LITMIR.BIZ

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this is the time to look for a little while at this Nero, whose name has deservedly passed into a byword for heartless bestiality. In the year 64 he is 27 years of age, and has been seated on the throne for ten years. Four years more are to elapse before he perishes with the cry, "What an artist the world is losing!" In his early years his vicious propensities, inherited from an abominable father, had been kept in check partly by his preceptor, the philosopher Seneca, and by Burrus, the commander of the Imperial Guards, partly by his domineering and furious-tempered mother, Agrippina, who seems to have so closely resembled the mother of Lord Byron. But at this date he had got rid of both his tutors. Burrus was dead, probably by poison, and Seneca was in forced retirement. The emperor had also caused his own mother to be murdered. Poisoning, strangling, drowning, or a command—explicit or implied—to depart this life, were his ways of shaking off any incubus upon a free indulgence of his will. His follies and vices had revealed themselves from the first, and had gone to outrageous lengths, but now he is entirely unhampered in exhibiting them.

      [Illustration: Photo—Mansell & Co. FIG. 14—BUST OF AGRIPPINA, MOTHER

       OF NERO.]

      Educated slightly in philosophy, but better in music and letters, he could speak, like others of his day, Greek as well as his native Latin. His aim was to be an "artist," but if the want of balance which too often goes with what is called the "artistic temperament" ever manifested itself in its worst form, it was in Nero. Apart from his passion for music and verse, he developed an early mania for horse-racing, and when he was caught talking in school—where such conversation was forbidden—about a charioteer who had fallen out of his chariot and been dragged along the ground, he explained that he was discussing the passage in Homer where Achilles drags the body of Hector round the walls of Troy. In after life he carried both forms of mania to amazing lengths. The highest form of music was then represented by singing to the harp. Nero's ambition was no less than to compete with the champion minstrels of the world. As he remarked, "music is not music unless it is heard," and he decided to make public appearances upon the stage like any professional. Whenever he did so, a number of energetic youths, salaried for the purpose, were distributed among the audience as claqueurs—the words actually used for them being perhaps translatable as "boomers" or "rattlers." He acted parts in plays—a proceeding which would correspond to an appearance in opera—and made a peregrination through Greece and back by way of Naples as an exponent of the art of singing to the harp. While upon this tour, whenever he was performing in the theatre, the doors were shut, and no one might leave the building for any reason whatever. "Many," says the memoir-writer, "got so tired of listening and praising that they jumped down from the wall, or pretended to be dead, so as to get carried out." Naturally he always won the prize, and, on his side, it should be remarked that he honestly believed he had earned it. He practised assiduously, took hard physical training, regulated his diet for the cultivation of his voice, which was not naturally of the best, and probably became not at all a bad amateur. His monstrous self-conceit did the rest. Besides singing to the harp, he was prepared to perform upon the flute and the bagpipes, and to give a dance afterwards. All this, of course, was undignified and ridiculous, but it was scarcely tyranny. Doubtless there was sufficient suffering among the audience, but that cruelty was hardly deliberate. In the Roman noble, whose ideal of behaviour included dignity and gravity, these public appearances perhaps often aroused more indignation and scorn than did his sensual vices. The same contempt was often evoked by other proceedings of a similar nature. His insatiable fondness for horse-racing, or rather chariot-racing, induced him to appear also as a charioteer. First he practised in his extensive private park or gardens, which were situated across the Tiber on the ground now approximately occupied by St. Peter's and the Vatican. When he appeared at the Olympic games driving a team of ten horses, he was thrown out of the car, and had to be lifted into it again. Though he was eventually compelled to abandon the race, he was, of course, crowned victor all the same. He dabbled also in painting and modelling.

      We must not dwell too long upon his eccentricities. One might describe how in his earlier years he often put on mufti and roamed the streets at night with a few choice Mohawks, broke into shops, and insulted respectable citizens, throwing them into the drains if they resisted; how, being unrecognized, he once received a sound thrashing from a person of the senatorial order, and was thereafter attended on such occasions by police following at a distance. One might describe his dicing at £3 or £4 a pip, or his banquets, at one of which he paid as much as £30,000 for roses from Alexandria. After the great conflagration which swept over a large part of Rome in this very year 64 he began to build his enormous Golden House, in which stood a colossal effigy of himself 120 feet high, and in which the circuit of the colonnade made three Roman miles. Whether he deliberately set fire to the city in order to make room for this stupendous palace is open to doubt. It was naturally believed at the time, and, in order to divert suspicion from himself, he turned it upon those persons for whom the Roman populace had at that moment the greatest contempt, because, as the historian puts it, of their pestilent superstition and of a profound suspicion that they harboured a "hatred of the human race." These were the new sect of the Christians, and with burning Christians did Nero proceed to light up his gardens on one famous night, as a means of placating the populace whom he had offended, but who for the most part loved him for his misplaced generosity in the matter of "bread and sports." The tolerant attitude of the Romans towards foreign religions will be discussed in its own place; but the cruelty of a Nero in the year 64 can hardly be put down as properly a religious persecution in any way typical of the Roman government.

      The sensual vices of Nero are indescribable, and that word must suffice. His extravagances, whether in lavish presents or in personal expenditure, soon rendered him bankrupt. He had no means of paying the soldiers or meeting his own appetites. Then began, or increased, his attacks on wealthy persons, his executions and banishments of senators and other wealthy men, and his flimsy pretexts for all manner of confiscation. The Senate he hated and the Senate hated him. Nevertheless, so far as the empire itself was concerned, no systematic or widespread oppression can have been perceptible. His officers and the officers of the Senate were apparently all the time governing and administering the law and the taxation throughout the empire in as sound and steady a way as if an Augustus sat upon the throne.

      If we wish to picture Nero to ourselves, here is his description: "He was of a fairly good height; his skin was blotched, and his odour unpleasant; his hair was inclined to be yellow; his face was more handsome than attractive; his eyes were grayish-blue and short-sighted; his neck was fat; he was protuberant below the waist; his legs were very slender; his health was good."

      Such was the man to whom St. Paul elected to have his case referred, when at Caesarea he exercised his privilege as a Roman citizen and appealed to the titular protector of the commons. "Thou hast appealed unto Caesar, and unto Caesar shalt thou go." There is indeed no great probability that the apostle was ever brought directly before this precious emperor. We may perhaps draw from bur inner consciousness elaborate and interesting pictures of the two men confronting each other, but we must not forget that they will be pure imagination. The appeal of a citizen did not imply such right to an interview, for the Caesar in such minor cases commonly delegated his powers to other judicial authorities at Rome. Paul's object was gained if his case was safely removed from the local influences of Judaea and the weaker policy of its governor, the "agent of Caesar," to the capital with its broader-minded men and its superiority to small bribes and local interference.

      [Illustration: FIG. 15.—BUST OF NERO.]

CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

      ADMINISTRATION AND TAXATION OF THE EMPIRE

      We are now brought to the consideration of the methods by which this huge empire was organised and governed.

      And first let us observe that the Romans—strict disciplinarians and great lawyers as they were—never sought to impose upon the subject provinces any uniformity. They never sought, any more than Great Britain has sought, to erect one code of law, one form of administration, one standard of rights, one rate of taxation, one religion, and to make

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