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

by F. W. Farrar

The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who, in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to the assembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaints were read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed against senators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglecting their legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and used this charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated by personal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Eprius was still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, with threatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazing with fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of sedition by impotent disdain for his clear duties.But if the senate was terrified by this lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia,[114] it was terrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms. Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, was banished from Italy.

It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng of illustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messenger came to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends to leave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by association with one who had been condemned. In those days compassion was dangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snapped by fear.

He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wished to die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband, Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a dagger into her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into the hand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ The daughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would not let her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of their child, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed more cheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grieved that he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said, ‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make me do wrong.’

He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. The indomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm his resolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements, and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted to leave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-clad philosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing. On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmly replied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. When his blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, and exclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look, young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are born to times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples of constancy.’

They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyre burned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when they had gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure the anguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breaking sorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the people greeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of Venus Genetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic—of a tragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assembly of woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had been the Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime of friendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered his province rather with a view to his own glory than for the public good. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in having supported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedy robbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These were old charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that his daughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money to the diviners of horoscopes.

The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she was practically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driven into exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though no evidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow—she was not yet twenty years old—was falling sick with the intensity of her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She had merely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and the inexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable, and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or, at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after accepting large sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the two consuls stood the hapless prisoners—the father grey with age, the young daughter not even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face, because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ he asked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, did you not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for your magic incantations?’