第90章 A.D.54-58(12)

He had offered her marriage and had won her consent.But as soon as she was free, she devised delays, pretended that her father's wishes were against it, and having secured the prospect of a richer husband, she repudiated her promises.Octavius, on the other hand, now remonstrated, now threatened; his good name, he protested, was lost, his means exhausted, and as for his life, which was all that was left to him, he surrendered it to her mercy.When she spurned him, he asked the solace of one night, with which to soothe his passion, that he might set bounds to it for the future.A night was fixed, and Pontia intrusted the charge of her chamber to a female slave acquainted with her secret.Octavius attended by one freedman entered with a dagger concealed under his dress.Then, as usual in lovers' quarrels, there were chidings, entreaties, reproaches, excuses, and some period of the darkness was given up to passion;then, when seemingly about to go, and she was fearing nothing, he stabbed her with the steel, and having wounded and scared away the slave girl who was hurrying to her, rushed out of the chamber.Next day the murder was notorious, and there was no question as to the murderer, for it was proved that he had passed some time with her.The freedman, however, declared the deed was his, that he had, in fact, avenged his patron's wrongs.He had made some impression by the nobleness of his example, when the slave girl recovered and revealed the truth.Octavius, when he ceased to be tribune, was prosecuted before the consuls by the father of the murdered woman, and was condemned by the sentence of the Senate under "the law concerning assassins."A profligacy equally notorious in that same year proved the beginning of great evils to the State.There was at Rome one Sabina Poppaea; her father was Titus Ollius, but she had assumed the name of her maternal grandfather Poppaeus Sabinus, a man of illustrious memory and pre-eminently distinguished by the honours of a consulship and a triumph.As for Ollius, before he attained promotion, the friendship of Sejanus was his ruin.This Poppaea had everything but a right mind.Her mother, who surpassed in personal attractions all the ladies of her day, had bequeathed to her alike fame and beauty.Her fortune adequately corresponded to the nobility of her descent.Her conversation was charming and her wit anything but dull.She professed virtue, while she practised laxity.Seldom did she appear in public, and it was always with her face partly veiled, either to disappoint men's gaze or to set off her beauty.Her character she never spared, making no distinction between a husband and a paramour, while she was never a slave to her own passion or to that of her lover.Wherever there was a prospect of advantage, there she transferred her favours.And so while she was living as the wife of Rufius Crispinus, a Roman knight, by whom she had a son, she was attracted by the youth and fashionable elegance of Otho, and by the fact too that he was reputed to have Nero's most ardent friendship.

Without any delay the intrigue was followed by marriage.

Otho now began to praise his wife's beauty and accomplishments to the emperor, either from a lover's thoughtlessness or to inflame Nero's passion, in the hope of adding to his own influence by the further tie which would arise out of possession of the same woman.

Often, as he rose from the emperor's table, was he heard repeatedly to say that he was going to her, to the high birth and beauty which had fallen to his lot, to that which all men pray for, the joy of the fortunate.These and like incitements allowed but of brief delay.Once having gained admission, Poppaea won her way by artful blandishments, pretending that she could not resist her passion and that she was captivated by Nero's person.Soon, as the emperor's love grew ardent, she would change and be supercilious, and, if she were detained more than one or two nights, would say again and again that she was a married woman and could not give up her husband attached as she was to Otho by a manner of life, which no one equalled."His ideas and his style were grand; at his house everything worthy of the highest fortune was ever before her eyes.Nero, on the contrary, with his slave girl mistress, tied down by his attachment to Acte, had derived nothing from his slavish associations but what was low and degrading."Otho was now cut off from Nero's usual familiar intercourse, and then even from interviews and from the royal suite, and at last was appointed governor of the province of Lusitania, that he might not be the emperor's rival at Rome.There he lived up to the time of the civil wars, not in the fashion of his disgraceful past, but uprightly and virtuously, a pleasure-loving man when idle, and self-restrained when in power.

Hitherto Nero had sought a veil for his abominations and wickedness.

He was particularly suspicious of Cornelius Sulla, whose apathetic temper he interpreted as really the reverse, inferring that he was, in fact, an artful dissembler.Graptus, one of the emperor's freedmen, whose age and experience had made him thoroughly acquainted with the imperial household from the time of Tiberius, quickened these apprehensions by the following falsehood.The Mulvian bridge was then a famous haunt of nightly profligacy, and Nero used to go there that he might take his pleasures more freely outside the city.So Graptus, taking advantage of an idle panic into which the royal attendants had chanced to have been thrown on their return by one of those youthful frolics which were then everywhere practised, invented a story that a treacherous attack had been planned on the emperor, should he go back by the Flaminian road, and that through the favour of destiny he had escaped it, as he went home by a different way to Sallust's gardens.Sulla, he said, was the author of this plot.