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Page 37
[Illustration: The Emperor Claudius.]
Nevertheless, it would now have been no easy matter, even if the
emperor had wished it, to convict an empress of infidelity and
disobedience to one of the great laws of Augustus. Caligula was a
madman and had been able to secure three divorces, but a wiser emperor
would have to think for a long time before rendering public the shame
and scandals of his family, especially when confronted with an
aristocracy which was as eager to suspect and calumniate as was the
aristocracy of Rome. But the problem became hopeless as soon as the
emperor did not see or did not wish to see the faults of his wife.
Would any one dare to step forward and accuse the empress?
The situation gradually became grave and dangerous. The state,
governed with intelligence, but without energy, with vast
contradictions and hesitations, was being strengthened along certain
lines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortions
of the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both through
what she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalina
was being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whose
infamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all in vain.
It now became quite evident that an empress was virtually invulnerable,
and that, once enthroned upon the Palatine, there was no effective
means of protesting against the various ways in which she could abuse
her lofty position unless the emperor wished to interfere. In its
exasperation, the public finally vented upon Claudius the anger which
the violence and misconduct of Messalina had aroused. They declared
that it was his weakness which was responsible for her conduct; and
intrigues, deeds of violence, conspiracies, and attempts at civil war
became, as Suetonius says, every-day occurrences at Rome.
A sense of insecurity and doubt was spreading throughout the state as a
result of the indecision of the emperor, and all began to ask
themselves how long a government could last which was at the mercy of a
wanton. The violent death of Caligula, which was still fresh in the
minds of the people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurity
and alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness of
his person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody,
in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, it
seemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the case
of Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government be
overturned,--in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had been
overturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, and
alarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded in
ridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius.
[Illustration: Messalina, third wife of Claudius.]
So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of a
government which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things.
Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainly
the one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because of
his wife. Such a situation could not endure.
It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could
believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most
monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could
have abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at a
loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her
head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love,
who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the
consul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the
imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did
marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius
was at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting that
Messalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reason
would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very
heart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina
certainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing to
admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would
have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting
farce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they acted
through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could
constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.
This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius
by chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidem
excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat,
tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass all
belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted with
the adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed the
figures for the dowry"). If Claudius himself gave a dowry to the
bride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius was
to take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredible
to Suetonius. But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man could
give away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in
this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to
Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The
deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre
marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground
in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the
prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as
the middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded in
imposing upon it their ideas and sentiments. The passage in Suetonius
proves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, and
it is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it. Nor is
it improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of the
contemporaries of Claudius. We could therefore explain how, not really
understanding what had happened, the historians of the following
century should have believed that Messalina had married Silius while
she was still the wife of Claudius.
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