|  | | Louis Sheehan | | Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire | |
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Sunday, August 29, 2010 - 12:18 PM
Meanwhile the Senate, as they were now on the eve of the quinquennial
contest, wishing to avert scandal, offered the emperor the "victory in
song," and added the "crown of eloquence," that thus a veil might be thrown
over a shameful exposure on the stage. Nero, however, repeatedly declared
that he wanted neither favour nor the Senate's influence, as he was a match
for his rivals, and was certain, in the conscientious opinion of the judges,
to win the honour by merit. First, he recited a poem on the stage; then,
at the importunate request of the rabble that he would make public property
of all his accomplishments (these were their words), he entered the theatre,
and conformed to all the laws of harp-playing, not sitting down when tired,
nor wiping off the perspiration with anything but the garment he wore,
or letting himself be seen to spit or clear his nostrils. Last of all,
on bended knee he saluted the assembly with a motion of the hand, and awaited
the verdict of the judges with pretended anxiety. And then the city-populace,
who were wont to encourage every gesture even of actors, made the place
ring with measured strains of elaborate applause. One would have thought
they were rejoicing, and perhaps they did rejoice, in their indifference
to the public disgrace.
All, however, who were present from remote towns, and still retained
the Italy of strict morals and primitive ways; all too who had come on
embassies or on private business from distant provinces, where they had
been unused to such wantonness, were unable to endure the spectacle or
sustain the degrading fatigue, which wearied their unpractised hands, while
they disturbed those who knew their part, and were often struck by soldiers,
stationed in the seats, to see that not a moment of time passed with less
vigorous applause or in the silence of indifference. It was a known fact
that several knights, in struggling through the narrow approaches and the
pressure of the crowd, were trampled to death, and that others while keeping
their seats day and night were seized with some fatal malady. For it was
a still worse danger to be absent from the show, as many openly and many
more secretly made it their business to scrutinize names and faces, and
to note the delight or the disgust of the company. Hence came cruel severities,
immediately exercised on the humble, and resentments, concealed for the
moment, but subsequently paid off, towards men of distinction. There was
a story that Vespasian was insulted by Phoebus, a freedman, for closing
his eyes in a doze, and that having with difficulty been screened by the
intercessions of the well disposed, he escaped imminent destruction through
his grander destiny.
After the conclusion of the games Poppaea died from a casual outburst
of rage in her husband, who felled her with a kick when she was pregnant.
That there was poison I cannot believe, though some writers so relate,
from hatred rather than from belief, for the emperor was desirous of children,
and wholly swayed by love of his wife. Her body was not consumed by fire
according to Roman usage, but after the custom of foreign princes was filled
with fragrant spices and embalmed, and then consigned to the sepulchre
of the Julii. She had, however, a public funeral, and Nero himself from
the rostra eulogized her beauty, her lot in having been the mother of a
deified child, and fortune's other gifts, as though they were
virtues.
To the death of Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, which, though a public grief, was a delight
to those who recalling the past thought of her shamelessness and cruelty,
Nero added fresh and greater odium by forbidding Caius Cassius to attend
the funeral. This was the first token of mischief. Nor was it long delayed.
Silanus was coupled with Cassius, no crime being alleged, but that Cassius
was eminent for his ancestral wealth and dignity of character, Silanus
for the nobility of his birth and the quiet demeanour of his youth. The
emperor accordingly sent the Senate a speech in which he argued that both
ought to be removed from the State, and made it a reproach against Cassius
that among his ancestors' busts he had specially revered that of Caius
Cassius, which bore the inscription "to the Party-Leader." In fact, he
had thereby sought to sow the seeds of civil war and revolt from the House
of the Caesars. And that he might not merely avail himself of the memory
of a hated name to stir up strife, he had associated with him Lucius Silanus,
a youth of noble birth and reckless spirit, to whom he might point as an
instrument of revolution.
Nero next denounced Silanus himself in the same terms as he had
his uncle Torquatus, implying that he was already arranging the details
of imperial business, and setting freedmen to manage his accounts, papers,
and correspondence, imputations utterly groundless and false. Silanus,
in truth, was intensely apprehensive, and had been frightened into caution
by his uncle's destruction. Nero then procured persons, under the name
of informers, to invent against Lepida, the wife of Cassius and aunt of
Silanus, a charge of incest with her brother's son, and of some ghastly
religious ceremonial. Volcatius Tullinus, and Marcellus Cornelius, senators,
and Fabatus, a Roman knight, were drawn in as accomplices. By an appeal
to the emperor these men eluded an impending doom and subsequently, as
being too insignificant, escaped from Nero, who was busy with crimes on
a far greater scale.
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