CHAPTER I.
The same day, which saw our friends in the country house at Ostia, and the bond of love sealed between Aurelius and Claudia, had been one of infinite agitation and annoyance to the Emperor Domitian.
The very first thing in the morning came vexatious tidings from the town and provinces. At the earliest dawn inscriptions had been discovered on several of the fountains, columns and triumphal arches, of which the sting was more or less covertly directed against the Palatium and the person of Caesar. “Enough!” was attached to the base of a portrait bust.[1] “The fruit is ripe!” was legible on the arch of Drusus. In the fourth, eighth and ninth regions the revolutionary question was to be seen in many places: “Where is Brutus?” and at the entrance of the baths of Titus, in blood-red letters, stared the appeal: “Nero is raging; Galba, why dost thou tarry?”
Domitian, who had heard all this from his spies, long before the court officials even suspected what had happened, received these courtiers in the very worst of tempers. His levée was not yet ended, when a mounted messenger brought the news, that a centurion had raised the standard of revolt on the Germanic frontier,[2] but that he had been defeated and slain after a short struggle.
At noonday the soldiers of the town-guard seized an astrologer, Ascletario by name,[3] who had publicly announced that ruin threatened Caesar. Before the moon should have twelve times rounded—so ran his prophecy—Caesar’s blood would be shed by violence. The immortals were wroth at his reprobate passion for a woman who, by all the laws of gods and men, he had no right to love.
At first Domitian laughed. His connection with Julia seemed to him so dull and pointless a weapon for his foe to turn against him, that the stupidity of it astonished him. However, he commanded that the astrologer should be brought before him.
“Who paid you?” he enquired with a scowl, when the prisoner was dragged into the room.