‘This is poor stuff,’ he said, in high dudgeon, pretending to yawn in the most insulting way he could. ‘Who would have expected mock heroics at the Saturnalia?’ Then he rose, and said, with a slight wave of the hand, ‘I am tired of this. I bid farewell to the guests. You may go without ceremony.’
Every one felt that the Emperor’s ill-humour had thrown a deadly chill over the gladdest night of the year. With mutual glancings, and slight shrugs of the shoulder, and almost imperceptible liftings of the eyebrow, they departed. Only Tigellinus remained.
‘What does Cæsar think of Britannicus now?’ he asked in malignant triumph.
‘I think,’ said Nero, savagely, ‘that swans sing sweetest before they die.’
‘Ah-h!’ said the base plotter; and he knew that now the first step in the Sejanus-course of his ambition was accomplished.
But Britannicus went straight from the supper to the rooms of his sister. Octavia sat there in the old Roman fashion of matronly simplicity. She was spinning wool at her distaff, and with kind heart she often gave what she spun to the children of her slaves. And while she spun, a maiden was reading to her.
It was the Christian girl Tryphæna. Usually she read from the Roman poets, and Octavia was never tired of hearing the finer odes of Horace, or the Æneid and Bucolics of Virgil. Sometimes she listened to the history of Livy, and to the treatises of Seneca, which she liked better than their author. But this evening Tryphæna—between whom and her young mistress there was a confidence akin to affection—had timidly asked ‘whether she might read a Christian writing.’ She knew that the Empress had been interested in the Christians by the conversation of Pomponia, and she was anxious to show how shamefully her brethren and sisters in the faith were misrepresented and slandered.
She drew forth from her bosom a manuscript, which had been lent her as a precious favour by the Christian Presbyter Cletus. It was a copy of a general letter of the Apostle Peter, which had been written to encourage the struggling Christian communities. It was not the letter which we now know as the First Epistle of St. Peter, which was written perhaps ten years later, but one of those circular addresses which touched, as did so many of the Epistles, upon the same universal duties, and used in many passages the same form of words. She had read the beautiful passage about obeying the ordinances of man for the Lord’s sake, and putting to silence by well-doing the ignorance of foolish men. And pausing there, she asked ‘whether Octavia was interested in it, and whether she should continue.’
‘Yes, Tryphæna,’ she said, ‘continue this strange letter. How different it is from the treatise of Seneca which you were reading to me the other day! There rings through it I know not what accent of elevation and sincerity.’
The girl then read the noble advice to slaves, and Octavia no longer wondered that Christian slaves so invariably deserved the comprehensive epithet of frugi. How well would it be if the worthless multitude of the slave population—the cunning veteratores, the impudent vernæ, the abject copreæ, the pampered minions of luxury, the frivolous Greeklings—could act in the spirit of such exhortations!