Part 3 (1/2)

”The swarm that in the noontide beam were born?

Gone to salute the rising Morn.

Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway, That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.”

The last lines of this pa.s.sage would alone have been applicable to Caius Caesar. There was nothing fair or gay even about the beginning of his reign. From first to last it was a reign of fury and madness, and l.u.s.t and blood. There was an hereditary taint of insanity in this family, which was developed by their being placed on the dizzy pinnacle of imperial despotism, and which usually took the form of monstrous and abnormal crime. If we would seek a parallel for Caius Caesar, we must look for it in the history of Christian VII. of Denmark, and Paul of Russia. In all three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same sleeplessness which compelled them to rise, and pace their rooms at night, the same incessant suspicion; the same inordinate thirst for cruelty and torture. He took a very early opportunity to disembarra.s.s himself of his benefactors, Macro and Ennia, and of his rival, the young Tiberius. The rest of his reign was a series of brutal extravagances. We have lost the portion of those matchless Annals of Tacitus which contained the reign of Caius, but more than enough to revolt and horrify is preserved in the scattered notices of Seneca, and in the narratives of Suetonius in Latin and Dio Ca.s.sius in Greek.

His madness showed itself sometimes in gluttonous extravagance, as when he ordered a supper which cost more than 8,000_l_; sometimes in a _bizarre_ and disgraceful mode of dress, as when he appeared in public in women's stockings, embroidered with gold and pearls; sometimes in a personality and insolence of demeanor towards every rank and cla.s.s in Rome, which made him ask a senator to supper, and ply him with drunken toasts, on the very evening on which he had condemned his son to death; sometimes in sheer raving blasphemy, as when he expressed his furious indignation against Jupiter for presuming to thunder while he was supping, or looking at the pantomimes; but most of all in a ferocity which makes Seneca apply to him the name of ”Bellua,” or ”wild monster,”

and say that he seems to have been produced ”for the disgrace and destruction of the human race.”

We will quote from the pages of Seneca but one single pa.s.sage to justify his remark ”that he was most greedy for human blood, which he ordered to stream in his very presence with such eagerness as though he were going to drink it up with his lips.” He says that in one day he scourged and tortured men of consular and quaestorial parentage, knights and senators, not by way of examination, but out of pure caprice and rage; he seriously meditated the butchery of the entire senate; he expressed a wish that the Roman people had but a single neck, that he might strike it off at one blow; he silenced the screams or reproaches of his victims sometimes by thrusting a sponge in their mouths, sometimes by having their mouths gagged with their own torn robes, sometimes by ordering their tongues to be cut out before they were thrown to the wild beasts.

On one occasion, rising from a banquet, he called for his slippers, which were kept by the slaves while the guests reclined on the purple couches, and so impatient was he for the sight of death, that, walking up and down his covered portico by lamplight with ladies and senators, he then and there ordered some of his wretched victims to be beheaded in his sight.

It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread and detestation inspired by some of these Caesars, that their mere countenance is said to have inspired anguish. Tacitus, in the life of his father-in-law Agricola, mentions the shuddering recollection of the red face of Domitian, as it looked on at the games. Seneca speaks in one place of wretches doomed to undergo stones, sword, fire, and _Caius_; in another he says that he had tortured the n.o.blest Romans with everything which could possibly cause the intensest agony,--with cords, plates, rack, fire, and, as though it were the worst torture of all, with his look! What that look was, we learn from Seneca himself, ”His face was ghastly pale, with a look of insanity; his fierce, dull eyes were half-hidden under a wrinkled brow; his ill-shaped head was partly bald, partly covered with dyed-hair; his neck covered with bristles, his legs thin, and his feet mis-shapen.” Woe to the nation that lies under the heel of a brutal despotism; treble woe to the nation that can tolerate a despot so brutal as this! Yet this was the nation in the midst of which Seneca lived, and this was the despot under whom his early manhood was spent.

”But what more oft in nations grown corrupt, And by their vices brought to servitude, Than to love bondage more than liberty, Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty?”

It was one of the peculiarities of Caius Caesar that he hated the very existence of any excellence. He used to bully and insult the G.o.ds themselves, frowning even at the statues of Apollo and Jupiter of the Capitol. He thought of abolis.h.i.+ng Homer, and order the works of Livy and Virgil to be removed from all libraries, because he could not bear that they should be praised. He ordered Julius Graecinus to be put to death for no other reason than this, ”That he was a better man than it was expedient for a tyrant that any one should be;” for, as Pliny tells us, the Caesars deliberately preferred that their people should be vicious than that they should be virtuous. It was hardly likely that such a man should view with equanimity the rising splendour of Seneca's reputation.

Hitherto, the young man, who was thirty-five years old at the accession of Caius, had not written any of his philosophic works, but in all probability he had published his early, and no longer extant, treatises on earthquakes, on superst.i.tions, and the books _On India_, and _On the Manners of Egypt_, which had been the fruit of his early travels. It is probable, too, that he had recited in public some of those tragedies which have come down to us under his name, and in the composition of which he was certainly concerned. All these works, and especially the applause won by the public reading of his poems, would have given him that high literary reputation which we know him to have earned. It was not, however, this reputation, but the brilliancy and eloquence of his orations at the bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor.

Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness.

For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of ”a golden sheep” which he gave to the rich and placid Sila.n.u.s, and of ”Ulysses in petticoats,” by which he designated his grandmother, the august Livia. The two epigrammetic criticisms which he pa.s.sed upon the style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works _Commissiones meras_, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament and ant.i.theses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings _Arenu sine Calce_, ”sand without lime,” or, as we might say, ”a rope of sand.” This epigram showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached ant.i.theses. It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins.

[Footnote 25: Suet. _Calig._ liii.]

But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism. On one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he marked him out for immediate execution. Had Seneca died at this period he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain authenticity, and possibly a pa.s.sing notice in the page of Dio or Tacitus. But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more questionable career. One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp; that the health of the orator was so feeble that a natural death by the progress of his consumptive tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him out of the tyrant's way.

Throughout the remainder of the few years during which the reign of Caius continued, Seneca, warned in time, withdrew himself into complete obscurity, employing his enforced leisure in that unbroken industry which stored his mind with such encyclopaedic wealth. ”None of my days,”

he says, in describing at a later period the way in which he spent his time, ”is pa.s.sed in complete ease. I claim even a part of the night for my studies. I do not _find leisure_ for sleep, but I _succ.u.mb_ to it, and I keep my eyes at their work even when they are wearied and drooping with watchfulness. I have retired, not only from men, but from affairs, and especially from my own. I am doing the work for posterity; I am writing out things which may prove of advantage to them. I am intrusting to writing healthful admonitions--compositions, as it were, of useful medicines.”

But the days of Caius drew rapidly to an end. His gross and unheard-of insults to Valerius Asiaticus and Ca.s.sius Chaereas brought on him condign vengeance. It is an additional proof, if proof were wanting, of the degradation of Imperial Rome, that the deed of retribution was due, not to the people whom he taxed; not to the soldiers, whole regiments of whom he had threatened to decimate; not to the knights, of whom scores had been put to death by his orders; not to the n.o.bles, mult.i.tudes of whom had been treated by him with conspicuous infamy; not even to the Senate, which ill.u.s.trious body he had on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely and hatred,--but to the private revenge of an insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Ca.s.sius Chaereas, tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coa.r.s.e and calumnious banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, while day after day, Caius presided in person at the b.l.o.o.d.y games of the amphitheatre. On the fifth day (Jan. 24, A.D. 41), feeling unwell after one of his gluttonous suppers, he was indisposed to return to the shows, but at last rose to do so at the solicitation of his attendants. A vaulted corridor led from the palace to the circus, and in that corridor Caius met a body of n.o.ble Asiatic boys, who were to dance a Pyrrhic dance and sing a laudatory ode upon the stage. Caius wished them at once to practice a rehearsal in his presence, but their leader excused himself on the grounds of hoa.r.s.eness. At this moment Chaereas asked him for the watchword of the night. He gave the watchword, ”Jupiter.” ”Receive him in his wrath!”

exclaimed Chaereas, striking him on the throat, while almost at the same moment the blow of Sabinus cleft the tyrant's jaw, and brought him to his knee. He crouched his limbs together to screen himself from further blows, screaming aloud, ”I live! I live!” The bearers of his litter rushed to his a.s.sistance, and fought with their poles, but Caius fell pierced with thirty wounds; and, leaving the body weltering in its blood, the conspirators rushed out of the palace, and took measures to concert with the Senate a restoration of the old Republic. On the very night after the murder the consuls gave to Chaereas the long-forgotten watchword of ”Liberty.” But this little gleam of hope proved delusive to the last degree. It was believed that the unquiet ghost of the murdered madman haunted the palace, and long before it had been laid to rest by the forms of decent sepulchre, a new emperor of the great Julian family was securely seated upon the throne.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS, AND THE BANISHMENT OF SENECA.

While the senators were deliberating, the soldiers were acting. They felt a true, though degraded, instinct that to restore the ancient forms of democratic freedom would be alike impossible and useless, and with them the only question lay between the rival claimants for the vacant power. Strange to say that, among these claimants, no one seems ever to have thought of mentioning the prince who became the actual successor.

There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar. Weakened both in mind and body by the continuous maladies of an orphaned infancy, kept under the cruel tyranny of a barbarous slave, the unhappy youth had lived in despised obscurity among the members of a family who were utterly ashamed of him. His mother Antonia called him a monstrosity, which Nature had begun but never finished; and it became a proverbial expression with her, as is said to have been the case with the mother of the great Wellington, to say of a dull person, ”that he was a greater fool than her son Claudius.” His grandmother Livia rarely deigned to address him except in the briefest and bitterest terms. His sister Livilla execrated the mere notion of his ever becoming emperor. Augustus, his grandfather by adoption, took pains to keep him as much out of sight as possible, as a wool-gathering[26] and discreditable member of the family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately pa.s.sed him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept him as a b.u.t.t for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles. If, as was his usual custom, he dropped asleep, after a meal, he was pelted with olives and date-stones, or rough stockings were drawn over his hands that he might be seen rubbing his face with them when he was suddenly awaked.

[Footnote 26: He calls him [Greek meteoros] which implies awkwardness and constant absence of mind.]

This was the unhappy being who was now summoned to support the falling weight of empire. While rummaging the palace for plunder, a common soldier had spied a pair of feet protruding from under the curtains which shaded the sides of an upper corridor. Seizing these feet, and inquiring who owned them, he dragged out an uncouth, panic-stricken mortal, who immediately prostrated himself at his knees and begged hard for mercy. It was Claudius, who scared out of his wits by the tragedy which he had just beheld, had thus tried to conceal himself until the storm was pa.s.sed. ”Why, this is Germanicus!” [27] exclaimed the soldier, ”let's make him emperor.” Half joking and half in earnest, they hoisted him on their shoulders--for terror had deprived him of the use of his legs--and hurried him off to the camp of the Praetorians. Miserable and anxious he reached the camp, an object of compa.s.sion to the crowd of pa.s.sers-by, who believed that he was being hurried off to execution. But the soldiers, who well knew their own interests, accepted him with acclamations, the more so as, by a fatal precedent, he promised them a largess of more than 80_l_. apiece. The supple Agrippa (the Herod of Acts xii.), seeing how the wind lay, offered to plead his cause with the Senate, and succeeded partly by arguments, partly by intimidation, and partly by holding out the not unreasonable hopes of a great improvement on the previous reign.

[Footnote 27: The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus Caesar Germanicus.]

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not only were no _worse_ sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully established some claim to being considered a learned man. Had fortune blessed him till death with a private station, he might have been the Lucien Bonaparte of his family--a studious prince, who preferred the charms of literature to the turmoil of ambition. The anecdotes which have been recorded of him show that he was something of an archaeologist, and something of a philologian. The great historian Livy, pitying the neglect with which the poor young man was treated, had encouraged him in the study of history; and he had written memoirs of his own time, memoirs of Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars since the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so candid that his family indignantly suppressed it as a fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became master of the civilized world. He offers some singular points of resemblance to our own ”most mighty and dread sovereign,” King James I. Both were learned, and both were eminently unwise;[28] both of them were authors, and both of them were pedants; both of them delegated their highest powers to worthless favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites with such foolish liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them had been terrified into const.i.tutional cowardice by their involuntary presence at deeds of blood. Both of them, though of naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty, succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile. The parallel, so far as I am aware, has never been noticed, but is susceptible of being drawn out into the minutest particulars.