'No,' said Pomponia, but of a heavenly.'

Heavenly? What is heaven?' asked Poppæa, wearily. All that we know is life; and life has given me all that pleasure can give, and rank and riches, and the adoration of self; and it has left me so miserable that life itself has grown hateful to me, while yet I fear death.'

Pomponia listened in profound sadness. Poppæa,' she said, 'I need not fear now to tell you that I am a Christian; and we Christians have been taught that "he who saveth his life shall lose it, and he who loseth it for Christ's sake, shall find it." It is too late for you to redeem the life which you have flung away, or to find the pleasure which you have slain in seeking for it. But while there is life, there is hope. The God in whom we Christians believe is a God of mercy, and we believe also that Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins, and that by Him they may be washed away.'

All the waters of Adria would not wash mine away. Oh, Pomponia, do you know that Seneca, and Octavia, and many others owed their deaths to me?'

'You have sinned deeply; but you have, I know, been taught about the sacred books of the Jews, and have you not read there of a guilty king, an adulterer and murderer, who yet prayed "Oh, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great"? And has no Jewish teacher read you the promise of God by His prophet, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool"?'

I have heard those words,' said Poppæa. They were quoted to me once by Helen, Queen of Adiabene, who is now living as a proselyte at Jerusalem; and I have been taught that there is but one God.'

'Oh, pray to Him, then,' said Pomponia, for He is abundant in pardon.'

'I know not how to pray,' said the dying Empress; 'pray for me.'

If Poppaa knew not, Pomponia knew well; for to her, as a Christian, prayer had become the habit, the attitude of her life. Poppea had never before heard such words as those. She knew that when she died she would be made a goddess by the Senate, as her infant child had been; yet here by her bedside Pomponia was speaking of her as though she were any other

woman, speaking of her deep sinfulness, and not making any difference between her case and that of the commonest slavegirl who might have lived an evil life. And all that she could do was to resign her soul, and suffer it to be borne along unresisting on that stream of prayer.

And yet she felt, even in her misery, some dim sense of consolation, some faint gleam of hope such as she had never felt before. She knew that death was near, and urged Pomponia not to leave her. Pomponia sat by the bedside, holding the weak hand, and doing every act of tenderness, and speaking words of consolation, until the sinful troubled life had ebbed away.

Such a mind as Nero's had become was incapable of sorrow. He announced, indeed, that he was overwhelmed with grief, and he indulged in a certain amount of hysterical and theatric lamentation, which interfered in no way with his follies or his appetities. A funeral was decreed to Poppaa at the public expense, and Nero at the Rostra pronounced a eulogy not on her virtues, for there were none on which he could speak, but on her beauty and high fortune, and because she had been the mother of a divine infant. By her own wishlearnt doubtless from the Jews she was buried, and not burnt as was the Roman custom. Nero had so many spices burnt at her funeral that the learned doubted whether Arabia could furnish more in a single summer. But not one genuine tear was shed upon her grave.

CHAPTER LX

THE DOOM OF VIRTUE

'Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.'

SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth, iv. 3.

NERO went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime. One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he had already killed.

In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the Annals' of Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the funeral of Poppaa. The real cause of Nero's hatred was that he was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius, the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth's father, Marcus Silanus (the 'golden sheep' of Caligula), had already been poisoned by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with

false charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. He begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish patience and pusillanimous acquiescence. All that he can say is that it was destiny it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of Rome.

We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous births- which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, neither slave nor master. The houses were filled

1 Tac. Ann. xvi. 16.

with corpses, the roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone.

Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco, and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed. He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor, handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood, looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith to amuse him no wit, no learning — nothing but the coarse satieties of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And