click to read pdf file - The Preterist Archive

318 DARKNESS AND DAWN
night. In vain he practised the old expiatory
rites to rid
himself of the menacing phantom. On the night of May 13,
two months after Agrippina's death, he determined to go
through the mummery of the Lemuralia, which some of his
credulous advisers had told him would be efficacious. At
midnight, amid the dead silence, he stole with naked feet to
the water of the fountain in the atrium, and there, trembling
with excitement, washed his hands thrice. Then with his
thumb and finger, he filled his mouth with nine black beans,
and, full of superstitious horror, flung them one by one behind
him over his shoulder, saying each time, ' With these beans
redeem me and mine.' Arrived at his chamber he again dipped
his hands in water, and beat a great brazen gong to terrify
the pursuing ghost.
1
Then he turned round, and peered with
a frightened glance into the darkness ;
and as he peered
was even this expiation all in vain ? what were those glimmering
lights ? What was that white and wavy form ? A
shriek rang through the villa, and Nero sank fainting into the
arms of the timid minions who had awaited the result of the
expiation and rushed forward at his cry.
The following year, when he had returned to the city,
he repeated
this antiquated rite, and he commanded the vestals to
bear him specially in mind when, on the Ides of May, they
flung from the Sublician Bridge into the Tiber the thirty little
figures called argei, made of bulrushes, which were supposed
to be in lieu of human sacrifices.
Then he tried yet further forms of magic and yet darker
rites of propitiation to the infernal powers, in which it was
whispered that human blood the blood of murdered infants
formed part of the instruments of sorcery. But he could
learn no secrets of the future ;
he could evoke no powers who
could ward away that white menacing spectre which gleamed
upon him if at any moment he found himself alone in the
hours of night.
Nero became a haunted man. The whole earth seemed to
5
him to be 'made of glass
to reveal his turpitude. He knew
in his miserable heart that the very street boys of Eome
the ragged urchins of the slaves and gladiators were aware
of the crime which he had committed. Kind friends kept
Mm informed, under pretence of officious indignation, that
1
Note 34.