Part 17

There is another Roman woman who may be counted on the list of authors, and whose writings, had they only been preserved, would have proved of exceeding interest. This was the brilliant and accomplished Agrippina the Younger; a woman who was as finished a scholar as she was an experienced and successful politician. She wrote her _Memoirs_, not so much from a desire to make a contribution to history as to use them to blacken the character of the enemies of her house. She dipped her pen in the venom of hate and envy, and she found her material in the scandalous stories which floated about Rome, growing daily more exaggerated from an origin which no one knew. From this work of Agrippina, Suetonius and Tacitus doubtless drew much of the information which in their more serious productions blackens the character of Tiberius. It is also likely that, if it had not been for the facile and unrestrained pen of her successor, Messalina would have been known to us as a far less disreputable woman than she is made to appear.

Although there is no writing of Agrippina's extant, we do have what purports to be the speech in her defence which she made when accused by Junia Silana with a design of inciting Plautus to effect a change in the State, and, by marrying him, to regain her power in the commonwealth, which Nero had taken out of her hands. In it all we see nothing but the backbitings of two rancorous old women; but it was represented to Nero as a horrible affair. Nero's fears were so excited that it was with difficulty that he could be induced to allow his mother to survive until morning and have an opportunity to make her own defence. We have her speech as it is given by Tacitus. Possibly it is the historian's own composition; but it is exactly what we might expect from the fierce old empress-mother. And as it is certain that Seneca and Burrhus, to whom it was addressed, would have with them shorthand writers, it is not improbable that Tacitus took it from the official records. "I wonder not," said Agrippina, "that Silana, who never bore a child, should be a stranger to the affections of a mother; for, in truth, children are not so easily renounced by their parents, as adulterers are changed by a profligate. Nor, because Iturius and Calvisus, after having consumed their whole fortunes, as a last resource pay back to an old woman their services in undertaking my accusation, as an equivalent for their hire, does it follow that I am to be branded with the infamy, or that Cæsar should conceive the guilt of parricide. As to Domitia, I would thank her for all the efforts of her enmity to me, if she strove to exceed me in kindness to her nephew, my Nero. At present, by the ministration of Atimetus, her minion, and the merry-andrew Paris, she is framing a farce to fit for the stage. Where was she when I by my counsels obtained the adoption of her nephew and my son into the Claudian house? when I advanced his cause in every way necessary for getting him the Empire?--Admiring her fishponds at Baiæ." If this is Agrippina's composition, there is certainly no lack of force in it and she was preëminently an adept in the use of innuendo. We would like to have seen those _Memoirs_.

To turn to a pleasanter subject and introduce a more amiable, though less picturesque, character. While there were few women authors, there were many ladies who knew how to appreciate the work of their literary husbands; matrons who, in the bonds of legal marriage, were companions to their husbands in learning as well as in other things. Pliny has left us a most beautiful pen portrait of his young wife. He tells how, to please him more, she studied polite literature, learned his books by heart, set his verses to music, and accompanied them on her lyre. "How great is her anxiety," he says, "when she sees me going to speak in court, and how great her joy when I have spoken! She sets messengers about to report to her what favor and applause I have excited, and what is the result of the trial. Then whenever I recite she sits hard by, separated only from us by a curtain, and catches up with eager ears the praise bestowed on me."

IX

WOMAN AT HER WORST

In the course of this study there have come within our view some of the noblest women of whom the history of the world can boast. We have seen women of exalted purity in high positions, stately, dignified matrons, women renowned for intellect and noble spirit, women who have bravely endured unmerited suffering; we have also noted the women of the common people, and the gay ladies who ministered to love and laughter. But our account will be incomplete, the picture will not be a true one, unless it also represents the worst that human nature has produced, women stained with some of the basest crimes recorded in the annals of human depravity. It is a story in which the sober truth can only be told in superlative terms. What Scipio feared and Cato endeavored to prevent came to pass; and at the time when Rome centred in herself all the power and glory of the world, she also reached the climax of the vice and degradation of all ages.

The moral conditions which characterized the period between the reigns of Tiberius and Nero are, in these days, impossible of adequate comprehension. It was a continuous Saturnalia, a perpetual reign of terror, a paroxysm of indecency. What renders the situation so amazing and so difficult to describe is its strange mixture of civilization and savagery, of art and anarchy. The atrocious cruelties which render the history of that time so terrible and the lust which makes it so revolting are not attributed to half-clad barbarians or ignorant Asiatics; they were participated in by men and women whose outward life was marked and distinguished by all the signs and appointments of culture. The Julias and the Poppæas of the age were women who lived in beautiful houses; they were surrounded by a magnificence of art such as never since has been witnessed; they were the students of a literature which the world has never ceased to admire. Nor was the extravagant wickedness of the time a revolt against law; on the contrary, everything was done in accordance with legal forms. Vistilia, the wife of a Roman knight, in order that she might be unrestrained in her lasciviousness, went before the ædiles and proclaimed herself a prostitute, the law considering that prostitutes were sufficiently punished by merely thus avowing their shame. Even when the innocent children of Sejanus were put to death for the misdeeds of their father, the little girl--who asked what she had done that was wrong and if they were going to whip her--must be outraged by the executioner before he strangled her; for it was unlawful to inflict capital punishment upon virgins. While such things were being perpetrated, the ladies of Rome were studying the Greek philosophers, reading their own Virgil, and improving their diction by an acquaintance with the elegant periods of Cicero. It was an age in which the arts of civilization were entirely divorced from the best impulses of humanity, an age when the highest mental attainments were joined with the lowest moral conditions. The depraved Messalina was contemporary with the philosophic Seneca; the conscienceless Agrippina the Younger was a student of letters and an author.

It is easy to perceive that the cruelty and lust which render the history of the first two centuries of the Christian era so lurid are simply the natural developments from preceding conditions. The proscriptions and massacres of Sylla and the two triumvirates could but produce a society which would witness bloodshed with apathy, if not with delight. The total disregard of the sacredness of matrimonial vows, when political purposes were to be served, necessarily resulted in a generation of women among whom chastity was a matter of indifference and honor a thing unknown. Given a society thus, by heritage and training, predisposed to inhumanity and licentiousness, and it only needed the presence of favorable conditions for the introduction upon the imperial stage of a company of women upon whose actions the world has ever since gazed with profound amazement. Such conditions were then present in Rome in such a degree as they have never been at any other time or among any other people. The age was propitious and the circumstances were ripe for a climax in human depravity. The spoil of the conquered world provided Rome with incalculable riches; the Empire was the prize of him who could win and hold it, and of her who could maintain her position by the side of the ruler; power and the absence of restraint gave free rein to impulses which the existent conditions necessarily rendered evil. This was the _entourage_ of the women of Rome under the first emperors. The ladies of the nobility were trained and urged to cruelty and prostitution by the exigencies of their position; the women of the common class, for whom tributary bread and sanguinary spectacles were freely provided, were impelled in the same direction by example and idleness.

The acme of female turpitude was attained by Messalina, whose name has ever since served as a byword for unparalleled incontinence. Valeria Messalina was the great-granddaughter of Octavia, the sister of Augustus, both on her father's and her mother's side; thus in her veins united a twofold stream of the sacred Julian blood, which fact she never allowed herself to forget while insisting upon her demands, though it had no restraining effect upon her conduct. When only sixteen years of age, she became the third wife of the feeble, half-imbecile Claudius; one of her predecessors was Plautia Urgulanilla, the daughter of that proud Urgulania whose debts Livia Augusta had been compelled to pay. Plautia was divorced for "scandalous lewdness" and on the suspicion of murder, after she had given birth to two children, the youngest of whom Claudius exposed, being convinced that it had no just claims upon his paternal authority. But his honor as a husband was far less safe with Messalina than it had been with Plautia. That she should have any affection for the doddering, gormandizing old man--he was nearly fifty--was hardly to be expected. During the first three years after the marriage, her position was comparatively private, her husband having no expectation of attaining to the imperial throne.

During the reign of the demented Caligula, the women of the court present no figure of political importance, and are not interesting except as they illustrate the depravity of the times. This emperor was possessed with an exaggerated idea of the divinity that was inherent in the Augustan race. Therefore he deemed that, like the kings of Egypt, he should conserve that dignity by marrying his own sister. Suetonius will have us believe that all three of the sisters of Caligula were dishonored by their brother; but Drusilla was his favorite. She had been given to Cassius Longinus, but Caligula took her from him and kept her as though she were his lawful wife. He made a will appointing her heiress of his private estates and also of the Empire; and at her death he ordered for her a public mourning, and threatened capital punishment against any person who should laugh or bathe or seek any amusement during the period. It was also declared that she had been received among the heavenly deities; and as Panthea, the universal goddess, her worship was enjoined upon all the cities of Italy and the provinces.

The other sisters, Agrippina and Julia, became involved in a conspiracy with Marcus Æmillius Lepidus against the life of their brother; and when the plot was discovered, though the lives of these women were spared,--probably owing to Caligula's intense respect for the Julian blood,--their property was confiscated and they were both sent into exile. Agrippina, however, was first compelled to perform a most unpleasant office. The family of Lepidus begged that his ashes might rest in the family mausoleum at Rome, and the disordered mind of Caligula recalled a journey which his mother had made, bearing the ashes of Germanicus. So he forced Agrippina, who had schemed to marry Lepidus in the hope of gaining for him the succession, to carry the urn that contained his remains from Germany to Rome, and never once allowed her, night or day, to rest from bearing her burden.

Of the wives of Caligula, Suetonius says: "Whether in repudiating them or retaining them he acted with greater infamy, it is difficult to say." Being at the wedding of Caius Piso with Livia Orestilla, he ordered the bride to be carried to his own house; but within a few days divorced her, and two years after banished her, because, as was thought, upon her divorce she had returned to her former husband. Lollia Paulina, who was married to a man of consular rank in command of an army, having been mentioned to Caligula as much resembling her grandmother, who had been a famous beauty, the emperor suddenly called her from the province where she resided with her husband, and married her; but he soon repudiated her, interdicting her from ever afterward marrying another man. He loved with a most passionate and constant affection Cæsonia, who was neither handsome nor young, and who was the mother of three daughters by another man; but she was a woman of excessive wantonness. He would frequently exhibit her to the soldiers, riding by his side, dressed in a military cloak, with shield and helmet. To his friends he showed her in a guise far less elaborate and much more improper. After she had borne a child to him, she was honored with the title of wife. Caligula named the infant Julia Drusilla, and, carrying it around the temples of all the goddesses, he laid it on the lap of Minerva, from whom he begged the care of bringing up and instructing this daughter. He considered her as his own child, for no better reason than that her temper was so savage that even in infancy she would attack with her nails the faces and eyes of the children at play with her.

Cæsonia could hardly have enjoyed her position, especially on those occasions when her demoniacal husband would amuse himself with the idea of having it in his power to sever her neck at any time that it might please him so to do. She was killed at the time of his assassination; and, fortunately, her vicious offspring perished with her. The manner in which Cæsonia met her death seems to indicate that the woman not only possessed courage, but also that she cherished some sort of affection for her husband. The conspirators hesitated over the question as to whether she should share his fate; but it was only for a few minutes. It was believed by many that it was through her love philtres and licentious practices that his mind had become disordered and that therefore she was, in a sense, the author of his evil doings. It being determined that she should die, the men who went in search of her found Cæsonia embracing the body of Caligula as it lay upon the ground, and they heard her bewailing the fact that he had not been governed by her advice. Whether that advice had been to restrain himself in his madness, or to follow with vengeful measures a clue which she had given him in regard to the conspiracy, those who heard her could not decide. Their minds were predisposed to believe in the latter explanation. When she saw Lupus, the man who had her death in charge, approaching, she sat up, all besmeared as she was with her husband's blood, and, baring her throat, requested the assassin not to be awkward in finishing the tragedy. She received the death stroke cheerfully, and the little daughter, who was by her mother's side, perished by the same sword.

To his own intense astonishment, Claudius suddenly found himself proclaimed and accepted as Emperor of the Romans. There is no evidence to show that Messalina had anticipated this change of fortunes any more than had her husband. Finding herself, however, in the position of empress, she had no mind to do otherwise than maintain herself secure in its enjoyment. The times were such that this could be done only by means of merciless expedients. This fact should constantly be kept in mind as we study the women of imperial Rome. No individual can be governed by the ideas that are prevalent in the society in which he lives and, at the same time, dispense with the methods ordinarily employed by that society. The Romans of the period which we are now reviewing believed that the best, as well as the easiest, way in which to placate an enemy or to outwit a rival was to destroy him. Messalina had no desire to do better than her surroundings warranted; in fact, she represents the climax of immorality. There were two causes which led her freely to dispense destruction among her associates. First, there were plenty of women who would gladly have rivalled her in the affection of the amorous Claudius; and while she did not in the least reciprocate her husband's affection, its retention was necessary to the maintenance of her position. Again, her innumerable amours were constantly furnishing weapons against herself, and it was only by inspiring dread that she could restrain her enemies from making use of them to her own destruction.

In such a position as she found herself, and among such surroundings, it is not surprising that Messalina was bad. Raised, when only a mere girl, to a dizzy height; flattered and sought after by all the most dissolute of the imperial court; the wife of a doting husband who, as she quickly discovered, was absolutely under her influence; all this would have tested a woman in whose character good impulses were perceptibly present. So far as can be learned, Messalina possessed no such impulses; on the contrary, everything in her contributed to the strength of the evil influences of her environment. Her glaring immoralities, combined with the consummate art with which she contrived to befool her husband, have rendered this woman's history a monument of conjugal infidelity for all the ages.

We may be fairly certain as to Messalina's personal appearance, for there are a number of cameos and busts of her in existence, though, of course, some of these are ideal and others are not well executed. Baring Gould, who has made a careful study of the sculptured portraits of the Cæsarian family, regards it as certain that in the onyx cameo which is in the Cabinet of Antiques at Vienna and in the bust now preserved in the Uffizi Palace we have what may be considered correct representations of Messalina. Of the former, he says: "The hair is arranged in small curls covered with a species of crown wreathed with corn. This is the usual mark of the deification of an empress as Ceres. The brow is low, the nose straight and a little retrousse at the end, the mouth remarkable for the thinness of the lips; the chin is not prominent, and a peculiar feature is the slope from the chin to the throat, forming a marked contrast in formation to that of Livia opposite. The mouth turns down, but there is a slight contraction in the corner." Of the bust, he tells us: "The profile there has a remarkable likeness to the type-giving face on the cameo. The hair is in curls, but hangs down in plaits behind, the brow is low, the eyes full, and the mouth with its thin lips and cruel expression seems thoroughly to express the character of the woman as known to us by history. The head is flat. There is insolence in the mouth, and a curl in the corner, noticeable also in the gem. One eye is larger than the other. They are not in line. The nose has been restored, so that we cannot compare it with that on the cameo. The rest agrees perfectly, though the slope from the chin is not so perceptible in the bust owing to the difference in position of the head. The brows are straight, not arched. Not only are the eyes of different shapes, but the chin is on one side. The end of the chin is square, the mouth is small, the lips fuller on the left side than on the right, and the right corner drawn up. The expression of the face is different when seen from each side, owing to the singular lack of uniformity in the sides of the face. In the same gallery is a so-called young Britannicus, and the resemblance of this child, as far as the formation of the lower part of the head goes, to the Messalina above described is remarkable. Still more remarkable is that of the beautiful statue in the Lateran, where the resemblance is very close. The boy's lips are fuller, but the whole structure of the jaws and chin, and the curl of the lower lip, are the same as in the Messalina of Florence. If this be Britannicus, then the bust at Florence is that of his mother; and it is hard to say who else can be intended by this charming statue in military costume.

"A medical man of large experience, who at my request studied the bust of Messalina in the Florence gallery, informs me that it is that of a woman physically unsound; the flattening of the top of the head indicates an imperfect mental development, and the general aspect of the face, evidently a close study from life without any attempt at hiding blemishes and idealizing, is that of a woman whose span of life would naturally be short. There would probably be malformation of the chest. The face is that of one with feverish blood, whose flame of life burnt too fast. The face is not in itself sensual, nor at all animal, but it is insolent and cruel. The low, flat brow as well as the low, flat head show that she was deficient in all the higher and nobler qualities. In this bust the formation of the throat is peculiar. M. Mayor remarks: 'Thin lips, evil smile, ears hardly visible, jaw advancing and remarkably massive, eyes close together, profoundly sunk under their arcade, nostrils fine and flexible, lips asymmetrical, the upper lip lifted on the right, as in a beast prepared to bite, the same characteristic feature observed in Caligula and commented on by Darwin. Facial asymmetry. The left eye highest and furthest from the nose (the same noticeable in Nero and Claudius, etc.). The look cruel rather than voluptuous. An ironical smile, the by no means uncommon mask worn by pathological corruption and nymphomania,'" M. Menière, in a book entitled _Medical Studies from the Latin Poets_, also gives it as his opinion that Messalina was a victim of nymphomania. He says: "At the Salpêtrière, there are Messalinas, cases which have absolutely nothing to do with morals." This probably may safely be accepted as the true explanation of the case, if one can rid one's mind of two suspicions. The first of these is that this much-talked-of asymmetry may be nothing other than inferior or careless artistic work. The sculptor may not have been able, or he may not have given himself the time, to carve both sides of the face so absolutely alike as to defy the criticism of sharp scientists, bent on discovering a cause for the poetical effect found in Juvenal and others. The mention of the satirist suggests our second suspicion, which is that in his astonishing account of the criminal appetites of Messalina he is straining after effect.