The Empresses of Rome

by Joseph McCabe

Before the end of the year Poppæa presented Nero with a daughter, and a few weeks of wild rejoicing restored her to general favour, and obliterated the memory of Octavia. The title of “Augusta” was, in an excess of flattery, bestowed upon both the mother and the infant. Senators raced each other to the Imperial villa at Antium, to express their joy at this substantial promise of a continuance of the Cæsarean house which had dragged them in the mire. The whole of Italy was lit up with rejoicing. Poppæa felt that her position was at last secure. And then, by one of those dread changes which were almost as common in the life of Rome as in the tragedies of Greece, and made men assume that there was a stern and mighty fate behind their puny and indulgent gods, the storm broke over Italy once more. The child withered and died, and Nero’s mind fell once more into dark disorder. He glanced round with insane suspicion for possible aspirants to the throne, and Poppæa’s remaining son was the first victim. One day he saw her boy (by her former husband) playing at being emperor in his games with the other children. In a few days Poppæa heard that the boy had lost his life while fishing. Many another execution was ordered with the same levity.

OCTAVIA

PORPHYRY BUST IN THE LOUVRE

As before, these terrible deeds were mingled with the most splendid and the most licentious entertainments. Noble dames of the highest rank wrestled and fought in the amphitheatre before the frivolous crowds; the city abounded in schools where the nobility learned to ape the Emperor’s folly, and contribute to the gaiety of Rome with the flute, the zither, or the dance. Nero conceived a new idea, and pursued it with zeal. He would contest the crown with the artists of Greece. Poppæa saw him training in the palace, lying for hours with heavy plates of lead on his chest, restricting himself to a diet of leeks and oil. She saw him exhibit his skill in the theatre, lifting up his blotched and swollen body, in extraordinary contortions, on his thin legs, as he strained after the high notes. Woe to the man who openly laughed, or who excelled him! One of his masters was put to death because Nero perceived that he could not equal the man. At last his training was complete, and Rome sighed with relief as the thousand carts, drawn by silver-shod mules, and the five thousand youths of the Augustan band, set out for the coast. They gratified Naples with a show as they passed through. For several days Nero kept the amazed citizens in the theatre, and took his meals in the orchestra, so as to lose no time. Then came the inevitable epilepsy; and it was announced that Nero, perceiving the grief of his subjects at the prospect of his departure, had postponed the Grecian tour.

On his return to comparative health, and to Rome, he once more kept the citizens agog with alternate bursts of frantic dissipation and sanguinary melancholy. From the death of her child until her own violent end, two years later, Poppæa appears very little in the chronicles; but, as we shall see that, willing or unwilling, she supported her husband in his bloody crimes, we may assume that she joined him in his less criminal orgies. One instance will suffice. He ordered that a banquet should be given on a raft, on the large sheet of water known as Lake Agrippa. When the citizens crowded to the shore on the appointed evening, they found the great raft towed by vessels plated with ivory and gold, manned by youths who had won distinction in infamy. Round the shore taverns, brothels, and dining-rooms had been erected. And when the night fell, and the beautiful scene was lit by the light of innumerable torches, the public found that women of the highest rank were no less accessible to them than prostitutes in the houses by the lake, and the slave was at liberty to embrace his mistress under the eye of her husband. Nero even outdistanced Caligula in the Imperial teaching of vice. In the garb of a bride, he went through the religious ceremony of marriage with a man of base character, named Pythagoras. He had nude children fastened to stakes, and rushed upon them fittingly clad in the skin of a wild beast. And round the frontiers of that vast Empire, which the strength and sobriety of his ancestors had created, the weary soldiers watched the barbarians who prepared to invade it.

It was about this time that the great fire occurred which turned the laughter of Nero’s subjects into resentment. For six days and seven nights the flames ate their way through the blocks of tall tenements, divided only by narrow streets, in the parching heat of July. Nero was in the provinces at the time, and from the conflicting accounts it is impossible to pass an opinion on the rumour that he had ordered the burning of Rome. Dio gives us the familiar picture of Nero twanging his zither, and chanting the “Fall of Troy” from the summit of a high tower on the hill. Others declare, however, that he at once ordered the most expedient methods for checking the conflagration. But it was angrily whispered among the camps of the homeless that men had been seen throwing torches upon their houses, and that they were acting under orders from the palace. Nor were the citizens appeased when he threw the blame on the obscure and unpopular devotees who went by the name of Christians, and afforded them the brutal spectacle of driving round the circus to the light of burning men and women, whose living bodies had been wrapped in tow and soaked in wax and tar. Few believed in their guilt. Even Seneca at length broke his casuistic or diplomatic reserve, and retired in disgust from Rome. Nero went down in great dejection to Baiæ, leaving orders that, in the restoration of the city, a new palace should be built for him that should transcend anything within the memory of Rome or of history.

This “golden house,” which Nero raised round the more modest palaces of his predecessors, gave a fresh grievance to discontent. The great and unselfish Octavian had been satisfied with a small patrician mansion; Tiberius had built a palace; Caligula had enlarged it; Nero flung out its wings over a vast space. It seemed that Emperors squandered the money of the State in proportion to their uselessness. The colossal edifice and its wonderful park stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline, across the intervening valley, and was surrounded by a triple colonnade in marble. Citizens huddled in the crowded blocks of the Subura and the Velabrum, while Nero created a miniature world within his marble girdle. There was a great lake, filled with salt water from Ostia, with a small town on its shore; there were vineyards, cornfields, groves in which wild beasts ran loose, fountains, and gardens. The palace itself was of such proportions that a statue of Nero one hundred and twenty feet high could be conveniently lodged in its porch. Some of the rooms were plated with gold and adorned with precious stones. The supper-room had a ceiling of ivory, with openings through which flowers and costly perfumes might be shed upon the guests. The Egyptian roses whose beauty withered in one banquet in this chamber had a value of £35,000 in our coinage.

There now dawned on Rome some consciousness of the price that the Empire was paying for the stupendous folly it had so long applauded. While the treasury was being exhausted in entertainments that all could enjoy, the murmuring was confined to the sober few. From the moment when this colossal symbol of Nero’s selfishness towered above the city, the murmurs became audible and were multiplied. Nero, alarmed at the sullen looks and the vague reports of plots, went down angrily to the coast. Then a slave brought a definite accusation of conspiracy against his master, and the stream of blood began to flow.

It is an unhappy fact, and one that confirms the darker view of Poppæa’s character, that almost the only detail related of her in the chronicles, after the death of her child, is that she was one of the council of three who directed this horrible series of executions. Nero would not trust the ordinary procedure of Roman justice. With Poppæa and Tigellinus as associate-judges, he himself examined, or endorsed, every charge that cupidity or malignity brought to the palace. Rome was reddened for weeks with torture, murder, and suicide. Students of the decay of Rome have, perhaps, not sufficiently appreciated the effect of this periodic effusion of the best blood in the city. In the earlier wars, both civil and foreign, the good and the base alike had fallen. In these inquisitions for conspiracy, which fill Rome with mourning time after time from the death of Octavian to the accession of Trajan, it is chiefly the men and women of honour who suffer. They constitute a natural selection of the cowardly and the sycophantic.