Читать книгу The Empresses of Rome онлайн

63 страница из 103

He had been married in 33 to Junia Claudilla, daughter of Junius Silanus, a proconsul of eminent services and distinguished family. She was happily spared the fate of sharing the throne with Caligula by dying in childbirth. What her life in Capreæ must have been is not obscurely suggested by her early death. No prospect in Europe is more pleasant than that which unfolds its superb and far-lying beauty to the spectator on the green summits of Capri, from which the eye may wander over the broad blue bay, with its silver fringe of surf, or round the crescent of evergreen land that begins with Sorrento, and sweeps majestically, past the foot of Vesuvius, to the distant haze in which Baiæ once lived. Yet to a refined and sensitive young woman this splendid palace must have been a deathly jail. Repelled alike by the purblind scholars and the licentious princes, the heavy monotony of learning and vice unrelieved by visits to Rome, she sank under her burden in three years—just missing by one year the title of second Empress of Rome. Her father, a grave and illustrious Senator, endeavoured to check Caligula’s extravagance in the first year of his reign. The brutal Emperor bade him “take his greeting to the spirit of the dead.” With a last sad glance at the future of his country, Junius Silanus obeyed.