Wounded by the falling timbers, exhausted by the struggle, stricken to the heart by the brutality of her son, she nevertheless rallied at once, and devised a fresh plan. She calmly sent a message to Nero that, by the favour of the gods, she had survived the wreck of the galley which he had given her, but requested that he would not come to visit her until her wound was healed. Without a word to her attendants about the horrible plot, she ordered the remedies for her condition, and trusted that Nero would repent. Through the remaining hours of the night she lay on her couch, with one maid in attendance, her room feebly lit by a single light. The whole country without was alive with men. The shore was lit up with their torches, and they gathered about the house to express their joy that Agrippina had escaped shipwreck on the very night of so auspicious a reconciliation. As the first light of dawn broke on the encircling hills, Anicetus and his men entered the house with Nero’s reply. She read something of its tenor in their faces, and said to their leader: “Hast thou come to visit me? Then tell my son that I have recovered. Hast thou come to slay me? Then I say it is not my son who sent thee.” A sailor struck her over the head with a stick, and she saw that the end had come. Tearing aside her loose robe, and baring her white body to the men, she said sadly: “Strike here, Anicetus, for it was here that Nero was born.” She fell dead under a shower of blows.
Nero had heard that his mother had escaped. Dreading that she might stir into flame the resentment of Rome, he called a council of his friends. Seneca is said to have been silent, Burrus indignant. At that moment Agrippina’s chamberlain entered with her message. In a flash of cunning Anicetus threw a sword at his feet, and pretended that he had been sent by Agrippina to kill Nero. The Emperor accepted the sordid pretext, and, as Burrus bluntly refused to send his soldiers to execute her, Anicetus gladly charged himself with the task. He was appointed admiral of one of the fleets for his services. It is even recorded, though details like this must always be regarded with reserve, that when the servants bore their mistress’s body to the garden, and stripped it for the pile, Nero stood by and said, jeeringly: “I had no idea she was so handsome.”
A report was issued, and a formal announcement made to the Senate, that Agrippina had attempted the Emperor’s life, and that, when Nero sent men to arrest her, she took her own life. And the Senate licked the feet of Nero, decreed games and festivals in gratitude for his preservation, and led the enthusiasm of the people. So well known was the murder that an actor referred mockingly to it in the theatre. “Farewell, my father,” he said, eating a mushroom—“Farewell, mother,” he added, imitating the action of a swimmer. The common folk repeated numbers of these grim jokes. But they enjoyed the games of thanksgiving, and Senators and nobles took part in them on the stage and in the arena, and Rome sank swiftly into the terrible degradation of Nero’s later reign, which will occupy us in the next chapter.
It is hardly necessary to add a summary estimate of Agrippina’s character. In the view of Stahr and Baring-Gould and a few other recent writers, she was “queenly, honourable, and pure,” and had only the doubtful vices of ambition and pride. For Tacitus and the other Latin writers she was capable of any enormity, and guilty of most. It will be seen that I hold an intermediate view. She was a woman of great distinction, ability, and strength. Had she lived in an age when virtue was not inexpedient, she would have been an illustrious and virtuous queen. But she had to struggle to obtain and retain power in an age when a new and more intellectual moral standard was replacing an older and more instinctive standard, and, where it seemed profitable, she availed herself of the moral scepticism which such a change always engenders. She was queenly, but she was not entirely honourable, and she was almost certainly not pure. But she served Rome well, and left it happy and prosperous; and her unselfish passion for the advancement of her son, her chivalrous and fatal defence of his injured wife, and the bravery with which she met his unspeakable brutality, do much to outweigh her evil deeds in the scale of Osiris.
CHAPTER VI
THE WIVES OF NERO
Nero was no longer “the young Apollo” of his boyhood. Unbridled dissipation and precocious crime had made their impress on body no less than on mind. He was a little above the average height, but his prematurely swollen paunch was poorly balanced on his slender and ungraceful limbs, and his skin was blotched and repellent. The dull grey eyes betrayed his unceasing indulgence, and the yellow hair, dressed in stages of short curls, framed a face that was certainly no longer handsome. His mind was in unmistakable disorder. Our kindly age would invoke this mental trouble in extenuation of the brutal crimes he had committed and the stupendous folly he is about to perpetrate. Were this a biography of the Emperors, we might boldly essay to prove rather that the insanity followed the matricide, but that does not concern us. He was, as yet, only in his twenty-second year.
To this precocious monstrosity of vice and crime was mated one of the gentlest young matrons of the Cæsarean house, Octavia, the daughter of Claudius and Messalina. Married at the very early age of thirteen to Nero, her timid girlish nature was paralyzed by the coarse habits of her husband, and she merely hovers about the stage, like a dimly perceptible shadow, during the earlier part of Nero’s reign. It must have been shortly after their marriage that Nero disdained her for the beautiful Greek slave, Acte, to whom he was more constant than to any other living thing, and who, in return, paid the last tribute to his despised remains. At first one of Nero’s associates screened the entanglement, but, as we saw, it became known in the palace, and Agrippina made a fruitless effort to press the rights of his girl-wife. The injustice was, however, one that Roman ladies were not unaccustomed to bear. Nero soon fell into more disreputable ways. Octavia would see him leave the palace after supper with his wild companions, and needed little effort of imagination to follow his course when he returned, in the early morning, with torn garments and flushed, if not bruised, features and, occasionally, the painted signs that he had wrenched from shop-doors, or the cups he had stolen in a raid upon some low tavern.
He had gathered about him a band of older youths, who encouraged him in the licentious use of his power, and endeared themselves to him by the fertility of their imaginations. Chief among them was Salvius Otho, a young noble of Etruscan descent, five years older than Nero—the Emperor Otho of a later date. He had entered the palace in virtue of an amorous relation with one of Agrippina’s ladies, and his wide knowledge of adolescent amusements won him the regard of Nero, whom he led into the wildest adventures. They would wander at night through the streets, and revel in the taverns and brothels of the popular quarters of the city, the mysterious dim-lit valleys on which patrician maidens looked down from the mansions on the hills. In those centres of nightly disorder Nero and his companions were the most daring Mohocks, if we may use a phrase that belongs to later history. They violated women and boys, and played the most brutal pranks upon unarmed folk. One night Nero was severely thrashed by a Senator, whose wife he had insulted. The man learned afterwards that it was the Emperor whom he had beaten, and went to the palace to apologize. Nero forced him to atone with his life for the injury he had done to the Imperial dignity. He withdrew the guards from the Circus, in order that he might enjoy the fights of the rival factions, and from the Milvian Bridge, at night, so as to give complete liberty to vice in that nocturnal resort.
The chaste and trembling Octavia, who was still only in her sixteenth year, shrank from his brutal disdain. It was enough for her to have the title of Empress, he said to his mother, when she urged the rights of Octavia. Presently Nero declared that he would divorce her, and marry the handsome Greek girl, but Seneca and Burrus succeeded in preventing him. To check his disorders entirely they were quite powerless, and they seem to have thought it better to direct, than to resist, his vices. Suddenly, however, in the year 58, Nero transferred his passion to the daughter of Poppæa Sabina, and began the long, tragic struggle to secure her as his Empress.