‘taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him.’
And when he ended his peaceful life of obscurity and self-denial in extreme old age, he deserved the epitaph, ‘I, Epictetus, was a slave, and lame, and a pauper, and dear to the Immortals.’
And did vengeance suffer such wretches as Nymphidius Sabinus and Tigellinus to escape? After crimes so many and so heinous, did they come to a good end? The traitor Nymphidius, after a futile and impudent attempt to secure the Empire for himself, was murdered by his own Prætorians. He dragged down with him to destruction the fierce Cingonius Varro, who had written an oration which Nymphidius was to pronounce to the soldiers. Tigellinus, indeed, was strangely protected by Nero’s old and miserly successor when the clamour of the people demanded his life as an expiation for his crimes. He escaped by giving enormous bribes to Titus Vinius, Galba’s legate, and priceless gems to his daughter Crispina. But to him also as to all, ‘punishment was but another name for guilt, taken a little lower down the stream,’ and vengeance in due time fell upon him, and suffered him not to live. After a vain attempt to bribe his executioners, he committed suicide at Sinuessa amid a coarse and brutal orgy, which reads like a parody upon the death of Petronius Arbiter. It was a death exceptionally squalid, vile, and agonising—fit end for a traitor, a coward, a villain of the deepest dye.
As for the succeeding Emperors, the spasm of their brief elevation was marked by universal horrors—wars, and rumours of wars, and massacres, and civil conflicts; nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, plagues and famines and earthquakes in divers places. There was, as Christ had warned His disciples, great tribulation, such as had not been since the beginning of the earth, no nor shall be. These things were the beginning of troubles. The epoch is so described on the sacred page, and the best comment on those Christian prophesies is furnished by the dreary summary of the greatest of pagan historians.
And amid all these calamities and this unbelief, as the lightning cometh from the east and shineth even to the west, the sign was seen in heaven of the Son of Man coming in power and great glory. Against the old dispensation and the old world the doom visibly went forth. The abomination of desolation—the desolating wing of Rome’s abominable eagle—was seen in the Holy Place. The marble floors of the Temple of Jerusalem swam in blood. Zealots laid their gory and brutal hands on the holiest things. Priests, gaunt with famine, were seen leaping madly into the flames kindled upon the altars. The gold which overlaid the cedarwork ran molten through the hissing stream of the carnage of its defenders, and the Holiest Place sank into heaps of ghastly ruin to have its site defiled with swinish offerings and pagan shrines. The Temple was doomed to annihilation, because it was the centre and type of an inferior and abrogated worship. And the same year which saw this visible abrogation of Judaism and all its pompous ineffectuality of ceremonies and sacrifices, saw also the great temple of the Capitoline Jupiter reduced to ashes in the fierce faction-fight between Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, and the partisans of Vitellius. Thus, within a few months, the chief shrines of the Jew and the Pagan were polluted with massacre, and flung high into the air their flaming signals of the new faith which was to dominate the world. Their destruction was a beacon-light of the coming fulfilment of the old and awful prophecy, ‘I will overturn, overturn, overturn, saith the Lord, till He come whose right it is.’
The three shadowy Emperors who followed Nero passed away within a few months, like phantoms, in defeat and shame. Galba—old, prosaic, unattractive, niggardly, with his feet so gouty that he could not wear a shoe, and his hands so gouty that he could not hold up a book—had disgusted Rome before six months were over, and was butchered in the streets. His body was left lying where it fell till a common soldier, returning from harvesting, flung down his corn, cut off Galba’s head, and, since there was no hair to hold it by, first hid it in his bosom, and then brought it to Otho with horrible indignities. Otho, hurried to imperial dignity by his freedman and a score of soldiers, was Emperor for ninety-five days, and then was totally defeated by the German legions of Vitellius at the bloody battle of Bedriacum.It happened that one of the legionaries had brought evil tidings, and, being treated partly as a liar and partly as a coward who had fled from battle[T20] drew his sword, and, stabbing himself, fell dead at Otho’s feet. Otho shuddered and recoiled at the sight. ‘Men so brave, men so well-deserving,’ he exclaimed, ‘shall not be further imperilled on my account.’ He might still have held out; he might still have been victorious; but at the age of thirty-seven he had seen enough of life. He had drained to the dregs the cup of its unsatisfying pleasures; he had discounted its hopes and fears. He wrote some kindly letters; divided among his servants what he had at hand; pardoned some deserters; saw any one who wished to see him; and then, hiding a dagger under his pillow, closed the doors and fell fast asleep. He awoke at dawn, and with one blow drove the dagger into his heart. He felt his own total unfitness for Empire. Τί γάρ μοι καὶ μακροῖς αὐλοῖς; ‘What have I to do with long flutes?’ he was often heard to murmur to himself. Voluptuous, unheroic, this ‘sweet and impudent creature’ had, at one time, been more at home in the rites of the Bona Dea than among the banners of the legions. He was half inclined to fancy that he was one of those who are raised to power by a jest of fortune;—but he had been sobered a little by responsibility, and there was a touch of grace in the courage of his end.
His successor, Vitellius, the yet more infamous son of an infamous father, after a reign of seven months, chiefly noticeable for its drunkenness and voracity, was murdered in the streets with every expression of contumely. His body, pierced with multitudes of slight wounds, was first flung down the Gemonian steps, and then dragged through the streets by a hook, and flung into the Tiber.
The good plebeian, Vespasian, inaugurated a respite of simpler manners and better days, in which Rome and its society returned to decency and good sense. A man of robust commonplace and kindly instincts, he won the Romans by his honesty and rough wit. When the Consular Menstrius Florus corrected his pronunciation (as Kemble did that of George III.) and told him that he ought not to say plostra (wagons) but plaustra, he only resented the impertinence when he met him the next day by addressing him, not as Florus, but as Flaurus (φλαῦρος phlauros), or ‘not worth much.’ When a youth came, reeking with perfume, to thank him for an appointment to the Prætorship, Vespasian, with a frown of disgust, said, ‘I would have preferred that you smelt of garlic,’ and cancelled the dandy’s office. Tolerant and fearless, he resented no injuries, and ruled for ten years without making an enemy. Too sensible, and with a conscience too much at ease, for superstitious fears, when a comet was pointed out to him as portentous, he said—alluding to the Roman expression ‘a hairy star’—that, ‘it could not refer to a bald person like himself, but to the King of the Parthians, who had long hair!’ When he felt the first touch of mortal illness, he observed, with a jest at the folly of senatorial apotheosis, ‘I think I am becoming a god.’ He was charged, indeed, with avarice, and the story was told that, when informed of a colossal statue which was to be reared to him at the public expense, he held out the hollow of his hand as though for the money, and said, ‘The pedestal is ready.’ But, if he was parsimonious, it was for the public good, and he returned from the proconsulate of Africa so poor that he had to mortgage all his possessions to his brother Sabinus. A thorough man of business, he was indifferent to parade and pomp. Napoleon I. was probably but half sincere when, on his return from the magnificences of his coronation, he flung his gorgeous robes into the corner, and said that ‘he had never spent so tedious a day in his life;’ but Vespasian was quite in earnest when, on the day of his great Judæan triumph, he found the procession so tardy and tedious that he called himself ‘an old fool who had been deservedly punished for his silly vanity.’
And what shall we say of Titus, who has played a considerable part in our earlier pages? A Marcus Aurelius he was not; nor did he knock at the door of truth so earnestly or sit at the feet of virtue so humbly as did that saintly heathen. Yet there was an infinite charm about him. He was a man of fine presence, of dignified yet winning demeanour, endowed with great personal strength and tenacious memory, eloquent, poetic, accomplished, a splendid rider, a fine swordsman, a patient and skilful general, a soldier of unflinching personal bravery. Josephus is constantly telling us of his firmness, his pity, his stern discipline, his splendid bravery. Again and again he exposed his person as freely as the commonest soldier in his ranks. Again and again he extricated himself from personal peril, and his legions from imminent defeat, with a strength which was unequalled, and a prowess which was contagious. At the siege of Jerusalem he constantly rode near the walls, and on one occasion shot down twelve of its defenders with twelve consecutive arrows. Amid all his heroic labours and anxious responsibilities he lost none of the fascination of his youth. When he left the Province to visit his father, the soldiers, who had already saluted him Emperor, demanded with supplications, and almost with threats, that he would either stay or take them with him. Unjustly suspected of a disloyal intention to found for himself an Eastern kingdom, he hurried to Rhegium, and thence to Puteoli with the utmost possible speed; and when he reached Rome, bursting into his father’s presence, as though to confute the calumny, he embraced him with the touching cry, ‘I have come, my father, I have come!’ He did not escape the sins and temptations of his youth, and his passionate love for Berenice, which she as passionately returned, involved him in discredit. But while he was still the support of his father’s throne, he gave proofs of his faithfulness and self-control, and if he had been guilty of the faults which scandal charges upon him, the change which came over him when he was summoned to the purple was greater than the traditional change of our own hero-king, Henry V. As an Emperor, no vice was visible in him, but many supreme virtues. Deeply as he was attached to Berenice, he dismissed her from the city because Rome condemned an amour which would have been held venial and almost innocent in a Nero or a Domitian. He became chaste and self-controlled, full of munificence, entirely free from avarice. Gracious and generous to all, he acted on the rule ‘that no one should leave the Emperor’s presence with a gloomy brow.’ His famous saying, ‘Friends, I have lost a day,’ was spoken when, at supper-time, he was unable to recall a favour conferred on any one since morning. He courted the goodwill of the people, but without base concessions. Desirous as Pontifex Maximus to keep his hands unstained by the blood of the innocent, he declared ‘that he would rather perish than destroy.’ Nothing was more touching than the forgiving lenity with which he tolerated the plots and hatred of his execrable brother, Domitian. Aware of his wicked designs, he only took him aside secretly, and begged him with tears to act as a brother should. A deep misgiving oppressed his soul. At the end of the games which he had displayed to the people, he wept abundantly, and, oppressed by evil omens, started for his Sabine farm, full of grief. Stricken down with fever before he reached his home, he drew back the curtains of his litter, and looking heavenwards, he murmured, ‘I do not deserve that my life should be thus cut short, nor have I done any deed to be repented of, except one.’ What that one sin was he did not reveal, and no one could conjecture. He died in the same homely villa as his father, and, though he had only reigned two years and three months, in that brief time he had earned an affection which expressed itself in a genuine outburst of eulogy and regret, and which won for him the title of ‘the darling of the human race.’ But how vain a thing is glory! On the Arch of Titus the hero is represented being borne heavenward by an eagle with outspread wings. Vain triumphs! Vain and profane apotheosis! Little did it avail him to have won the passionate affection of his subjects! There is something infinitely sad in his shortened days and his brief tenure of power. It is only too probable that he fell a victim to the machinations of his brother, and died by poison secretly administered. And Destiny—let us say rather the will of God, of which he was the instrument—forced him, against his own wish, to be the exterminator of the city and—had extermination been possible—of the nationality of the chosen people. To them the darling of the human race is Titus ha-Rashang, ‘Titus the Wicked.’ They fable how, when he boasted that he had escaped vengeance, after escaping from a storm at sea, God sent a tiny gnat, which crept up his nostril into his brain. On his brain it fed, and caused him, day and night excruciating agonies. Finding once that it ceased to gnaw for an instant on hearing the banging of an anvil, he had an anvil constantly banged with a huge hammer at his side. But the creature soon became accustomed to the sound! When Titus died, it was taken out of his brain, and found to be of the size of a bird, and to be furnished with a beak and claws of iron. Such is the torment which hatred devised for the best of the Twelve Cæsars, and the best but one or two of all the Emperors for three hundred years. But the sad truth is that, apart from such frenetic imaginations, the last years of the life of Titus were full of anxiety and disquietude, for which he did not find in a sounding philosophy the alleviation which he would have found abundantly in a humble faith.