The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Such a pre-emptive strike on Nero’s part represented a momentum of sorts and swiftly acquired an inexorability which looked to deny the Augusta room for rearguard action. First she was deprived of the soldiers who protected her. Then she was removed from the palace. Nero had made plain his intention towards her. She was probably still safe as long as she behaved with circumspection and accepted the new role Nero had determined for her. But as Agrippina survives in the sources – a termagant of tunnel vision tortured by ambition – she was incapable of such a course.

  Nero’s thoughts had already turned to his musical career. In Britannicus’ death he had eliminated one challenger. It was not enough. His early education had included a musical component. Now as emperor he summoned the leading lyre-player of the time, Terpnus, to play and sing for him. For many nights, Nero simply listened. Then he embarked on a course of practice and a strenuous training regime which involved abstinence from fruit, regular emetics and self-induced vomiting, and lying on his back under a lead plate in order to strengthen his chest. At one level it testifies to a degree of self-discipline that was alien to Gaius; it also outlines the first stirrings of an obsession.

  The combined influence of Seneca and Burrus prevented Nero’s wholehearted surrender to his artistic ‘vocation’ at this stage. ‘The senate shall keep its ancient powers,’ Nero had asserted in his accession speech. It would become no more than a form of words but in the beginning it implied a two-way compact in which princeps and senate both had roles to play. Nero delivered judgements carefully, not as many as Claudius but less capriciously, after deliberating over written opinions; he prevented sons of freedmen from becoming senators, a conservative policy which ought to have won golden opinions among the political classes; and following the killing by one of his slaves of Lucius Pedanius Secundus, former city prefect, Nero upheld unpopular legislation which insisted on every slave in Pedanius’ household being killed. After the power struggles of emperor and senate which had characterized recent reigns, the city fathers were surely impressed by Nero resisting so obvious a chance to win popularity at their expense. Either the emperor or his advisers re-examined tax-collecting and, in keeping with another accession-speech promise, Nero distanced himself from the culture of informing. It was a parade of good behaviour managed with something of that amiability to which he laid claim as part of his inheritance from Germanicus. In relation to Rome’s upper classes, it served the same purpose as Nero’s accession gift to every Roman citizen of a sum of money which has been estimated as equivalent to a year’s supply of wheat (Romans’ staple diet).13

  After Acte, a less benign temptress. Once the egoïsme à deux of Nero and Agrippina had been unthinking. Jointly they had publicized a story that Nero was defended by snakes. (When Messalina sent assassins to kill Nero in bed, a snake emerged from his pillow and routed the would-be killer. In the process it shed its skin. Agrippina had the skin fashioned into a bracelet, which Nero wore as a guarantee of his safety.) But in Rome, snakes took many forms. The serpent that finally outmanoeuvred Nero’s mother bathed in asses’ milk to dispel ‘all diseases and blights from her beauty’. Graced by every quality save virtue, Poppaea Sabina first became a sexual obsession for Nero, afterwards a wife whom he loved with angry intensity (and as angrily killed) – that aspect of Poppaea’s life which survives in Monteverdi’s opera The Coronation of Poppaea with its emphasis on love. Like Agrippina, discounting baroque opera, Poppaea has fallen foul of history. Her contemporaries disliked her too, publicly demonstrating against her. In 59, Poppaea was married to Nero’s fellow reveller Marcus Salvius Otho. Unwilling to share her, Nero banished Otho to provincial governorship in modern-day Portugal. (In doing so, he provided the basis for Otho’s later claims to the principate.) Sources describe Poppaea as no more willing to share Nero than he was to share her. The price of her love was Nero’s divorce of Octavia – and the removal of Agrippina. In Tacitus’ hands it becomes one of the great dramatic set pieces of classical literature. In the history of the principate it represents a critical development. ‘Everyone longed for the mother’s domination to end. But no one believed that her son’s hatred would go as far as murder.’ The emperor not only killed his mother but escaped unpunished, the ‘happy’ outcome celebrated in acts of thanksgiving in shrines and temples and a vote of annual games at the Festival of Minerva. Even senators added their voices to the clangour of untruths, a single arch conservative, Thrasea Paetus, walking out of the senate in protest at this policy of whitewash. Such blanket acquiescence is a symptom of debasement, one ground for that lowly estimate placed on the crown during the year of upheavals which followed Nero’s death.

  The plan depended on an ingenious if far-fetched contrivance: a collapsing ship. It was the brainchild of Nero’s boyhood tutor Anicetus, now commander of the fleet at Misenum. The unpredictability of the sea offered a cloak for dark deeds and Nero invited Agrippina to join him at Baiae to celebrate Minerva’s festival. He installed her in a splendid mansion; offshore an equally splendid ship lay becalmed at anchor. That night, in his own house, Nero hosted a banquet of long-drawn splendour. Afterwards he conducted his mother to the jetty for her homeward journey. The brightness of the moon was a blow to best-laid plans, but there could be no retreat. On a millpond sea, stilly reflecting a million stars, the ‘accident’ happened. Heavy lead weights caused the ceiling of the ship’s cabins to fall. There were casualties but Agrippina was not among them. The high sides of her couch protected the Augusta and her waiting woman. Instead, both fell into the sea. The waiting woman, Acerronia, shouted that she was Agrippina and must be rescued. Sailors in Nero’s pay battered her to death with oars. Silently, stealthily, Agrippina swam for her life. A fishing boat rescued her and returned her to the house from which all peacefulness had vanished. She saw everything.

  Agrippina sent word to Nero of her terrible ‘accident’ and her survival. He knew already, reduced by the knowledge to a frenzy of panic. Nero summoned Seneca and Burrus for advice, but again it was Anicetus who seized the initiative. When Agrippina’s messenger arrived, Nero dropped a sword at his feet and promptly had him arrested on suspicion of trying to kill him. With a convoy of men, Anicetus set out for Agrippina’s house. He dispelled the crowds of watchers who had gathered, drawn by curiosity. Then he slew each and every slave who stood between him and the bedroom in which, half in darkness, Agrippina waited with a single maidservant. Through the flickering lamplight, this former employee bent on revenge advanced towards his quarry. The maidservant fled. But Agrippina stood resolute. ‘I know my son is not responsible,’ she said. ‘He did not order his mother’s death.’ A truncheon blow to the head shortly silenced her. Stunned but still, in Tacitus’ account, mistress of the dramatic scenario, schooled in the dynamics of the Roman way of death, she placed her hands above her womb. Two last words: ‘Strike here!’ Like rain the blows fell.

  For the first time in his life, Nero found himself dreaming while he slept. Dark, portentous dreams – in Suetonius’ history, the wages of sin, restlessness the tyrant’s lot. The emperor was twenty-two. The biographer does not countenance the possibility of remorse. Although his conscience pricked him so hard that he summoned priests to conjure up his mother’s shade and beg her forgiveness, he did not utter a single penitent word. When, probably in 64, Nero made his debut on the Roman stage, his repertoire included a song Suetonius calls ‘Orestes the Matricide’. It told the story of Clytemnestra’s murder by her son. That such a performance should have been contemplated tells us something of the moral temperature of the times, as well as the collapse of that policy once pursued by Seneca and Burrus of distancing Nero’s public life of rectitude from his private viciousness.

  The year after Agrippina’s murder, the appearance of a comet was interpreted as a presentiment of a change of ruler. (A descendant of Tiberius, Rubellius Plautus, was suggested; Nero requested his banishment and killed him later.) Perhaps the ancient authors invented the phenomenon to underscore Nero’s unsuita
bility and demonstrate that alternatives existed within the emperor’s own extended family. If so, the time was not ripe. Nero’s hold on power remained strong. With Agrippina dead, awaiting immortalization by Handel, he later divorced Octavia on trumped-up charges of adultery and barrenness.7 Nero banished Octavia to Pandateria and there ordered her death. Then he married Poppaea. He created her Augusta and the couple had a daughter, who shortly died. Poppaea died too, in 65, after a miscarriage and severe haemorrhaging. The sources preserve a rumour that Nero caused his wife’s death, also her miscarriage. Furious at Poppaea for criticizing his late return from the chariot-races, he kicked her repeatedly in the stomach. His reputation permits such an explanation.

  Throat cancer was the most likely cause of Burrus’ death in 62. Having murdered his mother and his brother, Nero could not expect to escape without accusations of poison. Burrus’ replacements as Praetorian prefect were Faenius Rufus and Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus. The former had acquired a reputation for honesty and efficiency in his organization of Rome’s grain supply; the latter proved the dominant personality despite – or perhaps because of – the considerable animosity felt towards him by the senate. Following their appointment, Tacitus claimed, ‘decent standards carried less weight... now Nero listened to more disreputable advisers’, and Seneca petitioned Nero to allow him to retire, having first offered to give up his fortune.14 Nero declined both offers, though a plea of illness on Seneca’s part had the same effect as resignation; he transferred much of his dependence on his former tutor to Tigellinus, a man whose interests like his own emphasized debauchery at the expense of statecraft. Nero’s marriage to Poppaea in the same year had completed the shift in tone of the imperial regime. The new empress’s inclination was for magnificence: her funeral would later suggest affinities with Eastern concepts of royal divinity closer to Gaius’ preoccupations than those of the Nero of the early years. If it is possible to discern a turning point in the conduct of government in Nero’s reign, it occurred in 62. The emperor made further breaks with the past. This was the year of Pallas’ death as well as that of Nero’s former freedman lover Doryphorus; Tacitus claims poisoning on Nero’s instructions in both cases. In a development which presaged a revival in maiestas (treason) trials, the emperor expelled from Italy a scribbler called Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento, after the latter had written a wittily slanderous spoof will which included Nero among the targets of its mordant maligning. In this case Veiento escaped with his life. But attitudes were hardening on the Palatine. The senate looked on with unease.

  Despite his misgivings, Nero’s entry into Rome following the death of Agrippina was received with rapture. For the observant there were signs that that feeling was neither universal nor deeply engrained. Suetonius reports Nero’s relaxed response to lampoons circulating in the city. Graffiti proliferated: it accused the emperor outright of matricide. It may not have been benign. The most famous event of Nero’s principate, occurring in 64, demonstrated the depth of ambivalence which existed towards the emperor ten years after his accession.

  On a warm, moonlit night, fire broke out in Rome. It began amid the jerry-built cafés and cook-shops close to the Circus Maximus racecourse.15 Nero was out of town, at the seaside resort of Antium thirty-five miles away, but hurried back in time either to recite a poem on the fall of Troy or to supervise the firefighting operation (only lyre-playing is ruled out categorically). His efforts, which included the demolition of several large granaries in the path of the fire in order to halt its spread, proved unsuccessful. Wind probably fanned the conflagration, which eventually ravaged ten of the city’s fourteen districts. In the smoke and whirling soot, rumour too took wing. Observers noted men hurling firebrands, attempting to augment the fire’s spread. It may have been a cover for looting. Or they may have acted on higher instructions. The finger of blame pointed at Nero. It was not a response born out of popular affection. ‘To suppress this rumour, Nero fabricated scapegoats,’ Tacitus explains. ‘He punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were called).’16 Under the circumstances it was a sensible deflection on the emperor’s part. Disasters on such a scale were traditionally interpreted as proof of heavenly disapproval, ominous and threatening. As the embers cooled, Nero concurred with the outpouring of prayers offered to Vulcan, Ceres, Proserpina and Juno; then he executed Christian prisoners. He fed them, dressed in animal skins, to wild beasts; they were crucified or burned. It was a highly public purge intended to make his point. Still the rumours persisted.

  Extending the reach of his aestheticism, Nero exploited the destruction of so much of Rome to institute a city-wide rebuilding programme that was partly designed around future fire-avoidance but also emphasized visual considerations. Dominating this new cityscape was a splendid imperial palace, the Domus Aurea or Golden House. Facilitated by recent clearances as well as land confiscations, it stretched from the Esquiline Hill in the northeast, over the Oppian, Caelian and Palatine Hills, to the Circus Maximus in Rome’s southwest quarter.17 ‘Its wonders’, according to Tacitus, ‘were lawns and lakes and faked rusticity – woods here, open spaces and views there.’18 Suetonius describes the lake as ‘like a sea’. The astonishing size of the Golden House was underlined by the statue of Nero himself erected in the new palace vestibule, a shimmering, golden likeness that rose 120 feet into the Roman skyline. Within the palace complex, rooms were decorated with more gold, walls inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gemstones. Insensitive to the losses of so many Roman townsfolk, Nero announced that at last he was beginning to be housed like a human being. Martial preferred to describe it as ‘an arrogant park which deprived the poor of their houses’.19 The taunting excess of the Golden House – albeit it might in future provide a source of pride for Romans – undid any good opinions Nero had won through his enlightened rebuilding of Rome itself.

  It may have contributed to that support from all classes of Romans claimed by Tacitus for a bungled conspiracy against Nero the following year. Although the sources disagree about the identity of the plotters, the ‘Pisonian’ conspiracy, which may or may not have centred on Gaius Calpurnius Piso, grandson of that Piso accused of poisoning Germanicus, included senators, prominent thinkers and members of the Praetorian Guard (Dio offers Faenius Rufus as well as Seneca). Gossipy in its organization, the plot was betrayed by carelessness on the part of the man chosen to strike the first blow: Flavius Scaevinus.

  Nero’s retribution ignored Seneca’s one-time warning against the unseemliness of cruel and inexorable anger in kings; vanished was that moderacy which had tolerated graffiti and lampoons. He resorted to torture to root out as many of the conspirators as possible. In doing so, he learned unpalatable truths. A military tribune called Subrius Flavius explained his motive for joining the conspiracy in unequivocal terms: ‘I have both loved and hated you above all men. I loved you, hoping that you would prove a good emperor; I have hated you because you do so-and-so. I cannot be a slave to a charioteer or lyre-player.’20 For his part Piso committed suicide. The death of Faenius Rufus created a vacancy in the Praetorian Guard, which was filled by an opportunist on the make, Nymphidius Sabinus. In the long term, the latter offered Nero poor service. Meanwhile, on Nero’s behalf, Tigellinus trained his sights on the elimination of future dissent. The senate’s victimization was determined, occasionally arbitrary and consistently cruel. Rumour claimed rapacity as a rationale: Nero needed money. Public building work in Rome could not be blamed for the emptiness of the imperial coffers. It was the Golden House, that dream of grandeur, which threatened to impoverish Rome.

  Other emperors could have claimed the exorbitant cost of war as exoneration. But Nero, Suetonius tells us, was ‘so far from being actuated by any wish or hope of increasing or extending the empire, he even thought of withdrawing the army from Britain and changed his purpose only because he was ashamed to seem to belittle the glory of his father [Claudius]’. Trusting in the army’s loyalty – his inheritance from his grandfather Germ
anicus – Nero omitted to visit a single provincial legion. Instead, his government’s policy in the provinces was one of reacting to changing circumstances. Significant revolts broke out in Britain (Boudicca’s rebellion of 60) and, in 66, in Judaea; in Parthia it was only the skill of Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo which restored Roman honour after the wholesale defeat of Caesennius Paetus in 62. The glory of that reversal cost Corbulo his life. Afraid of his general’s eminence, Nero requested his suicide in 67.

  The victories Nero craved were not to be found on battlefields; the prizes he valued did not lie among the spoils of conquest. With unprecedented lavishness, his instincts those of the set designer or Hollywood director, in 66 the emperor celebrated victory over Parthia. Then he departed Rome for Greece. He left behind him two freedmen, Helius and Polyclitus, to act as viceroys in his absence. It may have been a calculated snub to the senate. With him, he took his ardent philhellenism and those skills in singing and chariot-racing which he had practised in Rome both in public and in private. His efforts, which at home, as Dio tells us, had inspired laughter, in Greece earned him 1,808 prizes: among them was a prize won in the Olympic Games for a chariot-race in which he had fallen from his chariot. Shameless it may have been, but Greek realpolitik reaped dividends. On 28 November 67, Nero declared the whole of Greece free from Roman taxation. ‘To cities other rulers too have granted freedom,’ he announced, ‘but Nero alone to an entire province.’21 His return to Rome took the form of a triumph. In Augustus’ triumphal carriage he processed through city streets sprinkled with perfume. Ribbons rained like confetti. Contending with the perfume were the scents of sacrifice: victims offered in thanksgiving lined the processional route. Over his purple robe, Nero wore a cloak patterned with stars, on his head the Olympic crown. It was an extraordinary piece of posturing, attributable in Suetonius’ version to his need to win popular approval: ‘above all he was carried away by a craze for popularity and he was jealous of all who in any way stirred the feeling of the mob.’ Such megalomaniac theatricality served only to assert the impossibility of incorporating within traditional Roman mores tendencies that were alien, out of sympathy, a challenge.