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A CONSPIRACY AND ITS COLLAPSE 495
dients both pitiful and violent. With great peril to himself
he had to let the payments of his Praetorians fall into arrears.
Instead of half the patrimony left by his freedmen,
he now iinpropriated nine-tenths. Confiscations raged on
and their statues even
every side. Temples were plundered,
those of the Eoman Penates were sent to the melting-pot.
A law was made against wearing amethystine colours, and
once when he saw a lady with the forbidden colour at the
games, he pointed her out to his Procurator, and not only inflicted
the fine, but forfeited her entire property. No meanness
was too base for him to practise, no wrong too cruel for
him to inflict. Italy, the provinces, the allied peoples, the
free states, groaned under intolerable burdens.
And while his bodily functions, disordered by riotous living,
made of his life a physical burden, he was distracted by
daily superstitions. In his theatric way he used to tell his
intimates that he was haunted by
all the Furies. His effeminated
intellect was constantly unnerved by rumours of storms,
and earthquakes, and strange births, and comets, which the
astrologers interpreted to imply change and political
A disaster.
revolt of gladiators at Prseneste threatened a renewal of
the devastations in the days of Spartacus. In consequence
of an ill-advised order of Nero, the whole fleet of triremes
and smaller vessels was hopelessly shipwrecked at Misenum,
and he had to bear the odium of the disaster.
While he was thus wearied and agitated, there burst upon
him the immense weight of Piso's conspiracy, which afforded
him a proof how many and how varied were the forces of
hatred and contempt which he had kindled in the hearts
of all.
Piso stood at the head of the great Calpurnian house,
and was connected by ties of relationship with many of the
noblest families in Rome. He was not himself the author
of the conspiracy, for which, indeed, his character was altogether
corrupt. He was dragged into it
by
Subrius Flavus, a tribune, and Sulpicius Asper, a centurion
of the Praetorian guards. Faenius Rufus, the Praetorian Praefect,
approved of the plot, out of disgust for the machinations
of his rival, Tigellinus, who was constantly incriminating him
to the Emperor. Seneca lent a dubious sanction, which many
believed to be mixed up with personal designs. Lucan was