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MUTTERING THUNDER 547
silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine.
Many
flatly refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get
back the sums with which the informers had been gorged to
repletion.
He was made daily to feel that his power was
gone. When he summoned the city tribes to renew their
oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves as soldiers, the
result was such a failure that he had to order each household
to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these
he would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting
stewards and secretaries.
But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The
people were suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of
an Alexandrian corn-vessel was announced. This always gave
an occasion for rejoicing, but when it turned out that the
vessel was only laden with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle
over the arena, there was an outburst of rage and contumely.
Scoffs at his chariot-racing and singing were heard everywhere.
Burghers pretended to get up quarrels with their
slaves at night, and then shouted Vindex ! Vindex ! as
though they were merely appealing to the police.
Nor
was this all. He was tormented with dreams and portents
of every description, which made his days and nights hideous.
He dreamt that he was steering a ship, and that some one
wrenched the helm out of his hand ;
that his murdered wife
Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss ;
that he was
covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was a
stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his
dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey's
theatre sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path.
It was rumoured that on the first
day of the year, the Lares
had fallen down in the middle of a sacrifice, and that the
great gates of the mausoleum of his family had opened spontaneously,
while a voice came from their awful recesses which
summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to be performed
at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found.
When his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the
Senate, and he said that ' criminals should soon meet the
end they had deserved,' the senators had joined in an illomened
shout of approval. It was noticed, too, that the last
tragedy which he had chanted in '
public was that of (Edipus
in Exile/ and that the last verse which he had spoken was