Nerva

“ The verdict of history upon his reign is best expressed in his own words—“ I have done nothing which should prevent me from laying down my power, and living in safety as a private man.” The memory of Nerva is still preserved by the ruined temple in the Via Alessandrina (il Colonacce) which marks the site of the Forum begun by Domitian, but which Nerva completed and dedicated (Suet. Dom. 5; Aur. Vict. 12) . ”

“ The portion of Sensibility which feels the influences of the human nervaura, is the highest portion of the organ, where it connects with Modesty, Somnolence, and Ideality. This we regard as the special organ of Nervauric Impressibility, because it renders the system so sensitive to the nervaura, as to be strongly affected whenever it is applied. ”

“ Not only does the nervaura, direct from the brain convey such impressions of organic action, but almost any substance held for a few moments in contact with any part of the head will absorb enough of the local nervaura to convey a distinct impression to a sensitive, similar to that derived directly from the head. ”

“ 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 ”

“ She must go step by step; but who would dare to say that she would not succeed? The wit and purpose of a woman against the world! ‘Yes, Nero, my Nero, thou shalt be Emperor yet! Thou shalt rule the world, and I have always ruled thee, and will rule thee still. Thy weak nature is under my dominance; and I, whose heart is hard as the diamond, shall be Empress of the world. Nemesis—if there be a Nemesis—must bide her time.’
She murmured the words in a low tone to herself; but at this point her reverie was broken.
CHAPTER II
AGRIPPINA AND NERO ‘Occidat dum imperet.’—Tac. ”

“ Such strange security deepened the impression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detain him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island of Patmos.104
Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like fury against the saints of God. ”

“ But, Octavia, something—some voice like that of a god within me—tells me that it will be happier to die than to live.’
That evening, when Tigellinus left him, Nero first realised, with a start of horror, that he was on the eve of a fearful crime. By a rare accident he was alone. One of the reasons why he knew so little of himself was that he scarcely ever endured a moment’s solitude. From the time that he awoke in the morning till the latest hour of his nightly revels, he was surrounded by flatterers and favourites, by dissolute young nobles or adoring slaves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out of his head.
Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives, his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Helen: And what sends the messages to and from the brain over the nerves, mother?
Mother: The power which sends them is called “nerve force,” though what it is even the wisest men do not know. We can stop it by pressing on the nerves, just as you can stop the current of the telegraph. We sometimes say that our leg or arm is “asleep.” If we try to move, it gives us pain, or it may be we can not move at all. One nerve runs along the back side of the arm over the elbow. If we hit the elbow, it makes the arm and hand feel numb. ”

“ But, the only evidence that they afford as to the situation of the mischief is, that they uniformly point to the central end of a particular nerve; and accordingly I have already shown, in the chapter on Pathology, that the attentive study of these very complications furnishes us with some of the most powerful arguments upon which rests my theory that in neuralgia there is always centric mischief. ”

“ This change, as I have seen in my practice of medicine, sometimes passes up the nerves toward the centers, and occasions a more or less constant irritation of the nerve-fibers, producing neuralgia, which is usually referred by the brain to that part of the lost limb to which the affected nerve belonged. This pain keeps the brain ever mindful of the missing part, and, imperfectly at least, preserves to the man a consciousness of possessing that which he has not. ”

“ Nero was more than three years his senior, and in superficial qualities and graces outshone him; but keen observers whispered that though Britannicus could not sing or paint or drive a chariot like his stepbrother, and was less fascinating in manner and appearance, he would far surpass Nero in all manly and Roman virtues. The heart of Octavia was full of unspeakable misgivings. Motherless, unloved, neglected, she had known no aspect of life except its tragedy, and none had as yet taught her any possible region in which to look for comfort under the burden of the intolerable mystery. ”

“ It had required all the wisdom and tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they had deserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that they would not be losers by not surviving until that second coming which many of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was not more anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence. All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitude of victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, human as well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and their infernal joy. ”

“ Nerve-fluid has its own aura like every congregation of molecules in nature, even prime ether has its own aura which is âkâsh. Nerve-fluid has its own aura, called the odic aura of the man. All auras have one base, they are all akin to the magnetic fluid in the cosmos. For every thought there is an affection of the nerve currents of the brain or nerve. This implies vibration which is caught up by the astral aura which communicates with the astral fluid with which it is in contact. ”

“ O Nero, I will confess to thee that I have talked to Acte; I have talked to Christian slaves—once my fellow-slaves—in thy Palace and the household of Narcissus, and I know that the gods—or that God, if (as they say) there be but one God—is with them. ”

“ See—it is done; again Nobili retires behind Nera's chair, to wait the moment when he shall claim her himself.
How the men drag at the ribbons, whirling round and round, hand-in-hand!—Nera's small hand can scarcely hold them—the men whirling round every instant faster—tumbling over each other, indeed; each moment the ribbons are dragged harder. Nera laughs; she sways from side to side, her arms extended. Faster and more furiously the men whirl round—like runaway horses now, bearing dead upon the reins. The strain is too great, Nera lets fall the ring. The cavaliere claps his hands. ”

“ Numerous investigators have long established the fact that the great sensory nerve of the head and face is endowed with an exquisite degree of sensibility. More than half a century ago, both Magendie and Sir Charles Bell pointed out that merely exposing and touching this fifth nerve gave signs of most acute pain. "All who have divided this root in living animals must have recognized, not only that it is sensitive, but that its sensibility is far more acute than that of any other nervous trunk in the body." ”

“ Nera was dead to him. Dead?—Fool!—And did he think that any thing can die? Do not our very thoughts rise up and haunt us in some subtile consequence of after-life? Nothing dies—nothing is isolated. Each act of daily intercourse—the merest trifle, as the gravest issue—makes up the chain of life. Link by link that chain draws on, weighted with good or ill, and clings about us to the very grave.
Thinking of Nera, Nobili's color changed—a dark look clouded his ready smile. Enrica asked, "What pains you?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?—And is there an object in the life of a Nero? ”

“ Nero fled from Rome, was declared an enemy of his country, and to save himself from execution committed suicide. See W. Wolfe Capes' Early Roman Empire and Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire.
Nerves, the fibers of white nervous matter connecting the different parts of the body with the central nervous system. Two kinds of nervous tissue are recognized,— the white and gray. The white is composed of fibers, the gray is largely made of nerve cells located in centers. The nerves are merely conductors of the nervous impulses that arise within the nerve-cells. ”

“ Rushing through the city, they flung down and trampled and spat upon the statues of Poppæa. Those of Octavia they uplifted on their shoulders, showered blossoms over them, and, carrying them to the Forum and the temples, crowned them with garlands. They shouted their approval of Nero’s tardy repentance, and, donning their holiday attire, organised an immense procession to the Capitol, to thank Jupiter for the restoration of their Empress. Returning from this procession they crowded to the Palatine, and Nero in alarm appealed to the Prætorians. Tigellinus let loose the soldiers upon the people. ”

“ And certainly it is infinitely more probable that paralysis or spasm of a muscular viscus should occur as a reflex consequence of neuralgia occurring in a nerve whose central nucleus was closely connected with the motor centre of the organ, than that mere paralysis of the viscus should convey a reflex impression to sensitive nerves which should express itself in the form of acute pain. It must be confessed that the matter hangs in doubt; but the evidence is, on the whole, very strong for the belief that central nervous mischief is the most important element in angina. ”