CHAPTER V
THE MOTHER OF NERO
Tacitus has given us a spirited picture of life in the Imperial palace during the months which followed the execution of Messalina. Claudius himself had sunk into a state of drowsy indifference when the storm excited by his discovery had spent itself. “Where is the Empress?” he asked, as he sat at supper the night after her death, and noticed the empty place on the couch. Narcissus told him that she was dead, and he asked no more. But the palace about his slumbering figure soon began to hum with conflicting intrigues for the succession to her chamber. Ladies who had visited the Palatine with nervous prudence while Messalina lived now came to display their charms, and express their tenderness, to the doting Emperor. From the sombre night of the tragedy Rome passed with relief to the light enjoyment of the new comedy. The freedmen, who surrounded and controlled Claudius, selected their candidates.
Claudius had inserted one sentiment of his own in the speech which Narcissus had induced him to make to the Prætorian Guards. He had sworn that he would not marry again. There were ladies in his household, such as Calpurnia and Cleopatra, who would encourage the resolution; but the freedmen decided that he was bound to capitulate under so fair a siege, and it would be better to have some share in the making of the new Empress. Each of the Greeks chose a different lady. Narcissus, who had been promoted to high public service for his zeal, favoured the suit of Ælia Pætina, whom Claudius had lightly divorced twenty-one years before. Callistus took up the cause of Lollia Paulina, the wealthy and beautiful woman whom Caligula had torn from her husband and used so unjustly. The steward, Pallas, was more fortunate in his choice. He advocated marriage with Agrippina; and, as the mind of Agrippina coincided more decisively with that of her champion than seems to have happened in the case of her rivals, his campaign succeeded. She discovered a most tender and considerate affection for her uncle, visited him assiduously, and persuaded him to betroth his daughter Octavia to her son Lucius Domitius (later Nero).
Octavia was already betrothed, and Agrippina is said to have removed the first obstacle to her designs by a cruel and unscrupulous act. We are told that she induced, and it is at least clear that she permitted, the sycophantic courtier Vitellius, who favoured her suit, to accuse the young man, to whom Octavia was betrothed, of incest with his daughter-in-law. Tacitus has so mean an estimate of the young people and their generation that he does not regard the charge as a serious libel. He insists, however, that Agrippina had the case against them forged, and thus opened her dark Imperial career with a crime.
We are now approaching the generation in which the great historian lived, and we are considering the very woman whose memoirs furnished him with his more serious charges against her rivals and predecessors. It may therefore seem strange that, if we are to follow our authorities with docility, we must ascribe a very vicious and unscrupulous character to Agrippina herself. We have rejected the rumour that she poisoned her second husband, but that is by no means the only charge that is brought against her before she married Claudius. The authorities uniformly assert that she had had incestuous relations with Caligula in her early teens, had been notorious for her amours during the life of Messalina, and now very flagrantly placed such honour as she had at the disposal of Claudius. These charges we cannot control. We shall find even more serious accusations against her later, and shall have to regard them with reserve or frank incredulity. It was the literary fashion to make a consort of the Cæsars imperial in her vices. On the whole, however, we are compelled to think that the eldest daughter of Agrippina and Germanicus had the taint of her stock. She inherited the virile ambition of her mother, and she had even less scruple in pursuing it. The best that can be said for her is that she aimed rather at making the future of her son than her own. And when that son proves to be the Emperor Nero, the murderer of his mother, we are disposed to read her record with the lenient eye of pity.
When the elder Agrippina had been banished by Tiberius, as we saw, in the year 12 A.D., her children were brought up in the house of their grandmother Antonia. In this plain home of old Roman virtue Caligula is said to have infected and corrupted all his sisters. Agrippina left it, in her thirteenth year, to marry Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus. As the authorities are sharply divided in regard to his character, we cannot trace his influence in the development of her character. He died in the year 40, leaving her with a three-year-old boy, Lucius Domitius. Agrippina was still a young and beautiful woman, and is said to have availed herself of the loose morals of Roman society until, as we saw, the attitude of Messalina forced her to marry. She was soon a widow for the second time, with considerable wealth. Her ambition revived at the death of Messalina, and she paid the most winning and flagrant attentions to Claudius. We should go beyond the letter of the chronicles if we suggested that she bribed Vitellius and Pallas to promote her suit. It is enough to say that they overcame the reluctance of Claudius, and they profited materially by her accession to the throne.
Claudius professed that he had a scruple about marrying his niece, and proposed to adopt her as his daughter. That empty honour was hardly recompense enough for the daily contemplation of his senility and sensuality. Vitellius induced him to submit his delicate feeling to the Senate and the people, and then artfully represented to the Senators that, if Claudius married Agrippina, she might rid them of the hated influence of the freedmen. Tacitus, whose disdain for the obsequious Senate of the early Empire always aggravates his comments on their conduct, describes how they raced each other to the palace to inform Claudius of their decision, and how the people not improbably incited by Vitellius, assembled below the Palatine Hill and clamoured for the marriage. The obtuse and weak-willed Claudius assented, and a few days later, in the year 49, Agrippina became the sixth Empress of Rome. Little did she dream that she was entering upon the last decade of her eventful life, and that it would close with the most ghastly horror.
She was in her thirty-third year, Claudius in his fifty-eighth. Years of sensual indulgence had not improved his character or his intelligence, and no one in Rome can have expected him to live more than the few years which remained for him. Agrippina was looking to the time when she would be sole mistress of the Empire. The fine statue of her which is exhibited in the Lateran Museum has a moral physiognomy so concordant with the authentic record of her career that we picture her to ourselves with confidence. In face and figure she is all that the word imperial suggests to the imagination. Haughty, strong, and reposeful in her self-reliance, she has lost the last shade of apprehension with the passing of Messalina, and has the majestic air of a mistress of the world. Her low brow and large, finely-carved oval face are said by some physiognomists to have every mark of purity and refinement, but the close observer will discover in her features only such a refinement of passion as her ambition would lead us to expect. In a word, it is the face of a woman who will not stoop to vice or crime to gratify a sensual impulse, but may have recourse to either when her ambition lends it a certain expediency.
