasand monstrosities. He was suffering from that blood-poisoning ofunchecked vice which has so often maddened Eastern despots.
The fixed idea of watching a conflagration, and getting illustrationsfor his Trojan epic, often returned to this Emperor of melodrama.Without resolutely entertaining the purpose of wrapping Rome inflames, he allowed himself to hint at it and to play with it. Buthe had made Tigellinus much more in earnest than himself. That evilgenius of the Emperor thought that from such a calamity he at leastwould have nothing to lose, and might have everything to gain. He hadinexhaustible riches at his disposal, and numberless wretches in hispay. He meant to see what could be done. Not long after the aboveconversation Nero went for a few days of literary leisure and musicalpractice to his villa at Antium, and Tigellinus gave him hints thatat Antium he might expect startling news, and that a first-ratesensation was in store for him. For the magnitude and horror of thatsensation even Nero was not prepared.
* * * * *
To us it all seems incredible. It did not seem incredible to Tacitus,and it is positively affirmed by Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and even bythe grave and learned Pliny the Elder, who, as a contemporary, musthave known infinitely better than we can do ‘the depths to whichdespotism in delirium can descend.’
