Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 11 Critical Writings.djvu/17



Rome, eighteen centuries ago this very year, Nero was married to a maiden called Octavia. He was the son of Ahenobarbus and Agrippina; the son of a father so abandoned and a mother so profligate that when congratulated by his friends on the birth of his first child, and that child a son, the father said, what is born of such a father as I, and such a mother as my wife, can only be for the ruin of the State. Octavia was yet worse born. She was the daughter of Claudius and Messalina. Claudius was the Emperor of Home, stupid by nature, licentious and drunken by long habit, and infamous for cruelty in that age never surpassed for its oppressiveness, before or since. Messalina, his third wife, was a monster of wickedness, who had every vice that can disgrace the human kind, except avarice and hypocrisy: her boundless prodigality saved her from avarice, and her matchless impudence kept her clean from hypocrisy. Too incontinent even of money to hoard it, she was so careless of the opinions of others that she made no secret of any vice. Her name is still the catchword for the most loathsome acts that can be conceived of. She was put to death for attempting to destroy her husband's life; he was drunk when he signed the warrant, and when he heard that his wife had been assassinated at his command he went to drinking again.

Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and the bitterest enemy of Messalina, took her place in a short time, and became the fourth wife of her uncle Claudius, who succeeded to the last and deceased husband of Agrippina only as he succeeded to the first Roman king—a whole commonwealth of predecessors intervening. Octavia, aged eleven, was already espoused to another, who took his life when his bride's father married the