Gods! They set up the base, the foul, and crown him with roses, and trample the noble and good into the earth. The Gods! see you now! They set a star in heaven, they grave a duty in my heart, and the star is unattainable, and the duty, they make impossible of achievement. Bah! There is no star. There are no duties on earth, and no Gods in heaven.”
CHAPTER V.
THE SHIP OF THE DEAD
“It is of no use in the world, Plancus, your attempting to reason me out of a fixed resolve,” said the lady Longa Duilia, peevishly. “My Corbulo shall not have a shabby funeral.”
“Madam, I do not suggest that,” said the steward humbly, rubbing his hands.
“Yes, you do. It is of no good your standing on one leg like a stork. Shabby it must be – no ancestors present. As the Gods love me, you would not have me borrow ancestors of Asclepiades, our client, who has lent us this villa! He may have them or not, that is no concern of mine. Will you have done preening yourself like an old cockroach. I say it would be an indignity to have a funeral for my Corbulo without ancestors. O Times! O Morals! What is the good of having ancestors if you do not use them?”
“But, Madam, they are in your palace at Rome in the Carinæ – or at the Gabian villa.”
“And for that reason they are not here. Without the attendance of his forbears, my Corbulo shall not be buried. Besides, who is there to impress here with the solemnity? Only a lot of wretched sailors, ship sutlers, Jew pedlers and petty officials, not worth considering. I have said it.”
“But, Lady, Lucius Lamia agrees with me – ”
“Lucius Ælius Lamia – it will not exhaust your lungs to give him his name more fully – is not as yet one of the family.”
“Madam, consider how Agrippina did with Germanicus – she had his pyre at Antioch, and conveyed his ashes to Rome.”
“Agrippina was able to have the funeral conducted with solemn pomp at Antioch. There were the soldiers, the lictors, great officers and all that sort of thing. Here – nothing at all. By the Immortals – consider the expenses, and none to look on gaping but tarry sailors and Jew rag-and-bone men.”
“Madam!”
“Silence. Without ancestors! – as impossible as without wood.”
To understand the point made so much of by the widow, the Roman funeral custom must be understood.
On the death of a noble or high official, his face was immediately moulded in wax, into a mask, or rather, into two masks, that were colored and supplied with glass eyes. One was placed over the dead face, when the corpse lay in state, and when he was conveyed to his funeral pyre, and the first effect of the rising flames was to dissolve the mask and disclose the dead features.
The ancient Greeks before they burned their dead laid gold-leaf masks on their faces, and in a still earlier time the face of the corpse was rouged with oxide of iron, to give it a false appearance of life.
But the second mask was preserved for the family portrait gallery.
When a Roman gentleman or lady was carried forth to his funeral pyre, he was preceded by a procession of actors dressed up in the togas and military or municipal insignia of departed ancestors, each wearing the wax mask of him he personified. For these masks were preserved with great care in the atrium of the house.
Now as Longa Duilia saw, to have her husband burned at Cenchræa, without a procession of imitation ancestors, would be to deprive the funeral of its most impressive feature.
Plancus had advised the burning at the port, with shorn rites, and that the ashes should be placed in the family mausoleum at Gabii, and that the utmost dignity should be accorded to this latter ceremony sufficient to content the most punctilious widow.
But this did not please the lady. The notion of a funeral with maimed pomp was distasteful to her; moreover, as she argued, it was illegal to have two funerals for the same man.
“That,” said Plancus, “hardly applies to one who has died out of Italy.”
“It is against the law,” replied Duilia. “I will give no occasion to objection, offer no handle to informers. Besides, I won’t have it. The respect I owe to Corbulo forbids the entertainment of such an idea. Really, and on my word, Plancus, I am not a child to be amused with shadow pictures, and unless you are making a rabbit, a fish, or a pig eating out of a trough, I cannot conceive what you are about with your hands, fumbling one over the other.”
“Madam, I had no thought – ”
“I know you have none. Be pleased another time when addressing me to keep your hands quiet, it is irritating. One never knows where they are or will be, sometimes folding and unfolding them, then – they disappear up your sleeves and project none can guess where – like snails’ horns. Be pleased, – and now pawing your face like a cat washing itself. Please in future hold them in front of you like a dog when sitting up, begging. But as to the funeral – I will not have it cheap and nasty. Without ancestors a funeral is not worth having.”
“Then,” said the harassed freedman, “there is nothing for it but to engage an embalmer.”
“Of course – one can be obtained at Corinth. Everything can be had for money.”
As Plancus was retiring, the lady recalled him.
“Here,” said she, “do not act like a fool, and let the man charge a fancy price. Say that I have an idea of pickling Corbulo in brine, and have brought an amphora large enough for the purpose. Don’t close with his terms at once.”
When the steward was gone, then Longa Duilia turned her head languidly and summoned a slave-girl.
“Lucilla! The unfortunate feature of the situation is that I must not have my hair combed till we reach Gabii. It is customary, and for a bracelet of pearls I would not transgress custom. You can give my head a tousled look, without being dishevelled, I would wish to appear interesting, not untidy.”
“Lady! Nothing could make you other than fascinating. A widow in tears – some stray locks – it would melt marble.”
“And I think I shall outdo Agrippina,” said Duilia, “she carried her husband’s cinders in an urn at the head of her berth and on appropriate occasions howled in the most tragic and charming manner. But I shall convey the unconsumed body of my Corbulo in state exposed on his bier, in his military accoutrements all the way to Rhegium, then up the coast to Ostia and so to Gabii. There will be talk!”
“You will be cited in history as a widow the like of which the world has never seen. As for Agrippina, in your superior blaze she will be eclipsed forever.”
“I should prefer doing what Agrippina did – make a land journey from Brindisium, but – but – one must consider. It would be vastly expensive, and – ”
But the lady did not finish the sentence. She considered that Nero might resent such a demonstration, as exciting indignation against himself, in having obliged Corbulo to put an end to his life. But she did not dare to breathe her thought even into the ear of a slave.
“No,” she said; “it would come too expensive. I will do what I can to honor my husband, but not ruin myself.”
When Longa Duilia had resolved to have her own way, and that was always, then all the entire family of slaves and retainers, freedmen and clients knew it must be done.
The vessel after a brief stay at Cenchræa had left for Diolcus where it had been placed on rollers and conveyed across the isthmus, and was launched in the Corinthian Gulf.
Nero had been engaged for some days in excavating a canal between the two seas. He had himself turned the first sod, but after getting some little way, rock was encountered of so hard a quality that to cut through it would cost time, toil and money.
He speedily tired of the scheme, wanted the money it would have cost for some dramatic exhibition, and was urged by Helios, a freedman whom he had left in Rome, to return to Italy, to prevent an insurrection that was simmering. Nero did not much