Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  With the state secure and the emperor pre-eminent once more, Nero showed a modicum of balance and restraint by pardoning Natalis for his confession and sparing others. However, his progress towards overt tyranny now took a step forward when he declared that he wanted to fulfil the greatest ambition of his entire life. To act. In public. In Rome.

  DOWNFALL

  In the colonnades of the streets of Rome, in the houses and baths of leading statesmen, the whispering ran rife. The senators were now desperately trying to avert a new crisis. The lowly profession of acting, utterly scorned by the conservative élite of Roman society, was about to be embraced in all earnestness by the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. The venue? The theatre of Pompey the Great. The occasion? The second Neronia. In the republic and during the early days of the empire, leading magistrates had hosted games as a way of asserting their family prestige and winning influence in the state. Now Nero was asserting his primacy by paying for the Neronia, the greatest games of the age, himself. All Roman citizens from Italy and the provinces were invited, and the humiliation and discrediting of the emperor, went the rumour, would be total.

  The senators quickly came up with a plan: at a meeting of the emperor’s private council at the palace they gently suggested awarding him in advance the prize for first place in the category of song – and also in the category of political oratory to detract from the show-business nature of Nero’s chosen field of expertise. The emperor rejected their hypocrisy outright: he was to perform in public, he said, and he was to be received on equal terms with the other artists competing in the competition. There were to be no special favours.

  While the emperor rehearsed assiduously, the games’ presiding officer chose a theme: the golden age. This was attributed to the fact that the Neronia was due to coincide with Nero’s search for treasure to which he had been alerted by an opportunistic Carthaginian called Caesellius Bassus. So successful was Bassus in convincing Nero of the existence of the treasure that the emperor continued to spend money on the games, as well as the palace and the rebuilding of his new Rome, in the expectation that it would materialize. It never did. Meanwhile, as the theme suggested, the games were going to be glorious and lavish. There would be elaborate sacrifices and extravagant, gaudy processions featuring images of the gods and the emperor. The Greek-style contests between athletes and guilds of performing arts would range from chariot racing and gymnastics to poetry, heraldry, lyre playing and acting in comic and tragic set pieces. There was even a titillating, transgressive element – the athletic games – which featured nude men, and from which Augustus had once banned women. Now they were to be honoured by the presence of not just Roman noble-women and plebs, but the vestal virgins too. These sacral aristocratic maidens devoted thirty years of their lives to the service of the goddess of the hearth. Their inclusion also had a Hellenic origin: the Greeks included priestesses at similar events, so Nero wanted them too. All his wishes were granted, but disgrace was waiting in the wings.

  When Nero took to the stage for his chosen contest, the recital of tragic material, he was accompanied by members of the Praetorian Guard; the military backbone of Rome, the élite police force of the emperor was reduced to carrying Nero’s musical instrument. The emperor himself looked unsteady and grotesque in the authentic garb of an actor: he wore the appropriate mask – a haunting face with an elongated forehead, high platform shoes, an ornately embroidered and colourful tunic and, underneath it, padding for his chest and torso designed to emphasize his presence on the stage. Following his recital, he performed a section of his own composition about the fall of Troy. The Roman plebs were rapturous in their applause. Dazzled and delighted that the emperor of Rome was performing for their pleasure, they called him back for more.

  In the wings an aristocratic friend called Aulus Vitellius encouraged the emperor to follow their wishes. His entreaty gave Nero the excuse to yield to their demands and return to the stage, this time to play the lyre and sing. Genuinely fearful of the judges’ verdict, and convinced that he was competing with the other performers on a level playing field, Nero took his performance seriously and followed the rules to the letter: he maintained the dignified poses required, he avoided using a cloth to wipe the sweat away, and showed no visible clearing of the throat and nose. At the close of his song, on bended knee and deferring to the crowd, Nero awaited the verdict. The judges put on their own very best performances as they made their assessments before awarding the first prize. The winner was Nero.

  Again the urban masses of Rome stamped, applauded and cheered. It is recorded, however, that in disgust many knights voted with their feet and walked out. In their urgency to leave, some were crushed. Indeed, beneath the jubilation were sinister signs of tyranny. The more conservative citizens from Italy and the provinces were also horrified by what they saw. Nonetheless, they clapped with the rest. They had no choice: they were chivvied along by Nero’s professional cheerleaders, planted in the audience by the emperor. These young and ambitious men were called the Augustiani, and they were a special, 5000-strong division of knights appointed by Nero and formed from aspiring artists. As the emperor’s official fan club, they cuffed, cajoled and harassed the bored and the horrified among the audience. They also acted like secret police, for they spied on the crowd and noted down the names of those who did not attend or those who did not look as though they were enjoying themselves.30

  Lack of support for the emperor’s performance was tantamount to treason. But that was just one aspect of the games that the senatorial élite found hard to stomach. For not only was Nero strong-arming them into applauding him; through the Neronia, the emperor was also wooing the people in a way that completely cut out the Senate from the political process. The magnificent games made a mockery of any equality between the first citizen and the Senate. This was a naked example of Nero setting himself above the institutions of the state: he was seeking to win the people over by appealing to their emotions, inspiring awe and exaltation of himself as an individual. No one else, muttered the senators in envy, could possibly put on games that would match these. None of them could ever win favour with the people in the way that Nero did.

  Over the next year yet more extravagant and offensive spectacles were staged, and on each occasion the same image of Nero was presented – that of a tyrant retreating into a world of fantasy, unable to distinguish what was real from what was illusion. The state funeral of Poppaea was one such moment. Soon after the games, Nero had kicked his wife and their unborn child to death because he was in a rage when he returned from an evening out at the chariot races. Poppaea had said that she wanted to die before she passed her prime, so she had her way.31 The public funeral, full of procession and ceremony to reflect Nero’s grief, again flouted all tradition and sense of Roman decorum: Poppaea was not cremated in the Roman style, but embalmed and stuffed with spices in the manner of eastern potentates. Nero took the platform, eulogized his love’s virtues and announced the deification of a woman whom many aristocrats considered to be of questionable birth and ancestry. Nero saved the final affront for last. He ordered her body to be laid to rest in the mausoleum of the divine Augustus.

  Unsurprisingly, one senator found this a desecration too offensive to endure. Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus was a principled rebel senator who had dared to challenge Nero’s decisions in government. He had walked out during the vote on the fictitious charges brought against Nero’s mother and now once again he broke cover. He made his disgust public knowledge by not attending Poppaea’s funeral. From that day on Nero would look for any excuse, no matter how corrupt, to remove this dignified aristocrat permanently. His chance was not long in coming.

  At the start of the year AD 66 Tigellinus’s son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, brought a charge against Thrasea. The senator was accused of not honouring the emperor’s welfare: he had not attended the ceremony of swearing the oath that augured the new year. Secretly, Capito was motivated by an old grudge he bore Thrase
a; the senator had helped a deputation from the Roman province of Cilicia to successfully bring charges against him for extortion while he was governor. The trial against Thrasea began in May. It was clear from the hundreds of soldiers anxiously guarding the approaches to the Senate House, law courts and nearby temples that there was much more at stake than Thrasea’s innocence. In reality, battle lines were being drawn up between two warring factions: on one side the emperor, his cronies and various servile senators; on the other side the backbone of the Senate trying to assert its authority once again. The covert war was breaching the veneer of harmonious imperial government between emperor and Senate. As usual, however, there was only one winner. After a series of vicious denunciations, Thrasea was found guilty and chose his own death: suicide. The fight against corruption and tyranny, and the battle for senatorial dignity, prestige and responsibility in government were being lost quite publicly.

  The plebs of Rome, however, did not seem to care. Their attention was distracted from Thrasea’s ugly trial by another expensive state occasion that had been timed by Nero for that very purpose: the crowning of King Tiridates of Armenia. The occasion was a piece of political pageantry staged to represent the victorious pacification of the Roman empire’s eastern border with her hostile neighbouring empire Parthia. Tiridates was to be installed as Rome’s client-king in the buffer kingdom of Armenia, which lay between the two. The general who achieved this successful pacification was the brilliant, honourable Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo. For the ceremony, however, he remained in the east.

  No expense was spared for the king’s reception. It cost Rome 800,000 sesterces a day for Tiridates and his train of family, servants and 3000 cavalry to make the nine-month journey to the capital. When the royal entourage arrived it was welcomed by a megalopolis decked out in garlands, colourful banners and fancy lights; the Praetorian soldiers guarded the roads in their finest armour, and the citizens wore their best clothes as they flooded in their thousands to the Forum, or thronged streets and even rooftops to catch a glimpse of the grand occasion.32

  The crowning was to take place in the Great Theatre of Pompey, the interior of which had been gilded with gold leaf for the occasion. On the stage where Tiridates would kneel before Nero, a massive cloth awning had been set up to shade the proceedings from the sun; on it was the embroidered figure of Nero driving a chariot and surrounded by heavenly constellations. When Tiridates compared the emperor to the eastern god Mithras, the disenchanted senators looking on were apalled. The contrast between the trial and suicides of dignified senators and the theatrical glorification and submission of a foreign potentate for which Nero could claim little responsibility was truly nauseating. Surely things could get no worse? Indeed, they could.

  The cumulative costs of Nero’s Golden House, the second Neronia, Poppaea’s funeral and now the reception of Tiridates meant that the finances of the Roman empire were quickly spiralling out of control. To avoid financial ruin the coinage was devalued, but in AD 66 and 67 Nero turned to more extreme measures. He was already fearful of any aristocrat who could rival him for wealth. He believed that his homes, estates and possessions provided the very basis, the proof of his eminence in the state; men of conspicuous wealth were, as a result, rivals who could undermine him.33 Now, however, he began murdering them for their money. It was like a continuation of the purge that he had carried out the year before, but this time without even the excuse of an assassination plot to justify it.

  Tigellinus was again instrumental in the purge, and the process of elimination was simple. An aristocrat whose wealth was desired was falsely accused of treason: some slave, crony, or servile senator or knight seeking to win favour, eliminate an enemy or settle an old score could always be found to turn informer and make the accusation. The charges were many and various. Cassius Longinus was accused of honouring his ancestor Cassius, the assassin of Julius Caesar, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty; the charge against Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus was that he had given his slaves and staff titles usually bestowed on members of the imperial household, as though he himself were aspiring to be emperor; others were accused of incest, black magic and consulting astrologers about the death of Nero. All the charges, according to Tacitus, were fatuous.

  Often the accused would do the honourable thing and commit suicide after signing over much of his wealth to the emperor in order to protect some small part of it for his remaining family. If, however, there was any resistance in signing the will, as in the case of Anteius Rufus, Tigellinus would bring along a lawyer or a witness who would forcibly sanction it and ensure that the money went either to the emperor or directly to Tigellinus himself before the victim died. While many were murdered in this way, others escaped death by ‘purchasing their lives’ from Tigellinus.34

  With this spree of tyrannical murders, many below the upper echelons of the élite – the families, allies, associates, friends and dependants of those connected to the persecuted senators and knights – now also turned against the emperor too. The ordinary people of Rome continued to love their populist emperor; they marvelled at his lavish shows and grand spectacles.35 Those of more substantial means took a very different view. They now saw their money stolen, their chances of inheritance destroyed, and their prospects for future advancement and achievement in Roman public life evaporate. If further evidence were needed, they only had to look at the temples of Rome and Italy. These were further plundered and the ancient sacred relics, statues and treasures won during the centuries of the glorious republic were melted down. It was as if the heart was being ripped out of the character of the Romans and their ancient virtues.

  Nero took this growing disenchantment as a personal rejection. He was hurt by the ingratitude he was being shown after all he had done for the Roman people. Far from tackling the mounting crisis head-on, Nero’s response was to retreat further into fantasy. He said he wanted to escape from the world of Rome, which he increasingly disliked, to a place of like-minded souls who really appreciated him and who were worthy of his talents. So in September AD 66, with an entourage of servants, freedmen, compliant senators and knights, and some Praetorian guards led by Tigellinus, Nero left for Greece.

  Before departure there was one final insult to level at the Roman élite, the clearest sign yet that they counted for nothing. It lay in his choice of the person left in charge of affairs in Rome. The man chosen to stay behind was not the consul for the year, not even a senator, but a vicious former slave from the imperial household: Helius. He was given complete authority to banish, confiscate from and even put to death citizens, knights and senators. The historian Cassius Dio was moved to quip:

  Thus the Roman empire was at that time a slave to two emperors at once, Nero and Helius; and I am unable to say which of them was the worse. In most respects they behaved entirely alike, the one point of difference being that the descendant of Augustus was emulating lyre-players and tragedians, whereas the freedman of Claudius was emulating the Caesars.36

  Away from the capital, Nero saw his tour of the great pan-Hellenic games of Greece as a chance to express the full flowering of his artistic career. And in that ambition the Greek city-states were happy to accommodate him. Although some of the four-yearly festivals, such as the Olympic Games, were not due for the year of Nero’s visit, the Greeks simply brought them forward to coincide with it. To Nero, however, his participation in the competitions represented much more than artistic freedom. It was an opportunity to silence his critics and vanquish his rivals in Rome. For a militaristic society that valued virtue and excellence above everything else, Nero would assert once and for all his primacy as emperor; his chosen field to prove his excellence was not the theatre of war, as it was for Augustus, but the theatre itself.

  At the Pythian, Nemean, Delphic and Olympic Games, Nero won prize after prize in the contests for chariot racing, lyre playing and recitals of tragic material. Indeed, the organizers of the Olympic Games had to add musical contests to the competition because it tra
ditionally included only athletic events. Through these victories Nero continued to show his ascendancy over the senators. And yet his insecurity never left him. He sent a message commanding Helius to murder Sulpicius Camerinus and his son for simply having the family name Pythicus, believing that it diminished the glory he gained from the Pythian Games. However, Nero saved the most outrageous murder for Greece. He invited the general Corbulo, the man to whom he owed all the successes of Roman foreign policy in the east, to join him in Greece. He addressed him as ‘father’ and ‘benefactor’ in his correspondence. When Corbulo came ashore unarmed in Corinth, however, he was not given a war hero’s welcome by the emperor. He was met by Nero’s henchmen, who forced him to commit suicide. The rumour went that Nero was preparing to go on stage, and while dressed in the long, unbelted tunic of an actor, he simply could not face greeting the man who had pacified Rome’s eastern frontier with Parthia, the man who represented all that was virtuous and excellent.37

  In addition to his fear of rivals, other demons, anxieties and insecurities played on Nero’s mind during his grand tour. He refused to take part in the Eleusinian Mysteries near Athens for fear of raising the wrath of his mother’s ghost. The ghost of Poppaea loomed large too, as the masks of the female characters he performed on stage were deliberately made to resemble her features. He also called Sporus, one of his freedmen, ‘Sabina’ (Poppaea’s other name) because of his resemblance to her. In fact, Nero even had him castrated and underwent a mock marriage ceremony with him, at which Tigellinus gave the ‘bride’ away. Henceforth, Nero affectionately called Sporus his ‘queen’ and his ‘lady’, as though Poppaea were alive and well and a part of the tour. ‘After that, Nero had two bedfellows at once: [the freedman] Pythagoras to play the role of husband to him and Sporus that of wife.’38