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502 DARKNESS AND DAWN
have recalled verses so fantastic is characteristic of a soul not
naturally ignoble, but distorted and, so to speak, encrimsoned
by the horrors of life's tragedies and life's amusements in the
midst of which he lived.
The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour.
Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not
even the death of his glorious sou could check Mela's besetting
vice. A nobler man would have hid his head in shame as
well as sorrow, but Mela showed a discreditable eagerness in
recovering the debts due to Lucan, whose great wealth was
now added to his own. Among other debtors, he pressed hard
on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan's intimate friend.
What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of
Rome when we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence,
that, in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who
had betrayed his mother resorted to forgery in order to ruin
his friend's father! He forged a letter of Lucan to prove an
imaginary complicity in the plot between him and his father.
Mela knew that his wealth would be his death warrant. Nero
no sooner read the forged letter than he summoned Mela to
his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela saw
that the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after
having written a will which was doubly base. To save his
estate from confiscation, lie left a large donation to Tigellinus,
and his worthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added
spite to his '
greed and baseness. I am condemned to die,' he
said, ' though I have done nothing to deserve punishment ;
but Crispinus and Anicius Cerealis live, though they are
enemies of the Emperor.' Anicius Cerealis was the consuldesignate
who, after the conspiracy, had proposed in the senate
that a temple should with all speed be reared at the public
expense ' to the Divine Nero.' His abjectness did not save
him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela's will he, too, committed
suicide.
The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous
adulation. They decreed supplications to the gods, and a
special honour to the Sun as the detector of the conspiracy,
and a restoration of the Temple of Fortune from which
'
Scsevinus had taken his dagger. Amid these decrees, the
sweet Gallio ' pleaded humbly that his life might be spared,
although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca and