he rubbish-cart of a market
gardener which happened to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the
looks and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and the narrative
of her crimes, and, getting rid of the Vestal by promising her that the
cause of Messalina should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first
to the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs of his guilt, and
then to the camp of the Praetorians, where swift vengeance was taken on
the whole band of those who had been involved in Messalina's crimes. She
meanwhile, in alternative paroxysms of fury and abject terror, had taken
refuge in the garden of Lucullus, which she had coveted and made her own
by injustice. Claudius, who had returned home, and had recovered some of
his facile equanimity in the pleasures of the table, showed signs of
relenting; but Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own
authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch the Empress. They
found her prostrate on the ground at the feet of her mother Lepida, with
whom in her prosperity she had quarrelled, but who now came to pity and
console her misery, and to urge her to that voluntary death which alone
could save her from imminent and more cruel infamy. But the mind of
Messalina, like that of Nero afterwards, was so corrupted by wickedness
that not even such poor nobility was left in her as is implied in the
courage of despair. While she wasted the time in tears and lamentations,
a noise was heard of battering at the doors, and the tribune stood by
her in stern silence, the freedman with slavish vituperation. First she
took the dagger in her irresolute hand, and after she had twice stabbed
herself in vain, the tribune drove home the fatal blow, and the corpse
of Messalina, like that of Jezebel, lay weltering in its blood in the
plot of ground of which her crimes had robbed its lawful owner.
Claudius, still lingering at his dinner, was informed that she had
perished, and neither asked a single question at the time, nor
subsequently displayed the slightest sign of anger, of hatred, of pity,
or of any human emotion.

The absolute silence of Seneca respecting the woman who had caused him
the bitterest anguish and humiliation of his life is, as we have
remarked already, a strange and significant phenomenon. It is clearly
not due to accident, for the vices which he is incessantly describing
and denouncing would have found in this miserable woman their most
flagrant illustra