The Historians' History of the World 06

Although, during his sojourn in Greece, Nero traversed the province in every direction, it was observed that he refrained from visiting either Athens or Sparta. With respect to the city of Lycurgus it was affirmed merely that he kept aloof from it lest the austerity of its usages should prove irksome to him; but he dared not enter the abode of the Erinyes, from dread of their vengeance on his crimes. Another account said that he was deterred from initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis, which was denied, under direst imprecations, to the impious and impure. Of these awful legends of Grecian antiquity but a faint and confused echo resounded in Italy. To the Latin or the Sabine it little mattered whether the murderer shrank from Athens or Eleusis, whether it was the avenging Furies or the pure goddess of the mysteries before whom he trembled to appear. Give but freedom to the people, they said, to declare what they really think, and who so base as to hesitate between Seneca and Nero—Nero, who more than once deserved the sack, the serpent, and the ape, the instruments of death for parricide. True, Orestes by divine command had slain his mother; but he at least avenged the death of a father—Nero had assisted at the slaughter of Claudius; Orestes spared at least his wife and sister—Nero had murdered both; Orestes had not poisoned a kinsman—Nero had mingled aconite for many: above all, Orestes had never sung upon the stage, nor chanted, like Nero, the fall of Ilium. This it seems was the crown and climax of his crimes, the last and worst of the indignities he heaped on Rome; this was the deed for which the sword of the avenger was most fitly drawn. “For such,” exclaims Juvenal, “forsooth, were the acts, such were the arts of our high-born prince, proud to degrade himself on a foreign stage, and earn the paltry chaplets of the Grecian games. Let him lay before the image of Domitius the mantle of Thyestes, the mask of Antigone or Melanippe; let him hang his votive lyre on the marble statue of Augustus.”

Beneath this veil of rhetoric lies a truth which it is the province of history to remark. The Romans, from age to age, viewed their own times in a very different light from that in which they have appeared to posterity. The notion of Juvenal that the acting and singing of Nero were in fact his most flagrant enormities was felt no doubt, even in his own day, as a wild exaggeration; nevertheless it points to the principle, then still in vigour, of the practical religion of antiquity, the principle of faith in its social traditions. With cruelty and oppression the Romans were so familiar that Nero’s atrocities in this respect, so harrowing to our feelings, made little impression upon them; but his desecration of their national manners, his abandonment of the mos majorum

, the usage of his ancestors, startled them like impiety or sacrilege. They were not aware how far they had really drifted from the habits of antiquity, how much of foreign poison they had admitted into their veins. Theoretically they still held in sanctimonious horror the customs of the stranger; foreign usages might be innocent, nay, laudable, in their own place, but to introduce them into Rome was a monstrous sin, a sin, not against the gods in whom they no longer believed, but against the nation, in which they believed more intensely perhaps than ever. The state or nation was itself gradually assuming in their eyes the personality of a distinct divinity, in which all other divinities were absorbed; the Hellenism which Nero vaunted was apostasy from the goddess Roma.

Roman Bronze Kettle