‘Would that you would strike as manfully!’ he replied.
Unwarned by the answer which he had received from Flavus, Nero, who felt himself specially injured by the defection of his soldiers, asked Sulpicius Asper also ‘why he had conspired to murder him.’
‘It was the only remedy left for so many infamies,’ answered the centurion; and spoke no more.
After this Nero still continued to bathe in blood. The consul Vestinus was his enemy, and a man of courage, but he had not engaged in the plot. He had once been one of the Emperor’s intimate circle, and Nero, who had felt the weight of his rough wit and shrunk from its truthfulness, had cause to dread his spirit. Before the consul had been accused or even mentioned, the Emperor sent a tribune with a cohort to seize his best slaves, and take his house as it were by storm. Vestinus was giving a banquet, and when summoned by the soldiers, rose from the table without hesitation. He was immediately shut up in his chamber, his veins were opened, and, without uttering so much as a word of complaint, he was stifled in a bath. His terrified guests were meanwhile kept in their places by the soldiers, expecting that their fate would follow. It was late at night before Nero, who had secretly gloated over the imagination of their terrors, allowed them to be dismissed, with the remark that they had been sufficiently punished for their consular banquet.
Nero seized the opportunity to get rid of all who were for any reason obnoxious to him. Rufius Crispinus was banished because he had once been Poppæa’s husband; Verginius, because he was an eloquent orator and instructor of youth; Musonius Rufus, because he was a genuine Stoic. There was no room for such eminence in such a Rome.
There was no room even for a Petronius Arbiter, by the side of a Tigellinus. To pagan conceptions Petronius, despite his dissolute life, was still a gentleman, and Tigellinus, whatever might be his position, was the opposite. Petronius, however vicious, was the reverse of cruel; Tigellinus, far blacker and baser in his vices, superadded to them a savage ruthlessness. It was he who developed this phase of Nero’s degradation, whereas Petronius entirely disapproved of it. The Præfect felt, therefore, that Petronius must be crushed. He suborned one of the household to give false witness against him, permitted him no defence, and threw most of his slaves into chains. Petronius had left home for Campania to pay his respects to Nero. At Cumæ he was ordered to stop, and, not choosing to await the tedious delays of hope and fear, he set the example of a death as satirical as any which history records. There was nothing tragic in it, nothing remotely serious. He treated death as a jest no less contemptible than life, and died with complete coolness, effeminately brave, and sincerely frivolous. If in the deaths of some of the philosophic republicans of that day we see the theatric pomposity of Stoicism, in that of Petronius we see the callous levity of the infidel voluptuary.
Opening his veins, he discoursed with his friends, not on high topics, but on trivial literature and vers de société. If he felt interested, he had his veins bound up again, and banqueted, and slept, to make his death seem a matter of freewill, not of compulsion. He had his bad slaves scourged, his good slaves rewarded. Instead of mentioning Nero and Tigellinus in his will with lying adulation, he penned a scathing satire, in which he drew a vivid picture of Nero’s infamies, and sent a sealed copy of the document to the Emperor himself. Then he broke his signet ring, that it might not, after his death, be abused for purposes of forgery and delation; and dashed into shivers a myrrhine vase for which he had paid a fabulous sum, that it might not fall into Nero’s hands. When Nero received his satire, he writhed under it. He could not tell how Petronius had become acquainted with some of those deeds which he had concealed in the closet and the midnight, but which were here blazoned in the noonday. Thinking that Petronius could only have learnt them from an abandoned lady, named Silia, the wife of a senator, he drove her into exile on the suspicion that she had betrayed the secrets which she had shared and witnessed. At the same time he banished the ex-Prætor Minucius Thermus, and tortured one of his freedmen, because the latter had spread similar reports about Tigellinus.
And so, day after day, ‘the hard reality of death was brushed by the rustling masquerade of life,’ and society presented the spectacle of a lascivious dance on the edge of a precipice, over which some dancer or some indignant spectator from hour to hour was violently hurled.
CHAPTER LVIII
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA
‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod perseverandum est.’—Seneca.