‘We all know that the Annæi are loyal,’ sneered Tigellinus.
‘As loyal, at any rate, as men who would sell their souls for an aureus,’ answered the Spaniard. He looked full at Tigellinus, who remembered the scene, and put it down in his note-book for the day of vengeance.
But Petronius loved elegance, and did not care for quarrels, and he tried to turn the conversation from unpleasant subjects. ‘Lucan,’ he asked, ‘have you written any verses about Nero? If so, pray let us have the pleasure of hearing them.’
Lucan was far from unwilling to show that he too could flatter, and he recited the lines of colossal adulation from the opening of the ‘Pharsalia.’ Even the civil wars, he sang, with all their slaughter, were not too heavy a price to pay for the blessing of having obtained a Nero; and he begs him to be careful what part of Olympus he chooses for his future residence, lest the burden of his greatness should disturb the equilibrium of the world![39]
Nero had just heard the deification of Claudius torn to shreds with mortal sarcasm, but his own vanity was impervious to any wound, and he eagerly drank in the adulation which--with no more sincerity than that which had been addressed to his predecessor by the Senate and people of Rome--assured him of the honour of plenary divinity among the deities of heaven in whom, nevertheless, he scarcely even affected to believe.
He turned to Petronius and asked him to recite his poem on the Sack of Troy. Petronius did so, and the Emperor listened with eager interest. It was a subject which fascinated him.
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘to see a city in flames--that would be worth living for! I have tried to write something on that subject myself.’
All present, of course, pressed him to favour them with his poem, and after a little feminine show of reluctance, and many protestations of mock modesty, he read them, in an affected voice, some verses which were marked in every phrase by the falsetto of the age. It was evident that they had been painfully elaborated. Indeed, as they looked at the note-book from which the Emperor read they saw that the _labor limæ_ had been by no means wanting. The book, which afterwards fell into the hands of Suetonius, was scratched and scrawled over in every direction, and it showed that many a turn of expression had been altered twenty times before it became tinkling enough and fantastic enough to suit Nero’s taste. It was clear from the tone in which he read them that the most bizarre lines were exactly those that pleased him best, and they were therefore the ones which his flatterers selected for their loudest applause.