A half-suppressed groan from Onesimus stopped the conversation.
‘I know not what to do,’ said Nereus. ‘Go back, my child, to your cell and to your distaff. I will see you soon. And you,’ he said, ‘thrice-wretched boy, come with me.’
He dragged Onesimus from the ground, and was in such a transport of wrath that he could not refrain from shaking him by the shoulders with the roughest and most contemptuous violence, before he thrust him into the house, and into the cell which had been assigned to him. Then, calling two of his fellow-slaves, Stachys and Amplias, Christians like himself, whom he could implicitly trust, he bade them bind Onesimus hand and foot, and leave him, not unwatched, till he should have time to consider his case.
CHAPTER XIV
MOTHER AND SON
‘Asper et immitis, breviter vis omnia dicam?
Dispeream si te mater amare potest.’
Sueton. Tib. 59.
Nero was now firmly seated on the throne of the Empire. Its cares sat lightly on him. The government went on admirably without him. He had nothing to do but to glut himself with enjoyments, and to make what he could of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.
At first, like one dazed with a sudden outburst of light, he had been unable to understand the immensity of his own power. For the first month of his reign he could hardly realise that he was more than a boy. He had always been passionately fond of chariot races, which as a boy he had not been permitted to frequent. One day, while at his lessons, he had been deploring to his companions the fate of a charioteer of the green faction who had been thrown out of his chariot and dragged to death by his own horses. His master, overhearing the conversation, reproved him, and the boy, with a clever and ready lie, said, ‘I was only talking about Hector being dragged round the walls of Troy by Achilles.’ And now he might watch the races all day long and plunge into the hottest rivalry of the factions, and neither in this pursuit nor in any other was there a single human being to say him nay.
The only thing which troubled him was the jealous interference of his mother. Agrippina still clutched with desperate tenacity at the vanishing fruits of the ambition for the sake of which all her crimes had been committed. She had sold her soul, and was beating back the conviction that she had sold it for nought. How could that slight boy of seventeen, whom as a child she had so often chastised with her own hand, dream of resisting her? Was not her nature, compared with his, as adamant to clay? She had been a princess of the blood from infancy, surrounded by near relatives who had been adored in life and deified after death; she had enjoyed power during two reigns, and now at last she had fancied that she would control the Empire for the remainder of her life. Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia? Was not her indomitable purpose even more intense? She forgot that Livia had been, what Caligula called her, Ulysses stolatus, ‘a Ulysses in petticoats,’ a woman with absolute control over her own emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of a wild passion which ruined her caution and precipitated her end.