When none is shed, we count it holiday;
We who are most in favour, cannot call
This our own.’
Dryden, The Cruelty of Tyranny, v. 15-16.
The persecution of the Christians, once begun, did not cease, but broke out again and again, in various parts of the Empire, like a conflagration which only pauses from the exhaustion of materials which it can devour. But a few more sporadic executions could furnish no further excitement to Nero, after he had supped so full of horrors. The jaded ‘old man of thirty’ therefore turned his whole attention to the building and embellishment of the Palace, which was not only to cover the vast area of the Domus Transitoria, but also the additional room which he had snatched from the ruins. It extended over a space equal to that covered by the Louvre and Tuileries together. It was called the Golden House, and exceeded in sumptuosity everything which the world had hitherto seen. It showed the degeneracy of taste which marked that age, by its tendency to hugeness of size and strangeness of material. Nothing but the grotesque and the enormous suited the diseased appetite of Nero. At the entrance stood a colossus of himself, of which the base is still visible, beside the Colosseum. It was a hundred and twenty feet high, and was the work of Zenodorus.Inside the hall was also a picture of Nero, a hundred and twenty feet high, painted on linen, which was afterwards burnt up by lightning.[109] The famous architects Severus and Celer were set to work, with all the power of the Empire to back them, and all the treasures of the world at command. Triple colonnades of marble pillars led to the Palace from the vestibule, and the outer spaces of the columns were filled with statues and flowers. At the four corners of the hall, on tables of citron, of which the veins looked like curled tresses, stood huge vases of silver, embossed by Acragas, with scenes of the chase derived from the ‘Cynegetica’ of Xenophon. The painter Fabullus, who stood at the head of the artists of the age, was bidden to enrich the halls of audience with scenes of history and mythology. One of his paintings was a Pallas, which to the astonishment of the spectators seemed always to follow them with her eyes. The most distinguished pupils of the schools of landscape, founded by Ludius, and of the rhyparographer Pyroeicus, were set to adorn the private chambers. A thousand statues of bronze, alabaster, gold, silver, and delicately tinted marble were ranged about the building, and in porticoes a thousand feet long. Not only were the old temples of Rome plundered of their treasures, but Acratus the freedman and Carinas the Greek philosopher were sent to Greece to seize whatever was most precious in her ancient cities. So shameless was the rapacity with which they served the Emperor’s greed, that at Delphi—from which he carried off five hundred statues of bronze—the population rose in arms to protect the images and bas-reliefs of their temples.
The baths of alabaster, inlaid with lapis lazuli, were supplied from the Aqua Virgo, and from the sea, and from the pale sulphur-impregnated waters of the river Albula. The vaulted roof of one banquet-room was made to represent the heavens, and to revolve in imitation of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. The roof of another, fretted with gold and ivory, was so constructed as to shower roses on the guests, or to sprinkle them with the fine dew of fragrant essences.
Nero’s own bedroom was a prodigy of gorgeousness. It contained the golden statue of Victory, which spread her wings in sign of good omen over the slumbers of successive Cæsars. On a slab of agate stood the statuette of Nero, five inches high, armed in a corslet which had been carved with infinite labour out of hard jasper. A debased art—which did not rely for its triumph on the genius of the artist or the beauty of the result, but stimulated the languors of imagination by the conquest of apparent impossibilities—was further illustrated by other minute images cut out of emerald or topaz, like those described by Pliny. On abaci of carved ivory stood myrrhine vases—the most precious known to antiquity—red, veined, lustrous, of a value which could hardly be expressed in terms of purchase. Besides such treasures there was a little gem of sculpture, the Amazon of Strongylion, known as Eucnemos, from its exquisite proportions, which Nero took with him wherever he went. A place of special honour was assigned to Nero’s harp of gold, adorned with precious stones.
Still more marvellous were the gardens. They covered a space so large that a single lake on which imperial galleys were moored, sufficed, when filled up, for the site of the Colosseum. They were full of grottoes, and gardens for exotic plants, and waterfalls shaded with masses of foliage, and pastures in which the sheep, with revolting bad taste, were dyed blue or crimson. They also contained aviaries of rare tropical birds, and dens for animals—among the rest a monster which was said to be fed with human flesh. The palace-stables of Nero’s favourite horse Asturco, and of the other horses which drew his chariot, were in distant parts of these enchanting grounds, and were far more magnificent in their appointments than the houses of the poorer senators. The chief ornament of the garden was a temple of Seia, the goddess who was propitious to harvests. It was built of a newly discovered marble, so warm and glowing that, according to Pliny, it seemed rather to enclose than to transmit the light.
But the splendour with which he had surrounded himself soon became insupportably wearisome. It involved him further in pecuniary anxieties. Buoyed up for a time by the chimera of a Roman knight, who, giving credence to a dream, promised, at small expense, to discover the legendary treasures which Dido had carried with her from Troy, and which were supposed to be hidden in the caves of Carthage, he was compelled, when that bubble burst, to have recourse to expedients both pitiful and violent. With great peril to himself he had to let the payments of his Prætorians fall into arrears. Instead of half the patrimony left by his freedmen, he now impropriated nine-tenths. Confiscations raged on every side. Temples were plundered, and their statues—even those of the Roman Penates—were sent to the melting-pot. A law was made against wearing amethystine colours, and once when he saw a lady with the forbidden colour at the games, he pointed her out to his Procurator, and not only inflicted the fine, but forfeited her entire property. No meanness was too base for him to practise, no wrong too cruel for him to inflict. Italy, the provinces, the allied peoples, the free states, groaned under intolerable burdens.
And while his bodily functions, disordered by riotous living, made of his life a physical burden, he was distracted by daily superstitions. In his theatric way he used to tell his intimates that he was haunted by all the Furies. His effeminated intellect was constantly unnerved by rumours of storms, and earthquakes, and strange births, and comets, which the astrologers interpreted to imply change and political disaster. A revolt of gladiators at Præneste threatened a renewal of the devastations in the days of Spartacus. In consequence of an ill-advised order of Nero, the whole fleet of triremes and smaller vessels was hopelessly shipwrecked at Misenum, and he had to bear the odium of the disaster.