by Baker, Simon
On his deathbed Augustus called for a mirror and gave instructions to his attendants that ‘his hair should be combed and his drooping features rearranged’. Afterwards he asked the friends he had summoned whether, in the comedy of life, he had played his part well. Before then sending everyone away, he quoted the last lines of a comedy by Menander:
Since the play has been so good, clap your hands
And all of you dismiss us with applause.16
Soon after his death, Augustus was deified. His corpse was deposited in perhaps his most striking building – his own mausoleum. It was located in the Campus Martius, had been under construction for the last twenty years of his reign, and is still standing in part today. Some 40 metres (130 feet) high, the original monument was crowned with a colossal bronze statue of the first Roman emperor, his most explicit display of self-glorification. The ancient traveller and geographer Strabo considered it to be the one Roman monument most worth seeing.17
But it was a typically subtle piece of glorification. The design followed the humble circular shape of an ancient Etruscan burial mound, but its execution and its description as a ‘mausoleum’ elevated it to rival one of the Seven Wonders of the World – the tomb of the ancient Carian dynast Mausolus. It was one last flourish, one last clever artifice, one last bow. The age of emperors had begun in style. It had been created by a consummate performer. Under another performer, however, that age would reach its greatest crisis.
III
NERO
The mid-March evening at the fashionable pleasure resort of Baiae passed in gaiety and fun. One aristocratic lady had travelled by sedan chair from Antium, further north along the coast, to join a smart coterie of high-society guests. The event that brought them together was the festival of Minerva, the goddess of art and wisdom. After gazing at the beautiful, anchored ships from a waterside mansion and enjoying a lavish dinner, it was now time for the woman to return home. As the night was starlit and the sea flat, she chose to do this not by sedan chair but by boat. Despite the favourable conditions, however, that decision would prove near-fatal. For on board the garlanded ship a death trap had been devised. The deck had been carefully engineered with lead weights to cave in and crush the female guest reclining below. The woman for whom the trap was intended was Agrippina, the mother of Emperor Nero. The man who had set the trap was the emperor himself.
Agrippina suspected nothing. After all, Nero had spent the entire evening in her company in a studied spirit of reconciliation and filial love. As the emperor said his goodbyes on the shore, he spoke intimately, childishly with his mother. Lavishing attention on her, he gave her a long, lingering hug. Then Agrippina boarded the ship, went below deck and the boat set off. As soon as it was sufficiently far out at sea, however, a member of the rowing crew activated the device. To Agrippina’s horror, the wood in the deck above her head splintered violently, and suddenly the roof came crashing down. But as the weighted ceiling dropped, it stopped within centimetres of her: the sides of her couch had been high enough and strong enough to protect her from the full impact of the blow. Bewildered, she slowly extricated herself and looked around. One of her companions close by had been killed instantly. While Agrippina gathered her strength below, the crew above made a second attempt on her life by capsizing the boat. Now another companion came to Agrippina’s aid. Realizing what was afoot, the imperial freedwoman declared that it was she who was the emperor’s mother. The crew of the ship, unable to tell the difference in the dark, duly piled in and clubbed her to death with their oars. Meanwhile, as quietly as she could, Agrippina dived into the sea and slipped away.
As she swam ashore, she realized that the whole evening had been nothing but a piece of theatre. The collapse of the boat was no accident, but rather a case of stage machinery gone drastically wrong: the sea had been calm and there were no rocks nearby that might have caused a real accident. She knew full well who had tried to kill her. But before she worked out what to do next, she bought herself time. Once she had returned home to Antium, she decided to maintain the pretence that she had been the victim of an accident at sea by sending a message to Nero. It stated that even though she knew he would no doubt be distraught over what had happened to his dear mother, she now needed to rest and must not be disturbed.
As soon as he heard the news that his mother was still alive, Nero turned to Anicetus, a fleet commander and the man who had devised the death trap. Now, Nero told him, he must be the one to finish what he had started. Accordingly, Anicetus broke into Agrippina’s house with a band of soldiers and surrounded her bed. Her final words, according to the historian Tacitus, were a tragic defence of her son. She knew, she said, that it was not Nero who had sent them to kill her. Agrippina then pointed to her womb and told the soldiers, ‘Strike here’. Despite the fear and bitterness that had made mother and son enemies, she perhaps wanted to ensure with her last breath that nothing would diminish Nero’s hold on power. That was paramount. Her body was cremated the same night on an open couch in a makeshift funeral more fit for a pauper than a descendant of a deity, the first emperor Augustus.
Nero’s final order to kill his mother may have seemed cruelly clinical. In reality, he was rattled to the core. In Roman society piety towards mothers, let alone the mother of the emperor, was an ancient, cherished and sacrosanct virtue. Nero was the fifth emperor of Rome, a member of the Julio-Claudian family, the great-great-grandson of Augustus. He was the man whom many in the imperial palace, the Senate and among the Roman people believed to be restoring the government of the empire to the glories achieved by his ancestor some fifty years earlier. In the year of his mother’s death Nero was hugely popular, but if the news got out that he had committed the heinous crime of matricide, that popularity would plummet. But there was another, more complex reason why he now felt painfully vulnerable.
Nero had risen to be emperor not by destiny, but by cold, calculating design. Agrippina had been his kingmaker. It was true that the empire was, despite appearances, a hereditary monarchy: all the emperors of Rome had so far come from the one dynasty established by Augustus – the family of the Julio-Claudians. It was true too that, through Agrippina, Nero was descended from the divine Augustus. However, as the first emperor had left no clearly defined system of succession, the route to becoming the most powerful man in the ancient world was laden with murderous pitfalls. Agrippina had ensured that her son overcame them and then, to her cost, reminded him of that fact in order to control him. In so doing, she had fostered in the young emperor an insecurity, a fear that was symbolic of both the system of government he inherited and his character. It centred on his right to be emperor. That insecurity would be instrumental in the collapse of Nero’s regime and the crisis into which he would plunge the Roman empire. Yes, Agrippina, the maker of that insecurity, was now gone, but so too perhaps was the one person who could assuage it.
The last years of Nero’s rule created one of the most infamous revolutions in all Roman history. His downfall would fatally discredit the dynasty of emperors founded by Augustus and, to the shock of many Romans, bring it to extinction. It would take the political arrangement of government by a single emperor to the greatest crisis of its history. But that was not all. Of all the fault lines in the Augustan system of hereditary monarchy, Nero’s downfall would become notorious for exposing its greatest inbuilt flaw – a flaw that, until his reign, had been brushed under the carpet. What if the man who succeeded as emperor possessed a character so insecure and self-obsessed that he was completely unsuited to governing the Roman empire? What if the one person who could do or have anything he wanted withdrew from his responsibilities into a world of fantasy? What if the most powerful man in the ancient world went mad?
HEIR OF AUGUSTUS, SON OF AGRIPPINA
During the forty long years of Augustus’s reign, civil war had become a thing of the past, and the 20 million Roman citizens across the breadth of the empire had enjoyed a new period of stability. They, like he, wanted that stability
to continue and for Rome and her empire to prosper long after his death. So great was his dominance of the government, and so integral was he to the image of Rome, that the people believed the Roman empire depended entirely on him and his family for its future safety and security. Augustus had carefully laid the groundwork for this throughout his reign. In the best court poetry of the day, and on the Altar of Peace, one of the great monuments to Augustus’s reign, it was not just the emperor who was honoured, but his family too. The same was true of the oath of loyalty uttered by Romans around the four corners of the empire: ‘I will be loyal to Caesar Augustus,’ it went, ‘and to his children and descendants all my life in word, in deed and in thought.’1
However, there was a problem: how to legitimize the succession of Augustus’s power and thus maintain the new regime. As his principate was based on the appearance that the Senate and the Roman people were sovereign, and that the mandate enjoyed by the emperor was conferred on him by them, there could be no explicit acknowledgement of the hereditary principle, nor of any law of succession.2 Indeed, the paradox of a hereditary monarchy with no defined system for succession was just the start of the difficulty. Beneath the propaganda of Augustus’s regime, the root of the problem remained: the oneman rule of which Augustus was the architect was at its core more provisional and uncertain than its public image suggested. The emperor had simply innovated as his rule continued, trying one device then another. The question of succession was no different. This state of affairs engendered only uncertainty, an uncertainty that would cast a long, dark shadow over all of Augustus’s heirs.
Augustus had no sons of his own. To overcome this obstacle, he chose the time-honoured Roman practice of adoption. In ancient Rome, there was no recognition of primogeniture as a basis for inheritance, so he had a number of people to choose from. During the course of his rule he adopted his nephew Marcellus and the sons of his daughter Julia, Gaius and Lucius, suggesting that the principle of succession was hereditary. But here he was struck by very bad luck. His favoured nephew and his two beloved grandsons all suffered premature deaths (see family tree, page 188). Would Augustus now adopt not from his own family but from the best of the senators? He was said to have considered this, but by AD 4 he had rejected the idea3. In that year he had adopted his stepson, Tiberius, and named him as his heir in his will. It was impossible to escape the impression, however, that this was a last resort.
Tiberius succeeded Augustus in AD 14, but the problem of legitimizing the hand-over of power did not go away. In fact, it only grew worse. The question of legitimate succession was again open to competing principles. What was now more important: descent from Augustus or descent from the reigning emperor? In the absence of a clear answer, there were a number of people with potential claims to succeed to the supreme position in the state. The climate of uncertainty bred rivalry, intrigue and murder.
One potential successor to Tiberius was Germanicus. He was the grand-nephew of Augustus, the husband of Augustus’s granddaughter Agrippina, and the adopted son of Tiberius. His claim to succession competed with that of Tiberius’s natural son, Drusus. In AD 19 Germanicus, a general and a hero of the wars in Germany, died not on the battlefield but ignominiously, by poison. Many suspected Tiberius. This left the path open to Drusus, but he too was murdered by poison in AD 23. His assassin was another man making a bid for power: Sejanus, the low-born commander of the Praetorian Guard. His claim depended on his affair with Tiberius’s daughter Livilla, whom he hoped to marry and thus enter the dynastic struggle. The emperor refused the marriage of his daughter to a man with the rank of mere knight, so Sejanus’s claim foundered too.
By the time Tiberius died in AD 37, having ruled for twenty years, he still had not made up his mind about a successor. As a result, the decision of who would now rule the Roman empire was eventually made not by an emperor, but by the officers of the Praetorian Guard. It was in their interests that the system of dynastic succession should continue, so now they played their part. The man they chose as the third emperor of Rome met at least one of the criteria for succession: he was the great-grandson of Augustus and the son of Germanicus. His name was Caligula.
It was during Caligula’s reign that the sheer scale of the problem posed by dynastic succession came to light. Throughout Roman history it was the custom of ancient aristocratic families to intermarry. This was how the old families of the republic held on to power, political position and wealth. In the period of the early empire, however, this habit had a new and potentially dangerous consequence. The longer the Julio-Claudian dynasty continued, the greater the number of people who could claim some descent from Augustus. So when, following an illness, the new emperor grew unhinged and tyrannical, there was an ever-increasing pool of rival aristocrats with legitimate claims to the principate who were ready to pounce.
In AD 41 Caligula was assassinated and his wife and daughter murdered. Once again, the Praetorian Guard stepped in to secure a smooth succession, and once again they stuck to the formula for hereditary monarchy, despite its flaws. With the backing of the Roman army they appointed as emperor Caligula’s uncle and nearest surviving male relative, Claudius. Rome’s fourth emperor ruled for thirteen years and brought stability after the short and turbulent rule of Caligula. However, the problem of competitors and rivals within the Julio-Claudian circles of the aristocracy did not disappear. The new emperor’s protected existence before his accession was in part to blame. Claudius had grown up not amid the cut and thrust of public life, but in the imperial palace, surrounded by a coterie of compliant freedmen and slaves. This made his fear of rivals all the greater. It was said that he was responsible for the deaths of thirty-five senators and more than two hundred knights during his time as emperor.4 But his fear of rivals actually stemmed from another source: direct descent from Augustus was still viewed as the golden seal on an emperor’s position. Other aristocrats could boast such a family connection, but not Claudius. Now that was about to change.
When a conspiracy involving Claudius’s third wife was uncovered, she and her lover were executed for treason and Claudius became a widower in search of a new wife. The woman who presented the strongest, most persuasive case was Julia Agrippina. She was Claudius’s beautiful young niece and, more importantly, the great-granddaughter of Augustus. By this one union, Augustus’s dream of an imperial royal family at the heart of Roman government and the empire would once again be alive and well. But that union would also prove crucial for another reason. Agrippina would bring to the marriage a son from her first husband – an eleven-year-old boy called Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the future emperor Nero.
In AD 50 Claudius adopted the young boy as his own son. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus now became Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar. The boy could claim descent from both the reigning emperor and Augustus. It was a claim that had the potential to outshine that of Claudius’s own son, Britannicus, and that of all other rivals. It could even be enough to make Nero Rome’s fifth emperor. However, given the absence of any defined succession criteria, Agrippina knew the many slips between cup and lip. To make her son’s rise to power a certainty, she needed single-minded ruthlessness. It was one quality she appeared to have in spades.
Her first victim was the aristocrat and senator Lucius Junius Silanus. He was young, popular and successful in public life. Agrippina, however, viewed him simply as a rival to Nero. Silanus posed a significant threat to the future of her son because he too was a descendant of Augustus. Worse, he was already engaged to Claudius’s daughter Octavia. Agrippina was quick off the mark. She ensured that a rumour was let loose that accused Silanus of committing incest with his notoriously promiscuous sister Junia Calvina. Although the rumour was utterly untrue, Silanus’s name was struck from the roll-call of senators, and his career ended abruptly in disgrace. Claudius cancelled the engagement to his daughter and Silanus committed suicide – on Agrippina’s wedding day. The point was not lost on many people.
Next Agrippina tackled the prob
lem of Nero’s other serious rival, Claudius’s son from his previous marriage, Britannicus. All that was required to destroy his prospects was to establish Nero’s prominence in public life before Britannicus’s. Nero was three years older than his stepbrother, and the small matter of this age difference allowed Agrippina to make rapid progress. Between AD 50 and 53 the young Nero first slipped into the dead Silanus’s shoes and married Claudius’s daughter Octavia. He was then given a raft of honours that reflected his swift ascendancy. In March AD 51, at the age of thirteen, Nero assumed the toga of manhood a year before it was due, and in the same year he marked his debut in public life when he made a speech in the Senate thanking Claudius for these honours. This was followed by statesman-like addresses in both Latin and Greek on behalf of petitioners from Rome’s provinces. The speeches showed the boy’s precocious intelligence and philhellenism. When, in AD 53, he appeared at games given in his honour wearing a triumphal toga alongside Britannicus, who was still wearing the toga of a boy, Nero’s supremacy over his younger stepbrother was plain for all to see.
