Piso's conspiracy caused him to order a massacre of patricians, which left terrible rancour in its wake; in an access of fury, he killed Poppæa; he began to imagine accusations against the richest men of the Empire, in order to confiscate their estates. His prodigality and the general carelessness had completely disorganised the finances of the Empire; he had to recur to all kinds of expedients to find money. Finally he undertook a great artistic tour in Greece—that province which had been the mother of arts—to play in its most celebrated theatres. This time indignation burst all bounds. The armies of Gaul and Spain, for a long time irregularly paid, led by their officers, revolted. This act of energy sufficed. On the 9th of June, 68 A.D., abandoned by all the world, Nero was compelled to commit suicide.

So the family of Julius Cæsar disappears from history. After so much greatness, genius, and wisdom, the fall may seem petty and almost laughable. It is absurd to lose the Empire for the pleasure of singing in a theatre. And yet, bizarre as the end may seem, it was not the result of the vices, the follies, and the crimes of Nero alone. In his way, Nero himself was, like all members of his family, the victim of the contradictory situation of his times.

It has been repeated for centuries, that the foundation of monarchy was the great mission of Cæsar's family. I believe this to be a great mistake. The lot of the family would have been simple and easy, if it had been able to found a monarchy. The family of Cæsar had to solve another problem, much more difficult,—in fact insoluble; a problem that may be compared, from a certain point of view, to that which confronted the Bonapartes in the nineteenth century. The Bonapartes found old monarchical, legitimistic, theocratic Europe agitated by forces which, although making it impossible for the ancient regime to continue, were not yet able to establish a new society, entirely democratic, republican, and lay. The family of Cæsar found the opposite situation: an old military and aristocratic republic, which was changing into an intellectual and monarchical civilisation, based on equality, but opposing formidable resistance to the forces of transformation. In these situations the two families tried in all ways to reconcile things not to be conciliated, to realise the impossible: one, the popular monarchy and imperial democracy; the other, the monarchical republic and Orientalised Latinity. The contradiction was for both families the law of life, the cause of greatness; this explains why neither was ever willing to extricate itself from it, in spite of the advice of philosophers, the malcontent of the masses, the pressure of parties, and the evident dangers. This contradiction was also the fatality of both families, the cause of their ruin; it explains the shortness of their power, their restless existence, and the continuous catastrophes that opened the way to the final crash.

Waterloo and Sedan, the exile of Julia and the tragic failure of Tiberius's government, all the misfortunes great and small which struck the two families, were always consequences of the insoluble contradiction they tried to solve. You have had a perfectly characteristic example of it in the brief story I have been telling you. Agrippina becomes an object of universal hatred and dies by assassination because she defends tradition; her son disregards tradition and, chiefly for this very reason, is finally forced to kill himself. Doubtless the fate of the Bonapartes is less tragic, because they, at least, escaped the infamous legend created by contemporary hatred against Cæsar's family, and artfully developed by the historians of successive generations. I hope to be able to prove in the continuation of my Greatness and Decline of Rome, that the history of Cæsar's family, as it has been told by Tacitus and Suetonius, is a sensational novel, a legend containing not much more truth than the legend of Atrides. The family of Cæsar, placed in the centre of the great struggle going on in Rome between the old Roman militarism, and the intellectual civilisation of the Orient, between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between Asiatic mysticism and traditional religion, between egoism over-excited by culture and wealth, and the supreme interests of the species, had to injure too many interests, to offend too many susceptibilities. The injured interests, the offended susceptibilities, revenged themselves through defaming legends.

The case of Nero is particularly instructive. He was half insane and a veritable criminal: it would be absurd to attempt in his favour the historical rehabilitation to which other members of the family, Tiberius for instance, have a right. And yet it has not been enough for succeeding generations that he atoned for his follies and crimes by death and infamy. They have fallen upon his memory: they have overlooked that extenuating circumstance of considerable importance, his age when elected; they have gone so far as to make him into a unique monster, no longer human and even the Antichrist!

Surely he first shed Christian blood; but if we consider the tendency he represented in Roman history, we can hardly classify him among the great enemies of Christianity. Unwittingly, Augustus and Tiberius were two great enemies of the Christian teachings, because they sought by all means to reinforce Roman tradition, and struggled against everything that would one day form the essence of Christianity—cosmopolitism, mysticism, the domination of intellectual people, the influence of the philosophical and metaphysical spirit on life. Nero, on the contrary, with his repeated efforts to spread Orientalism in Rome, and chiefly with his taste for art, was unconsciously a powerful collaborator of future Christian propaganda. We must not forget this: the masses in the Empire became Christian only because they had first been imbued with the Oriental spirit.

Nero and St. Paul, the man that wished to enjoy all, and the man that suffered all, are in their time two extreme antitheses: with the passing of centuries, they become two collaborators. While one suffered hunger and persecution to preach the doctrine of redemption, the other called to Italy and to Rome, to amuse himself, the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, musicians, whom Rome had always rebuffed.

Both disappeared, cut off by the violent current of their epoch; centuries went by: the name of the Emperor grew infamous, while that of the tent-maker radiated glory. In the midst of the immense disorder that accompanied the dissolution of the Roman Empire, as the bonds among men relaxed, and the human mind seemed to be incapable of reasoning and understanding, the disciples of the saint realised that the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, and musicians of the Emperor could collect the masses around the churches and make them patiently listen to what they could still comprehend of Paul's sublime morality. When you regard St. Mark or Notre Dame or any other stupendous cathedral of the Middle Ages, like museums for the work of art they hold, you see the luminous symbol of this paradoxical alliance between victim and executioner.

Only through the alliance of Paul and Nero could the Church dominate the disorder of the Middle Ages, and, from antiquity to the modern world, carry through that formidable storm the essential principles from which our civilisation developed: a decisive proof that, if history in its details is a continuous strife, as a whole it is the inevitable final reconciliation of antagonistic forces, obtained in spite of the resistance of individuals and by sacrificing them.

Julia and Tiberius