The last scene is brief and inevitable. Galba is marching on Rome, the Prætorian guards have been won for him, the nobles find it safe to desert Nero. The nerveless brute whimpers and weeps in his helplessness. He will fly to Alexandria, and earn his living as a musician. The great “golden house” is silent and deserted. Rome is openly deriding him. His servants have fled; one has even stolen the box in which he kept poison for such an emergency. The faithful Acte, Sporus, and a very few of those who fed on his folly, remain with him. Messalina has deserted him, and will appear later as the friend of one of his successors.
In the great silent house, with its walls of gold and its ceilings of ivory, he puts off the purple robes and clothes himself in an old shirt and a ragged cloak. On a miserable horse he rides with them across the vast deserted park, and makes for the house of one of his dependents, a few miles from Rome. There they admit him by a hole they have made in the wall, give him black bread and water, and cover him with a blanket. They discuss the situation, and conclude by offering him a dagger. He shrinks, like Julia, like Messalina, from the horrible darkness, and vainly strains his eyes for a ray of hope. At last they hear the clatter of cavalry on the road, and Nero feebly points the dagger at his breast, for a servant to drive home. And when the customary cremation is over, there are none but Acte and a faithful old nurse to lay the degraded ashes in the tomb.
So the tenth Empress of Rome laid down her brief dignity. Statilia Messalina had had little reason to follow Nero in his humiliation. Whether the charge of laxity that is brought against her be true or no, she was a woman of exceptional intelligence and culture, and had probably only married Nero out of fear. We meet her again, at a later stage, in the chronicles. After Galba’s short hour of supremacy we shall find an equally short reign of Salvius Otho, the man who once pillaged taverns with Nero in the Subura. Provincial government had sobered him, and he wrote affectionate letters to Messalina. He would, no doubt, have made her Empress once more if he had lived, but the throne was wrested from him, and Messalina retired to the calmer world of letters and rhetoric. Our last glimpse of her discovers her delivering orations of great eloquence and learning among the intellectual ladies of Rome.
CHAPTER VII
THE EMPRESSES OF THE TRANSITION
The house of Cæsar had perished with Nero, and few sober folk can have regretted that it had no living representative to win the fancy of the frivolous people or the blind cupidity of the Guards. There must have been men living in Rome who had witnessed the whole of that appalling degradation, so swift it had been. The Cæsars had sunk in little over forty years from the sobriety of Octavian to the insanity of Nero; their consorts had fallen from the strong standard of Livia to the insipidity of Poppæa; the resources of the Empire had been squandered in spectacles that had left its people nerveless and debauched; the old Roman ideal of character had been almost obliterated in the Imperial city. It was our concern to see what part the Empresses played in this lamentable history of four decades. It is, on the whole, one that their biographer must blush to acknowledge. We must remember, however, that corrupt rulers would necessarily choose weak or corrupt wives, and we cannot affect surprise or disappointment when we find them floating in the swift current.
We have now to open a new and more attractive gallery of Imperial portraits, to pass in review the wives of those great Emperors who restored the high character of Rome and strengthened anew the fabric of the Empire. A very brief summary of events will suffice to link the Cæsars with the Antonines, and introduce to us one or two curious types of Empresses who dimly figure in the transition.
For a year after the fall of Statilia Messalina the throne of the Empress was vacant, and that of the Emperor had three successive occupants. Galba was a widower at the time of his elevation to the throne. We saw in an earlier chapter that Agrippina had wished to marry him twenty-six years earlier, and he had refused. His wife, Lepida, was a delicate woman, of high character, and he refused to divorce her. She had an energetic champion in her mother, who fought Agrippina sturdily and, if the story be true, laid fair patrician hands on her. But Lepida died long before her husband was made Emperor, and he refused to marry again. His reign was brief. Tradition has blamed him for an excessive sternness and parsimony. They were not inopportune vices, but Rome had been too long habituated to indulgence, and Galba was too confident. The discontent at Rome was inflamed by the news of the revolt in the provinces, and within a few weeks the Guards, to whom he had refused the customary donation, set up a new Emperor, and put Galba to death.
The new ruler was no other than the first husband of Poppæa, the companion of Nero’s revels, Salvius Otho. Rome acclaimed the choice, and expected that the circus and theatre were about to reopen their doors. But Otho, who had matured during his years of office in Spain, turned from them in disgust. He did, it is true, restore the statues of Poppæa, and contemplated restoring the discarded statues of Nero, but the alienation of Roman feeling from him is a proof that he intended to rule with sobriety. The same spirit is seen in the fact that he corresponded affectionately with Statilia Messalina, and apparently thought of marrying her. But the legions in the provinces almost immediately rebelled against him, and, in the midst of the struggle, he committed suicide.
There had been no Empress of Rome for twelve months. With the death of Otho, and the accession of Vitellius, we come to the eleventh Empress, Galeria Fundana, a very new and incongruous type in the series of Imperial women.