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"A PRIVATE TRIAL 247
faithful to the heads of a household in which they were
treated with generosity and consideration. The spies of
the informers could scarcely find a slave in the whole
family whom they could ternpt to drunkenness and indiscreet
babbling. All that they could learn from the gossip
of the least worthy was that Pomponia did not burn
incense in the Lararium, or attend the temples. The informers
had to content themselves with these meagre facts,
trusting to perjury and invention to do the rest. Kegulus
undertook the case. The sound of his name was sufficient
to strike a chill into an innocent and honest heart, and feeling
certain of success, or, at the worst, of impunity, he laid
before the Emperor a public information that Pomponia
Grsecina was the guilty votary of a foreign superstition.
The friends and relatives of Pomponia had heard rumours
that some attack of the kind was in contemplation but in
; the days of the Empire such rumours were rife, and they
often came to nothing. When the charge was published they
were filled with consternation. They knew that it mattered
very little whether it was true or false. The result would
turn on the influences which had been brought to bear on
Nero. If Nero favoured the prosecution, Pomponia might be
as innocent as a new-born child, yet it was certain that she
would be condemned. One could commit no fault so slight
but what Csesar's house might be mixed up with it. Had
not Julius GraBcinus been put to death under Gaius simply
because he was too honest a man ? Were not the wretched
little islets of Gyara and Tremerus crowded with illustrious
and innocent exiles ? If beauty and wealth and imperial
blood had not saved the two Julias, or the two Agrippiuas,
what should save a lady so alien from the common interests
of Koman society as the wife of Plautius ?
One thing saved her.
Nothing had been more remote from her mind than any
thought of self-interest when she visited Agrippina. She had
gone to see her chiefly because she knew that the threshold,
once thronged with suitors and applicants, had now become
so solitary, and because an habitual sense of pity drew her to
the side of the unfortunate. Her sole object had been, if
possible to bring a little peace and consolation to a sisterwoman,
whose dejection and misery could only be measured