At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely.He begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish patience and pusillanimous acquiescence.[113] All that he can say is that it was destiny—it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of Rome.
We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous births—which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, the roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone.
Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco, and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed. He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor, handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood, looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith to amuse him—no wit, no learning—nothing but the coarse satieties of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret misery and terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society, a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberating echoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderbolts of heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden goblet which he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table at which he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for some time grovelled there—a heap of abject terror. But the cup of his iniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every other warning was sent in vain.
Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reach of all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing his prosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in a shipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them back to him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised the imagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour which Augustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendant of the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receive from Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian, he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore came all the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont. He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousand horsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra, among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then begged that he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition was repeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed the diadem—a band of purple silk woven with pearls—upon the head of Tiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had been redecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding that the day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over the theatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the costume of Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nero sang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt of the wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison with the manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘in Corbulo he had a good slave.’
The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largesse before his departure were almost incredible. It was believed that one motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire to be initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, in order to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made, and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one of the ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile, and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to the unworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like a gorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds and more than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might be amassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, and closed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.
But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed in the pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commission of further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false charges the innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of the aristocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he now ventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, the two most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doing so, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.
The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treat the accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longed to hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggish acquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bled themselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friends advised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches, possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in that degraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even the good would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defence would assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of his wife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune Rusticus Arulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancient tribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thrasea decided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generous tribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his career were over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to await the decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friends remonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘Œdipus’ of Seneca—
‘Tacere liceat; nulla libertas minor
A rege petitur.’
‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding my tongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy which might have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimity which yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thrasea might, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such a murder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficent revolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flash nobleness into a host of slaves.