It was by this view of the case that the freedman Narcissus roused the inert spirit and timid indignation of the injured Emperor. While the wild revelry of the wedding ceremony was at its height, Vettius Valens, a well-known physician of the day, had in the license of the festival struggled up to the top of a lofty tree, and when they asked him what he saw, he replied in words which, though meant for jest, were full of dreadful significance, "I see a fierce storm approaching from Ostia." He had scarcely uttered the words when first an uncertain rumour, and then numerous messengers brought the news that Claudius knew all, and was coming to take vengeance. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled guests. Silius, as though nothing had happened, went to transact his public duties in the Forum; Messalina instantly sending for her children, Octavia and Britannicus, that she might meet her husband with them by her side, implored the protection of Vibidia, the eldest of the chaste virgins of Vesta, and, deserted by all but three companions, fled on foot and unpitied, through the whole breadth of the city, until she reached the Ostian gate, and mounted the rubbish-cart of a market gardener which happened to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the looks and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and the narrative of her crimes, and, getting rid of the Vestal by promising her that the cause of Messalina should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first to the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs of his guilt, and then to the camp of the Praetorians, where swift vengeance was taken on the whole band of those who had been involved in Messalina's crimes. She meanwhile, in alternative paroxysms of fury and abject terror, had taken refuge in the garden of Lucullus, which she had coveted and made her own by injustice. Claudius, who had returned home, and had recovered some of his facile equanimity in the pleasures of the table, showed signs of relenting; but Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch the Empress. They found her prostrate on the ground at the feet of her mother Lepida, with whom in her prosperity she had quarrelled, but who now came to pity and console her misery, and to urge her to that voluntary death which alone could save her from imminent and more cruel infamy. But the mind of Messalina, like that of Nero afterwards, was so corrupted by wickedness that not even such poor nobility was left in her as is implied in the courage of despair. While she wasted the time in tears and lamentations, a noise was heard of battering at the doors, and the tribune stood by her in stern silence, the freedman with slavish vituperation. First she took the dagger in her irresolute hand, and after she had twice stabbed herself in vain, the tribune drove home the fatal blow, and the corpse of Messalina, like that of Jezebel, lay weltering in its blood in the plot of ground of which her crimes had robbed its lawful owner. Claudius, still lingering at his dinner, was informed that she had perished, and neither asked a single question at the time, nor subsequently displayed the slightest sign of anger, of hatred, of pity, or of any human emotion.
The absolute silence of Seneca respecting the woman who had caused him the bitterest anguish and humiliation of his life is, as we have remarked already, a strange and significant phenomenon. It is clearly not due to accident, for the vices which he is incessantly describing and denouncing would have found in this miserable woman their most flagrant illustration, nor could contemporary history have furnished a more apposite example of the vindication by her fate of the stern majesty of the moral law. But yet, though Seneca had every reason to loathe her character and to detest her memory, though he could not have rendered to his patrons a more welcome service than by blackening her reputation, he never so much as mentions her name. And this honourable silence gives us a favourable insight into his character. For it can only be due to his pitying sense of the fact that even Messalina, bad as she undoubtedly was, had been judged already by a higher Power, and had met her dread punishment at the hand of God. It has been conjectured, with every appearance of probability, that the blackest of the scandals which were believed and circulated respecting her had their origin in the published autobiography of her deadly enemy and victorious successor. The many who had had a share in Messalina's fall would be only too glad to poison every reminiscence of her life; and the deadly implacable hatred of the worst woman who ever lived would find peculiar gratification in scattering every conceivable hue of disgrace over the acts of a rival whose young children it was her dearest object to supplant. That Seneca did not deign to chronicle even of an enemy what Agrippina was not ashamed to write,--that he spared one whom it was every one's interest and pleasure to malign,--that he regarded her terrible fall as a sufficient claim to pity, as it was a sufficient Nemesis upon her crimes,--is a trait in the character of the philosopher which has hardly yet received the credit which it deserves.
CHAPTER X.
AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO.
Scarcely had the grave closed over Messalina when the court was plunged into the most violent factions about the appointment of her successor. There were three principal candidates for the honour of the aged Emperor's hand. They were his former wife, Aelia Petina, who had only been divorced in consequence of trivial disagreements, and who was supported by Narcissus; Lollia Paulina, so celebrated in antiquity for her beauty and splendour, and who for a short time had been the wife of Caius; and Agrippina the younger, the daughter of the great Germanicus, and the niece of Claudius himself. Claudius, indeed, who had been as unlucky as Henry VIII. himself in the unhappiness which had attended his five experiments of matrimony, had made the strongest possible asseverations that he would never again submit himself to such a yoke. But he was so completely a tool in the hands of his own courtiers that no one attached the slightest importance to anything which he had said.
The marriage of an uncle with his own niece was considered a violation of natural laws, and was regarded with no less horror among the Romans than it would be among ourselves. But Agrippina, by the use of means the most unscrupulous, prevailed over all her rivals, and managed her interests with such consummate skill that, before many months had elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and the Empress of Rome.
With this princess the destinies of Seneca were most closely intertwined, and it will enable us the better to understand his position, and his writings, if we remember that all history discloses to us no phenomenon more portentous and terrible than that presented to us in the character of Agrippina, the mother of Nero.
Of the virtues of her great parents she, like their other children, had inherited not one; and she had exaggerated their family tendencies into passions which urged her into every form of crime. Her career from the very cradle had been a career of wickedness, nor had any one of the many fierce vicissitudes of her life called forth in her a single noble or amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum (afterwards called in her honour Colonia Agrippina, and still retaining its name in the form Cologne), she lost her father at the age of three, and her mother (by banishment) at the age of twelve. She was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she detested. At the age of fourteen she was married to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles of his day. The gossiping biographies of the time still retain some anecdotes of his cruelty and selfishness. They tell us how he once, without the slightest remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on the Appian Road; how on another occasion he knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had given him a hasty answer; and how, when his friend congratulated him on the birth of his son (the young Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero), he brutally remarked that from people like himself and Agrippina could only be born some monster destined for the public ruin.
Domitius was forty years old when he married Agrippina, and the young Nero was not born till nine years afterwards. Whatever there was of possible affection in the tigress-nature of Agrippina was now absorbed in the person of her child. For that child, from its cradle to her own death by his means, she toiled and sinned. The fury of her own ambition, inextricably linked with the uncontrollable fierceness of her love for this only son, henceforth directed every action of her life. Destiny had made her the sister of one Emperor; intrigue elevated her into the wife of another; her own crimes made her the mother of a third. And at first sight her career might have seemed unusually successful, for while still in the prime of life she was wielding, first in the name of her husband, and then in that of her son, no mean share in the absolute government of the Roman world. But meanwhile that same unerring retribution, whose stealthy footsteps in the rear of the triumphant criminal we can track through page after page of history, was stealing nearer and nearer to her with uplifted hand. When she had reached the dizzy pinnacle of gratified love and pride to which she had waded through so many a deed of sin and blood, she was struck down into terrible ruin and violent shameful death, by the hand of that very son for whose sake she had so often violated the laws of virtue and integrity, and spurned so often the pure and tender obligations which even the heathen had been taught by the voice of God within their conscience to recognize and to adore.