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Page 43
This "restoration of the republic" was Agrippina's masterpiece, and
marks the zenith of her power. It followed, as a result of her
decision, that Nero, who was to go down to posterity as the most
terrible of tyrants, was that one of all the Roman emperors who had the
most limited power; and furthermore it was likewise the result of her
activity that the constitution of the empire had never been so close to
that of the ancient republic as under the government of Nero. Most
historians, hallucinated by Tacitus, have not noticed this, and they
have consequently not recognized that in carrying out this plan
Agrippina is neither more nor less than the last continuator of the
great political tradition founded by Augustus. In the minds of both
Augustus and Tiberius the empire was to be governed by the aristocracy.
The emperor was merely the depositary of certain powers of the nobility
conceded to him for reasons of state. If these reasons of state should
disappear, the powers would naturally revert to the nobles. It was
therefore expedient at this time to make the senate forget, in the
presence of a seventeen-year-old emperor, the pressure which had been
brought to bear upon it by the cohorts, and to wipe out the rancor
against the imperial power which was still dormant in the aristocracy.
This restoration was not, therefore, a sheer renunciation of privileges
and powers inherent in the sovereign authority, but an act of political
sagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of government
had been received in the school of Augustus.
[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger.]
The move was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperial
authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil
wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply
grounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority was
specially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nero
therefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope in
the general promise of concord. The disaffection which had been felt
in the last six years of Claudius's government was changed into a
general and confident optimism, which the first acts of the new
government and the signs of the future seemed to justify. Agrippina
continued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done before
the election: together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, she
suggested to him every word and deed. The senate resumed its ancient
functions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina in
conjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressing
wonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government was
in a better way than it ever yet had been.
But the situation soon changed. Agrippina, to be sure, had given her
son a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with a
simplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she had
early given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternal
authority. But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was a
temperament which rebelled against this species of education as
strongly as did Nero's. His taste for the arts of drawing and singing,
the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from his
childhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his raging
exoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power. His
was one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperaments
which feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition,
education, and the general opinion of the society in which they live
have prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful. In the case of
Nero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were to
become apparent.
The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon one
of those early marriages of which we have spoken in the first of these
studies. Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young lady
who, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education,
might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevation
to the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made the
acquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses and
imagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom he
had married from a sense of duty and not for love. This person was
Acte, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardent
youth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that he
one day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry Acte. But a
marriage between Nero and Acte was not possible. The _Lex de
maritandis ordinibus_ prohibited marriages between senators and
freedwomen. It was therefore natural that Agrippina should have
opposed it with all her strength. She, the great-granddaughter of
Livia, the granddaughter of Drusus, the daughter of Germanicus,
educated in the strictest ideas of the old Roman aristocracy, could not
permit her son to compromise the prestige of the entire nobility in the
eyes of the lower orders by so scandalous a _m�salliance_. But on this
occasion the youth, carried away by his passion, resisted. If he did
not actually repudiate Octavia, he disregarded her, and began to live
with Acte as if she were his wife. Agrippina insisted that he give up
this scandalous relationship; but in vain. The mother and son
disagreed, and very shortly after having resisted his mother in the
case of Acte, Nero began to resist her on other occasions. With
increasing energy he shook off maternal authority, which up to that
time he had accepted with docility.
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