The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  11. He gave an immense variety of entertainments—coming-of-age parties, chariot races in the Circus, stage plays, a gladiatorial show—persuading even old men of consular rank, and old ladies, too, to attend the coming-of-age parties. He reserved seats for the knights at the Circus, as he had done in the Theatre; and actually raced four-camel chariots! At the Great Festival, as he called the series of plays devoted to the hope of his reigning for ever, parts were taken by men and women of both Orders; and one well-known knight rode an elephant down a sloping tight-rope. When he staged ‘The Fire’, a Roman play by Afranius, the actors were allowed to keep the valuable furnishings they rescued from the burning house. Throughout the Festival all kinds of gifts were scattered to the people—1,000 assorted birds daily, and quantities of food parcels; besides vouchers for corn, clothes, gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, paintings, slaves, transport animals, and even trained wild beasts—and finally for ships, blocks of City tenements, and farms.

  12. Nero watched from the top of the proscenium. The gladiatorial show took place in a wooden theatre, near the Campus Martius, which had been built in less than a year; but no one was allowed to be killed during these combats, not even criminals. He did, however, make 400 senators and 600 knights, many of them rich and respectable, do battle in the arena; and some had to fight wild beasts and perform various duties about the ring. He staged a naval engagement on an artificial lake of salt water which had sea-monsters swimming in it; also a ballet performance by certain young Greeks, to whom he presented certificates of Roman citizenship when their show ended. At one stage of the Minotaur ballet an actor, disguised as a bull, actually mounted another who played Pasiphaë and occupied the hindquarters of a hollow wooden heifer—or that, at least, was the audience’s impression. In the Daedalus and Icarus ballet, the actor who played Icarus, while attempting his first flight, fell beside Nero’s couch and spattered him with blood.

  Nero rarely presided at shows of this sort, but would recline in the closed Imperial box and watch through a window; later, however, he opened the box. He inaugurated the Neronia, a festival of competitions in music, gymnastics, and horsemanship, modelled on the Greek ones and held every five years; and simultaneously opened his Baths, which had a gymnasium attached, and provided free oil for knights and senators. Ex-consuls, drawn by lot, organized the Neronia, and occupied the Praetors’ seats. At the prize-giving Nero descended to the orchestra-stalls where the Senators sat, to accept the laurel-wreath for Latin oratory and verse, which had been reserved for him by the unanimous vote of all the distinguished competitors. The judges also awarded him the wreath for a lyre solo, but he bowed reverently to them, and said: ‘Pray lay it on the ground before Augustus’s statue!’ At an athletic competition held in the Enclosure, oxen were sacrificed on a lavish scale; that was when he shaved his chin for the first time, put the hair in a pearl-studded gold box and dedicated it to Capitoline Juppiter. He had invited the Vestal Virgins to watch the athletics, explaining that Demeter’s priestesses at Olympia were accorded the same privilege.

  13. The welcome given Tiridates when he visited Rome deserves inclusion in the list of Nero’s spectacles. Tiridates was the Armenian king whom he had lured to Rome with wonderful promises. Cloudy weather, prevented Tiridates from being displayed to the people on the day fixed by Imperial edict; however, Nero brought him out as soon as possible afterwards. The Guards battalions marched in full armour around the temples of the Forum, while Nero occupied his curule chair on the Rostrum, wearing triumphal dress and surrounded by military insignia and standards. Tiridates had to walk up a ramp and then prostrate himself in supplication; whereupon Nero stretched out his hand, drew him to his feet, kissed him, and replaced his turban with a diadem. When Tiridates’s supplication had been translated into Latin by an interpreter and publicly recited, he was taken to the Theatre (where he made a further supplication) and offered a seat on Nero’s right. The people then hailed Nero as a conqueror and, after dedicating a laurel-wreath in the Capitol, he closed the double doors of the Temple of Janus, as a sign that all war was at an end.

  14. The first of Nero’s four consulships lasted for two months, the third for four, the second and the last for six. He let a year elapse between the first and second, and between the third and fourth; but not between the second and third.

  15. When he judged a case he preferred to defer his judgement until the following day, and then give it in writing; and ruled that, instead of a case being presented as a whole, by one side and then by the other, every relevant charge should be debated separately. On withdrawing to study a problem of law, he never consulted openly with his judicial advisers, but made each of them write out an opinion; then mulled over these documents in private, came to his own conclusion, and passed it off as a majority opinion.

  For a long time Nero excluded the sons of freedmen from the Senate, and forbade those who had held magistracies under his predecessors to do so again. If too many candidates competed for any high office, he kept the unsuccessful ones employed by giving them legions to command. It became his practice to appoint Consuls for a period of six months; and should a Consul die before 1 January he made no substitute appointment, to mark his disapproval of Caninius Rebilus’s one-day consulship. He awarded triumphal regalia to men of quaestorial rank, and even to some knights, though their services had not been of a military nature. The Consuls were ordered to read certain of his speeches sent for the Senate’s information, thereby going over the heads of the Quaestors, whose business it should have been.

  16. After the great fire at Rome, Nero introduced his own new style of architecture: building out porches from the fronts of tenements and private houses to serve as fire-fighting platforms, and subsidizing the work himself. He also considered a scheme for extending the City wall as far as Ostia, and cutting a canal which would allow ships to sail straight up to Rome.

  During his reign a great many public abuses were suppressed by the imposition of heavy penalties, and among the novel enactments were sumptuary laws limiting private expenditure; the substitution of a simple grain distribution for public banquets; and a decree restricting the food sold in wine-shops to green vegetables, dried beans, and the like—whereas before all kinds of tasty snacks had been displayed. Punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief; and Nero ended the licence which the charioteers had so long enjoyed that they claimed it as a right: to wander merrily down the streets, swindling and robbing the populace. He likewise expelled from the City all pantomime actors and their hangers-on.

  17. A new and effective check on forgery was discovered about this time. Every signed tablet now contained three leaves; the contract was written on the first, which was open; and also on the third, which had to be linked with the second by a linen thread passed through three holes bored in both and then sealed. If the contract on the first page appeared to have been tampered with, it was checked against that on the third, the seals which hid it being broken in the presence of a magistrate. Provisions were also made that the first two pages of every will offered for witnesses to sign should bear only the testator’s name; and that no one drafting a will for signature by anyone else might insert in it a legacy for himself. Moreover, litigants were ordered to pay their lawyers at a fixed, reasonable rate; and no charge was to be made for seats in Court. Further, all Treasury suits, which had previously been settled by the Treasury officials themselves, were in future to come before a board of arbitration in the Forum; and every appeal from the verdict of a jury was to be addressed to the Senate.

  18. Nero probably felt no ambition to extend the Roman Empire, and even considered withdrawing his forces from Britain; yet kept them there because such a decision might have reflected on the glory won by his adoptive father Claudius. The sole additions made during his reign to the list of Imperial provinces were the Kingdom of Pontus, ceded to him by Polemon; and that of the Cottian Alps which, on the death of Cottius, reverted to Ro
me.

  19. Nero planned only two foreign tours: one to Alexandria, the other to Greece. A warning portent made him cancel the Alexandrian voyage, on the very day when his ship should have sailed: during his farewell round of the Temples he had sat down in the shrine of Vesta, but when he rose to leave, the hem of his gown caught fire and then a temporary blindness overcame him. While in Greece he tried to have a canal cut through the Isthmus of Corinth, and addressed a gathering of Praetorian Guards, urging them to undertake the task. Nero took a mattock himself and, at a trumpet blast, broke the ground and carried off the first basket of earth on his back. He had also planned an expedition to the Caspian Gates of the Caucasus, enrolling a new legion of Italian-born recruits, all six feet tall, whom he called ‘The Phalanx of Alexander the Great’; but it proved equally abortive.

  I have separated this catalogue of Nero’s less atrocious acts—some forgiveable, some even praiseworthy—from the others; but I must begin to list his follies and crimes.

  20. Music formed part of his childhood curriculum, and he early developed a taste for it. Soon after his accession, he summoned Terpnus, the greatest lyre-player of the day, to sing to him when dinner had ended, for several nights in succession, until very late. Then, little by little, he began to study and practise himself, and conscientiously undertook all the usual exercises for strengthening and developing the voice. He would lie on his back with a slab of lead on his chest, use enemas and emetics to keep down his weight, and refrain from eating apples and every other food considered deleterious to the vocal chords. Ultimately, though his voice was still feeble and husky, he was pleased enough with his progress to nurse theatrical ambitions, and would quote to his friends the Greek proverb: ‘Unheard melodies are never sweet.’ His first stage appearance was at Naples where, disregarding an earthquake which shook the theatre,74 he sang his piece through to the end. He often performed at Naples, for several consecutive days, too; and even while giving his voice a brief rest, could not stay away from the theatre, but went to dine in the orchestra where he promised the crowd in Greek that, when he had downed a drink or two, he would give them something to make their ears ring. So captivated was he by the rhythmic applause of some Alexandrian sailors from a fleet which had just put in, that he sent to Egypt for more. He also chose a few young knights, and more than 5,000 ordinary youths, whom he divided into claques to learn the Alexandrian method of applause—they were known, respectively, as ‘Bees’, ‘Roof-tiles’, and ‘Brick-bats’—and provide it liberally whenever he sang.75 It was easy to recognize them by their bushy hair, splendid dress, and the absence of rings on their left hands. The knights who led them earned four gold pieces a performance.

  21. Appearances at Rome meant so much to Nero that he held the Neronia again before the required five years elapsed. When the crowd clamoured to hear his heavenly voice, he answered that he would perform in the Palace gardens later if anyone really wanted to hear him; but when the Guards on duty seconded the appeal, he delightedly agreed to oblige them. He wasted no time in getting his name entered on the list of competing lyre-players, and dropped his ticket into the urn with the others. Guards colonels carried his lyre as he went up to play, and a group of military tribunes and close friends accompanied him. After taking his place and briefly begging the audience’s kind attention, he made Cluvius Rufus, the ex-Consul, announce the title of the song. It was the whole of the opera Niobe; and he sang on until two hours before dusk. Since this allowed the remaining competitors no chance to perform, he postponed the award of a prize to the following year, which would give him another opportunity to sing. But since a year was a long time to wait, he continued to make frequent appearances. He toyed with the idea of playing opposite professional actors in public shows staged by magistrates; because one of the Praetors had offered him 10,000 gold pieces if he would consent. And he did actually appear in operatic tragedies, taking the parts of heroes and gods, sometimes even of heroines and goddesses, wearing masks either modelled on his own face, or on the face of whatever woman happened to be his current mistress. Among his performances were Canace in Childbirth, Orestes the Matricide, Oedipus Blinded, and Distraught Hercules. There is a story that a young recruit on guard in the wings recognized him in the rags and fetters demanded by the part of Hercules, and dashed boldly to his assistance.

  22. Horses had been Nero’s main interest since childhood; whatever his tutors might do, they could never stop his chatter about the chariot races at the Circus. When scolded by one of them for telling his fellow-pupils about a Leek-Green charioteer who had the misfortune to get dragged by his team, Nero untruthfully explained that he had been discussing Hector’s fate in the Iliad. At the beginning of his reign he used every day to play with model ivory chariots on a board, and came up from the country to attend all the races, even minor ones, at first in secret and then without the least embarrassment; so that there was never any doubt at Rome when he would be in residence. He frankly admitted that he wished the number of prizes increased, which meant that the contests now lasted until a late hour and the faction-managers no longer thought it worth while to bring out their teams except for a full day’s racing.

  Very soon Nero set his heart on driving a chariot himself, in a regular race, and after a preliminary trial in the Palace gardens before an audience of slaves and loungers, made a public appearance at the Circus; on this occasion one of his freedmen replaced the magistrate who dropped the napkin as the starting signal.

  However, these amateur incursions into the arts at Rome did not satisfy him, and he headed for Greece, as I mention above. His main reason was that the cities which regularly sponsored musical contests had adopted the practice of sending him every available prize for lyre-playing; he always accepted these with great pleasure, giving the delegates the earliest audience of the day and invitations to private dinners. They would beg Nero to sing when the meal was over, and applaud his performance to the echo, which made him announce: ‘The Greeks alone are worthy of my genius; they really listen to music.’ So he sailed off hastily and, as soon as he arrived at Cassiope, gave his first song recital before the altar of Juppiter Cassius; after which he went the round of all the contests.

  23. He ordered those contests which normally took place only at long intervals to be held during his visit, even if it meant repeating them; and broke tradition at Olympia by introducing a musical competition into the athletic games. When Halius, his freedman-secretary, reminded him that he was urgently needed at Rome, he would not be distracted by official business, but answered: ‘Yes, you have made yourself quite plain. I am aware that you want me to go home; you will do far better, however, if you encourage me to stay until I have proved myself worthy of my reputation.’

  No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored with the music and the applause that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, or shammed dead and were carried away for burial. Nero’s stage fright and general nervousness, his jealousy of rivals, and his awe of the judges, were more easily seen than believed. Though usually gracious and charming to other competitors, whom he treated as equals, he abused them behind their backs, and often insulted them to their faces; and if any were particularly good singers, he would bribe them not to do themselves justice. Before every performance he would address the judges with the utmost deference: saying that he had done what he could, and that the issue was now in Fortune’s hands; but that since they were men of judgement and experience, they would know how to eliminate the factor of chance. When they told him not to worry he felt a little better, but still anxious; and mistook the silence of some for severity, and the embarrassment of others for disfavour, admitting that he suspected every one of them.

  24. He strictly observed the rules, never daring to clear his throat and even using his arm, rather than a handkerchief, to wipe the sweat from his brow. Once, while acti
ng in a tragedy, he dropped his sceptre and quickly recovered it, but was terrified of disqualification. The accompanist, however—who played a flute and made the necessary dumbshow to illustrate the words—swore that the slip had passed unnoticed, because the audience were listening with such rapt attention; so he took heart again. Nero insisted on announcing his own victories; which emboldened him to enter the competition for heralds. To destroy every trace of previous winners in these contests he ordered all their statues and busts to be taken down, dragged away with hooks, and hurled into public privies. On several occasions he took part in the chariot racing, and at Olympia drove a ten-horse team, a novelty for which he had censured King Mithridates in one of his own poems. He lost his balance, fell from the chariot and had to be helped in again; but, though he failed to stay the course and retired before the finish, the judges nevertheless awarded him the prize. On the eve of his departure, he presented the whole province with its freedom and conferred Roman citizenship as well as large cash rewards on the judges. It was during the Isthmian Games at Corinth that he stood in the middle of the stadium and personally announced these benefits.

  25. Returning to Italy, Nero disembarked at Naples, where he had made his debut as a singer, and ordered part of the city wall to be razed—which is the Greek custom whenever the victor in any of the Sacred Games comes home. He repeated the same performance at Antium, at Alba Longa, and finally at Rome. For his processional entry into Rome he chose the chariot which Augustus had used in his triumph nearly a hundred years previously; and wore a Greek mantle spangled with gold stars over a purple robe. The Olympic wreath was on his head, the Pythian wreath in his right hand, the others were carried before him, with placards explaining where and against whom he had won them, what songs he had sung, and in what plays he had acted. Nero’s chariot was followed by his regular claque, who shouted that they were Augustus’s men celebrating Augustus’s triumph. The procession passed through the Circus (he had the entrance arch pulled down to allow more room), then by way of the Velabrum and the Forum to the Palatine Hill and the Temple of Apollo. Victims were sacrificed in his honour all along the route, which was sprinkled with perfume, and the commons showered him with song-birds, ribbons, and sweetmeats as compliments on his voice. He hung the wreaths above the couches in his sleeping quarters, and set up several statues of himself playing the lyre. He also had a coin struck with the same device. After this, it never occurred to him that he ought to refrain from singing, or even sing a little less; but he saved his voice by addressing the troops only in written orders, or in speeches delivered by someone else; and would attend no entertainment or official business unless he had a voice-trainer standing by, telling him when to spare his vocal chords, and when to protect his mouth with a handkerchief. Whether he offered people his friendship or plainly indicated his dislike for them, often depended on how generously or how feebly they had applauded.