Nero

“ The features of the human monster before me were mild and almost handsome; a heavy eye and a figure tending to fulness gave the impression of a quiet mind, and but for an occasional restlessness of brow and a brief glance from under it, in which the leaden eye darted suspicion, I should have pronounced Nero one of the most indolently harmless of mankind. ”

“ A great shout of 'NERO!' 'CAESAR!' Meanwhile AGRIPPINA and SENECA are listening close together. Discordant cries are heard of 'BRITANNICUS!' A slave or attendant on NERO scatters gold in the direction of these discordant cries, which gradually subside, and are lost in one long shout of 'Nero, Imperator.' NERO motions for silence. ”

“ He had walked along the lines of temporary huts in the Campus Martius, and heard the wail of men and women who refused to be comforted for the loss of all. He had stood behind the base of a half-calcined pillar on the Aventine when Nero had been carried past him in an open litter of silver, in which he lolled on purple cushions. He was discinctured and clad in a light Coan synthesis, looking the picture of cruel and dissolute effeminacy. A young Greek slave shared his litter, and some of his worst associates laughed and jested by his side. ”

“ Nero felt a spasm of terror when the philosopher expressed a doubt whether sullen misery might not flash up into rage, and cause a formidable rebellion. For want of houses, the people were huddling into tombs and catacombs. Nero, therefore, took the hint that he should offer the Campus Martius and the monuments of Agrippa—his porticoes, baths, gardens, and the Temple of Neptune—as a refuge for the shivering throngs whom the flames had driven from their homes. ”

“ Even Nero was amazed at the abandon of welcome, the delirium of ostentatious applause with which he was received, while his hands were still red-wet with his mother’s blood. The people thronged forth by their tribes to greet him. The senators were in festal array. They were surrounded by their wives and children. Stages had been built all along the road, in which the spectators had purchased their places to look on as at a triumph. Incense burned in the streets; the shouts of myriads of voices rent the air. ”

“ That design was the elevation of her Nero, at the first possible moment, to the throne whose dizzy steps were so slippery with blood.
In the achievement of her purpose no question of right and wrong for a moment troubled her. Guilt hid no horror for that fair woman. She had long determined that neither the stings of conscience nor the fear of peril should stop her haughty course. To her, as to most of the women of high rank in the Rome of the Empire, crime was nothing from which to shrink, and virtue was but an empty name. Philosophers she knew talked of virtue. ”

“ Nero consented, and Aliturus, who was always among his favourites, was ushered into his presence. The actor wore the ordinary dress of a wealthy Roman youth, but the two friends who accompanied him were in the costume of the East, with rich robes and silken turbans. The elder of the two was an old man, whose white beard flowed in waves over his breast, and whose sumptuous dress and haughty bearing accorded with the dignity, if not with the humility, of the High-Priesthood. The younger was a man not yet thirty years old, splendidly handsome and full of the genius of his race. ”

“ Be gods and kings in reality; for I say that ye can permit yourselves the position! As to thee, O Cæsar, thou hast threatened us with the sentence of coming ages; but think, those ages will utter judgment concerning thee also. By the divine Clio! Nero, ruler of the world, Nero, a god, burnt Rome, because he was as powerful on earth as Zeus on Olympus,—Nero the poet loved poetry so much that he sacrificed to it his country! From the beginning of the world no one did the like, no one ventured on the like. ”

“ Paul was a man the very sight of whom naturally inspired Nero with ferocity. For Nero, whom all the world knew to be a robber, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide—a sensualist, effeminate, degraded, and unutterably depraved—had become aware that these Christians lived lives of purity and holiness, the possibility of which he affected to deny. And his guilty splendour and luxurious misery were forced at last to blush and tremble before the irresistible weakness of that despised, ragged, fettered prisoner. ”

“ But all this does not tell us what the man at heart is any more than if some flatterer of Nero should expatiate on the esthetic taste of Nero and his love of the fine arts and his skill as a violinist when he sat at night in his marble palace and enjoyed the blazing magnificence of Rome. ”

“ There were points in it which might perhaps have touched the heart of Nero if Poppæa and Tigellinus had not been at his elbow as the evil genii of his degradation. But, when the tablets of Octavia came, Nero was sitting with the enchantress. Taking them out of his hands, she turned the letter into such ridicule, and laughed over it so sweetly and so immoderately, and mixed her silvery laughter with so many acts of fascination, that the fear of her ridicule—to which, like all vain persons, Nero was inordinately sensitive—quenched in his heart all thoughts of mercy. ”

“ The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra, among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. ”

“ AGRIPPINA. How long till Rome shall greet her Emperor?
ASTROLOGER. Behold the heavens! The moment!
[Exit ASTROLOGER.
AGRIPPINA. Give the sign!
[Sounds of acclamation and cries of 'Nero.' BURRUS draws his sword.
BURRUS. See the Praetorians!
SENECA. Nero returns.
Enter a HERALD gorgeously dressed, bearing
a silver wreath
MESSENGER. From Nero unto Agrippina greeting!
He comes a victor from the chariot race.
[Sounds of acclamation grow louder, the
crowd of NERO'S friends and satellites
pours in: last comes NERO dressed as a charioteer.
AGRIPPINA. [Touching CLAUDIUS' body.] ”

“ Her Coliseum and her Capitol are now two grains of sand that served once as a pedestal; but Death has swung his scythe: the monuments have fallen. Behold! At their head comes Nero, pride of my heart, the greatest poet earth has known!
[Nero advances in a chariot drawn by twelve skeleton horses. With the sceptre in his hand, he strikes the bony backs of his steeds. He stands erect, his shroud flapping behind him in billowy folds. He turns, as if upon a race-course; his eyes are flaming and he cries loudly:]
Nero. ”

“ Nothing could be more marvellous than the whole impersonation. So vivid was the illusion that the guests of Nero could hardly believe that they had seen but one young man before them, and not a company of varied characters. ”

“ No Christian pen can paint that revelry of Antichrist, or do more than distantly allude to the scenes which followed, when Nero, disguised in the skin of a bear, crawled on all fours among the vilest of those wretches, and gave to him ‘who saw the Apocalypse’ the image of the wild beast who sprang from the foul scum of the world’s most turbid sea. ”

“ Nero rose in a passion. Fearful lest she should goad him too far, Poppæa called him to her side and changed her tone.
‘Your home is empty, Nero,’ she said. ‘No child will succeed you. I have a little son. Octavia must be dismissed, if you would have an heir to be Emperor of Rome.’
‘How can I dismiss her?’ said Nero gloomily. ‘Even my freedmen espouse her cause. Doryphorus is for her, and Pallas.’
‘Doryphorus! Pallas!’ she repeated, with a laugh of ringing scorn. ‘An effeminate slave-minion; a miserly dotard! Tush, Cæsar! be a man. Sweep aside these flies. Poison them both ”

“ It was impossible not to observe the towering stature and herculean mould of the Briton, the lithe and sinewy frame of the dark-eyed Asiatic. Then the Prætor once more flung down the napkin, in sign that the fighting should begin. Grouped under the Emperor’s seat, they all uplifted to him their right hands and chanted in monotone their sublime greeting: ‘Hail, Cæsar! we who are about to die salute thee!’
Nero flung them a careless glance, and scarcely broke the animated conversation which he was holding with Petronius. ”

“ It is a mistake to think of Nero as habitually and without scruple trampling under his blood-stained foot the rights and privileges of the provinces, or grinding from them the last penny, or harrying, slaying, and violating throughout the empire. ”

“ No strength was left among them to evoke the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.
And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it was not passed. ”

“ There is a marvellous force of illumination in a great crime, but it is the lurid illumination of the lightning-flash, revealing to the lost Alpine wanderer the precipices which yawn on every side of him. While the murder was yet to do, Nero could talk of it lightly and eagerly among the accomplices who were in the secret. To the irresponsible Emperor of the world it did not seem so great a matter to order the murder of a mother. ”

“ If Nero had been a man—if there had been in his passion for her a single ennobling element—she might have retained him in her bondage for long years, as she could certainly have retained Otho. But already Nero preferred to her society the flattery of parasites and minions, and at this very time, though she was very sick and languid with the approach of motherhood, to which she looked forward with neither hope nor happiness, he had left her to her weary solitude, and for days had scarcely so much as seen or talked with her. ”

“ Multitudes of men, though nearly exhausted with fatigue, were desperately toiling on, in hopeless endeavors to extinguish the flames, or to save some small remnant of their property,—and distracted mothers, wild and haggard from terror and despair, were roaming to and fro, seeking their children,—some moaning in anguish, and some piercing the air with loud and frantic outcries. Nero was entertained by the scene as if it had been a great dramatic spectacle. ”

“ One of the heaviest of the many afflicting thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa’s husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso’s conspiracy first to banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his life. How fatal had her love been to him! ”

“ Monuments of murder, how poor the thoughts, how mean the memories ye awaken, compared with those that speak to the heart of man on the heights of Phyle, or by thy lone mound, grey Marathon! We stand amidst weeds, and brambles, and long waving herbage. Where we stand reigned Nero — here were his tesselated floors; here,
"Mighty in the Heaven, a second Heaven,"
hung the vault of his ivory roofs — here, arch upon arch, pillar on pillar, glittered to the world the golden palace of its master — the Golden House of Nero. How the lizard watches us with his bright timorous eye! ”

“ Naturally enough he had not heard of this ferocious satire upon his unhappy father. Attracted by the oddness of the title ‘Apokolokyntosis,’ which the librarian had written on the outer case, he took up the book, and had read the first few columns when Nero entered. As he read, his soul burned with inexpressible indignation. His father had received a sumptuous Cæsarean funeral; he had been deified by the decree of the Senate; a grand temple had been reared in his honour on the Cœlian hill; priests and priestesses had been appointed to worship his divinity. ”

“ They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’
But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent, overgrown, corrupted boy—this soul steeped through and through its every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime—how could it be thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead—only the cowardly animal survived. ”

“ No man had shed a purer lustre over the age of Nero than the brave and honest Corbulo. His life had been devoted to the service of the Empire. To him had been due those splendid victories which kept the Parthians in check, and induced Tiridates to put the colophon on Nero’s glory by coming to receive at his hands before the Roman people the diadem of Armenia. Well might the Arsacid tell Nero that in Corbulo he had a good slave. The great victorious general had spent his life in foreign service. ”

“ The veil which shrouds Nero’s present from every eye is removed, and all perceive a silver skeleton, of terrifying truthfulness, and which, by its admirable mechanism, proclaims artist to be one of those Greeks who have come to Rome to seek fortune and celebrity. ”

“ The shameful torments of maidens violated before death by gladiators dressed as wild beasts, delighted the hearts of the rabble. They saw priestesses of Cybele and Ceres, they saw the Danaides, they saw Dirce and Pasiphaë; finally they saw young girls, not mature yet, torn asunder by wild horses. Every moment the crowd applauded new ideas of Nero, who, proud of them, and made happy by plaudits, did not take the emerald from his eye for one instant while looking at white bodies torn with iron, and the convulsive quivering of victims. ”