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POPPLEA VICTRIX 385
'
Is Caesar truly Caesar ?
'
she asked, with contempt.
Caesar can do what he likes in his own private life,' he
'
answered ;
but woe to Caesar if he degrade the majesty of
'
Empire by any public deed.'
He said truly, and she knew it; but she knew also that he
had not yet fathomed, as she had done, the abysses of Roman
servility.
Had they not applauded him after the murder of
Agrippina? Had they not passed in silence the murder of
Britanuicus ? Had they not suffered the doom of Sulla and
of Plautus to pass by without creating so much as a ripple on
the surface of the general tranquillity
?
By her urgency, by her wiles, by her taunts, by the
supreme ascendency which she had now acquired over the
Emperor, she prevailed on him at length to divorce Octavia
on the plea of her barrenness, and to make Poppaea his wife.
This, however, did not content her, while her unhappy rival
remained an inmate of the Palace. Poppaea therefore endeavoured
to blacken her character. She put into play every
poisonous art of slander. In most cases nothing was easier
than to trump up a false charge against any one whom the
Emperor desired to ruin. The white innocence of Octavia,
her stainless purity in that age of infamy, were no protection
to her. The faithful love of her few attendants was a partial
safeguard. Most of them were tampered with in vain. At
last, however, a worthless Alexandrian flute-player, who had
sometimes played before her to while away a heavy hour, was
induced by a great bribe to swear that he had been her lover.
The charge was too monstrous to deceive a single person, but
on this pretext Octavia's handmaids were seized and tortured.
The majority, however, stood firm even against the torturechamber,
and one of them, named Pythias, cried out to
Tigellinus, as he heightened the torture and pressed her with
questions, that Octavia's worst offence was white as snow
beside the blackness of his best virtues. It was impossible
to pretend a conviction on evidence which would have been
invalid against the humblest slave.
It was, nevertheless, decided that Octavia should be removed
from the Palatine, and she was sent from the home of
her father with the ill-omened gifts of the estate of Plautus as
her dower, and the house of Burrus as her residence.
The unhappy girl she was but nineteen obeyed with-