Any Christian might have predicted the result; one would have thought that even a pagan philosopher might have been enlightened enough to observe it. We often quote the lines--
"The child is father of the man,"
and
"Just as the twig is bent the tree inclines."
But the ancients were quite as familiar with the same truth under other images. "The cask," wrote Horace, "will long retain the odour of that which has once been poured into it when new." Quintilian, describing the depraved influences which surrounded even the infancy of a Roman child, said, "From these arise first familiarity, then nature."
No one has laid down the principle more emphatically than Seneca himself. Take, for instance, the following passage from his Letters, on evil conversation. "The conversation," he says, "of these men is very injurious; for, even if it does no immediate harm, it leaves its seeds in the mind, and follows us even when we have gone from the speakers,--a plague sure to spring up in future resurrection. Just as those who have heard a symphony carry in their ears the tune and sweetness of the song which entangles their thoughts, and does not suffer them to give their whole energy to serious matters; so the conversation of flatterers and of those who praise evil things, lingers longer in the mind than the time of hearing it. Nor is it easy to shake out of the soul a sweet sound; it pursues us, and lingers with us, and at perpetual intervals recurs. Our ears therefore must be closed to evil words, and that to the very first we hear. For when they have once begun and been admitted, they acquire more and more audacity;" and so he adds a little afterwards, "our days flow on, and irreparable life passes beyond our reach." Yet he who wrote these noble words was not only a flatterer to his imperial pupil, but is charged with having deliberately encouraged him in a foolish passion for a freedwoman named Acte, into which Nero fell. It was of course his duty to recall the wavering affections of the youthful Emperor to his betrothed Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, to whom he had been bound by every tie of honour and affection, and his union with whom gave some shadow of greater legitimacy to his practical usurpation. But princes rarely love the wives to whom they owe any part of their elevation. Henry VII. treated Elizabeth of York with many slights. The union of William III. with Mary was overshadowed by her superior claim to the royal power; and Nero from the first regarded with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca's part to urge upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking into the degraded position of an accomplice with young profligates like Otho, as the confident of a dishonourable love. Such conduct, which would have done discredit to a mere courtier, was to a Stoic disgraceful. But the principle which led to it is the very principle to which we have been pointing,--the principle of moral compromise, the principle of permitting and encouraging what is evil in the vain hope of thereby preventing what is worse. It is hardly strange that Seneca should have erred in this way, for compromise was the character of his entire life. He appears to have set before himself the wholly impossible task of being both a genuine philosopher and a statesman under the Caesars. He prided himself on being not only a philosopher, but also a man of the world, and the consequence was, that in both capacities he failed. It was as true in Paganism as it is in Christianity, that a man must make his choice between duty and interest--between the service of Mammon and the service of God. No man ever gained anything but contempt and ruin by incessantly halting between two opinions.
And by not taking that lofty line of duty which a Zeno or an Antisthenes would have taken, Seneca became more or less involved in some of the most dreadful events of Nero's reign. Every one of the terrible doubts under which his reputation has suffered arose from his having permitted the principle of expedience to supercede the laws of virtue. One or two of these events we must briefly narrate.
We have already pointed out that the Nemesis which for so many years had been secretly dogging the footsteps of Agrippina made her tremble under the weight of its first cruel blows when she seemed to have attained the highest summit of her ambition. Very early indeed Nero began to be galled and irritated by the insatiate assumption and swollen authority of "the best of mothers." The furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca's concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the youthful son of Claudius, with even more suspicion and hatred than that with which he regarded Octavia. Kings have rarely been able to abstain from acts of severity against those who might become claimants to the throne. The feelings of King John towards Prince Arthur, of Henry IV. towards the Earl of March, of Mary towards Lady Jane Grey, of Elizabeth towards Mary Stuart, of King James towards Lady Arabella Stuart, resembled, but probably by no means equalled in intensity, those of Nero towards his kinsman and adoptive brother. To show him any affection was a dangerous crime, and it furnished a sufficient cause for immediate removal if any attendant behaved towards him with fidelity. Such a line of treatment foreshadowed the catastrophe which was hastened by the rage of Agrippina. She would go, she said, and take with her to the camp the noble boy who was now of full age to undertake those imperial duties which a usurper was exercising in virtue of crimes which she was now prepared to confess. Then let the mutilated Burrus and the glib-tongued Seneca see whether they could be a match for the son of Claudius and the daughter of Germanicus. Such language, uttered with violent gestures and furious imprecations, might well excite the alarm of the timid Nero. And that alarm was increased by a recent circumstance, which showed that all the ancestral spirit was not dead in the breast of Britannicus. During the festivities of the Saturnalia, which were kept by the ancients with all the hilarity of the modern Christmas, Nero had been elected by lot as "governor of the feast," and, in that capacity, was entitled to issue his orders to the guests. To the others he issued trivial mandates which would not make them blush; but Britannicus in violation of every principle of Roman decorum, was ordered to stand up in the middle and sing a song. The boy, inexperienced as yet even in sober banquets, and wholly unaccustomed to drunken convivialities, might well have faltered; but he at once rose, and with a steady voice began a strain--probably the magnificent wail of Andromache over the fall of Troy, which has been preserved to us from a lost play of Ennius--in which he indicated his own disgraceful ejection from his hereditary rights. His courage and his misfortunes woke in the guests a feeling of pity which night and wine made them less careful to disguise. From that moment the fate of Britannicus was sealed. Locusta, the celebrated poisoner of ancient Rome, was summoned to the councils of Nero to get rid of Britannicus, as she had already been summoned to those of his mother when she wished to disembarrass herself of Britannicus's father. The main difficulty was to avoid discovery, since nothing was eaten or drunk at the imperial table till it had been tasted by the praegustator. To avoid this difficulty a very hot draught was given to Britannicus, and when he wished for something cooler a swift and subtle poison was dropped into the cold water with which it was tempered. The boy drank, and instantly sank from his seat, gasping and speechless. The guests started up in consternation, and fixed their eyes on Nero. He with the utmost coolness assured them that it was merely a fit of epilepsy, to which his brother was accustomed, and from which he would soon recover. The terror and agitation of Agrippina showed to every one that she at least was guiltless of this dark deed; but the unhappy Octavia, young as she was, and doubly terrible on every ground as the blow must have been to her, sat silent and motionless, having already learnt by her misfortunes the awful necessity for suppressing under an impassive exterior her affections and sorrows, her hopes and fears. In the dead of night, amid storms and murky rain, which were thought to indicate the wrath of heaven, the last of the Claudii was hastily and meanly hurried into a dishonourable grave.
We may believe that in this crime Seneca had no share whatever, but we can hardly believe that he was ignorant of it after it had been committed, or that he had no share in the intensely hypocritical edict in which Nero bewailed the fact of his adoptive brother's death, excused his hurried funeral, and threw himself on the additional indulgence and protection of the Senate. Nero showed the consciousness of guilt by the immense largesses which he distributed to the most powerful of his friends, "Nor were there wanting men," says Tacitus, in a most significant manner, "who accused certain people, notorious for their high professions, of having at that period divided among them villas and houses as though they had been so much spoil." There can hardly be a doubt that the great historian intends by this remark to point at Seneca, to whom he tries to be fair, but whom he could never quite forgive for his share in the disgraces of Nero's reign. That avarice was one of Seneca's temptations is too probable; that expediency was a guiding principle of his conduct is but too evident; and for a man with such a character to rebut an innuendo is never an easy task. Nay more, it was after this foul event, at the close of Nero's first year, that Seneca addressed him in the extravagant and glowing language of his treatise on Clemency. "The quality of mercy," and the duty of princes to practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide. Imagine some Jewish Pharisee,--a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel--pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca's consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries.
This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of Nero's Quinquennium, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of his mother. A charge of pretended conspiracy was invented against her, and it is probable that but for the intervention of Burrus, who with Seneca was appointed to examine into the charge, she would have fallen a very sudden victim to the cowardly credulity and growing hatred of her son. The extraordinary and eloquent audacity of her defence created a reaction in her favour, and secured the punishment of her accusers. But the ties of affection could not long unite two such wicked and imperious natures as those of Agrippina and her son. All history shows that there can be no real love between souls exceptionally wicked, and that this is still more impossible when the alliance between them has been sealed by a complicity in crime. Nero had now fallen into a deep infatuation for Poppaea Sabina, the beautiful wife of Otho, and she refused him her hand so long as he was still under the control of his mother. At this time Agrippina, as the just consequence of her many crimes, was regarded by all classes with a fanaticism of hatred which in Poppaea Sabina was intensified by manifest self-interest. Nero, always weak, had long regarded his mother with real terror and disgust, and he scarcely needed the urgency of constant application to make him long to get rid of her. But the daughter of Germanicus could not be openly destroyed, while her own precautions helped to secure her against secret assassination. It only remained to compass her death by treachery. Nero had long compelled her to live in suburban retirement, and had made no attempt to conceal the open rapture which existed between them. Anicetus, admiral of the fleet at Misenum, and a former instructor of Nero, suggested the expedient of a pretended public reconciliation, in virtue of which Agrippina should be invited to Baiae, and on her return should be placed on board a vessel so constructed as to come to pieces by the removal of bolts. The disaster might then be attributed to a mere naval accident, and Nero might make the most ostentatious display of his affection and regret.