ndly on
what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning
torments, it may have been that the dreadful Caesar might have found the
'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellowship in exalting the
furnace of misery. The lady herself--may we not suppose her at the last
to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist
indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no
benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural
interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be
worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There
is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that
the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to
the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in
proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to
live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or
in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so nobly
released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this
followed--that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native
nobility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly
under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay,
inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously
impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of
Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such _public_
manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one
motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry
along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of
heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society
exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the
existence of other and nobler agencies in human affairs? Not at all.
Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not
known, or imperfectly known to _them_, these they ignore. What it was
circumstantially that passed, long since has been overtaken and
swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives--namely,
that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that
his death followed. But what was it that he _did_ say? That is precisely
the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present
w