Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

Mock the tired worlding. Idle Hope

And dire Remembrance interlope,

And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:

The bubble floats before; the spectre stalks behind.’

Coleridge, Ode to Tranquillity.

In one of the most enchanting rooms of the Golden Palace, surrounded by every object of beauty and splendour which the wealth of kingdoms could supply, sat Poppæa, miserable in heart with a misery which nothing could alleviate—no luxury of the present, no memory of the past, no hope of the future. Like Agrippina, like Seneca, like Nero, she had been ‘cursed with every granted prayer.’ Nothing which this world could give was left for her to attain. Of the honours which overpower, of the riches which clog, of the pleasures which inflame the soul, she had unbounded experience. They had left her heart weary and her life in ashes, and she had never dreamed of the secret which had enabled so many thousands of humble Christians, whom she would have regarded as the dust beneath her feet, to find exaltation in abasement, wealth in penury, and joy in tribulation.

She was Empress; she was Augusta; she was mother of an infant who had been deified; her smile meant prosperity, her frown was death. Of what avail was it all? Could this awful power, could those inestimable gems, could the gorgeousness of her Golden House fill up the void in a heart numbed by satiety and chilled by despair? What had she to aim at? Her enemies had been swept out of her path. What had she left to hope for? There was no object of earthly wishes which she had not attained. Ah! but what work worth doing could she find to do in order to fill up the vacuity of aimless self-indulgence? Who was there to love her, or whom she could love?

She thought of her early home, of her lovely mother, of her consular and triumphant grandfather, of the adoration which had surrounded her in the days of her own dawning beauty. She thought of Rufius Crispinus, the bridegroom of her youth, who had loved her tenderly, and whom she had loved, and of the little son whom she had borne him. He had grown up into a beautiful and gallant child, and the mother had always listened with pride to the anecdotes about him which were secretly brought to her. One of the heaviest of the many afflicting thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa’s husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso’s conspiracy first to banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his life. How fatal had her love been to him! It had blighted his career; it had stained his home; it had cut short his life. But what had her poor boy done that he too should perish? She had heard only a few days since that simply because in his games the high-spirited lad had played at being general or emperor, Nero had given orders to his slaves to drown him by suddenly pushing him into the sea while he sat fishing on a rock. She knew that this crime had been committed, and his bright young life sacrificed simply because he shared her blood; and what maddened her most of all was that she dared make no complaint, dared not even to reveal that she was aware of the murder, because to allude to her first husband or her son was always to rouse Nero into a paroxysm of fury. In the brightest and most luxurious room of the Golden House she sat solitary, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

Then she thought of Otho. Dandy as he was, and debauchee, to her at least he had been passionately faithful. She had abandoned Crispinus to live with Otho partly from a certain fascination which hung about his wickedness, but even more from motives of ambition, and because he was Nero’s most cherished favourite. She heard good accounts of his administration in Lusitania. Her intrigues to entangle the love of Nero had succeeded; but would she not have been incomparably more happy if she had remained in the home of Otho, and still more if she had lived as the virtuous wife of her first husband?

For with Nero she had long been disgusted, while she was obliged to feed his gluttonous vanity with perpetual eulogies of his beauty. And when in the close intercourse of daily life she saw to the depths of the man’s nature, it was impossible for her to find any words sufficiently bitter for the expression of her contempt. And this wretched meticulous creature, with no manliness in him; this tenth-rate singer and dilettante twangler on harps; this lump of egregious vanity; this catspaw of Tigellinus, whose effeminacy was steeped in the blood of the innocent which he had shed like water—this womanish man, with none of the worth of Crispinus, and none of the charm of Otho, was to be her husband and companion for life! The day for other lovers, the day when she could have the excitement of secret intrigues, was past, for anything of the kind would mean instant death. And yet she felt more and more that it was impossible to retain secure hold on such love as Nero’s. It was an ignoble love, tigerish and animal, which would evanesce long before her youth and beauty had faded away. 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. Was some rival casting her spells over his volatile and evil nature, and taking vengeance on her for the wrongs of Octavia? The thought made her heart burn with a fury of impotent indignation.