Читать книгу The Empresses of Rome онлайн

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The path to the abyss was made smoother for her by her husband’s reliance on his freedmen. In the later years of the Republic, when the dominion of Rome was extended over the East, the practice had grown of employing the more accomplished slaves of Greece and Syria in the patrician palaces. Equally expert at keeping accounts or pandering to vice, they won their emancipation and acquired large fortunes in the service of their new masters. They were usually regarded with disdain, but, as we saw, Claudius had been driven to associate familiarly with them, and they attained great power when he ascended the throne. Rome now discovered a new evil in the Imperial rule it had adopted. All who wished to approach the Emperor with a petition had to flatter or bribe the freedman Callistus, to whom this part of Claudius’s duties was entrusted. His steward of finances, Pallas, his secretary, Narcissus, and his adviser in letters, Polybius, stood at one or other avenue of the palace, and exacted toll of all who approached. Offices were distributed through their avaricious hands, and it was soon noticed that they built magnificent villas in the neighbourhood of Rome. Whether the rumour was true or not, it was believed in Rome that some of the noblest ladies paid an ignominious price to these men for the favours they sought, or were surrendered to them by the Empress. It is at all events clear that Messalina soon came to an understanding with them. Both they and she needed to dupe the purblind Emperor, and it was felt that a friendly co-operation would be better than a precarious contest for supremacy.