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Page 36
But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not a
sufficiently intelligent or serious woman to understand that if she had
been able to abuse the weakness of Claudius with impunity while he had
been the most obscure member of the imperial family, it was a much more
difficult matter to continue to abuse it after he had become the head
of the state. It was from this error that all their difficulties
arose. Elated by her new position, Messalina more than ever took
advantage of her husband's infirmity. She began by starting new
dissensions in the imperial family. Claudius had recalled to Rome the
two victims of Caligula's Egyptian caprices, Agrippina and Julia
Livilla; but if the latter no longer found a brother in Rome to
persecute them, they did find their aunt, and they had gained but
little by the exchange. Messalina soon took umbrage at the influence
which the two sisters acquired over the mind of their weak-willed
uncle, and it was not long before Julia Livilla was accused under the
_Lex de adulteriis_, and exiled with Seneca, the famous philosopher,
whom they wished rightly or wrongly to pass off as her lover.
Agrippina, like her mother, was a virtuous woman, as is proved by the
fact that she could not be attacked with such weapons and was enabled
to remain in Rome; though she also had to live prudently and beware of
her enemy, and much the more as she had only recently become a widow
and could therefore not even count upon the protection of a husband.
Though Agrippina remained at Rome, she was isolated and reduced to a
position of helplessness.
Messalina alone, together with four or five intelligent and
unscrupulous freedmen, hedged Claudius about, and there began the
period of their common government--a government of incredible waste and
extortion. Among these freedmen there were, to be sure, men like
Narcissus and Pallas, intelligent and sagacious, who did not aim merely
at putting money into their purses, but who helped Claudius to govern
the empire properly. Messalina, on the other hand, thought only of
acquiring wealth, that she might dissipate it in luxury and pleasures.
The wife of the emperor had been selling her influence to the sovereign
allies and vassals, to all the rich personages of the empire, who
desired to obtain any sort of favor from the imperial authority; she
had been seen bartering with the contractors for public works, mingling
in the financial affairs of the state every time that there was any
occasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulged
in ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the
_Lex sumptuaria_, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it is
easy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtues
she set. Claudius either knew nothing of all this or else submitted
without protest.
Messalina then, with her peculiar levity of character and violence of
temperament, continued to emphasize the modernizing Asiatic tendency
introduced by Caligula into the state, and was influential in
destroying the puritanic traditions of Rome and replacing them by the
corruption and pomp of Asia. Her r�le was exactly the opposite of that
of Livia. The latter had been the embodiment of the conservative
virtues of traditionalism: the former by her egoism, her extravagance,
and her wantonness was in a fair way to destroy all such traditions.
Livia had been almost a vestal in her fight for the puritanism of old
Rome: Messalina most ardently and violently fought to destroy it.
Such an empress, however, could hardly please the public. While those
who profited by her dissipations greatly admired Messalina, a lively
movement of protest was soon started among the people, for they, unlike
many of the aristocrats, who affected modern views and who pretended to
scorn the traditions of ancient Rome, were faithful to all such
puritanical traditions and wished to see at their emperor's side a lady
adorned with all the fairer virtues of the ancient matron--with those
virtues, in short, which Livia had personified with such dignity. How
could they tolerate this sort of dissipated Bacchante, who should have
been condemned to infamy and exile with the many other Roman women who
had been faithless to their husbands; who with the effrontery of her
unpunished crimes dishonored and rendered ridiculous the imperial
authority?
To the middle classes the emperor was a semi-sacred magistrate, charged
with maintaining by law and example the purity of the family, fidelity
in marital relations, and simplicity of customs. Now, to their
amazement, they saw in the person of the empress all the dissipations,
corruptions, and perversions of the woman who wished to live only for
her pleasure, to enjoy her beauty, and to have others enjoy it,
enthroned, to the scandal of all honest minds, in the palace of the
emperor. Furthermore, it seemed to every one a scandal that one who
was an emperor should at the same time be a weak husband; for the
simple good sense of the Latin would not admit that a man who could
govern an empire should not be able to command a woman. It soon became
the general opinion of all reasonable people that Messalina, in the
position of Livia upon the Palatine, and with so weak a husband, was
not only a scandal, but also a continual menace to the public.
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