Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  Nero had already built an elegant mansion for himself on the Palatine Hill, where Augustus had his residence, and which was thereafter associated with imperial homes. Nero’s mansion now became merely an entrance, an elaborate vestibule leading to the vast complex of his proposed new residence. The Golden House consisted of several lavish villas and buildings centred on a lake. The magnificent landscaped gardens featured not just lawns but ‘ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodlands, and a multitude of all sorts of domestic and wild animals’. This was a kind of fashionable high artifice formed from nature, a style of ‘faked rusticity’ affording exquisite views.21 There were numerous fanciful and playful flights of folly too: grottoes, colonnades, pavilions and arcades. The complex filled the valley between the Palatine, Esquiline and Caelian hills, and is estimated to have covered somewhere between 50 and 120 hectares (125 and 300 acres).

  The centrepiece was Nero’s main palace – two grand wings of intricately designed rooms built over two storeys and flanking a central courtyard. Some of it survives today. The architects Severus and Celer introduced daring new styles and techniques, demonstrated by an octagonal hall in the east wing that was topped by a dome incorporating the latest developments in cloister vaulting. Even the lighting was revolutionary: a series of apertures in the circular crown between the eight walls of the hall and the dome above. At ground level too the eight walls lent further sophistication: the front three gave on to the park, four gave on to vaulted rooms, and the last, at the back, featured a flight of steps down which water streamed. The sections of the palace that are visible today reveal that Nero also employed the greatest painters of the day. They provided exquisite paintings, chic frescoes and decorated panels in the many bedrooms and reception rooms that led off the hall.

  The palace was also a showcase of technical innovations and novelty gadgets. The baths boasted both flowing salt water from the sea and sulphurous water from natural springs. In the dining rooms movable ivory panels released flower petals on to the guests seated below, while disguised pipes sprayed them with perfume. The pièce de résistance was a constantly revolving ceiling in one banqueting hall, the design of which reflected the day and night sky.22 The Golden House was the very height of fashion and good taste, utterly exquisite in every detail. Anyone entering it would have been seduced by its mesmerizing elegance and artistic ambition. But outside lay a reality check: to most Roman citizens, Nero was simply turning the very heart of the city into a private residence devoted to his pleasure.

  The Golden House robbed the plebs of places to live; graffiti and satirical verses claimed that the palace was swallowing up Rome itself. Conservatives denounced the break with Rome’s ancient history; Nero’s pleasure palace had even devoured the site dedicated to the temple to his adoptive father, the divine Claudius.23 This, said Nero’s critics, showed that filial piety, a traditional Roman virtue, had been destroyed. Accordingly, people spread malicious rumours suggesting that the fire had been started deliberately to clear Rome for Nero’s megalomaniac vision. This accusation was fuelled by a further rumour that the second fire had begun on the estate of Tigellinus. Indeed, such was the persistent power of the rumours that Nero resorted to drastic measures. He made scapegoats of the sect of Christians in Rome. They were arrested and, as a form of public entertainment, Nero hosted the spectacle of their deaths in his own gardens and in the restored Circus Maximus. The Christians were dressed in wild animal skins and ravaged to death by dogs, or else crucified, their bodies torched to light up the night sky.24

  A fitting symbol of Nero’s excesses was provided by the sculpture that was erected in the vestibule of his new palace: a bronze statue 36 metres (120 feet) high portraying the emperor, a crown of sunrays around his head. With such extravagances as this, it soon became clear to Nero, his advisers and the Senate that the rebuilding of Rome and, above all, the dream palace was going to cost a vast amount of money. What the senators did not reckon on, however, was that Nero would sanction outrageous means to obtain it:

  Italy was ransacked for funds, and the provinces were ruined – unprivileged and privileged communities alike. Even the gods were included in the looting. Temples at Rome were robbed and emptied of the gold dedicated for the triumphs and vows, the ambitions and fears of generations of Romans.25

  To pay for his new Rome Nero was not only riding roughshod over every ancient tradition. To inaugurate his new age he seemed prepared to bankrupt the empire. On his orders, a financial and political crisis was beginning to envelope the management of Rome and her provinces. Why was Nero doing it? The significance of the Golden House runs deeper than the financial crisis that the spiralling costs brought in their wake. At the same time it provides an insight into why opposition to Nero now accelerated.

  The Golden House was an artistic endeavour to prove Nero’s primacy, his superiority over others, his right to be the most powerful person in the Roman state. He felt the need to do so because of the insecurity that Augustus’s hereditary monarchy promoted and that Agrippina had fostered. Now Nero believed he had found the way to settle this issue once and for all. When the palace was partly habitable, Nero was reported to have said, ‘Good! Now at last I can live like a human being’.26 Only the grandest palace the world had ever seen could mean normal living for Nero. Underlying this attitude was the reality and expression of Nero’s superiority to all others in the Roman state. Yes, parts of the palace grounds were open to the plebs, and yes, Nero certainly gave the impression of opening up his home to ordinary citizens. But even these concessions painted a picture not of a people’s palace, but of a monarch generously bequeathing gifts from his position of supremacy.27 The change in style of government from Augustus to Nero could not have been more clearly expressed. The first emperor had stressed the modesty of his villa. His house on the Palatine said, ‘I am just like any other senator.’ Nero’s said, ‘I am like no other; I am better.’ Why did he need to stress this?

  When Augustus ended the civil war and established a new state around his position of emperor, the lion’s share of power was self-evidently in his hands: he had the loyalty of the army, and he had amassed an incredible personal fortune by conquering the wealth of Egypt. That power set him above all others in Rome as the first citizen, and gave him the licence to dominate the state. So long as Augustus behaved tactfully and disguised his supreme power within a form of constitutional government, others in the élite tolerated this situation. By contrast, Nero’s claim to the same position was not self-evident. He enjoyed no great respect among the armies, having had neither opportunity nor interest in winning it through military conquest. He had no outstanding sources of wealth. Heredity alone was responsible for his position. He was there by birth – just.

  By AD 64 the murders of his mother Agrippina, the great-granddaughter of Augustus, and of his wife Octavia, the emperor Claudius’s daughter, had further weakened Nero’s claim to the throne. He feared that other descendants of the Julio-Claudians could make as good a case as he, and that they were now waiting in the wings, potential rivals for power. The final straw was Seneca. Increasingly estranged, Nero’s old tutor was no longer at hand to advise him on how to conceal his power, handle the Senate and govern affably with tact, openness and clemency. For all these reasons, in order to assuage the insecurity he felt over his right to be emperor, Nero turned to one solace above all: pursuing a style of rule that asserted explicitly, and offensively, his primacy over his rivals.

  Through the unrivalled glories of the Golden House, through its artistic virtues and ambitions, Nero stressed not just his excellence, but his superiority and eminence over everyone else. It was utterly unpalatable to senators and knights with ambition. By the following year a small core of them were plotting in earnest to get rid of him.

  THE PLOT

  What turned the grumblings and mutterings of a few disaffected aristocrats looking to improve their lot into a serious attempt on the life of the emperor was the participation of the joint head of
the Praetorian Guard, Faenius Rufus. In AD 65 the able and efficient Rufus had suffered three years of insults and slanders from Tigellinus while watching him grow more powerful as the whispering voice in the infinitely suggestible emperor’s ear. Rufus brought with him other key members of Nero’s guard: colonels, company commanders and officers. Their support was critical.

  The plotters were led by the senator Flavius Scaevinus, and their plan was simple: to replace Nero with one of their own, Gaius Calpurnius Piso. To their minds Piso was the ideal candidate. He came from an illustrious, aristocratic family of the republic; in more recent times it could trace associations with the Julio-Claudian dynasty as far back as Julius Caesar and Augustus. He was also popular with the plebs as a senator and lawyer who had often acted in their defence. Affable, suave and a sparkling guest at high-society parties, he was a politician who counted even Nero among his friends. But now he was preparing to betray that friendship, forced to this extreme plan, he said, by the need to rescue the freedom of the state from a tyrannical, avaricious emperor who was running Rome into the ground. Others, meanwhile, said he was motivated by pure self-interest.

  The plotters hesitated until their plan was in danger of being exposed. A freedwoman named Epicharis had tried to win over Proculus, a captain of the fleet, mistaking his disaffection with Nero’s regime for a willingness to join the plot. In response, Proculus, though he had none of the conspirators’ names warned Nero, and Epicharis was kept in custody. The pressure to act was now on. The plotters gathered discreetly to decide how to kill Nero. One person suggested inviting the emperor to Piso’s luxury villa in Baiae, but Piso refused to defile the sacred guest–host relationship: it would, he said, look bad. Secretly, however, he feared that if Nero’s life were to be taken outside Rome, another rival aristocrat, Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, a descendant of Augustus, could take control of events and rob him of the fruits of the plot. Finally, the conspirators settled on taking action during games at the Circus Maximus, a place that Nero could be counted on visiting.

  Before they dispersed, they acted out how they would attack the emperor. The strongest of the senators would approach Nero with a petition for financial assistance. He would then seize Nero and pin him to the ground while the disenchanted Praetorians would stab him to death. In this bloody act they would be led by the senator Scaevinus, who had taken to carrying a dagger in his toga as a totem of his intent. He had taken the weapon from a temple dedicated to the deified virtue ‘Safety’. The murder in the name of the state’s welfare, thought the assassins, would thus be lent extra credence. In reality the enactment was closer to a piece of macabre theatre – an unimaginative rerun of the assassination of that other tyrant, Julius Caesar.

  The night before the crime was to take place, Scaevinus was in melancholy mood. He signed his will and settled his affairs, even freeing his slaves and giving them gifts. One slave, Milichus, was charged by his master with two final tasks: to sharpen the dagger and to prepare bandages for wounds. Milichus’s suspicions were immediately aroused, but then some guests arrived for dinner and the senator gave the impression of being as entertaining as usual. His cheerful conversation, however, could not disguise his distraction.

  Milichus too was distracted that night. Encouraged by his wife to reveal any danger to the emperor in the hope of receiving a reward, and tormented by the possibility that he would miss the opportunity to be the first to reveal the danger, Milichus sneaked out of the house the next day to report his suspicions to Nero. At first he was ignored by the gatekeepers, but eventually his perseverance prevailed. Accompanied by one of Nero’s freedmen, Epaphroditus, he finally won an audience with the emperor.

  Immediately Scaevinus was arrested and brought to the palace. Here he faced Tigellinus. The senator, a picture of calmness and ease, denied all the allegations; the dagger, he said, was a family heirloom that this ungrateful, dishonest ex-slave had stolen. And the will? Well, came the reply, I have often added new clauses and freed slaves to stave off my creditors. These responses undermined Milichus’s evidence and gave the advantage to Scaevinus. The official investigation of treason had been transformed into a scene of social awkwardness and embarrassment. But just as the whole sorry business was winding down and Scaevinus was preparing to leave, Milichus spoke up one last time. He had one last suspicion to voice. He had seen Scaevinus, he said, talk at length with the knight Antonius Natalis.

  Scenting blood, Tigellinus agreed to see if Scaevinus’s and Natalis’s stories matched up. The knight was promptly arrested and brought to the palace. The two men were interrogated separately and their stories immediately differed. To get at the truth Tigellinus now exchanged the nicety of questioning for the sharper tool of torture. And sure enough, in a short space of time, he learnt a great deal. With only the slightest threat of pain, Natalis broke down first – in Nero’s presence. He denounced Piso, but then, in his panic, he also blurted out the name of another: Seneca. Tigellinus quickly went to the other interrogation room and confronted Scaevinus with Natalis’s confession. Defeated, the senator duly named the others involved. The discovery of such a widespread plot cut straight to the source of Nero’s insecurity: after all his magnanimous generosity, and after all he had given the senators, was this how they showed their gratitude to him?

  The notion that Nero’s regime was becoming anything other than tyrannical was abandoned in the terror that now followed. The walls of Rome and its neighbouring towns were overrun with the military and blockaded; everywhere there were signs of a state of emergency. Each and every one on the confession list faced Nero’s wrath. Tigellinus’s soldiers rounded up as many as possible and chained them outside the gates of Nero’s palace. Although most at first refused to confess, every one eventually gave way either to torture or the bribe of immunity. In the process, they incriminated their associates and even members of their own families. Trials, such as they were, were informal; people were incriminated on the flimsiest of evidence. In Nero’s campaign of terror an association with a known conspirator, ‘or a chance conversation or meeting, or entrance to a party or a show together’ was tantamount to guilt.28

  No one, however, had yet denounced the joint head of the Praetorian Guard, Faenius Rufus. To conceal his involvement in the plot from Tigellinus and Nero, he bullied, tortured and interrogated more viciously than the others. During one violent ‘trial’, a Praetorian officer who had also not been detected, surreptitiously flashed Rufus a glance; he was looking for a sign that he should go ahead and assassinate Nero. But as the officer prepared to draw his sword, Rufus lost his nerve and stopped him. With that last opportunity abandoned, the dying embers of the conspiracy were put out.

  Meanwhile, Nero’s bloody purge of the aristocracy grew in ferocity. During the early stages of the exposure of the plot, Piso had been encouraged to go to the Praetorian camp, to go to the Forum, to go everywhere he could and rally the soldiers and the people against the emperor. But he had decided against it. Instead, he committed suicide by opening his veins before Tigellinus’s soldiers could get to him. The spectacular collapse of the conspiracy was symbolized by Piso’s will: in order to protect his wife from the emperor’s vengeance, it flattered Nero. Seneca, however, was not so quick to give in.

  Nero’s tutor had wanted no part in the conspiracy; Natalis had only informed against him because he wanted to please Nero. Although retired, Seneca was a thorn in the emperor’s conscience, and Natalis knew that Nero had secretly long wished to be rid of him. Natalis’s cowardly attempt to avoid death by ingratiating himself with the emperor worked, and Nero seized his opportunity to silence Seneca for ever. When the guards arrived and surrounded his house, the old senator was at dinner. With nothing to hide, Seneca stated his innocence with dignity. The commanding officer, Gavius Silvanus, reported this back to Nero. Seneca’s former pupil, however, chose to ignore the small matter of his tutor’s innocence, and sent the officer back to the countryside with a death sentence.

  Silvanus, howe
ver, was bearing a terrible secret: he himself had been one of the conspirators. Now he found himself perpetuating the crimes that he had joined the conspiracy to avenge. He could not bear to give the order directly, so he sent in one of his subordinates. Like Piso and many others, Seneca too chose to commit suicide by opening his veins. He began by severing those in his sinewy arms. When this failed to work fast enough, he cut the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. Seneca’s wife Paulina insisted on dying with her husband, and she had done the same. But, Seneca, fearing that the sight of each other would only weaken their resolve and intensify the agony, asked her to move to another room. Nero had anticipated this marital pact and in a final act of vindictiveness – or was it clemency? – had ordered his soldiers to prevent the death of Seneca’s wife. Paulina was resuscitated, her wounds bandaged, and she survived, a living ghost in mourning.

  Inevitably, Rufus was betrayed by his co-conspirators; there were simply too many who wanted to see him exposed for his role in their downfall, not least the imprisoned senator Scaevinus. When, during an interrogation, Rufus pressed the senator for more information, he pushed Scaevinus too far. The leader of the plot retorted coldly, ‘Ask yourself. No one is better informed than you.’29 Rufus’s stunned silence betrayed his guilt and he was seized. Tigellinus perhaps took most pleasure in seeing his colleague’s career come to an abrupt end.

  Aided by Nymphidius Sabinus and the fawning senator Petronius Turpilianus, both loyal allies of the emperor, Tigellinus mopped up the remaining conspirators among the Praetorian Guards and the Senate. To ensure the future loyalty of the Praetorians, Nero gave each soldier a reward of 2000 sesterces and a free supply of corn. Honorary triumphs were awarded to Turpilianus and Tigellinus, while Sabinus received a consulship and promotion to succeed Rufus as joint head of the Praetorian Guard. Finally, there was the usual round of congratulations, celebrations and thank offerings to the gods led by Nero. Cowed, the Senate slavishly joined in the ceremony.