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420 DARKNESS AND DAWN
her a goddess, by striking coins with the inscription
'
Diva
Claudia Neronis,' and by appointing in her honour a pulvinar,
a temple, and a priest
!
Those who understood his needs and his character saw that
life could only be made tolerable for him by excitements still
more intense, and crimes still more colossal, than those to
accustomed. It had become his con-
which he had grown
stant boast that the Emperor could do anything he chose,
and that he had been the first
Emperor to find out the
fact. He therefore never hesitated to secure the death of
any one whom he disliked. If they were insignificant persons,
he had them poisoned and seized their goods. As no instinct
of gratitude prevented him from thus murdering
Pallas, who had been the chief agent in procuring his
adoption and his succession to the Empire, he had the less
hesitation in sacrificing others of less fame. Sfuce Torquatus
Silanus was the great-great-grandson of Augustus, he determined
to get rid of him on charges of ostentation and
seditious practices. When he had driven him to suicide he
proclaimed that he had intended to forgive him. Against the
Senate he cherished so deep a grudge that with his intimates
he discussed the plan of putting all the members of the order
to death and distributing its functions among the knights and
freedmen. Cruelty had not been among his natural vices, but
he now became athirst for blood.
But hatred could only be gratified by spasms of brief indulgence,
and the animal passions also required something ever
new to galvanise their decrepitude. No one understood this
better than Tigellinus. Himself a voluptuary, who had exhausted
the resources of every base pleasure, he sought to supply
by effrontery the lack of new sensations. With this view
he organised continuous revelries which should be unparalleled
either for costly extravagance or for outrageous infamy.
Ruinous to the well-being of the State as were these portents
of materialism, they were innocent in comparison with
the deliberate corruption of public morals. Things are at their
worst when vice is so hardened that, instead of seeking concealment,
it courts notoriety. All Some, even her ordinarily
vicious population, recalled with shame the orgies, at once
monstrous and vulgar, which were planned and paid for by
Tigellinus to please his patron. Happily the world has never