Nero (eBook)

9.  EXTREME DEPRAVITY.

A.D. 62-64

The atrocity of Nero's crime in murdering Agrippina.--Nero's messages to the senate.--Action of the senate.--Nero divorces Octavia and marries Poppæa.--Octavia banished from Rome.--Anicetus.--Octavia's unhappy destiny.--Charges against her.--She is put to death.--Extreme depravity.--Nero recovers from his remorse.--His various crimes.--Public affairs neglected.--His performances on the stage.--Musical training.--Nero's success.--His trained applauders.--Rules and regulations at the theater.--Races and games.--Nero generally the victor.--His private conduct and character.--His midnight brawls.--Rioting and excess.--His great feasts.--The artificial lake.--Immense sums of money expended by Nero.--His favorites.--His excursions to Ostia.--The burning of Rome.--Nero accused of being the incendiary.--His probable motives.--He comes to see the fire.--He celebrates the occasion by a song.

 There was nothing in the attendant circumstances that were connected with the act of Nero in murdering his mother, which could palliate or extenuate the deed in the slightest degree. It was not an act of self-defense. Agrippina was not doing him, or intending to do him any injury. It was not an act of hasty violence, prompted by sudden passion. It was not required by any political necessity as a means for accomplishing some great and desirable public end. It was a cool, deliberate, and well-considered crime, performed solely for the purpose of removing from the path of the perpetrator of it an obstacle to the commission of another crime. Nero murdered his mother in cool blood, simply because she was in the way of his plans for divorcing his innocent wife, and marrying adulterously another woman.

For some time after the commission of this great crime, the mind of Nero was haunted by dreadful fears, and he suffered continually, by day and by night, all the pangs of remorse and horror. He did not dare to return to Rome, not knowing to what height the popular indignation, that would be naturally excited by so atrocious a deed, might rise; or what might be the consequences to him if he were to appear in the city. He accordingly remained for a time on the coast at Neapolis, the town to which he had retired from Baiæ. From this place he sent various communications to the Roman Senate, explaining and justifying what he called the execution of his mother. He pretended that he had found her guilty of treasonable conspiracies against him and against the state, and that her death had been imperiously demanded, as the only means of securing the public safety. The senators hated Nero and abhorred his crimes; but they were overawed by the terrible power which he exercised over them through the army, which they knew was entirely subservient to his will, and by their dread of his ruthless and desperate character. They passed resolves approving of what he had done. His officers and favorites at Rome sent him word that the memory of Agrippina was abhorred at the capital, and that in destroying her, he was considered as having rendered a great service to the state. These representations in some measure reassured his mind, and at length he returned to the city.

In due time he divorced Octavia, and married Poppæa. Octavia, however, still remained at Rome, residing in apartments assigned her in one of the imperial palaces. Her high birth and distinguished position, and, more than all, the sympathy that was felt for her in her misfortunes, made her an object of great attention. The people put garlands upon her statues in the public places in the city, and pulled down those which were placed at Nero's command upon those of Poppæa. These and other indications of the popular feeling, inflamed Poppæa's hatred and jealousy to such a degree, that she suborned one of Octavia's domestics to accuse her mistress of an ignominious crime. When thus accused, other women in Octavia's service were put to the rack to compel them to testify against her. They, however, persevered, in the midst of their tortures, in asserting her innocence. Poppæa, nevertheless, insisted that she should be condemned, and at last, by way of compromising the case, Nero consented to banish her from the city.

She was sent to a villa on the sea-coast, in the neighborhood of the place where Anicetus was stationed with his fleet. But Poppæa would not allow her to live in peace even as an exile. She soon brought a charge against her of having formed a conspiracy against the government of Nero, and of having corrupted Anicetus, with a view of obtaining the co-operation of the fleet in the execution of treasonable designs. Anicetus himself testified to the truth of this charge. He said that Octavia had formed such a plan, and that she had given herself up, in person, wholly to him, in order to induce him to join in it. Octavia was accordingly condemned to die.

Notwithstanding the testimony of Anicetus, Octavia was not at the time generally believed to be guilty of the charge on which she was condemned. It was supposed that Anicetus was induced, by promises and bribes from Nero and Poppæa, to fabricate the story, in order that they might have a pretext for putting Octavia to death. However this may be, the unhappy princess was condemned, and the sentence pronounced upon her was, that she must die.

The life of Octavia, lofty as her position was in respect to earthly grandeur, had been one of uninterrupted suffering and sorrow. She had been married to Nero when a mere child, and during the whole period of her connection with her husband he had treated her with continual unkindness and neglect. She had at length been cruelly divorced from him, and banished from her native city on charges of the most ignominious nature, though wholly false--and before this last accusation was made against her there seemed to be nothing before her but the prospect of spending the remainder of her days in a miserable and hopeless exile. Still she clung to life, and when the messengers of Nero came to tell her that she must die, she was overwhelmed with agitation and terror.

She begged and implored them with tears and agony, to spare her life. She would never, she said, give the emperor any trouble, or interfere in any way with any of his plans. She gave up willingly all claims to being his wife, and would always consider herself as only his sister. She would live in retirement and seclusion in any place where Nero might appoint her abode, and would never occasion him the slightest uneasiness whatever. The executioners cut short these entreaties by seizing the unhappy princess in the midst of them, binding her limbs with thongs, and opening her veins. She fainted, however, under this treatment, and when the veins were opened the wretched victim lay passive and insensible in the hands of her executioners, and the blood would not flow. So they carried her to a steam-bath which happened to be in readiness near at hand, and shutting her up in it, left her to be suffocated by the vapor.

Thus the great crowning crime of Nero's life,--for the murder of Agrippina, the adulterous marriage with Poppæa, and the subsequent murder of Octavia, are to be regarded as constituting one single though complicated crime,--was consummate and complete. It was a crime of the highest possible atrocity. To open the way to an adulterous marriage by the deliberate and cruel murder of a mother, and then to seal and secure it by murdering an innocent wife,--blackening her memory at the same time with an ignominy wholly undeserved, constitute a crime which for unnatural and monstrous enormity must be considered as standing at the head of all that human depravity has ever achieved.

Nero gradually recovered from the remorse and horror with which the commission of these atrocities at first overwhelmed him; and in order to hasten his relief he plunged recklessly into every species of riot and excess, and in the end hardened himself so completely in crime, that during the remainder of his life he perpetrated the most abominable deeds without any apparent compunction whatever. He killed Poppæa herself at last with a kick, which he gave her in a fit of passion at a time when circumstances were such with her that the violence brought on a premature and unnatural sickness. He afterward ordered her son to be drowned in the sea, by his slaves, when he was a-fishing, because he understood that the boy, in playing with the other children, often acted the part of an emperor. His general Burrus he poisoned. He sent him the poison under pretense that it was a medical remedy for a swelling of the throat under which Burrus was suffering. Burrus drank the draught under that impression and died. He destroyed by similar means in the course of his life great numbers of his relatives and officers of state, so that there was scarcely a person who was brought into any degree of intimate connection with him that did not sooner or later come to a violent end.

During his whole reign Nero neglected the public affairs of the empire almost altogether,--apparently regarding the vast power, and the immense resources that were at his command, as only means for the more complete gratification of his own personal propensities and passions. The only ambition which ever appeared to animate him was a desire for fame as a singer and actor on the stage.

At the time when he commenced his career it was considered wholly beneath the dignity of any Roman of rank to appear in any public performance of that nature; but Nero, having conceived in his youth a high idea of his merit as a singer, devoted himself with great assiduity to the cultivation of his voice,...