If Poppæa knew not, Pomponia knew well; for to her, as a Christian, prayer had become the habit, the attitude of her life. Poppæa had never before heard such words as those. She knew that when she died she would be made a goddess by the Senate, as her infant child had been; yet here by her bedside Pomponia was speaking of her as though she were any other woman, speaking of her deep sinfulness, and not making any difference between her case and that of the commonest slave-girl who might have lived an evil life. And all that she could do was to resign her soul, and suffer it to be borne along unresisting on that stream of prayer.
And yet she felt, even in her misery, some dim sense of consolation, some faint gleam of hope such as she had never felt before. She knew that death was near, and urged Pomponia not to leave her. Pomponia sat by the bedside, holding the weak hand, and doing every act of tenderness, and speaking words of consolation, until the sinful troubled life had ebbed away.
Such a mind as Nero’s had become was incapable of sorrow. He announced, indeed, that he was overwhelmed with grief, and he indulged in a certain amount of hysterical and theatric lamentation, which interfered in no way with his follies or his appetites. A funeral was decreed to Poppæa at the public expense, and Nero at the Rostra pronounced a eulogy—not on her virtues, for there were none on which he could speak, but on her beauty and high fortune, and because she had been the mother of a divine infant. By her own wish—learnt doubtless from the Jews—she was buried, and not burnt as was the Roman custom. Nero had so many spices burnt at her funeral that the learned doubted whether Arabia could furnish more in a single summer. But not one genuine tear was shed upon her grave.
CHAPTER LX
THE DOOM OF VIRTUE
‘Each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.’
Shakespeare, Macbeth, iv. 3.
Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime. One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he had already killed.
In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ of Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the funeral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that he was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius, the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, Marcus Silanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisoned by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with false charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.