The plot was reported to the palace, and Messalina and the freedmen drew up long lists of men whom it was desirable to remove or despoil. Wealthier men redeemed their lives by paying considerable sums; others were put to the torture, or were consigned to prison or the grave. A story is told in the record of this persecution which should guard us from admitting the common fallacy that the older spirit of Rome was quite extinct. A distinguished patrician heard that his name was on the list of the condemned. His wife urged him to escape the ignominy of a public execution by ending his own life, and, when he hesitated, she buried the dagger in her own bosom, and then handed it to him with the words, worthy of a Corneille: “It does not hurt.” Another victim was Appius Silanus, who had married Messalina’s mother, Domitia Lepida. The chroniclers say that his crime was to have rejected the advances which Messalina made to him. Whatever the motive was, she induced the freedman Narcissus to tell Claudius that he saw, in a dream, Silanus thrusting a dagger into the Emperor’s heart. Claudius nervously consulted his wife, who confessed, with artistic horror, that the same dream had frequently tormented her. They had meantime summoned Silanus to the palace, and, as he entered at that moment, the Emperor ordered him to be executed at once. Such are a few of the dark crimes attributed to Messalina that we cannot seriously question, and that fully prepare us to believe the less inhuman misdeeds which it might otherwise be possible to doubt. In the following year (A.D. 43) Claudius went to Britain, leaving his Empress at Rome. It seems to have been at this time that, unless we are arbitrarily to set aside one group of charges in the records and admit another, Messalina indulged in the practices which have secured for her an unenviable immortality. The perfectly authentic sequel of the story will show that she had so extraordinary a disregard for even the pretence of moral feeling that the statements of the chroniclers cannot for a moment be set down as improbable. In a word, Messalina surpassed Caligula both in her own misconduct and in the propagation of vice. Envying the trade of the lowest women of Rome, she had one of the rooms at the palace equipped on the model of the chambers of the _meretrices_ in the tenements of the Subura, put over the door the name of one of the most notorious women of that caste, Lycisca, and offered the lascivious embrace of an Empress to any who cared to pay the price for which she stipulated. Others place the scene in an actual brothel. Not content with her own abasement, she compelled the most distinguished ladies of Rome to follow her example. She bestowed the honours and offices, which Claudius left at her disposal, on the husbands who would complacently witness the defilement of their wives, and offered the alternative of her deadly lists to those who refused. Uncertain as we