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AGRIPPINA AT BAY 229
CHAPTER XXIX
A GRIPPINA AT BAY
'
Caritas quse est inter natos et parentes clhimi nisi detestabili scelere non
potest.'
Cic. Lad. viii. 28.
THERE were some who thought
it an unparalleled tragedy that
Britannicus should not only have died so young, but also at a
banquet, and so suddenly, and by the hand of a bitter enemy,
and under his very eyes. There were few in the Pagan world
who realised the truth that he who needed their shuddering
pity was not the boy who perished, but the youth who murdered
him.
At first Nero was alarmed by what he had done. He thought
that he would be haunted by the manes of the wronged Britannicus.
He shunned Octavia, and if he met her was forced
to avert his glance. He faced his mother with shy moroseness.
He never dared to sleep alone. The sound of a shaken
leaf terrified him. A thunderstorm, which happened a few
days later, drove him into a paroxysm of terror, during which,
like Gaius before him, he hid himself under a bed, and sent
for the skin of a seal as a fancied protection against the flame
of heaven.
But it was not thus that he was to feel the wrath of God.
The doom was past, but the punishment deferred. The most
terrible part of his retribution was that he was let alone to fill
to the brim the cup of his iniquity. Sin was to be to him the
punishment of sin, and the avenging scourge was put into the
hand of his own vices. The first fearful crime which he had
committed ought to have lit
up his dark conscience with its
fierce, unnatural, revealing glare. It did so for a moment, but
only to leave him in deeper darkness. His moral sense was
hardened to a still deadlier callosity, until he developed into
the execration of mankind.