The city “teemed with funerals,” in the terse phrase of Tacitus, and the gatherings of its citizens were black with mourning. Large numbers of officers and patricians were executed or driven to suicide, and their children were scourged or banished to the provinces. Seneca paid the penalty of his tardy outspokenness, and his admirable end sustains our trust that his character may, in spite of our unconquerable hesitations, have been not inconsistent with his high creed. He and his wife, who nobly asked permission to quit the world with him, had their veins opened, and Seneca passed into the silence with quiet dignity; his wife was, to her regret, recalled to life by the soldiers.
Poppæa did not live to share the punishment which these crimes brought upon Nero. Her end came more swiftly and in more terrible form. The carnage had been interrupted by a fresh outburst of rejoicing. A man declared to Nero that he knew where the fabulous treasures of the Carthaginian queen Dido, which Vergil had so recently sung in the “Æneid,” were buried. A fleet was sent to Africa to recover them, and from his sombre brooding Nero passed into a new fit of prodigal entertaining. He emptied the last depths of his treasury in spectacles and donations. When the fleet returned at length without a single cup or coin, his anger stormed with ungovernable fury, and one day, when Poppæa expostulated with him, he kicked her in the abdomen. The outrage proved fatal, as she was pregnant, and Nero’s light mind turned from rage to the most extravagant lamentation. Her body was not burned, as was usual at Rome, but embalmed, and vast quantities of rare perfumes were sacrificed on the funeral pile. This peculiarity of her funeral has been thought to strengthen the interesting legend of her conversion to Christianity. It was more probably due to Nero’s frenzied desire to give a unique burial to so unique a goddess, as the Senate declared her to be. It is unthinkable that Nero should make such a concession to Christian ideas, even if she had shared them in any measure, and her life does not dispose us to claim that honour for her. The legend has no foundation in history, and the early Church may easily be relieved of the stain of having counted Poppæa among its adherents.