‘What will she do?’ asked Nero in a faint voice. ‘Will she arm her slaves to attack and murder me? Will she rouse the soldiers? Will she go to Rome and accuse me of matricide before the Senate and the people?’ The older and robuster villany of Tigellinus was not terrified by these alarms; but he too saw that the situation was serious, and did not know what to advise. Nero, shaking with alarm, sent messengers in fiery haste for Burrus and Seneca, both of whom had come from Rome to Baiæ at his request to attend upon him during the Quinquatrus. They were roused from their beds at the dead of night, and hurried to Nero’s villa. He told them that, after his mother had left him, her vessel had been wrecked, and that she had swam to land with no worse hurt than a slight wound; but he added, ‘She suspects that I have attempted her life: and how am I to escape her vengeance?’ Burrus and Seneca stood silent and thunderstricken. They were innocent of the vile attempt. Dim rumours of some grave crime which was in contemplation had indeed reached them; and in Nero’s court everything seemed credible. The murder had been the design of the execrable Anicetus and the yet more execrable Tigellinus, and had only been revealed to kindred spirits such as Poppæa. But they at once saw through the story which Nero told them, in which he had indeed betrayed himself. It was a moment of anguish and of degradation for them both. The blunt, honest soldier was thinking of his happier youth, in which virtue was not compelled to breathe so contaminated an atmosphere. He was secretly cursing the day on which ambition had led him to espouse the cause of Nero, and so to be dragged into loathed complicity with so many crimes. And through the heart of Seneca there shot a pang of yet keener agony. He a philosopher; he a Stoic; he a writer of so many high-soaring moral truths; he so superior to the vile and vulgar standard of his age--to what had he now sunk! Was this corrupt fratricide--this would-be murderer of his mother--the timid boy who, little more than five years before, had been entrusted to his tutelage? And was he now called upon to advise the most feasible way in which a matricide could be accomplished? Was he, of all men, to be the Pylades to _this_ viler Orestes? Was it to the edge of such a precipice that he had been led by the devious ways of a selfish ambition?