When Galba first received the secret overtures of Vindex he temporised. He had only preserved his life under various tyrants by consummate care, and by affecting a policy of submission and indifference. Vindex implored him to constitute himself ‘the leader and avenger of the human race,’ but he took no step until he discovered that Nero had sent secret orders that he was to be murdered, and found that he had only escaped very narrowly and by the merest accident. Besides, as his officer T. Vinius reminded him, he had hesitated in his allegiance, and to hesitate was to be lost. He must either assume the purple or prepare to die.
The fresh intelligence that Galba and the two provinces of Spain had also revolted, struck Nero with panic. He swooned away, and remained for some time speechless and motionless. On recovering his senses he tore his robe, and beat his head, with the cry, ‘I am ruined!’ His nurse tried to console him with the remark that other Princes had suffered similar calamities. ‘Nay,’ he answered, ‘my fate is more unheard of than that of all others, for I lose the Empire while yet I live.’ Some steps were suggested to him. He recalled some troops from Illyria, and put Petronius Turpilianus at the head of such forces as he could secure. He set a price on the head of Vindex, and Vindex replied with the ‘sublime gasconade,’ ‘Nero promises ten million sesterces to any one who will bring him my head. I promise my head to any one who will bring me his.’ But scarcely a single plan occurred to Nero which was not puerile; not one measure which was not monstrous. He would execute the provincial governors, and appoint new ones. He would send round to the islands and kill all the exiles, for they might join the revolters. He would order a general massacre of all the Gauls in Rome, for they might favour their countrymen. He would give up the Gallic provinces to be plundered by the soldiers. He would invite the whole Senate to a banquet, and poison them. He deposed the two consuls, appointed himself sole consul, and as he left the banquet, leaning on the shoulders of his intimates, he declared that he would present himself before the legions unarmed and weeping; and, when he had melted their hearts by his tears, he would sing strains of victory to the rejoicing soldiers—which he must immediately compose. Above this ‘lugubrious buffoonery’ he could not rise!
His other preparations to meet the crisis—such as they were—bore the same stamp of infructuous folly. They were all tainted with vanity, imbecility, and corruption. In choosing vehicles for his expedition, his chief care was about those which were necessary for his stage properties. The women who were to accompany him had their hair cut short to make them look like Amazons, and were armed with axes and targets. In raising money he was very fastidious that the silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine. Many flatly refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get back the sums with which the informers had been gorged to repletion. He was made daily to feel that his power was gone. When he summoned the city tribes to renew their oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves as soldiers, the result was such a failure that he had to order each household to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these he would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting stewards and secretaries.
But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The people were suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of an Alexandrian corn-vessel was announced. This always gave an occasion for rejoicing, but when it turned out that the vessel was only laden with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle over the arena, there was an outburst of rage and contumely. Scoffs at his chariot-racing and singing were heard everywhere. Burghers pretended to get up quarrels with their slaves at night, and then shouted Vindex! Vindex! as though they were merely appealing to the police. Nor was this all. He was tormented with dreams and portents of every description, which made his days and nights hideous. He dreamt that he was steering a ship, and that some one wrenched the helm out of his hand; that his murdered wife Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss; that he was covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was a stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey’s theatre sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path. It was rumoured that on the first day of the year, the Lares had fallen down in the middle of a sacrifice, and that the great gates of the mausoleum of his family had opened spontaneously, while a voice came from their awful recesses which summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to be performed at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found. When his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the Senate, and he said that ‘criminals should soon meet the end they had deserved,’ the senators had joined in an ill-omened shout of approval. It was noticed, too, that the last tragedy which he had chanted in public was that of ‘Œdipus in Exile,’ and that the last verse which he had spoken was—
‘Wife, Mother, Father, join to bid me die.’
If, on receiving the news of the revolt of Vindex, he had put himself, like a true Roman Emperor, at the head of his legions, the terrible prestige of a Cæsar, the remembered failure of previous conspiracies, and the disunion of his enemies, might have secured his triumph. For the German legions of Verginius Rufus disdained to follow the initiative of the Gauls. Their own general refused the Empire, and declared for Galba; but an unhappy and accidental collision between the jealous cohorts led to a battle in which twenty thousand Gauls were left dead upon the field. Vindex, in despair, stabbed himself with his own sword. Galba, in scarcely less despair, meditated suicide at Clunia, hearing that the soldiers of Verginius were anything but favourable to his claims. If but one pulse of true blood of his brave patrician ancestors had stirred in the veins of Nero, if he could have shown but one momentary flash of their spirit, he would have been gloriously saved. But his abuse of passion, his disgraced manhood, his polluted mind, his enervated frame, stamped upon him the curse of nullity, and the infamous throng of contaminated courtiers who formed his band of intimates were as empty and effeminate as himself. No strength was left among them to evoke the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.
And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it was not passed. In petulant passion he tore the letters to pieces. Then, like a spoilt boy in a rage, he seized from the table two crystal cups, of priceless value, of which he was specially fond, and which were embossed with scenes from Homer, and dashed them to shivers on the marble floor.
More wild and wicked follies suggested themselves to his diseased and whirling brain. Why should he not again set fire to the city, and prevent all attempts to extinguish the flames, by sending to the vivaria of the amphitheatre, and letting loose all the wild beasts among the people? What a scene it would be! Lions, and tigers, and bears, and panthers, growling, leaping, roaring, amid the streets of a city bursting everywhere into conflagration, and—while themselves wild with terror—striking fresh terror into a screaming populace! Incapable of consecutive thought, he had not even considered what would come of this. Suffice it that it would be a magnificent excitement, a thrilling and supreme sensation! He did not repent of this design; he was not appalled by the stupendous and selfish wickedness; he was only deterred by the impossibility of carrying it out. It may be said that such schemes betray the madman; but Nero’s brain was undisturbed by any madness except that which consists in, and is the Nemesis of, a soul eaten away by conceit, selfishness, and lust. Caligula, it has been truly said, would, in modern days, have found his way to Bedlam; but Nero to Tyburn. His hour was come. He sent his most trusted freedman to Ostia to prepare the fleet. He sounded the tribunes and centurions of the Prætorian guard to see if they would share his flight. Some of them made excuses; some flatly refused; one of them even dared to quote to him the line: ‘Is it so very difficult to die?’ As for his Præfects—Tigellinus, whom he had laden with wealth and honours; Nymphidius, the son of a slave-woman—creatures who had crawled and sunned themselves in the noon of his prosperity, they shamelessly and without hesitation betrayed and abandoned him. The poisonous sunlight of his favour had bred no creature nobler than adders. What should he do? Should he array himself in his tragic robe and present himself as a suppliant before the Parthians, or before Galba, moving them to tears by his histrionic skill? But how could he get so far in safety? No; he would clothe himself in black garments, would go to the Forum, and there would weep before the Rostra, imploring pardon for the past, and begging the people—if only he succeeded in moving their minds—at least to allow him to be Præfect of Egypt in place of Tiberius Alexander! He even wrote the oration which he intended to deliver on the occasion, and it was found in his writing-desk after his death. His one dread was that, if he so much as ventured outside the gates of the Golden House, he would be torn to pieces before he could make his way to the Forum. He postponed the decision, and, summoning Locusta, obtained from her a poison which he placed in a golden box. Then he passed over to his favourite retreat in the Servilian gardens, and slept as well as he could his last wretched sleep on earth.
CHAPTER LXIV
AT THE THREE FOUNTAINS
‘For out of prison he cometh to reign.’—Eccl. iv. 14.