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

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER LX

  _THE DOOM OF VIRTUE_

  ‘Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.’

  SHAKESPEARE, _Macbeth_, iv. 3.

  Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime.One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paidhis addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, thehalf-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offerof marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero theunhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperorthen married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom hehad already killed.

  In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be sufferingfrom nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ ofTacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wantedto terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflictedon him a public insult. The world understood what was meant whenCaius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves ofPedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend thefuneral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that hewas a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but thecharges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius,the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, andthat he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, thegreat-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, MarcusSilanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisonedby Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a goodopportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with falsecharges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an oldman, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for hisdeath; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid himopen his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplikedocility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion orderedhis soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with hisunarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

  At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of histask in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise tohis reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at thecommand of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. Hebegs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavishpatience and pusillanimous acquiescence.[113] All that he can say isthat it was destiny--it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes ofRome.

  We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escapefrom this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned theworld with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside byChristianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the bloodof the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through thesame, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world wasin a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portentsand physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with thebirth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in diversplaces, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanicphenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as thoughthe stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrousbirths--which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism assigns of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at whichit had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities whichwe have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which causeduntold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas andorchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famineand destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearfulmalignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor,neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, theroads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became littlemore than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flunginto common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung afterthem; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing roundthe funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, andburnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to theplague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for itseemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish byimperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Romealone.

  Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in hisdistant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco,and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed.He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, hisGolden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statuesand portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his owndread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste tostrike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hourswhen the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense ofadulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when inthe dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge overhim. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he neverknew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart orpoison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa inhis earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he hadnot killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan andVestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor,handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood,looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from thebushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague inthe Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of baseorigin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but wasprobably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewithto amuse him--no wit, no learning--nothing but the coarse satietiesof adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no greatwriter now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, andpoisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret miseryand terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society,a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberatingechoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderboltsof heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden gobletwhich he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table atwhich he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for sometime grovelled there--a heap of abject terror. But the cup of hisiniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every otherwarning was sent in vain.

  Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reachof all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing hisprosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in ashipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them backto him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised theimagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour whichAugustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendantof the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receivefrom Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian,he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore cameall the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont.He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousandhorsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italyhe did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The sceneof the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the mostmagnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were rangedthrough all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra,among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphalinsignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Neroraised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then beggedthat he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition wasrepeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed thediadem--a band of purple silk woven with pearls--upon the head ofTiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had beenredecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding thatthe day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over thetheatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the
costumeof Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nerosang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt ofthe wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison withthe manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘inCorbulo he had a good slave.’

  The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largessebefore his departure were almost incredible. It was believed thatone motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire tobe initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, inorder to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made,and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one ofthe ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile,and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to theunworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like agorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds andmore than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might beamassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, andclosed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.

  But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed inthe pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commissionof further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false chargesthe innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of thearistocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he nowventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, thetwo most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doingso, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.

  The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treatthe accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longedto hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggishacquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bledthemselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friendsadvised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches,possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in thatdegraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even thegood would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defencewould assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of hiswife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune RusticusArulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancienttribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thraseadecided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generoustribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his careerwere over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to awaitthe decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friendsremonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘?'dipus’of Seneca--

  ‘Tacere liceat; nulla libertas minor A rege petitur.’

  ‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding mytongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy whichmight have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimitywhich yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thraseamight, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such amurder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficentrevolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flashnobleness into a host of slaves.

  The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of VenusGenetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who,in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to theassembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaintswere read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed againstsenators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglectingtheir legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and usedthis charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated bypersonal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Epriuswas still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, withthreatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazingwith fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of seditionby impotent disdain for his clear duties. But if the senate wasterrified by this _lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia_,[114] it wasterrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms.Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus,was banished from Italy.

  It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng ofillustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversationwith the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messengercame to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends toleave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by associationwith one who had been condemned. In those days compassion wasdangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snappedby fear.

  He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wishedto die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband,Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a daggerinto her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into thehand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ Thedaughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would notlet her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of theirchild, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed morecheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grievedthat he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said,‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make medo wrong.’

  He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. Theindomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm hisresolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements,and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted toleave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-cladphilosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing.On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmlyreplied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

  Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. Whenhis blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, andexclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter theLiberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look,young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are bornto times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples ofconstancy.’

  They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyreburned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when theyhad gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure theanguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breakingsorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the peoplegreeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

  During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of VenusGenetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic--of atragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assemblyof woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had beenthe Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime offriendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered hisprovince rather with a view to his own glory than for the publicgood. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in havingsupported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedyrobbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These wereold charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that hisdaughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money tothe diviners of horoscopes.

  The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she waspractically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driveninto exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though noevidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow--shewas not yet twenty years old--was falling sick with the intensityof her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She hadmerely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and theinexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable,and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or,at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after acceptinglarge sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

  On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the twoconsuls stood the hapless prisoners--the father grey with age, theyoung daughter not
even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face,because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

  The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ heasked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, didyou not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for yourmagic incantations?’

  Servilia prostrated herself upon the ground, and for some time couldfind no voice to speak; then rising, and embracing the altar ofVenus Genetrix, ‘I invoked,’ she exclaimed, ‘no infernal deities;I uttered no prayers of imprecation. The sole object of my ill-omenedsupplications was that thou, O Cæsar, that ye, O senators, mightpreserve to me this the best of fathers. I gave the Chaldeans mygems, my robes, the adornment of my matronly dignity; I would havegiven them, had they demanded it, my blood, my life. Let _them_look to it; their very existence and the nature of their arts werehitherto unknown to me. I never mentioned the name of the Emperor,except among the deities. And of all that I did my father knewnothing. If what I have done be a crime, I have sinned alone.’

  ‘Senators!’ exclaimed her father, Soranus, ‘let her be at onceacquitted. She is free from all the charges urged against me. Shedid not accompany me to my province; she was too young to have knownRubellius Plautus; she was in no way implicated in the accusationsagainst her husband. Her sole error has been her filial affection.Separate her case from mine. She is still in early youth. Let onevictim suffice you. I am prepared to undergo whatever fate youinflict upon me, but spare my child!’

  At those tender words he opened his arms, and his daughter sprangto his embrace, but the lictors lowered their cruel fasces, andinterposed between them.

  Then the witnesses were called, and a murmur of contempt andindignation broke out even among those abject senators when PubliusEgnatius Celer stepped out first among them. The lip of Soranuscurled in strong disdain, and he muttered the one word ‘Traitor!’For Egnatius was a professed Stoic; he was a client of Soranus; hehad been his teacher in philosophy; he was old, and Soranus young;he had received from his hands unnumbered kindnesses; he had himselfencouraged Servilia to consult the astrologers. He wore the dress ofa philosopher; he had trained his features to assume the aspect ofStoic dignity. But on this day he tore the mask off his own face,and revealed himself as what he was--a lecherous, treacherous,avaricious, hypocritic villain, who, having concealed his leprouscharacter under the guise of honour, did not hesitate for a momentto sell his friend for money in the hour of calamity, and therebydishonoured his grey hairs, and earned for himself the execrationof all time.[115] The wretch lived on in deserved and generalinfamy. In better days he was accused by Musonius Rufus and himselfcondemned. But to Soranus and Servilia were meted out such justiceas could alone be expected from such judges. The only mercy extendedto them was the permission to choose their mode of death.

  Such was the state of things in the days of Nero. The aristocracywere like men who live in an unknown land, glancing on every sideat the slightest sound. Seneca, who had lived through that reignof terror, most truly depicts it. His sole remedy is stubbornresignation. Even abstinence from action requires prudence, for youmay be condemned for what you do _not_ do. Above all must men shunthe Court, ‘that sad prison of slaves.’ But, after every precaution,no one could be safe, and therefore, Stoic-fashion, men must accustomthemselves to regard all calamities as matters of indifference.‘Above all, is not suicide always possible?’ Seneca asks; ‘and isnot that the best antidote to tyranny? The path of escape is openeverywhere. Do you see this precipice? It is the descent to Liberty!Do you see this sea, this well, this river? Liberty lies hidden intheir depths! Do you see this little barren, distorted tree? Libertyhangs from its branches!’[116] The historian is reminded of thepicture of Pascal. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemnedto death, some of whom have their throats cut daily in sight of therest, while the survivors see in their fate their own condition, andgaze one on another with sorrow, and without hope.’