AGRIPPINA

The Palace of the Cæsars was a building of extraordinary spaciousness and splendour, which had grown with the growing power of the emperors. The state entrance was in the Vicus Apollinis, which led into the Via Sacra. It was an Arch, twenty-nine feet high, surmounted by a statue of Apollo and Diana driving a chariot of four horses, the work of Lysias. Passing the Propylæa the visitor entered the sacred area, paved with white marble and surrounded by fifty-two fluted columns of Numidian giallo antico, with its soft tints of rose and gold. Between these stood statues of the Danaides, with their father Danaus brandishing a naked sword. In the open spaces before them were the statues of their miserable Egyptian husbands, each reining his haughty steed. Here, too, among other priceless works of art, stood the famous Hercules of Lysippus, clothed in his lion’s skin and leaning on his club. On one side was the Temple of Apollo, built of the marble of Luna, designed by Bupalos and Anthermos of Chios. On the top of its pediment was the chariot of Apollo in gilt bronze, and the great bronze valves were encrustedT1 with ivory bas-reliefs of the triumph over Niobe, and the panic-stricken flight of the Gauls from Delphi. Behind this temple was the shrine of Vesta, and on the west side the famous Palatine Library, large enough to accommodate the whole Senate, and divided into two compartments, Greek and Latin. In its vestibule was a bronze statue, fifty feet high, which is said to have represented Augustus with the attributes of Apollo.1

To the Palace and Propylæa of Augustus, with their open spaces, and shrubs, and flowers, and fountains, Tiberius had added a separate palace, known as the Domus Tiberiana, which overlooked the Velabrum; and Gaius—more commonly known by his nickname of Caligula—had filled with buildings the entire space between the Palace and the Forum. He had also purchased the House of Gelotius, and in that humble annex had delighted to spend nights of riotous orgies with the grooms and charioteers of his favourite green faction. Since his time it had been utilised as a training-school for the imperial pages, whose scribblings, sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes humorous and satirical, can still be traced on the fast-crumbling walls. Vast as was the whole composite structure, it received immense additions from the restless extravagance of Nero, Domitian, and later emperors.

But if it surpassed all the other buildings of imperial Rome in magnificence, it surpassed them also in misery and guilt. Here, in the days of Augustus, the Empress Livia had plotted the murder and removal of all who stood in the way of her son’s succession. Here in the days of Tiberius the conscious walls had witnessed the deadly intrigues of Ælius Sejanus. In A.D. 23, that daring and cruel conspirator had secured the poisoning of Drusus, the only son of Tiberius, by insinuating himself into the affections of Livia, his faithless wife. Here in A.D. 33, the younger Drusus, son of the hero Germanicus, was slowly starved to death by order of Tiberius. In one of the subterranean vaults he had poured out his mad reproaches against the tyrant, had writhed under the savage rebukes of the centurion, and had been beaten by the brutal slaves who guarded his dungeon. For nine days he had lingered on, chewing in his agony the tow with which his mattress was stuffed. Here the young Tiberius Gemellus, grandson of Tiberius, piteously ignorant how to kill himself, had been shown how to drive the poniard into his throat by the tribune sent for that purpose by his cousin and adoptive brother, Caligula. Chamber after chamber in that huge structure had witnessed the wild and brutal freaks of that madman-emperor and the tortures which he inflicted upon nobles and senators, whose mouths he ordered to be gagged with their own bloodstained garments. Here he had been visited with the dire vengeance of his crimes; for in the covered gallery which he had built as a passage between his palace and the theatre, he had been smitten by the fierce sword of the tribune Cassius Chærea. Hard by—the stains of blood were still upon the wall—his empress, the blue-eyed Cæsonia, had been stabbed in the throat as she wailed and wept over the dead body of her lord; and her little infant, Julia Drusilla, had been dashed against the stones.

Such was the Palace of pagan Rome in the days of Christ and His Apostles.

It might well have seemed, even to the most callous worshipper of the old gods, that a dark spirit was walking in that house; that the phantoms of the unavenged dead haunted it; that ghostly footfalls glided through its midnight corridors; and that in hidden corners the lonely wanderer might come on some figure ‘weeping tears of blood,’ which vanished with ‘hollow shriek’ before the presence of the innocent.

No such feelings of dread disturbed the thoughts of the Empress Agrippina on a certain September evening, A.D. 54. The world was at her feet. Her brave and good father, Germanicus, her chaste and virtuous mother, the elder Agrippina, had been the idols alike of the Roman soldiers and the Roman people. She was the great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus; the granddaughter of the victorious Agrippa; the great-niece of the Emperor Tiberius; the sister of the Emperor Gaius: and now at last her unwearied intrigues had made her the sixth wife of her uncle, the Emperor Claudius. Not content with such near bonds to so many of those who were honoured as gods on earth, did she not mean that her boy also—her darling Nero—should ere long mount the throne of the Cæsars, and that she herself should govern for many a long year in his name, as she now governed in the name of her husband Claudius? Her ancestress Livia, the stately wife of Augustus, had received the imperial title of Augusta, but not until her husband’s death; Agrippina had received it, and with it every honour which a servile Senate could devise, in her early prime. Had she not sat on a throne, in unwonted splendour, by the side of her weak and prematurely aged husband at the reception of foreign ambassadors? Was she not privileged, alone of Roman princesses, to ride in a chariot to the Capitol? Was not her fine head and lovely face stamped on thousands of coins and medals? Had she not shown, in contrast to her predecessor, the beautiful and abandoned Messalina, how dignified could be a matron’s rule?

Yes, the world was at her feet; and by every glance and every gesture she showed her consciousness of a grandeur such as no woman had hitherto attained. Her agents and spies were numberless. The Court was with her, for in the days of Claudius the Court meant the all-powerful freedmen, who impudently ruled and pillaged their feeble master; and if she could not seduce the stolid fidelity of his secretary Narcissus, she had not disdained to stoop to the still more powerful Pallas. The people were with her, for she was the sole surviving child of the prince whom they had regarded with extravagant affection. The intellect of Rome was on her side, for Seneca, always among her favourites, had been