And thus, while Agrippina was growing daily more furious and discontented; while Seneca and Burrus were plunged into deeper and deeper anxieties; while Pætus Thrasea, and Musonius, and Cornutus found it more and more necessary to entrench themselves in the armour of a despairing fortitude; while Nero was sinking lower and lower into the slough of vice--Octavia and Britannicus began to draw nearer to the Unknown God, and found that when the sea of calamity does not mingle its bitter waters with the sea of guilt, calamity itself might be full of divine alleviations. Agrippina and Nero were provoked by their appearance and bearing. The last thing which they would have suspected was that the Christianity which, in common with all Rome, they regarded as an execrable superstition, should have found its way into patrician circles--should even have met with favourable acceptance under the roof of the Cæsars. When they saw the disinherited Britannicus playing ball in the tennis-court, or beating his young fellow-pupils in races in the gardens, or wrestling not unsuccessfully with the sturdy and ruddy Titus, they were astonished to think that a boy who had been robbed of all his rights should be poor spirited enough to throw himself into enjoyments in which his merry and musical laugh often rang out louder than that of any of his companions. What hope or what consolation could sustain him? They jealously fancied that some plot must be afoot; but suspicion was disarmed by the boy’s transparent frankness and innocence of manner. And Octavia--they treated her as a nullity; they permitted themselves to indulge in every sneer and slight which they could devise. More than once Nero, fresh from some revel and lost to shame, had seized her by her long, dark tresses, or struck her with his brutal hand. Yet no passionate murmur had betrayed her resentment. What could be the secret of a beatitude which no misfortunes seemed wholly able to destroy? CHAPTER XII _ONESIMUS_ ‘Non tressis agaso.’--PERSIUS, v. 76. But we must now turn for a time from the Palace of the Emperor and the grand houses of the nobles crowded with ancestral images, gleaming with precious marbles, enriched with Greek statues of priceless beauty, to the squalid taverns and lodging-houses of the poorest of that vast and mongrel populace which surged through the streets of Rome.