University of Virginia Library

SCENE I

Scene.—Nero's private chamber. Enter Nero hastily and perturbed, followed by Seneca, Burrus, and Tigellinus, his privy-councillors.
Burrus.
Caesar, still glides the dead Britannicus
About the palace, and his memory
Your mother, Agrippina, uses: makes
Out of his ghost a faction for herself.
She grows a public peril; much you owe
To her, but more to Rome; from Antium
She rages disappointed to and fro.
Me for your army you hold answerable,
But can no longer if you suffer her
To lure the legions from their loyalty.
Her creatures whisper to your sentinels,
Corrupt your officers, inflame your guards.
A sullen silence on the camp is fallen,
A word, and it will roar in mutiny.

Tigellinus.
Everywhere steal her agents and her spies,
Gliding through temples, baths, and theatres;
Possess all angles, corners, noonday halts,
And darknesses; they flit with casual poison
Softly; the city secretly is filled
With murmurs, lifted eyebrows, and with sighs.
The mischief's in the very blood of Rome
Unless the sore that feeds it is cut out.

Nero.
Why, I myself have visited the fleet
With Anicetus: sullen droop the sails
Or flap in mutiny against the mast.
Burdened with barnacles the untarred keels
Drowse on the tide with parching decks unswabbed,
And anchors rusting on inglorious ooze.
All indolent the vast armada tilts,
A leafless resurrection of dead trees.
The sailors in a dream do go about
Or at the fo'c's'le ominously meet.
Should any foe upon the sea-line loom
They'll light with ease upon an idle prey.
And yet I felt the grandeur of stagnation
And the magnificence of idleness.

Burrus.
She hath seduced the breast-plates and the sails.

Nero.
[Distracted.]
Here I pronounce her exile.

Tigellinus.
Whither then?

Anicetus.
To Britain send her. There for Claudius
I fought; a melancholy isle, alone,
Sundered from all the world; and banned by God
With separating, cold, religious wave,
And haunted with the ghost of a dead sun
Rising as from a grave, or all in blood
Returning wounded heavily through mist.
Her rotting peoples amid forests cower,
Or mad for colour paint their bodies blue.
There in eternal drippings of the leaf
Or that dead summer of the living fly,
And by the eternal sadness of the surf,
Ambition cannot live, hope cannot breathe.
Even the fieriest spirit there will rust
Or gutter like a candle in the rain.
To Britain send her.

Tigellinus.
Never isle remote
On the sad water, never desert sand
In trembling flame, nor rock-built prison-house
Shall tame her: there's the danger, that she lives.
While she hath life, it is no matter where,
While she hath breath, no other dares to breathe,
Not Caesar, even!

Nero.
This breath to her I owe.

Tigellinus.
[Cautiously and slowly watching Nero, as do the others.]
Caesar, there is a region of exile
Whence none hath yet returned—your pardon, sir—

Nero.
[Starts and turns away.]
No, no, no! I remember very clear
How gently she would wake me long ago.

Burrus.
Then be thy mother's son still and surrender
This toy of Rome to her: she bought it you:
Now, wearied, give it back!

Nero.
Ah, patience, sir!
I cannot in one moment gird myself
To murder all these kisses, and she hath
A vastness in this narrow world so rare,
A sweep majestical about the earth—
True, that she hath no ear for verse—

Tigellinus.
For thine.

Nero.
Yet passion, fury, and ambition, these
Are primal things in our elaborate age.
Ill can we spare them.

Burrus.
Now, 'tis you or she.

Nero.
A little time in which to fix my mind.
I go to Baiae; for I am not housed
Here as I should be: all the palace seems
To me a hovel; scarcely can I breathe.
I should be roofed with gold, and walled with gold,
Should tread on gold; and if I cast mine eyes
Over the city, they should view a scene
Of spacious avenues and breathing trees,
And buildings plunged in odorous foliage.
This is a petty city: I have thought
It might be well to raze it to the ground
And build another and an ampler Rome,
More worthy site for this imperial soul.
I'll go to Baiae, there to dream this dream.

Tigellinus.
Might I propose you go not all alone?
At times the answering flash from other eyes
Can aid the mightiest; and a woman's thought—

Nero.
Yes—Yes—Poppaea!

Burrus.
Otho will be jealous.

Tigellinus.
And is already dangerous; he has joined
The Agrippina faction.

Nero.
He must be
Promoted then to—Lusitania.

Tigellinus.
Thule were safer—still.

Nero.
Here I appoint him
Sole governor of Lusitania.
To Baiae now—Poppaea—a new Rome!
[Exit Nero.

Tigellinus.
He hesitates—but I will see Poppaea:
She can find means we cannot, and we thus
Can use her beauty for our policy.

[Exeunt Tigellinus, Burrus, Seneca, and Anicetus.