In the great silent house, with its walls of gold and its ceilings of ivory, he puts off the purple robes and clothes himself in an old shirt and a ragged cloak. On a miserable horse he rides with them across the vast deserted park, and makes for the house of one of his dependents, a few miles from Rome. There they admit him by a hole they have made in the wall, give him black bread and water, and cover him with a blanket. They discuss the situation, and conclude by offering him a dagger. He shrinks, like Julia, like Messalina, from the horrible darkness, and vainly strains his eyes for a ray of hope. At last they hear the clatter of cavalry on the road, and Nero feebly points the dagger at his breast, for a servant to drive home. And when the customary cremation is over, there are none but Acte and a faithful old nurse to lay the degraded ashes in the tomb. So the tenth Empress of Rome laid down her brief dignity. Statilia Messalina had had little reason to follow Nero in his humiliation. Whether the charge of laxity that is brought against her be true or no, she was a woman of exceptional intelligence and culture, and had probably only married Nero out of fear. We meet her again, at a later stage, in the chronicles. After Galba’s short hour of supremacy we shall find an equally short reign of Salvius Otho, the man who once pillaged taverns with Nero in the Subura. Provincial government had sobered him, and he wrote affectionate letters to Messalina. He would, no doubt, have made her Empress once more if he had lived, but the throne was wrested from him, and Messalina retired to the calmer world of letters and rhetoric. Our last glimpse of her discovers her delivering orations of great eloquence and learning among the intellectual ladies of Rome. CHAPTER VII THE EMPRESSES OF THE TRANSITION The house of Cæsar had perished with Nero, and few sober folk can have regretted that it had no living representative to win the fancy of the frivolous people or the blind cupidity of the Guards. There must have been men living in Rome who had witnessed the whole of that appalling degradation, so swift it had been. The Cæsars had sunk in little over forty years from the sobriety of Octavian to the insanity of Nero; their consorts had fallen from the strong standard of Livia to the insipidity of Poppæa; the resources of the Empire had been squandered in spectacles that had left its people nerveless and debauched; the old Roman ideal of character had been almost obliterated in the Imperial city. It was our concern to see what part the Empresses played in this lamentable history of four decades. It is, on the whole, one that their biographer must blush to acknowledge. We must remember, however, that corrupt rulers would necessarily choose weak or corrupt wives, and we cannot affect surprise or disappointment when we find them floating in the swift current.