Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  There now remained only one task to seal her son’s future as the next ruler of the Roman empire: the murder of the present emperor. In AD 54 Claudius was sixty-four years old. Perhaps as a result of cerebral palsy in childhood, he had always suffered from a limp, constant trembling and a speech impediment. Now he was a doddering old man. But Agrippina could not wait for his death to come naturally. Time was against her. Britannicus was about to reach his fourteenth birthday and was eligible to receive the toga of manhood from his father. The natural son of the emperor might still eclipse Nero, so Agrippina seized the initiative. At dinner one evening, so the story goes, some mushrooms were sprinkled with a lethal substance. Claudius ate them under Agrippina’s watchful eye, but the poison resulted in nothing more than a coughing fit. At this point, her doctor stepped in. Ostensibly helping Claudius to vomit, he inserted a poisoned feather down the emperor’s throat and thus completed the job.

  On the morning of 13 October AD 54 the palace was buzzing with tense, surreptitious activity. Only Agrippina and her closest confidants, of course, knew that Claudius was dead. While her son was being dressed and readied for the formal accession, Agrippina spent her time deviously detaining Claudius’s children, Britannicus and Octavia, who were waiting to hear about the state of their father’s health. She pretended to seek solace in them during this anxious time; Britannicus, she said, touching his cheek, was the very image of his father. The Praetorian Guard too she kept at bay, fobbing them off with regular messages about the deteriorating health of the emperor. The truth was that she was desperately buying time, ‘waiting for the propitious moment forecast by astrologers’ to make the announcement of the succession.5 Agrippina had been plotting towards this moment all her adult life. Nothing, not even a poor omen, was going to ruin it now.

  At midday the doors of the imperial palace were flung open. The emperor was dead, and now before the expectant Praetorian Guard stood not Claudius’s son Britannicus, but Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar. Although the sight of the boy took some of the soldiers by surprise, the arranged ceremonies of that day allowed no time for hesitation or doubt. The company of soldiers cheered Nero and speedily put him in a litter to be taken to their camp in the Servilian Gardens in the southeast part of Rome. Here Nero addressed the soldiers and, after promising them the usual gifts of money, the seventeen-year old boy was hailed emperor. With the passing of a decree in the Senate House on the same day, the senators followed suit. No one would ever know whom Claudius himself had intended to succeed him because his will was immediately suppressed.

  Agrippina had achieved her greatest ambition. Her son was the most powerful man in the Roman world. At that moment, however, she could not have imagined that the tools she had used to secure power for him were now about to be turned on her. For not long after the young Nero’s rule began, a bitter power struggle developed between mother and son. Publicly Agrippina was given honour after honour. She was allowed a private bodyguard; she was made priestess of the cult of the deified Claudius; she was permitted an indirect hand in government by sitting secretly behind a sheet at council meetings held in the palace. Coins from the first years of Nero’s reign even bear heads of both the emperor and Agrippina. However, behind the polite courtly gloss of this mother–son relationship, the adolescent Nero began to lose patience with his influential, controlling kingmaker. His habitual obedience to her, he realized, was fast becoming a burden.

  His mother was hard to please. She disapproved of Nero’s interest in horse racing, athletics, music and theatre. By the second year of his rule, they had clashed over his girlfriend, a former slave called Acte. Motivated perhaps by jealousy, possessiveness and fear of a rival to her son’s affections, Agrippina scolded him for having a love affair with such a vulgar, low-born woman. Nero responded, as a teenager would, by intensifying his relationship with Acte and coming close to making her his lawful wife.6 His next action, however, was tantamount to declaring all-out war. When Nero was still a boy Agrippina had scrupulously filled the imperial household with staff loyal to her. Now Nero attacked that power base by removing one of his mother’s key allies – Antonius Pallas – a freedman in charge of financial matters. Agrippina retaliated, fighting fire with fire. She knew how to win power in the palace. More than that, however, she knew how to hit the new emperor of Rome where it hurt.

  One day Agrippina, in a display of anger, went around the palace, flinging her arms about and shouting out loud that she favoured not Nero, but his stepbrother Britannicus. The divine Claudius’s son was now grown up, she said, and was ‘the true and worthy heir of his father’s supreme position’.7 The cold blade of that remark opened a wound – namely, Nero’s insecurity over his claim to be emperor. The reaction Agrippina provoked in her son, however, may well have taken even her by surprise. At dinner one evening a drink was brought to Britannicus, who sat at a junior table with the children of other noblemen. Any poison in it would have been detected by the imperial tasters, so the drink was harmless, but it was deliberately made too hot, and the young boy refused it. Cold water, secretly spiked with poison, was added at the table. Thus cooled, the drink was handed back to Britannicus. Before the eyes of both Agrippina and his own sister the fourteen-year-old boy was soon convulsing uncontrollably. The person who had ordered the murder was widely believed to be Nero.

  Reacting with a studied lack of worry, Nero casually claimed that Britannicus was simply having one of his epileptic fits; it was nothing out of the ordinary. The other diners saw through this excuse, but did nothing. There was nothing they could do. Containing their horror beneath glazed, outwardly normal expressions, they were paralysed: to have protested or denied it was a fit would have been to suggest murder. But equally, to have conspicuously agreed that it must have been an epileptic fit would also have been to suggest a crime because it would have been so patently a lie. While everyone hesitated, the teenage boy died. ‘Octavia, young though she was, had learnt to hide sorrow, affection, every feeling . . . After a short silence, the banquet continued.’8

  The aptitude for the crimes required to hold on to imperial power had now passed from mother to son. Nonetheless, Agrippina, the determined and seasoned intriguer, did not give up the covert war against Nero for control of the palace. On the contrary, the death of Britannicus now prompted her to lend her support to Octavia; perhaps she could become a political figurehead around whom aristocrats with rival claims to be emperor would rally. A rumour circulated that Agrippina was also promoting the cause of the aristocrat Rubellius Plautus; he was in a position to claim descent from Augustus because his mother was Tiberius’s granddaughter, and Tiberius was the adopted son of Augustus. In response, Nero had Agrippina expelled from the palace and her bodyguard removed. However, it was not long before he devised a more permanent solution to the problem of his mother.

  The final straw stemmed from Nero’s love life. He did not feel anything for his wife, Octavia. He wanted passionately to marry his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, the wife of his close friend Marcus Salvius Otho, and the woman who would become the great love of Nero’s life. Nero knew that his mother would never allow him to divorce Claudius’s daughter and marry his mistress. Poppaea knew it too. In private she ‘nagged and mocked him incessantly. He was under his guardian’s thumb, she said, master neither of the empire nor of himself.’9 Poppaea’s skill in needling Nero was reinforced ‘by tears and all the tricks of a lover’. Thus provoked, in the spring of AD 59 Nero summoned Anicetus and sent his mother the fatal invitation to join him for the festival of Minerva at Baiae.

  With Agrippina dead, Nero felt released, free at last. The domineering influence in his life had been eliminated, and he could now rule and behave as he pleased. Indeed, there was much to celebrate. Despite the strife within the imperial palace, the first years of his rule had been far from disastrous. In fact, according to all the ancient sources, the empire thrived during Nero’s early years as emperor. Contemporary poets hailed them as a new golden age. Nero rivalled even Au
gustus for sheer popularity. The people loved him for the games he held, and the Senate for the respect he showed them. Abroad too there were successes to count: Rome was strengthening her eastern frontier in a successful campaign with Parthia. The empire was flourishing.

  Given Nero’s youth and inexperience at governing during those first few years, how had this happened? Perhaps the empire, administered by senators and knights, ran itself? Perhaps it did not even need an active, industrious emperor, but simply a celebrity figurehead? Another answer to the question of who, if anyone, was really in charge of the empire can be traced to the two men who, according to Tacitus, had taken control of government in the first years of Nero’s rule. Their names were Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Sextus Afranius Burrus, and they had been the fledgling emperor’s two closest advisers. While the adolescent Nero was growing up, he had sought refuge with them. They protected him from his mother and indulged his interests. In exchange, he listened to their advice. However, these two men were much more than allies with good advice to offer. They were astute politicians on whom the emperor depended entirely for his popularity, for his new golden age.

  Now all that was about to change. While Agrippina lived, she had taken the heat off Seneca and Burrus. With her gone, they stood exposed. Now it was they, not she, who were the spoilers of Nero’s fun. With Nero having slipped his mother’s leash, however, they were about to realize that there was nothing they could do to control him. The Roman empire was about to discover what kind of man its emperor really was.

  NERO’S NEW FRIENDS

  AD 62, the eighth year of Nero’s rule. According to the historian Tacitus, ‘the forces of good were in decline’. Those forces were the voices of Seneca and Burrus. To date, their control over the emperor had been clever and highly successful. Burrus was a knight, born in Gaul, who had risen to become the head of the Praetorian Guard. Severe in character and disfigured in one hand, he acted as a moral barometer for Nero. Agrippina had once been Burrus’s sponsor, and out of loyalty to her he had vehemently opposed Nero in his murder plans, refusing to have any part in her death. Nonetheless, once the murder had been committed, he dutifully ensured that the Praetorian Guards stayed loyal to the emperor. This support was critical to the success of Nero’s regime. But it was his tutor who was perhaps an even more pivotal figure.

  Seneca was a senator from an Italian family of Córdoba in Spain. He was also one of the greatest philosophers in Roman history. Urbane, charming and fatherly, he used his intelligence to guide and educate his adolescent charge. In so doing, he became one of the most influential voices in the Roman empire. The importance of Seneca to Nero can be seen in the variety of roles he played. He composed Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate and people. It was rapturously received. For the festival of Saturnalia in AD 54, he entertained the emperor by composing a satire lambasting the regime of the buffoon Claudius. Playing on the word ‘deification’, it was called The Pumpkinification of Claudius, and it had the court in stitches. As amicus (friend) of the emperor, Seneca also sat on the imperial council, which met in the palace with the leading senators. As a result, those senators heartily approved of Nero’s wise decisions.

  Perhaps Seneca’s greatest role, however, was damage limitation; he knew how to clear up Nero’s mess. His greatest coup was to manage the senators’ reaction to the murder of Agrippina. His deft handling of the situation meant that they duly bought the official version of events: Agrippina had been plotting the murder of Nero, the plot had been detected, and Agrippina had paid the price. The emperor was now safe. His public relations exercise was so effective that, far from expressing horror at the matricide, Rome gave thanks to the gods. The state, after all, had been saved. Seneca, one might have supposed, was indispensable to the emperor. But there was one task he set himself that would ultimately prove his undoing. The key lesson he set for his young charge was how to be a good emperor. It would become his life’s greatest project and his life’s greatest failure.

  We know what Seneca taught Nero because his great work of political philosophy, On Clemency, has survived. The lesson began with a simple statement of fact. The position Nero held, Seneca would have told the young emperor, was one of supreme power. He was the ‘arbiter of life and death for the nations’; in his power rested ‘what each person’s lot and state shall be’; by his lips Fortune proclaimed ‘what gifts she would bestow on each human being’.10 The key to being a good emperor, however, was not just to acknowledge that power, but to exercise it with restraint. If he could show clemency, he would become a good emperor, like Augustus; if not, he would be nothing more than a despised tyrant. In fact, Nero would do well to emulate Augustus in following this argument to its conclusion: above all, instructed Seneca, the emperor must disguise his absolute power.

  Nero at first had been an obedient student. He had revived the traditional partnership with the senators: they and not the cronies of the imperial palace were, after all, the true pillars of justice, political wisdom and administrative experience. Together, Nero and the Senate ruled Rome as if they were equals. The idea that Seneca had sown in the young man was that of civilitas: the affability and accessibility of the emperor ‘that helps to conceal the fact of autocratic power’.11 Nero had at first played his role well, giving the impression that he was just another senator, another ordinary citizen. And yet, despite Nero’s promising start, by AD 62 he was forgetting his lines. By character he was just not cut out to be a politician. Maintaining the pretence, the theatrical illusion, that he cared what the senators really thought was fast becoming yet another burden. The truth was that, despite Seneca’s best efforts, Nero’s passions lay elsewhere.

  One of these passions was for a good night out. It would amuse the young emperor and his dissolute playmates from the palace to put on a disguise, such as a freedman’s cap or a wig, and rampage around the streets of the city, drinking, carousing and getting into fights. ‘For he was in the habit of setting upon people returning home from dinner and would hurt anyone who fought back, throwing them into the drains.’12 Another of Nero’s passions from a young age was for horses. With great enthusiasm, he would follow the chariot races and their different teams. He supported the Greens over the Reds, the Whites or the Blues, much as fans follow football teams today. To attend the races and gratify his passion, he slipped out of the palace in secret, so it was said. However, his greatest love was reserved for the Greek arts: for music, poetry, singing and playing the lyre.

  Nero was not only very knowledgeable about these subjects, but pursued his own practice and study of them with determination. As soon as he had become emperor, he hired as his tutor the most famous and skilled lyre-player of the day, a man called Terpnus. He even undertook the voice-strengthening exercises of professional singers: ‘. . .he would lie on his back, holding a lead tablet and cleanse his system with a syringe and with vomiting.’ Diet too was important for improving the quality of one’s singing. Apples were to be avoided as they were deemed harmful to the vocal cords, but dried figs were beneficial; and every month for a few days the emperor lived on just chives preserved in oil.13 Nero’s pursuit of these Greek interests worried Seneca and Burrus. It was not the pursuits themselves that were the problem; it was rather that Nero was dangerously close to achieving the standard of a professional performer. In the conservative circles of Roman high society of the day that just would not do.

  At that time, when Rome had been the great cultural exchange centre, the exciting cosmopolis of the entire Mediterranean world for nearly two hundred years, and Greece had long been reduced to a Roman province, many Romans in the élite still laboured under an illusion. They were at heart, ran their self-serving myth, a people of tough, sturdy, self-reliant peasant-soldiers who, through grit, determination, fortitude and discipline, had forged their brilliant empire. Roman character and virtue, above all, were revealed in achievements on the battlefield and in public life. Yes, the Greek arts were good for education, perhaps even for relaxation too, b
ut devotion to them would lead only to a breakdown in the moral fibre of Rome, turning a nation of soldiers into one of cowards, gymnasts and homosexuals. Toning up one’s oiled muscles for athletics, prancing around in a theatrical costume or singing poetic compositions to the accompaniment of a lyre had not prevented the fall of Greece. In fact, such pursuits probably caused it.14 The conservatives need only look around the streets of the city to make their point: professional actors were nothing but slaves and common prostitutes.

  The chic taste-makers of the fashionable set disagreed. Music, theatre, singing and performing in the Greek style were exquisite, the height of sophistication, the pinnacle of civilization. In ancient Greece aristocrats and citizens had competed to win honours and social status through artistic contests; those contests had been glorified in the works of Homer and Pindar, the founders of epic and lyric literature. So why not in Rome too? To their absolute delight, the hip crowd now at last had a patron. As chance would have it, he was none other than the emperor himself – and he was prepared to lead from the front. In AD 59 Nero celebrated a set of games called the Juvenalia, held to mark the first shaving of his beard and his transition to manhood. They were private games for the government élite, so when the emperor chose to play his lyre on stage, his advisers had been able to pretend it was acceptable. Burrus, who was forced to lead a battalion of the Praetorian Guard on to the stage, grieved as he applauded. The next year, however, Nero really pushed the boundaries of what was proper for the emperor of Rome. He was determined to take his passions to the people.