by Will Durant
On July 18, 64, a fire broke out in the Circus Maximus, spread rapidly, burned for nine days, and razed two thirds of the city. Nero was at Antium when the conflagration started; he hurried to Rome and arrived in time to see the Palatine palaces consumed. The Domus Transitoria, which he had just built to connect his palace with the gardens of Maecenas, was one of the first structures to fall. The Forum and the Capitol escaped, and the region west of the Tiber; throughout the remainder of the city countless homes, temples, precious manuscripts, and works of art were destroyed. Thousands of people lost their lives amid falling tenements in the crowded streets; hundreds of thousands wandered shelterless through the nights, crazed with horror, and listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire, was scattering incendiaries to renew it, and was watching it from the tower of Maecenas while singing his lines on the sack of Troy and accompanying himself on the lyre.VI He energetically guided attempts to control or localize the flames and to provide relief; he ordered all public buildings and the imperial gardens to be thrown open to the destitute; he raised a city of tents on the Field of Mars, requisitioned food from the surrounding country, and arranged for the feeding of the people.80 He bore without remonstrance the accusatory lampoons and inscriptions of the infuriated populace. According to Tacitus (whose Senatorial prejudice must always be remembered), he cast about for some scapegoat, and found one in
a race of men detested for their evil practices, and commonly called Chrestiani. The name was derived from Chrestus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea. By that event the sect of which he was the founder received a blow which for a time checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigor not only in Judea . . . but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world. Nero proceeded with his usual artifice. He found a set of profligate and abandoned wretches who were induced to confess themselves guilty; and on the evidence of such men a number of Christians were convicted, not indeed on clear evidence of having set the city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race. They were put to death with exquisite cruelty, and to their sufferings Nero added mockery and derision. Some were covered with skins of wild beasts, and left to be devoured by dogs; others were nailed to crosses; numbers of them were burned alive; many, covered with inflammable matter, were set on fire to serve as torches during the night. . . . At length the brutality of these measures filled every breast with pity. Humanity relented in favor of the Christians.81
When the debris had been cleared away Nero undertook with visible pleasure the restoration of the city along the lines of his dream. Contributions for this purpose were solicited or elicited from every city in the Empire, and those whose homes had been destroyed were enabled to rebuild out of these funds. The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their façades and first stories of stone, and had to be sufficiently separated from other buildings to oppose a protective gap to the spread of fire. The springs that flowed beneath the city were channeled into a reserve water supply in case of future conflagrations. Out of the imperial Treasury Nero built porticoes along the main thoroughfares, providing a shaded porch for thousands of homes. Antiquarians and old men missed the picturesque, time-hallowed sights of the old city; but soon all agreed that a healthier, safer, and fairer Rome had risen from the fire.
Nero might have earned forgiveness for his crimes had he now molded his life as he had remade his capital. But Poppaea died in 65, in advanced pregnancy, allegedly from a kick in the stomach; rumor said this had been Nero’s answer to her reproaches for having come home late from the races.82 He grieved bitterly over her passing, for he had eagerly awaited an heir. He had her body embalmed with rare spices, gave her a pompous funeral, and delivered a eulogy over the corpse. Having found a youth, Sporus, who closely resembled Poppaea, he had him castrated, married him by a formal ceremony, and “used him in every way like a woman”; whereupon a wit expressed the wish that Nero’s father had had such a wife.83 In the same year he began the building of his Golden House; and its extravagant decoration, cost, and extent—covering an area that once had sheltered many thousands of the poor—renewed the resentment of the aristocracy and the suspicions of the plebs.
Suddenly Nero’s spies brought him word of a widespread conspiracy to put Calpurnius Piso on the throne (65). His agents seized some minor personages in the plot, and by torture or threat drew from them confessions implicating, among others, Lucan the poet and Seneca. Bit by bit the whole plan was laid bare. Nero’s revenge was so savage that Rome credited the rumor that he had vowed to wipe out the whole Senatorial class. When Seneca received the command to kill himself he argued for a while and then complied; Lucan likewise opened his veins and died reciting his poetry. Tigellinus, jealous of Petronius’ popularity with Nero, bribed one of the epicure’s slaves to testify against his master, and induced Nero to order Petronius’ death. Petronius died leisurely, opening his veins and then closing them, conversing in his usual light manner with his friends and reading poetry to them; after a walk and a nap he opened his veins again and passed away quietly.84 Thrasea Paetus, the leading exponent of the Stoic philosophy in the Senate, was condemned not for taking part in the plot, but on the general ground of deficient enthusiasm for the Emperor, for not enjoying Nero’s singing, and for composing a laudatory life of Cato. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely banished, but two others were put to death for writing in their praise. Musonius Rufus, Stoic philosopher, and Cassius Longinus, a great jurist, were exiled; two brothers of Seneca—Annaeus Mela, father of Lucan, and Annaeus Novatus, the Gallio who in Corinth had freed Saint Paul—were ordered to commit suicide.
Having cleared the lines in his rear, Nero left in 66 to compete in the Olympic games and make a concert tour of Greece. “The Greeks,” he remarked, “are the only ones who have an ear for music.”85 At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free—i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories. Amid his tour he received news that Judea was in revolt and that all the West was hot with rebellion. He sighed and continued his itinerary. When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, “no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out.”86 At Corinth he ordered work started on a canal to cut the Isthmus as Caesar had planned; the task was begun, but was laid aside during the turmoil of the following year. Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1808 prizes he had won in Greece.
Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy. In March, 68, the Gallic governor of Lyons, Julius Vindex, announced the independence of Gaul; and when Nero offered 2,500,000 sesterces for his head, Vindex retorted, “He who brings me Nero’s head may have mine in return.”87 Preparing to take the field against this virile antagonist, Nero’s first care was to choose wagons to carry along with him his musical instruments and theatrical effects.88 But in April word came that Galba, commander of the Roman army in Spain, had joined fortunes with Vindex and was marching toward Rome. Hearing that the Praetorian Guard was ready to abandon Nero for proper remuneration, the S
enate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero put some poison into a small box and, so armed, fled from his Golden House to the Servilian Gardens on the road to Ostia. He asked such officers of the Guard as were in the palace to accompany him; all refused, and one quoted to him a line of Virgil: “Is it, then, so hard to die?” He could not believe that the omnipotence which had ruined him had suddenly ceased. He sent appeals for help to various friends, but none replied. He went down to the Tiber to drown himself, but his courage failed him. Phaon, one of his freedmen, offered to conceal him in his villa on the Via Salaria; Nero grasped at the proposal, and rode through the dark four miles out from the center of Rome. He spent that night in Phaon’s cellar, clad in a soiled tunic, sleepless and hungry, and trembling at every sound. Phaon’s courier brought word that the Senate had declared Nero a public enemy, had ordered his arrest, and had decreed that he should be punished “after the ancient manner.” Nero asked what this was. “The condemned man,” he was told, “is stripped, is fastened to a post by a fork passing through his neck, and is then beaten to death.” Terrified, he tried to stab himself; but he made the mistake of testing the poniard’s point first and found it disconcertingly sharp. Qualis artifex pereo! he mourned—“What an artist dies in me!”
As a new day dawned he heard the clatter of horses: the Senate’s soldiers had tracked him down. Quoting a verse of poetry—“Hark! now strikes upon my ear the trampling of swift couriers”—he drove a dagger into his throat; his hand faltered, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him to press the blade home. He had begged his companions to keep his corpse from being mutilated, and Galba’s agents granted the wish. His old nurses, and Acte his former mistress, buried him in the vaults of the Domitii (68). Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.89
V. THE THREE EMPERORS
Servius Sulpicius Galba reached Rome in June of 68. He was of noble birth, for he traced his lineage on his father’s side to Jupiter, and on his mother’s to Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and the bull. In this year of his exaltation he was already bald, and his hands and feet were so crooked with gout that he could not wear a shoe or hold a book.90 He had the usual vices, normal and abnormal, but it was not these that made his reign so brief. What shocked army and populace were his economy of the public funds and his strict administration of justice.91 When he ruled that those who had received gifts or pensions from Nero must return nine tenths to the Treasury, a thousand new enemies arose, and Galba’s days ran out.
A bankrupt senator, Marcus Otho, announced that he could pay his debts only by becoming emperor.92 The Guards declared for him, marched into the Forum, and met Galba riding in a litter. Galba offered his neck unresisting to their swords; they cut off his head, his arms, his lips; one of them carried the head to Otho, but as he could not hold it well by the sparse and blood-wet hair, he thrust his thumb into the mouth. The Senate hastened to accept Otho, just as Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing as emperors their respective generals—Aulus Vitellius and Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vitellius invaded Italy with his hardy legions, and swept away the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the Praetorian Guard. Otho killed himself after a reign of ninety-five days, and Vitellius mounted the throne.
It does not speak well for the Roman military system that so senile a man as Galba should have commanded in Spain, or so slothful an epicurean as Vitellius in Germany. He was a gourmand who thought of the Principate chiefly as a feast, and made a banquet of every meal. He governed in the intervals; and as these grew shorter he left state affairs to his freedman Asiaticus, who in four months became one of the richest men in Rome. When Vitellius learned that Vespasian’s general Antonius was leading an army into Italy to dethrone him, he delegated his defense to subordinates and continued to feast. In October of 69 the troops of Antonius defeated the defenders of Vitellius at Cremona in one of the bloodiest battles of ancient times. They marched into Rome, where the remnants of Vitellius’ legions fought bravely for him while he took refuge in his palace. The populace, says Tacitus, “flocked in crowds to behold the conflict, as if a scene of carnage were no more than a public spectacle exhibited for their amusement”; while the battle raged some of them plundered shops and homes, and prostitutes plied their trade.93 The soldiers of Antonius triumphed, killed without quarter, and pillaged without stint; and the mob, as ready as history to applaud the victors, helped them to ferret out their enemies. Vitellius, dragged from his concealment, was led half naked through the city with a noose around his neck, was pelted with dung, was tortured without haste, and at last, in a moment of mercy, was slain (December, 69). The corpse was drawn through the streets with a hook and flung into the Tiber.94
VI. VESPASIAN
What a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor! Vespasian, busy directing the war against Judea, took his time in coming to occupy the dangerous eminence that his soldiers had won for him, and which the Senate hurriedly confirmed. When he arrived (October, 70), he set himself with inspiring energy to restore order to a society disturbed in every aspect of its life. Perceiving that he would have to repeat the labors of Augustus, he modeled his behavior and policy upon those of that prince. He made his peace with the Senate and re-established constitutional government; he freed or recalled those who had been convicted of lèse-majesté under Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; he reorganized the army, limited the number and power of the Praetorian Guard, appointed competent generals to suppress revolts in the provinces, and was soon able to close the Temple of Janus as a sign and pledge of peace.
He was sixty, but in the unimpaired vigor of his powerful frame. He was built foursquare in body and character, with a broad, bald, and massive head, coarse but commanding features, and small sharp eyes that pierced every sham. He had none of the stigmata of genius; he was merely a man of firm will and practical intelligence. He had been born in a Sabine village near Reate, of purely plebeian stock. His accession was a fourfold revolution: a commoner had reached the throne, a provincial army had overcome the Praetorians and crowned its candidate, the Flavians had succeeded the Julio-Claudians, and the simple habits and virtues of the Italian bourgeois replaced, at the court of the emperor, the epicurean wastefulness of the city-bred descendants of Augustus and Livia. Vespasian never forgot, or sought to conceal, his modest ancestry. When expectant genealogists traced his family back to a companion of Hercules he laughed them into silence. Periodically he returned to the home of his birth to enjoy its rustic ways and fare, and he would not allow anything there to be changed. He scorned luxury and laziness, ate the food of peasants, fasted one day in each month, and declared war upon extravagance. When a Roman whom he had nominated for office came to him smelling of perfume, he said, “I would rather you smelled of garlic,” and withdrew the nomination. He made himself easily accessible, talked and lived on a footing of equality with the people, enjoyed jokes at his own expense, and allowed everyone great freedom in criticizing his conduct and his character. Having discovered a conspiracy against him he forgave the plotters, saying that they were fools not to realize what a burden of cares a ruler wore. He lost his good temper in one case only. Helvidius Priscus, restored to the Senate from the exile into which Nero had sent him, demanded the restoration of the Republic, and reviled Vespasian without concealment or restraint. Vespasian asked him not to attend the Senate if he proposed to continue such abuse; Helvidius refused. Vespasian banished him and tarnished an excellent reign by ordering him put to death. He regretted the action later, and for the rest, says Suetonius, showed “the greatest patience under the frank language of his friends . . . and the impudence of philosophers.”95 These latter were not so much Stoics as Cynics, phil
osophical anarchists who felt that all government was an imposition and attacked every emperor.
To get fresh blood into a Senate depleted by family limitation and civil war, Vespasian secured appointment as censor, brought to Rome a thousand distinguished families from Italy and the western provinces, enrolled them in the patrician or equestrian orders, and over many bitter protests filled out the Senate from their ranks. The new aristocracy, under the stimulus of his example, improved Roman morals and society. It was not spoiled yet by idle wealth, nor yet so removed from labor and the soil as to disdain the routine tasks of life and administration; and it had something of the Emperor’s order and decency of life. Out of it came those rulers who, after Domitian, gave Rome good government for a century. Conscious of the evils that had flowed from the use of freedmen as imperial executives, Vespasian replaced most of them with men from this provincial infiltration and from Rome’s expanding business class. With their help he accomplished in nine years a miracle of rehabilitation.
He calculated that 40,000,000,000 sesterces were needed to transform bankruptcy into solvency.96 VII To raise this sum he taxed almost everything, raised the provincial tribute, reimposed it upon Greece, recaptured and let public lands, sold royal palaces and estates, and insisted upon such economy that the citizens denounced him as a miserly peasant. A tax was placed even upon the use of the public urinals that adorned ancient like modern Rome; his son Titus protested against such undignified revenue, but the old Emperor held some coins of it to the youth’s nose and said, “See, my child, if they smell.”97 Suetonious accuses him of adding to the imperial income by selling offices, and by promoting the most rapacious of his provincial appointees so that they might be swollen with spoils when he suddenly summoned them, examined their transactions, and confiscated their gains. The crafty financier, however, used none of the proceeds for himself, but poured them all into the economic recovery, architectural adornment, and cultural advancement of Rome.
