d by the civil wars, was
uncultivated, cut up into vast unproductive estates. From one end to
the other there was barely a trace of agriculture, not a sign of
traffic. You met soldiers, cooks, petty tradesmen, gladiators,
philosophers, patricians, market gardeners, lazzaroni and millionaires;
the merchant and the farmer, never. Rome's resources were in distant
commercial centres, in taxes and tribute; her wealth had come of
pillage and exaction. Save her strength, she had nothing of her own.
Her religion, literature, art, philosophy, luxury and corruption,
everything had come from abroad. In Greece were her artists; in Africa,
Gaul and Spain, her agriculturists; in Asia her artisans. Her own
breasts were sterile. When she gave birth it was to a litter of
monsters, sometimes to a genius, by accident to a poet. She consumed,
she did not produce. It was because of that she fell.

V

NERO

"Save a monster, what can you expect from Agrippina and myself?"

It was Domitius, Nero's father, who made this ingenious remark. He was
not a good man; he was not even good-looking, merely vicious and rich.
But his viciousness was benign beside that of Agrippina, who poisoned
him when Nero's birth ensured the heritage of his wealth.

In all its galleries history has no other portrait such as hers.
Caligula's sister, his mistress as well, exiled by him and threatened
with death, her eyes dazzled and her nerves unstrung by the
impossibilities of that fabulous reign, it was not until Claud, her
uncle, recalled her and Messalina disappeared, that the empress awoke.
She too, she determined, would rule, and the jus osculi aiding, she
married out of hand that imbecile uncle of hers, on whose knee she had
played as a child.

The day of the wedding a young patrician, expelled from the senate,
killed himself. Agrippina had accused him of something not nice, not
because he was guilty, nor yet because the possibility of the thing
shocked her, but because he was betrothed to Octavia, Claud's daughter,
who, Agrippina determined, should be Nero's wife. Presently Caligula's
widow, an old rival of her own, a lady who had thought she would like
to be empress twice, and whom Claud had eyed grotesquely, was
disencumbered of three million worth of emeralds, with which she
heightened her beauty, and told very civilly that it was time to die.
So, too, disappeared a Calpurina, a Lepida; women young, rich,
handsome, impure, and as such dangerous