Nero Persecutes the Christians – 5

Today’s installment concludes Nero Persecutes the Christians,
our selection by Frederic William Farrar.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in Nero Persecutes the Christians.

Time: 64-68 AD
Place: Rome

On receiving this intelligence he fainted away and remained for some time unconscious. He continued, indeed, his grossness and frivolity but the wildest and fiercest schemes chased each other through his melodramatic brain. He would slay all the exiles; he would give up all the provinces to plunder; he would order all the Gauls in the city to be butchered; he would have all the senators invited to banquets and would then poison them; he would have the city set on fire and the wild beasts of the Amphitheatre let loose among the people; he would depose both the consuls and become sole consul himself, since legend said that only by a consul could Gauls be conquered; he would go with an army to the province and when he got there would do nothing but weep and when he had thus moved the rebels to compassion would next day sing with them at a great festival the ode of victory which he must at once compose. Not a single manly resolution lent a moment’s dignity to his miserable fall.

Sometimes he talked of escaping to Ostia and arming the sailors; at others of escaping to Alexandria and earning his bread by his “divine voice.” Meanwhile he was hourly subjected to the deadliest insults and terrified by dreams and omens so somber that his faith in the astrologers who had promised him the government of the East and the kingdom of Jerusalem began to be rudely shaken. When he heard that not a single army or general remained faithful to him, he kicked over the table at which he was dining, dashed to pieces on the ground two favorite goblets embossed with scenes from the Homeric poems and placed in a golden box some poison furnished to him by Locusta.

The last effort which he contemplated was to mount the Rostra, beg pardon of the people for his crimes, ask them to try him again, and, at the worst, to allow him the prefecture of Egypt. But this design he did not dare to carry out, from fear that he would be torn to pieces before he reached the Forum. Meanwhile he found that the palace had been deserted by his guards and that his attendants had robbed his chamber even of the golden box in which he had stored his poison. Rushing out, as though to drown himself in the Tiber, he changed his mind and begged for some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. The freedman Phaon offered him a lowly villa about four miles from the city. Barefooted and with a faded coat thrown over his tunic, he hid his head and face in a kerchief and rode away with only four attendants. On the road he heard the tumult of the praetorians cursing his name. Amid evil omens and serious perils he reached the back of Phaon’s villa, and, creeping toward it through a muddy reed-bed, was secretly admitted into one of its mean slave-chambers by an aperture through which he had to crawl on his hands and feet.

There is no need to dwell on the miserable spectacle of his end, perhaps the meanest and most pusillanimous which has ever been recorded. The poor wretch who, without a pang, had caused so many brave Romans and so many innocent Christians to be murdered could not summon up resolution to die. He devised every operatic incident of which he could think. When even his most degraded slaves urged him to have sufficient manliness to save himself from the fearful infamies which otherwise awaited him, he ordered his grave to be dug and fragments of marble to be collected for its adornment and water and wood for his funeral pyre, perpetually whining, “What an artist to perish!”

Meanwhile a courier arrived for Phaon. Nero snatched his dispatches out of his hand and read that the senate had decided that he should be punished in the ancestral fashion as a public enemy. Asking what the ancestral fashion was, he was informed that he would be stripped naked and scourged to death with rods, with his head thrust into a fork. Horrified at this, he seized two daggers, and, after theatrically trying their edges, sheathed them again, with the excuse that the fatal moment had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his funeral song and begged someone to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus and he whiled away the time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses’ hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest him rushed in. Nero was not yet dead and under pretense of helping him the centurion began to stanch the wound with his cloak. “Too late,” he said; “is this your fidelity?” So he died; and the bystanders were horrified with the way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his head in a rigid stare. He had begged that his body might be burned without posthumous insults and this was conceded by Icelus, the freedman of Galbo.

So died the last of the Caesars! And as Robespierre was lamented by his landlady, so even Nero was tenderly buried by two nurses who had known him in the exquisite beauty of his engaging childhood and by Acte, who had inspired his youth with a genuine love.

But his history does not end with his grave. He was to live on in the expectation alike of Jews and Christians. The fifth head of the Wild Beast of the Revelation was in some sort to reappear as the eighth; the head with its diadem and its names of blasphemy had been wounded to death but in the Apocalyptic sense the deadly wound was to be healed. The Roman world could not believe that the heir of the deified Julian race could be cut off thus suddenly and obscurely and vanish like foam upon the water. The Christians felt sure that it required something more than an ordinary death stroke to destroy the antichrist and to end the vitality of the Wild Beast from the Abyss, who had been the first to set himself in deadly antagonism against the Redeemer and to wage war upon the saints of God.

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