seemed to her more lovely than any fragment of lyric song, and constantly woke a sweet echo in her thoughts. It

was

"Thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall bring to life her shades.'

CHAPTER XXIX

AGRIPPINA AT BAY

'Caritas quæ est inter natos et parentes dirimi nisi detestabili scelere non potest.'Cic. Lal. viii. § 28.

THERE were some who thought it an unparalleled tragedy that Britannicus should not only have died so young, but also at a banquet, and so suddenly, and by the hand of a bitter enemy, and under his very eyes. There were few in the Pagan world who realised the truth that he who needed their shuddering pity was not the boy who perished, but the youth who murdered him.

At first Nero was alarmed by what he had done. He thought that he would be haunted by the manes of the wronged Britannicus. He shunned Octavia, and if he met her was forced to avert his glance. He faced his mother with shy moroseness. He never dared to sleep alone. The sound of a shaken leaf terrified him. A thunderstorm, which happened a few days later, drove him into a paroxysm of terror, during which, like Gaius before him, he hid himself under a bed, and sent for the skin of a seal as a fancied protection against the flame of heaven.

But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God. The doom was past, but the punishment deferred. The most terrible part of his retribution was that he was let alone to fill to the brim the cup of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the punishment of sin, and the avenging scourge was put into the hand of his own vices. The first fearful crime which he had committed ought to have lit up his dark conscience with its fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for a moment, but only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense was hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into the execration of mankind.

What helped him to this rapid obduracy was the vileness and hypocrisy of the world around him.

The death of Britannicus had to be announced to the Senate. The eyes of Nero had to weep crocodile tears, and the pen of Seneca to be employed in venal falsities. No one could doubt. the hand of Seneca in the elegant pathos of the sentence which told the Conscript Fathers that deaths so immature as that of Britannicus were subjects of such bitter grief that his funeral had been hurried over in accordance with the ancestral custom which forbade the protraction of anguish by public oration or funeral obsequies.

'I have lost the aid of my brother,' continued the specious oration which Nero learnt by heart; no hopes are left to me save in the commonwealth. A prince like myself, who is now the sole survivor of a family born to the supremest dignity, needs all the love and all the help of the Senate and the people.'

Even the semblance of sorrow was abandoned almost before the cypress had been moved from the doors of the Palatine. Nero was anxious to implicate others as far as possible in the frightful responsibility which he had himself incurred. Britannicus had left a considerable heritage in houses, villas, and personal possessions, which had come to him from his father and mother. Nero, who as yet had not squandered a treasure which might well have been deemed inexhaustible, had no need of these things, and was eager to get rid of them. He therefore distributed them among leading senators, giving a pleasant villa to Seneca and a town house to Burrus. He thought that gifts would serve as a sort of hush-money, and both statesmen felt with inward anguish that they were the price of blood. Seneca was specially humiliated. He knew what men thought and said of him in secret, and his own conscience could not accept the facile excuse that it would have been fatal to refuse a largesse which was meant to bind his destiny irrevocably with that of the guilty Emperor. He thanked Nero for his munificence, and acted as if nothing had happened. Yet the inward voice spoke to him with unmistakable clearness. He called himself a Stoic: he wrote grand eulogies of virtue and simplicity. Ought he to have entered the magic circle of a court steeped in licentiousness and blood? Ought he to have yielded to the avarice which made his usury so notor

ious? Would Pætus Thrasea have accepted gifts intended to screen complicity with murder? Would such gifts have been offered to the modest poverty of Cornutus or Musonius? or, if so, would they not have faced exile or death rather than accept them? Conscience worked so painfully that he could not induce himself to visit the villa which had been presented to him on the death of Britannicus. Alas!' he moaned sadly to himself in the watches of the night, it is a viscosum beneficium, a kindness smeared with birdlime.'

But the great mass of the Roman world, lying as it did in wickedness, was pleased rather than otherwise to hear of the death which they all knew to have been the murder of the son of Claudius. The horrors of the civil wars were still vivid in many recollections, and knowing that rival princes rarely lived in concord, they hailed with satisfaction the bold iniquity which had succeeded in ridding them of a nightmare of the future. The story of the murder of a young and innocent prince, the only son of their late deified Emperor, sounded rather ugly, no doubt; but did not nine-tenths of them expose their own superfluous children? Had not Claudius himself exposed the infant of his wife Petina? And what was death? Was it not a dreamless sleep, which anyone might be glad to exchange for the present state of things, and which many of them would probably seek by suicide?

And why should Nero trouble himself any more about a death which scarcely caused so much as a ripple on the bitter and stagnant pool of Roman society? On the contrary he and all Rome felt a glow of conscious virtue when, a few days later, an order was given to execute a knight, named Antonius, as a poisoner, and publicly to burn his poisons. When Locusta heard that fact she smiled grimly. But what had she to fear?

There was one breast in which the earthquake of excitement, caused by the murder of Britannicus, did not soon subside. Octavia, in the depth of her anguish, had known where to find something of consolation. Not so Agrippina. To her also Nero had offered presents, which she refused with disdainful sullenness. Her soul was full of madness. Was she to be totally defeated by the slight, contemptible son on whom she had built all her hopes?

Not without a struggle would she abandon the power which it had been the object of her life to attain, and the

fabric of which she had with her own hand shattered to the dust.

Suddenly as the Nemesis had come upon her, she would not yet admit herself to be defeated. She was rich; she would be yet richer. She had friends, and she held many a secret interview with them. Octavia might still become in her hands an engine for political purposes, and Agrippina constantly embraced and consoled her. Every tribune and centurion who attended her levées was received with extreme graciousness. She paid her court to all the nobles of high birth and promising ability. She thought that even now it was not too late. to create a conspiracy, and put a fitting leader at the head of it.

But all her efforts were broken like foam on the rock of the Emperor's deified autocracy and the unscrupulous wickedness of the favourites by whom he was surrounded. At the suggestion of Otho and Tigellinus, Nero dealt blow after blow at the dignity of his mother. One day she no longer saw the two lictors who attended her litter, and was told that they had been discharged by the Emperor. Soon afterwards she missed the accustomed escort of soldiers who guarded her chambers, and heard with sinking heart that they had been removed. Worst of all, she was suddenly deprived of the body-guard of tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired Germans, to whom she had grown attached, and who were the most splendid outward sign of her imperial station. And, as though all this were not enough, at last the final thunderbolt was launched. She received a message from her son that he had assigned to her, as her residence, the house of his grandmother Antonia. She was dismissed from the Palace in which so many of her years had been spent in order that the courtiers who thronged the audience-hall of the Emperor might have no excuse for paying their respects at the same time to her.

Her feelings, as she left the chambers of the Palatine for a private residence, must be imagined rather than described. Her heart was too dry for tears. She felt humiliated to the very dust, and tasted the bitterness of a thousand deaths. All hope of re-establishing her empire over the heart of her son was gone. Thenceforth he scarcely saw her. If he came to visit her, he came, as though to evidence his distrust, amid a throng of soldiers and centurions, did not speak to