Page:Charactersevents00ferriala.djvu/128

 desire for public spectacles increased, even in secondary cities. The Italian people were losing their peasant's petty avarice and growing fond of things monumental and colossal, which was the great folly of the Orient. They found the monuments of Rome poor; everywhere, even in modest municipia, they demanded immense theatres, great temples, monumental basilicas, spacious forums, adorned with statues. In spite of the principles insisted upon with so much vigour by Augustus and Tiberius, public finances had, thanks to the weak Claudius and the extravagant Messalina, already gone through a period of great waste and disorder.

These contradictions, and the psychological disorder that followed, explain the discords and struggles very soon raging around the young Emperor. The public began to feel shocked by the attention that Agrippina gave to State affairs, as by a new and this time intolerable scandal of feminism. Agrippina was not a feminist, as a matter of fact, but a traditionalist, proud of the glory of her family, attached to the ancient Roman ideas, desirous only of seeing her son develop into a new Germanicus, a second Drusus. Solely the necessity of helping Nero had led her to meddle with politics. But not in vain had Cato declaimed