But late into the darkness, in the room of death, unnoticed, unasked for, Britannicus and Octavia mingled their sad tears and their low whispers of anguish, beside the rapidly blackening corpse of the father who had been the lord of the world. Yesterday--though his impudent freedmen had for years been selling, plundering, and murdering in his name--two hundred millions of mankind had lifted up their eyes to him as the arbiter of life and death, of happiness and misery. By to-morrow nothing would be left but a handful of ashes in a narrow urn. Of all who had professed to love and to adore him, not one was there to weep for him except these two; for their half-sister, Antonia, had been content merely to see the corpse, and had then retired. No one witnessed their agony of bereavement, their helplessness of sorrow, except the dark-dressed slave who tended the golden censer which filled the death chamber with the fumes of Arabian incense. And for them there was no consolation. The objects of their nominal worship were shadowy and unreal. The gods of the heathen were but idols, of whom the popular legends were base and foolish. Such gods as those had no heart to sympathise, no invisible and tender hand to wipe away their orphan tears. CHAPTER VII _SENECA AND HIS FAMILY_ ‘Palpitantibus præcordiis vivitur.’--SENECA, _Ep._ lxxii. ‘Sæculo premimur gravi, Quo scelera regnant.’ ID. _Octav._ act. ii. If there was one man in all Rome whom the world envied next to the young Emperor, or even more than the Emperor himself, it was his tutor, Seneca. He was the leading man in Rome. By the popular critics of the day his style was thought the finest which any Roman had written, though the Emperor Gaius, in one of his lucid intervals, had wittily remarked that it was ‘sand without lime.’ His abilities were brilliant, his wealth was immense. In all ordinary respects he was innocent and virtuous--he was innocence and virtue itself compared with the sanguinary oppressors and dissolute Epicureans by whom he was surrounded on every side.