Et patiens operum exiguoque assueta juventus,
Sacra Deum, sanctique patres.’
Virg. Georg. ii. 467.
Octavia was left in the comparative desertion of the Villa Castor, without even the homely companionship of Vespasian’s wife. The respectable guests had departed. There was scarcely a person about her to whom she could speak. As for her young husband, he treated her with habitual neglect and open scorn. His conduct towards her was due partly to the indifference which he had always felt, partly to jealousy—lest he should be thought to owe the Empire to his union with her. He therefore followed his own devices; and she desired no closer intercourse with him, for she shrank from the satyr which lay beneath his superficial graces. She was best pleased that he should be out of her sight. The void of an unloved heart was preferable to the scenes which took place between them when Nero’s worst qualities were evoked by the repulsion which she could not wholly conceal. Accustomed to hourly adulation, it was intolerable to him that from those who constituted his home circle he never received the shadow of a compliment. He was disturbed by the sense that those who knew him most intimately saw through him most completely. His mother did not abstain from telling him what he really was with an almost brutal frankness; his wife seemed to shrink from him as though there were pollution in his touch.
As there was little occasion for him to pay any regard to conventionalities in the retirement of Subiaco, he rarely paid the Empress even a formal visit—rarely even crossed the bridge which divided one villa from the other.
Octavia spent the long hours in loneliness. She sometimes relieved the tedium of her days by sending loving letters to her brother at Phalacrine, and sometimes summoned one of the young slave-maidens to sit and read to her. While Nero associated with the most worthless slaves, Octavia selected for her attendants the girls whose modest demeanour had won her notice, and whom she generally found to be Christians. Christianity, though overwhelmed with slanders, was not yet suppressed by law; and in the lowest ranks of society, where no one cared what religion any one held, the sole reason which induced the slaves to conceal their faith was the ridicule which the acknowledgment of it involved. The cross, which was in those days the gibbet of the vilest malefactors, was to all the world an emblem only of shame and horror. It was a thing scarcely to be mentioned, because its associations of disgrace and agony were so intense as to disturb the equanimity of the luxurious. And when a Christian slave was taunted with the gibe that he worshipped ‘a crucified malefactor,’ how could he explain a truth which was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness?
Octavia, whom sorrow had taught to be kind, was gentle in her demeanour to her slaves. The multitude of girls who waited on a patrician matron had a terrible time of it when their mistresses happened to be in an ill-humour. The gilded boudoirs of the Aventine not unfrequently rang with shrieks. As one entered the stately hall one heard the clanking chain of the ostiarius, who, with his dog and his staff, occupied the little cell by the entrance; and if a visitor came a little too soon for the banquet he might be greeted by the cries which followed the whistling strokes of the scourge, or might meet some slave-girl with dishevelled hair and bleeding cheeks, rushing from the room of a mistress whom she had infuriated by the accidental displacement of a curl. The slaves of Octavia had no such cruelties to dread. Lydus, who kept her chair; Hilara, who arranged her robes; Aurelia, who had charge of her lap-dog; Aponia, who adorned her tresses; Verania, who prepared her sandals, had nothing to fear from her. There was not one of her slaves who did not love the young mistress, whose lot seemed less happy than that of the humblest of them all.
And thus it happened that Tryphæna and others of her slaves were not afraid to speak freely, when she seemed to invite their confidence. From Britannicus she had heard what Pomponia had taught him; she had found from these meek followers of the ‘foreign superstition,’ that their beliefs and practice were inconceivably unlike the caricatures of them which were current among the populace. Because all men hated them, they were accused of hating all men; but Octavia found that love, no less than purity and meekness, was among their most essential duties. She was obliged to exercise the extremest caution in the expression of her own opinions, but she felt an interest deeper than she could express in all that Tryphæna told her of the chief doctrines of Christianity. And though she could scarcely form any judgment on what she heard, she felt a sense of support in truths which, if they did not convince her reason, yet kindled her imagination and touched her heart. One doctrine of the Christians came home to her with quickening power—the doctrine of the life everlasting. In Paganism that doctrine had no practical existence. The poets’ dream of meadows of asphodel and islands of the blest, where Achilles and Tydides unbound the helmets from their shadowy hair, and where the thin eidola of kings and heroes pursued a semblance of their earthly life, had little meaning for her. Like Britannicus, she was fond of reading the best Greek poets. But there was no hopefulness in them. In Pindar she read—
‘By night, by day,