The Historians' History of the World 06

This artfully compound speech, adapted to excite fear and rage, at once produced the desired effect, and terrified while it inflamed the imperial hearer; but a suspicion resting only on the evidence of a slave, and neutralised by the asseverations of the tortured maids, was not strong enough for this purpose. It was therefore resolved that some person should be found who would confess the guilty commerce, and who might also be plausibly charged with the crime of rebellion. Anicetus was judged a fitting instrument for this purpose; the same who had accomplished the murder of his mother, and, as I have related, commanded the fleet at Misenum; whom the emperor, after that horrid service, held in light esteem, but afterwards in extraordinary detestation; for the ministers of nefarious deeds seem in the eyes of their employers as living reproaches of their iniquity. Him therefore Nero summoned; and told him that he alone had saved the life of the prince from the dark devices of his mother; an opportunity for a service of no less magnitude now presented itself by relieving him from a wife who was his mortal enemy, nor was there need of force or arms; he had only to admit adultery with Octavia. He promised rewards, which he said must indeed be kept a secret for the present, but of great value, and also a delightful retreat; but threatened him with death, if he declined the task. Anicetus, from an inherent perversity of principle, and a facility in crime produced by the horrible transactions in which he had been already engaged, even exceeded his orders in lying, and made confession of the adultery to the friends of the prince, whom he had summoned as a council. He was then banished to Sardinia, where he lived in exile, but not in poverty, and where he died a natural death.

Now Nero in an edict stated that Octavia, in hopes of engaging the fleet in her conspiracy, had corrupted Anicetus the admiral. And forgetting that he had just before accused her of barrenness, he added, that in guilty consciousness of her lust, she had produced abortion, and that all these were clearly proved to him. And he confined her in the island Pandataria. Never was there any exile who touched the hearts of the beholders with deeper compassion; some there were who still remembered to have seen Agrippina banished by Tiberius; the more recent sufferings of Julia were likewise recalled to mind, confined there by Claudius: but they had experienced some happiness, and the recollection of their former splendour proved some alleviation of their present horrors. To Octavia, in the first place, the day of her nuptials was in place of a funeral day, being brought under a roof where she encountered nothing but memorials of woe; her father cut off by poison, and soon afterwards her brother; then a handmaid more influential than her mistress; Poppæa wedded to her husband, only to bring destruction on his lawful wife—and lastly, a crime laid to her charge more intolerable than death in any shape.

And this young lady, in her twentieth year, thrown among centurions and common soldiers, and already bereft of life under the presage of impending woes, did not, however, as yet enjoy the repose of death. After an interval of a few days she was ordered to die, when she protested,“she was now a widow, and only the emperor’s sister”; appealed to the Germanici, the common relatives of Nero and herself; and lastly invoked the name of Agrippina, observing, “that had she lived, her marriage-state would have been made wretched, but she would not have been doomed to destruction.” She was then tied fast with bonds, and her veins opened in every joint; and her death was accelerated by the vapour of a bath, heated to the highest point. A deed of still more atrocious brutality was added; her head was cut off and conveyed to the city for Poppæa to see it. Offerings at the temples were decreed by the fathers on account of these events; a circumstance which I have recorded in order that that all those who shall read the calamities of those times, as they are delivered by me or any other authors, may conclude by anticipation, that as often as a banishment or a murder was perpetrated by the prince’s orders, so often thanks were rendered to the gods; and those acts which in former times were resorted to to distinguish prosperous occurrences, were now made the tokens of public disasters. Still I will not suppress the mention of any decree of the senate which is marked by unheard-of adulation, or the extremity of abject servility.