We need not repeat the conversation which took place between the friendly ministers, but it was long and troubled. Burrus felt, no less strongly than Seneca, that affairs at Court were daily assuming a more awkward complexion. The mass of the populace, and of the nobles, rejoicing in the general tranquillity, were happily ignorant of facts which filled with foreboding the hearts of the two statesmen. The nobles and the people praised with rapture the speech which Nero had pronounced before the Senate after the funeral honours had been paid to the murdered Claudius. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘no wrongs to avenge; no ill feeling towards a single human being. I will maintain the purity and independence of legal trials. In the Palace there shall be no bribery and no intrigues. I will command the army, but in no particular will I encroach upon the prerogatives of the Conscript Fathers.’ Critics recognised in the speech the style and sentiments of Seneca, but that only showed that at last philosophy was at the helm of state. And the Fathers had really been allowed to enact some beneficent and useful measures. It was the beginning of a period of government of which the public and external beneficence was due to Seneca and the Prætorian Præfect, who acted together in perfect harmony, and with whom Nero was too indolent to interfere. Long afterwards, so great a ruler as Trajan said that he would emulate, but could not hope to equal, the fame of Nero’s golden quinquennium.
But, meanwhile, unknown to the Roman world in general, the ‘golden quinquennium’ was early stained with infamy and blood; and the contemporary Pliny says that all through his reign Nero was an enemy of the human race.[9]
The turbulent ambition of Agrippina was causing serious misgivings. When the senators were summoned to meet in the Palace she contrived to sit behind a curtain and hear all their deliberations. When Nero was about to receive the Armenian ambassadors she would have scandalised the majesty of Rome by taking her seat unbidden beside him on the throne, if Seneca had not had the presence of mind to whisper to the Emperor that he should step down to meet his mother and lead her to a seat. Worse than this, she had ordered the murder, not only of Narcissus, but of the noble Junius Silanus, whose brother, the affianced suitor of Octavia before her marriage with Nero, she had already got rid of by false accusations which broke his heart. She was doubly afraid of Junius, both because the blood of Augustus flowed in his veins, and because she feared that he might one day be the avenger of his brother, though he was a man of mild disposition. She sent the freedman Helius and the knight Publius Celer, who were procurators in Asia, to poison him at a banquet, and the deed was done with a cynical boldness which disdained concealment. So ended the great-great-grandson of Augustus, whom his great-great-grandfather had just lived to see. It was only with difficulty that Seneca and Burrus had been able to stop more tragedies, and they had succeeded in making the world believe in Nero’s unique clemency by the anecdote, everywhere retailed by Seneca, that when called upon to sign a death-warrant he had exclaimed, ‘I wish I did not know how to write!’ It was looked on as a further sign of grace that he had forbidden the prosecution of the knight Julius Densus, who was charged with favour towards the wronged Britannicus.
But now a new trouble had arisen. Nero began to seek the company of such effeminate specimens of the ‘gilded youth’ of Rome as Otho and Tullius Senecio. They were his ready tutors in every vice, and he was a pupil whose fatal aptitude soon equalled, if it did not surpass, the viciousness of his instructors.
Partly through their bad influence, he had devoted himself heart and soul to Acte, the beautiful freedwoman of Octavia. It was impossible that any secret of the Palace could long be concealed from the vigilant eyes of Agrippina. She had discovered the amour, and had burst into furious reproaches. What angered her was, not that the Emperor should disgrace himself by vice, but that a freedwoman should interfere with the supremacy of her will, and be a rival with her for the affections of her son. A little forbearance, a little calm advice, might have proved a turning point in the life of one who was not yet an abandoned libertine, but rather a shy and timid youth dabbling with his first experiences of wrong. His nature, indeed, was endowed with the evil legacy of many an hereditary taint, but if it was as wax to the stamp of evil, it was not as yet incapable of being moulded into good. But Agrippina committed two fatal errors. At first she was loudly indignant, and when by such conduct she had terrified her son into the confidence of Otho and Senecio, she saw her mistake too late, and flew into the opposite extreme of complaisance. Nero at that time regarded her with positive dread, but his fear was weakened when he saw that, on the least sign of his displeasure, she passed from fierce objurgations to complete submission. In dealing with her son, Agrippina lost the astuteness which had carried her triumphantly through all her previous designs.
But at this point Seneca also made a mistake no less ruinous. If he had remonstrated, and endeavoured to awaken his pupil to honourable ambition, it was not impossible that the world might have found in Nero a better Emperor than most of his predecessors. Instead of this, the philosopher adopted the fatal policy of concession. He even induced his cousin Annæus Serenus, the Præfect of the police, to shield Nero by pretending that he was himself in love with Acte, and by conveying to her the presents which were, in reality, sent to her by the Emperor. Seneca soon learnt by experience that the bad is never a successful engine to use against the worst, and that fire cannot be quenched by pouring oil upon it. When Nero had been encouraged by a philosopher to think lightly of immorality, the reins of his animal nature were seized by ‘the unspiritual god Circumstance,’ and with mad pace he plunged into the abyss.
Burrus had come to tell Seneca that Nero’s passion for Acte was going to such absurd lengths that he talked of suborning two Romans of consular dignity to swear that the slave girl, who had been brought from Asia, was in reality a descendant of Attalus, King of Pergamus!The Senate would be as certain to accept the statement as they had been to pretend belief that Pallas was a scion of Evander and the ancient kings of Arcadia; and Nero had actually expressed to Burrus a desire to divorce Octavia[T2] and marry Acte!
‘What did you say to him?’ asked Seneca.
‘I told him frankly that, if he divorced Octavia, he ought to restore her dower.’
‘Her dower?’