|
Saturday, August 28, 2010 - 8:14 PM
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire was therefore summoned, and they were separately asked
what the conversation was, and what was its subject. Then a suspicion arose
because their answers did not agree, and they were both put in irons. They
could not endure the sight and the threat of torture. Natalis however,
taking the initiative, knowing as he did more of the whole conspiracy,
and being also more practised in accusing, first confessed about Piso,
next added the name of Annaeus Seneca, either as having been a messenger
between him and Piso, or to win the favour of Nero, who hated Seneca and
sought every means for his ruin. Then Scaevinus too, when he knew the disclosure
of Natalis, with like pusillanimity, or under the impression that everything
now divulged, and that there could be no advantage in silence, revealed
the other conspirators. Of these, Lucanus, Quintianus, and Senecio long
persisted in denial; after a time, when bribed by the promise of impunity,
anxious to excuse their reluctance, Lucanus named his mother Atilla, Quintianus
and Senecio, their chief friends, respectively, Glitius Gallus and Annius
Pollio.
Nero, meanwhile, remembering that Epicharis was in custody on the
information of Volusius Proculus, and assuming that a woman's frame must
be unequal to the agony, ordered her to be torn on the rack. But neither
the scourge nor fire, nor the fury of the men as they increased the torture
that they might not be a woman's scorn, overcame her positive denial of
the charge. Thus the first day's inquiry was futile. On the morrow, as
she was being dragged back on a chair to the same torments (for with her
limbs all dislocated she could not stand), she tied a band, which she had
stript off her bosom, in a sort of noose to the arched back of the chair,
put her neck in it, and then straining with the whole weight of her body,
wrung out of her frame its little remaining breath. All the nobler was
the example set by a freedwoman at such a crisis in screening strangers
and those whom she hardly knew, when freeborn men, Roman knights, and senators,
yet unscathed by torture, betrayed, every one, his dearest kinsfolk. For
even Lucanus and Senecio and Quintianus failed not to reveal their accomplices
indiscriminately, and Nero was more and more alarmed, though he had fenced
his person with a largely augmented guard.
|