Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

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Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale Page 20

by F. W. Farrar


  CHAPTER XVIII

  _VESPASIAN’S FARM_

  ‘At secura quies, et nescia fallere vita, Dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis,

  * * * * *

  Mugitusque boum, mollesque sub arbore somni,

  * * * * *

  Et patiens operum exiguoque assueta juventus, Sacra Deum, sanctique patres.’

  VIRG. _Georg._ ii. 467.

  Octavia was left in the comparative desertion of the Villa Castor,without even the homely companionship of Vespasian’s wife. Therespectable guests had departed. There was scarcely a person abouther to whom she could speak. As for her young husband, he treatedher with habitual neglect and open scorn. His conduct towards her wasdue partly to the indifference which he had always felt, partly tojealousy--lest he should be thought to owe the Empire to his unionwith her. He therefore followed his own devices; and she desired nocloser intercourse with him, for she shrank from the satyr which laybeneath his superficial graces. She was best pleased that he shouldbe out of her sight. The void of an unloved heart was preferable tothe scenes which took place between them when Nero’s worst qualitieswere evoked by the repulsion which she could not wholly conceal.Accustomed to hourly adulation, it was intolerable to him that fromthose who constituted his home circle he never received the shadow ofa compliment. He was disturbed by the sense that those who knew himmost intimately saw through him most completely. His mother did notabstain from telling him what he really was with an almost brutalfrankness; his wife seemed to shrink from him as though there werepollution in his touch.

  As there was little occasion for him to pay any regard toconventionalities in the retirement of Subiaco, he rarely paid theEmpress even a formal visit--rarely even crossed the bridge whichdivided one villa from the other.

  Octavia spent the long hours in loneliness. She sometimes relievedthe tedium of her days by sending loving letters to her brother atPhalacrine, and sometimes summoned one of the young slave-maidens tosit and read to her. While Nero associated with the most worthlessslaves, Octavia selected for her attendants the girls whose modestdemeanour had won her notice, and whom she generally found to beChristians. Christianity, though overwhelmed with slanders, was notyet suppressed by law; and in the lowest ranks of society, where noone cared what religion any one held, the sole reason which inducedthe slaves to conceal their faith was the ridicule which theacknowledgment of it involved. The cross, which was in those days thegibbet of the vilest malefactors, was to all the world an emblem onlyof shame and horror. It was a thing scarcely to be mentioned, becauseits associations of disgrace and agony were so intense as to disturbthe equanimity of the luxurious. And when a Christian slave wastaunted with the gibe that he worshipped ‘a crucified malefactor,’how could he explain a truth which was to the Jews a stumbling-block,and to the Greeks foolishness?

  Octavia, whom sorrow had taught to be kind, was gentle in herdemeanour to her slaves. The multitude of girls who waited on apatrician matron had a terrible time of it when their mistresseshappened to be in an ill-humour. The gilded boudoirs of the Aventinenot unfrequently rang with shrieks. As one entered the stately hallone heard the clanking chain of the _ostiarius_, who, with his dogand his staff, occupied the little cell by the entrance; and if avisitor came a little too soon for the banquet he might be greetedby the cries which followed the whistling strokes of the scourge, ormight meet some slave-girl with dishevelled hair and bleeding cheeks,rushing from the room of a mistress whom she had infuriated by theaccidental displacement of a curl. The slaves of Octavia had no suchcruelties to dread. Lydus, who kept her chair; Hilara, who arrangedher robes; Aurelia, who had charge of her lap-dog; Aponia, whoadorned her tresses; Verania, who prepared her sandals, had nothingto fear from her. There was not one of her slaves who did not lovethe young mistress, whose lot seemed less happy than that of thehumblest of them all.

  And thus it happened that Tryphæna and others of her slaves were notafraid to speak freely, when she seemed to invite their confidence.From Britannicus she had heard what Pomponia had taught him; she hadfound from these meek followers of the ‘foreign superstition,’ thattheir beliefs and practice were inconceivably unlike the caricaturesof them which were current among the populace. Because all menhated them, they were accused of hating all men; but Octavia foundthat love, no less than purity and meekness, was among their mostessential duties. She was obliged to exercise the extremest cautionin the expression of her own opinions, but she felt an interestdeeper than she could express in all that Tryphæna told her ofthe chief doctrines of Christianity. And though she could scarcelyform any judgment on what she heard, she felt a sense of support intruths which, if they did not convince her reason, yet kindled herimagination and touched her heart. One doctrine of the Christianscame home to her with quickening power--the doctrine of the lifeeverlasting. In Paganism that doctrine had no practical existence.The poets’ dream of meadows of asphodel and islands of the blest,where Achilles and Tydides unbound the helmets from their shadowyhair, and where the thin _eidola_ of kings and heroes pursued asemblance of their earthly life, had little meaning for her. LikeBritannicus, she was fond of reading the best Greek poets. But therewas no hopefulness in them. In Pindar she read--

  ‘By night, by day, The glorious sun Shines equal, where the blest, Their labours done, Repose forever in unbroken rest.’[43]

  And in Homer--

  ‘Thee to the Elysian plain, earth’s farthest end, Where Rhadamanthus dwells the gods shall send; There mortals easiest pass the careless hour, No lingering winter there, nor snow, nor shower; But Ocean ever, to refresh mankind, Breathes the shrill spirit of the western wind.’

  But she had only to unroll the manuscript a little further, and waschilled to the heart by the answer of Agamemnon to the greeting ofUlysses:--

  ‘Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom, Nor think vain words, he cried, can ease my doom Better by far laboriously to bear A weight of woe, and breathe the vital air, Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread, Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead!’

  And though Cicero had written his Tusculan disputations to provethe doctrine of immortality, had he not, in his letters and speeches,spoken of that doctrine as a mere pleasing speculation, which mightbe discussed with interest, but which no one practically held? Yet tothese good Christians that doctrine was an unshakable conviction, atruth which consoled their heaviest afflictions. To them the eternal,though unseen, was ever present. It was not something future, but acondition of which they breathed the atmosphere both here and now.To them the temporal was the shadowy; the eternal was the only real.

  While Octavia was thus silently going through the divine educationwhich was to prepare her for all that was to come, Britannicus wassupremely happy in the Sabine farm. Its homeliness and securityfurnished a delightful contrast to the oppressive splendour of thePalace at Rome. There, in the far wild country, he had none but farmlabourers about him, except the members of the Flavian family, who,on the father’s side, rose but little above the country folk. He wasas happy as the day was long. He could lay aside all thoughts of rankand state, could dress as he liked, and do as he liked, and roam overthe pleasant hills, and fish in the mountain streams, with no chanceof meeting any one but simple peasant lads. With Titus and his twocousins, young Flavius Sabinus and Flavius Clemens, he could findsympathy in every mood, whether grave or gay. Titus with his rudehealth, his sunny geniality, his natural courtesy--a boy ‘tinglingwith life to the finger tips’--was a friend in whose society it wasimpossible to be dull. Flavius Clemens was a youth of graver nature.The shadow of far-distant martyrdom, which would dash to the groundhis splendid earthly prospects, seemed to play over his early years.He had already been brought into contact with Christian influences,and showed the thoughtfulness, the absence of intriguing ambition,and the dislike to pagan amuseme
nts, which stamped him in thevulgar eyes of his contemporaries as a youth of ‘most contemptibleindolence.’ A fourth boy was often with them. It was Domitian, theyounger brother of Titus, destined hereafter to be the infamy of hisrace. He was still a child, and a stranger unable to read the mind’sconstruction in the face would have pronounced that he was thebest-looking of the five boys. For his cheeks wore a glow of healthas ruddy as his brother’s, and his features were far softer. Butit was not a face to trust, and Britannicus, trained in a palace torecognize what was indicated by the expression of every countenance,never felt any liking for the sly younger son of Vespasian.

  Vespasian was proud of his farm, and was far more at home there thanin the reception-rooms of Nero. He was by no means ashamed of thehumility of his origin. As he sat in his little villa, he used totell people that his ancestor was only one of the Umbrian farmers,who, during the civil war between Marius and Sylla, had settled atReate and married a Sabine maiden. Amazed indeed would those humbleprogenitors have been if they had been told that their great-grandsonwould be an Emperor of Rome! Nothing made him laugh more heartilythan the attempt of his flatterers to deduce his genealogy froma companion of Hercules. He had not a single bust or waxen imageof any illustrious ancestor to boast of, but was proud that thecities of Asia had reared a statue to his father, Sabinus, with theinscription, ‘To the honest publican.’

  He delighted to recall the memories of Cincinnatus and Fabricius andthe old dictators, who had been taken from the plough-tail, and towhom their wives had to bring the single toga they possessed in orderthat they might meet the ambassadors of the Senate when they weresummoned to subdue the enemies of Rome. He was never happier thanwhen he took the boys round with him to visit his horses and hiscows, and even Domitilla’s hens. He delighted in the rude plenty ofthe house, the delicious cream, the fresh eggs, the crisp oat-cakes,the beautiful apples at breakfast, the kid and stewed fruits of themidday meal. Any one who watched those rustic meals would little haveconjectured that, in that low, unadorned room, with the watch-dogsslumbering before the hearth, they saw before them three emperors,two consuls and a princess. Still less would he have dreamed thatone of them only would die peacefully in his bed; that, of those fiveboys, four would be the victims of murder, and one of martyrdom; andthat the younger Domitilla, though she did not share her husband’smartyrdom,[*5] would die in a bleak and lonely island as a confessorof the faith. Our life lies before us, and the mercy of DivineProvidence hides its issues in pitchy night.

  Vespasian alone of that little company was old enough to feel inall its fulness the blessing of a temporary escape from the horribleworld of Rome, which tossed like a troubled sea whose waters castup mire and dirt. He knew, as those lads could hardly know, thatit was a world of insolence and passion, of treachery and intrigue,of ruthless cruelty and unfathomable corruption. He had seen thegovernment of it pass from a madman like Caligula to a half-dazedblunderer like Claudius, and knew that the two had been preceded bya Tiberius, and succeeded by a Nero. One morning, when the weatherdid not permit them to go out to their usual outdoor sports, the boyshad amused themselves with a genealogy of the Cæsars, in which theyhad become interested in consequence of some questions about thedescendants of Augustus. As the blunt soldier looked at them whilethey bent over the genealogy, he became very thoughtful. For thatstem of the Cæsars had something portentous in its characteristics.It was a grim reflex of the times. Here were emperors who hadmarried five or six wives, and empresses who had married four orfive husbands, and some of these marriages had been fruitful; andyet the Cæsars were hardly Cæsars at all, but a mixed breed ofancient Claudii, Domitii, Silani, and of modern Octavii and Agrippas.The genealogy showed a confused mass of divorces and adoptions, andneither the men nor the women of the royal house were safe. Manyof the women were adulteresses; many of the men were murderers ormurdered victims. Out of sixteen empresses, six had been killed andseven divorced. Julia, daughter of Augustus, after three marriages,had been banished by her father for shameless misconduct, andTiberius had ordered her to be starved to death at Rhegium. CouldAugustus have felt no anguish in his proud spirit, when he had towrite to a young patrician ‘You have committed an indiscretion ingoing to visit my daughter at Baiæ’? or when on hearing that Phœbe,Julia’s freedwoman, had hanged herself, he cried ‘Would that I hadbeen the father of that Phœbe’? And, alas! what multitudes of hisdescendants had equalled Julia alike in misery and shame! Death andinfamy had rioted in that deplorable family. Well might Augustusexclaim, in the line of Homer:

  ‘Would I had died unwed, nor been the father of children!’

  When the people demanded the recall of the two Julias, after fiveor six years of exile, he exclaimed in a burst of indignation andanguish, ‘I wish you similar wives and similar daughters.’ Hedescribed his wife Scribonia, his daughter Julia, and hisgranddaughter Julia the younger as ‘his three cancers.’[44]

  But while the boys were eagerly talking together, and discussingthose Cæsars, and members of their family, who from the time ofJulius Cæsar downward had been deified, Vespasian suddenly grewafraid lest the same thought which struck him should strike them. Inthose days he did not dream that he too should wear the purple anddie the apparent founder of a dynasty. He was not, indeed, unaware ofvarious prognostics which were supposed to portend for him a splendidfate. At Phalacrine, his native hamlet, was an ancient oak sacredto Mars, which had put out a new branch at the birth of each of thethree children of his father, Sabinus. The third, which representedhimself, grew like a great tree. Sabinus, after consulting an augur,told his mother, Tertulla, that her grandson would become a Cæsar.But Vespasian shared the feelings of the old lady, who had onlylaughed immoderately at the prophecy, and remarked, ‘How odd it isthat I am in my senses, while my son has gone raving mad!’

  Seeing that the boys were fascinated by the grandeur of Cæsarism, herolled up the stemma. ‘Do not be ambitious, lads,’ he said. ‘Couldthe name of _Imperator_ or the sight of your radiated heads upon acoin, give you more happiness than you are enjoying here and now?’

  The advice of Vespasian was perfectly sincere. In his homely wayhe saw too deeply into the heart of things to care for the outsideveneer. It was his mother, Vespasia Polla--the daughter of themilitary tribune--who, led on by dreams and omens, had forced himinto the career of civil honours. His brother obtained the rightto wear the laticlave, or broad purple stripe on the toga, and thesilver C on the boots, which marked the rank of senator. Vespasianwas unwilling to lay aside the narrow stripe, the angusticlave, whichshowed him to be of equestrian rank. He only yielded to the pressure,and even to the abuse, of his mother, who asked him how long he meantto be the lacquey--the _anteambulo_--of his brother. He had nearlythrown up his public life in disgust, when during his ædileship Gaiushad ordered the soldiers to cover him with mud, and to heap mud intothe folds of his embroidered magisterial robe, because he found theroads insufficiently attended to. He had practised the advice he wasnow giving.

  ‘My head has been struck on coins,’ said Britannicus, with a sigh;‘but I can’t say that it has made me much happier.’

  ‘You are as happy as Nero is,’ said Titus. ‘I am quite sure that allthe revels at Subiaco will not be worth the boar-hunt we mean to haveto-morrow.’

  ‘Clemens,’ said Vespasian, ‘Domitilla tells me that yesterday morningyou were learning my favourite poem, the “Epode” of Horace aboutthe pleasures of country life, and the lines of Virgil on the samesubject. As we have nothing special to do this morning, suppose yourepeat the poems to us, while the boys and I make a _formido_ for ournext deer-hunt.’

  The boys got out the long line of string, and busied themselves withtying to it, at equal distances, the crimson feathers which were tofrighten the deer into the nets; while Flavius, standing up, recitedfeelingly and musically the well-known lines of the Venusian poet,whose Sabine farm lay at no great distance from the place where theywere living--

  ‘Blessed is he--remote as were the mortals
Of the first age, from business and its cares-- Who ploughs paternal fields with his own oxen, Free from the bonds of credit or of debt. No soldier he, roused by the savage trumpet, Not his to shudder at the angry sea; His life escapes from the contentious Forum, And shuns the insolent thresholds of the great.’[45]

  And when, to the great delight of his uncle, he had finishedrepeating this poem, he repeated the still finer lines of Virgil, whopronounces ‘Happy above human happiness the husbandmen for whom farbeyond the shock of arms earth pours her plenteous sustenance.’[46]

  The boys talked together on all sorts of subjects; only if Domitianwas with them, they were instinctively careful about what they said.For Domitian could never forget that Britannicus was a prince. IfBritannicus became Emperor he might be highly useful in many ways,and it was worth Domitian’s while to insinuate himself into hisfavour. In this he soon saw that he would fail. The young princedisliked him, and could not entirely conceal his dislike underhis habitual courtesy. Domitian then changed his tactics. He wouldtry to be Nero’s friend, and if he could find out anything to thedisadvantage of Britannicus, so much the better. He had alreadyattracted the notice of two courtiers--the dissolute Clodius Pollio,who had been a prætor, and the senator Nerva, both of whom stood wellwith the Emperor. Already this young reprobate had all the basenessof an informer. But in this direction also his little plans weredefeated, for in his presence Britannicus was as reticent as to Titushe was unreserved.

  Britannicus was to have had a room to himself, in consideration ofhis exalted rank, but he asked to share the sleeping-room of Titusand Clemens. They went to bed at an early hour, for Vespasian wasstill a poor man, and oil was expensive. But they often talkedtogether before they fell asleep. Titus would rarely hear a wordabout the Christians. He declared that they were no better thanthe worshippers of the dog-headed Anubis, and he appealed to thecaricature of the Domus Gelotiana as though it proved the reality ofthe aspersions against them. He was, however, never tired of talkingabout the Jews. He had seen Agrippa; he had been dazzled intoa boyish love by the rich eastern beauty of Berenice. The dimforeshadowing of the future gave him an intense interest in thenation whose destiny he was to affect so powerfully in after years.Stories of the Jewish Temple seemed to have a fascination for him.But he was as credulous about the Jews as the rest of his race, andbelieved the vague scandals that they were exiles from Crete, anda nation of lepers, and about Moses and the herd of asses--whichafterwards found a place in Tacitus and later historians.

  Another subject about which he liked to talk was Stoicism. He thoughtnothing so grand as the doctrine that the ideal wise man was themost supreme of kings. He was full of high arguments, learnt throughEpictetus, to prove that the wise man would be happy even in thebull of Phalaris, and he quoted Lucretius and Virgil to prove thathe would be always happy--

  ‘If to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to feel the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness.’

  At all of which propositions Britannicus was inclined to laughgood-naturedly, and to ask--much to the indignation of his friend--ifMusonius was happy when he had a bad toothache.

  Finding him unsympathetic on the subject of the Christians,Britannicus ceased to speak of them. On the other hand, he soondiscovered that Clemens knew more about them than himself.

  ‘Are you a Christian, Flavius?’ asked Britannicus, when they werealone, after one of these conversations.

  ‘I have not been baptised,’ he answered. ‘No one is regarded asa full Christian until he has been admitted into their church bybaptism.’

  ‘Baptism? What is that?’

  ‘It is the washing with pure water,’ said Clemens. ‘Our Romanceremonies are pompous and cumbersome. It is not so with theChristians. Their symbols are the simplest things in the world.Water, the sign of purification from guilt; bread and wine, thecommon elements of life, taken in remembrance of Christ who diedfor them.’

  ‘And are the elders of these Christians--the presbyters, as they callthem--the same sort of persons as our priests?’

  ‘I should hope not!’ said Clemens. ‘They are simple and blamelessmen--more like the best of the philosophers, and more consistent,though not so learned.’

  The entrance of Domitian--whom they more than suspected of havinglistened at the door--stopped their conversation. But whatBritannicus had heard filled him with deeper interest, and he feltconvinced that the Christians were possessors of a secret moreprecious than any which Seneca or Musonius had ever taught.

  But the happy days at the Sabine farm drew to an end. When Novemberwas waning to its close it was time to return from humble Phalacrineand its russet hills, to the smoke and wealth and roar of Rome.

 

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