The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  37. After this, nothing could restrain Nero from murdering anyone he pleased, on whatever pretext. Here are a few instances only: Salvidienus Orfitus was charged with leasing three shops, which formed part of his house, close to the Forum, as offices for the representatives of certain allied States; and a blind lawyer, Cassius Longinus, with keeping a mask of Gaius Cassius, one of Julius Caesar’s murderers, attached to the family-tree; and Paetus Thrasea for looking like a cross old schoolmaster. Those whom he ordered to commit suicide were never given more than an hour’s grace. To insure against delays he made doctors ‘take care’ of any who were found still alive—which, in Nero’s vocabulary, meant opening their veins. He was eager, it is said, to get hold of a certain Egyptian—a sort of ogre who would eat raw flesh and practically anything else he was given—and watch him tear live men to pieces and then devour them. These ‘successes’, as Nero called them, went to his head and he boasted that no previous sovereign had ever realized the extent of his power. Often he hinted broadly that it was not his intention to spare the remaining senators, but would one day wipe out the entire Senatorial Order, and let knights and freedmen govern the provinces and command the armies, instead. He certainly never gave senators the kisses they expected when he set out on a journey or returned from one, and never bothered to answer their greetings. In his announcement of the Isthmus Canal project, to a huge crowd, he loudly voiced the hope that it might benefit himself and the Roman people, but made no mention of the Senate.

  38. Nero showed no greater mercy to the common folk, or to the very walls of Rome. Once, in the course of a general conversation, someone quoted the line:

  When I am dead, may fire consume the earth,

  but Nero said that the first part of the line should read: ‘While I yet live,’ and soon converted this fancy into fact. Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he brazenly set fire to the City; and though a group of ex-consuls caught his attendants, armed with oakum and blazing torches, trespassing on their property, they dared not interfere. He also coveted the sites of several granaries, solidly built in stone, near the Golden House; having knocked down their walls with siege-engines, he set the interiors ablaze. This terror lasted for six days and seven nights, causing many people to take shelter in the tombs. Nero’s men destroyed not only a vast number of tenements, but mansions which had belonged to famous generals and were still decorated with their triumphal trophies; temples, too, dating back to the time of the kingship, and others dedicated during the Punic and Gallic wars—in fact, every ancient monument of historical interest that had hitherto survived. Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, enraptured by what he called ‘the beauty of the flames’; then put on his tragedian’s costume and sang The Fall of Ilium from beginning to end. He offered to remove corpses and rubble free of charge, but allowed nobody to search among the ruins even of his own mansion; he wanted to collect as much loot as possible himself. Then he opened a Fire Relief Fund and insisted on contributions, which bled the provincials white and practically beggared all private citizens.

  39. Fate made certain unexpected additions to the disasters of Nero’s reign. In a single autumn 30,000 deaths from plague were registered at the Temple of Libitina. Two important British garrison-towns were taken by storm, and huge numbers of Romans and allies massacred.78 The legions in Armenia were shamefully defeated and sent beneath the yoke, and we almost lost Syria at the same time.

  It was strange how amazingly tolerant Nero seemed to be of the insults that everyone cast at him, particularly in the form of Greek and Latin lampoons. Here are a few examples of verses posted on city walls or current orally:

  Alcmaeon, Orestes, and Nero are brothers,

  Why? Because all of them murdered their mothers.

  ***

  Count the numerical values

  Of the letters in Nero’s name,

  And in ‘murdered his own mother’:

  You will find their sum is the same.79

  ***

  Aeneas the Trojan hero

  Carried off his aged father;

  His remote descendant Nero

  Likewise carried off (or rather

  Let Death carry off) his mother:

  Heroes worthy of each other.

  ***

  Though Nero may pluck the chords of a lyre,

  And the Parthian King the string of a bow,

  He who chants to the lyre with heavenly fire

  Is Apollo as much as his far-darting foe.

  ***

  The Palace is spreading and swallowing Rome!

  Let us all flee to Veii and make it our home.

  Yet the Palace is growing so damnably fast

  That it threatens to gobble up Veii at last.

  He never tried to trace the authors and, when an informer handed the Senate a short list of their names, gave instructions that they should be let off lightly. Once, as he crossed a street, Isidorus the Cynic loudly taunted him with: ‘In your song about Nauplius you make good use of ancient ills, but in all practical matters you make ill use of modern goods.’ Again, the comedian Datus, acting in an Atellan farce, illustrated the first line of the song ‘Goodbye Father, goodbye Mother’ with gestures of drinking and swimming—Claudius had been poisoned, Agrippina nearly drowned—and the last line, ‘Hell guides your feet…’ with a wave of his hand towards the senators whom Nero planned to massacre. He may have been impervious to insults of this sort or he may merely have pretended not to care, for fear of encouraging others to be equally witty; at any rate, he did no more than banish Datus and Isidorus.

  40. At last, after nearly fourteen years of Nero’s misrule, the earth rid herself of him. The first move was made by the Gauls under Julius Vindex, their pro-Praetor.

  Nero’s astrologers had told him that he would one day be removed from public office, and were given the famous reply:

  A simple craft will keep a man from want.

  This referred doubtless to his lyre-playing which, although it might be only a pastime for an emperor, would have to support him if he were reduced to earning a livelihood. Some astrologers forecast that, if forced to leave Rome, he would find another throne in the East; one or two even particularized that of Jerusalem. Others assured him that he would recoup all his losses, a prediction on which he based high hopes; for when he seemed to have lost the provinces of Britain and Armenia, but managed to regain them both, he assumed that the disasters foretold had already taken place. Then the Oracle at Delphi warned him to beware the seventy-third year, and assuming that this referred to his own seventy-third year, not Galba’s, he looked forward cheerfully to a ripe old age and an unbroken run of good luck; so much so that when he lost some very valuable objects in a shipwreck, he hastened to tell his friends that the fish would fetch them back to him.

  Nero heard of the Gallic revolt on the anniversary of his mother’s murder. He was in Naples at the time and took the news so phlegmatically that everyone diagnosed satisfaction at finding a good excuse to declare war on such a rich country and strip it clean. Going straight to the gymnasium, he was soon engrossed in watching the athletic contests, and when a far more serious despatch reached him at dinner time, still showed no sign of disturbance beyond a threat to punish the rebels. In fact, for eight days he wrote no orders and issued no special announcements; apparently trying to ignore the whole affair.

  41. At last a series of insulting edicts signed by Vindex must have made some impression on him: in a letter to the Senate he urged them to avenge himself and Rome, but pleaded an infected throat as an excuse for not appearing at the Senate House in person. Only two taunts went home: a suggestion that he was a bad lyre-player, and an insulting reference to him as ‘Domitius Ahenobarbus’, rather than Nero Caesar. Yet he told the Senate that he had already intended to renounce his adoptive name and resume that of his family; as for his lyre-playing, he replied that he could hardly deserve Vindex’s taunt (which proved the other acc
usations just as false) after his long and painstaking cultivation of the art; and asked several senators whether they knew of any better performer than himself. When further urgent despatches reached Antium in quick succession he hurried back to Rome in a state of terror. On the way, however, he happened to notice a group of monumental sculpture which represented a beaten Gaul being dragged along, head first, by a mounted Roman; this lucky sign sent him into a transport of joy, and he lifted his hands in gratitude to Heaven. When, therefore, he arrived in the City, he neglected to address either the Senate or the people; instead, he summoned the leading citizens to his Palace where, after a brief discussion of the Gallic situation, he devoted the remainder of the session to demonstrating a completely new type of water-organ, and explaining the mechanical complexities of several different models. He even remarked that he would have them installed in the Theatre ‘if Vindex has no objection’.

  42. But when news arrived of Galba’s Spanish revolt he fainted dead away and remained mute and insensible for a long while. Coming to himself, he tore his clothes and beat his forehead, crying that all was now over. His old nurse tried to console him by pointing out that many princes in the past had experienced similar setbacks; but Nero insisted that to lose the supreme power while still alive was something that had never happened to anyone else before. Yet he made not the slightest attempt to alter his lazy and extravagant life. On the contrary, he celebrated whatever good news came in from the provinces, with the most lavish banquets imaginable, and composed comic songs about the leaders of the revolt, which he set to bawdy tunes and sang with appropriate gestures; these have since become popular favourites. Then he stole into the green-room of the Theatre, and sent a message to an actor who was being loudly applauded at the time, that he should not take advantage of the Emperor’s absence from the stage on business of State, by pushing himself forward.

  43. At the first news of revolt Nero is said to have formed several appalling, though characteristic, schemes for dealing with the situation. Thus, he intended to recall all army commanders and provincial governors, and execute them on a charge of conspiracy; and to dispatch all exiles everywhere, for fear they might join the rebels; and all Gallic residents at Rome, because they might be implicated in the rising. He further considered giving the army free permission to pillage Gaul; poisoning the entire Senate at a banquet; and setting fire to the City again, but first letting wild beasts loose in the streets to hinder the citizens from coping with the blaze. However, he had to abandon these schemes, not because he scrupled to carry them out, but because he realized their impracticability in view of the military campaign soon to be forced on him. So he dismissed the Consuls from office before their term ended, and took over both consulships himself, declaring: ‘It stands to reason: only a Consul can subdue Gaul.’ But one day, soon after assuming the consular insignia, he left the dining room with his arms around two friends’ shoulders, and remarked that when he reached Gaul he would at once step unarmed in front of the embattled enemy and weep, and weep. This would soften their hearts and win them back to loyalty; and on the next day he would stroll among his joyful troops singing paeans of victory, which he really ought to be composing now.

  44. In his military preparations he was mainly concerned with finding enough wagons to carry his stage equipment and arranging for the concubines who would accompany him to have male haircuts and be issued with Amazonian shields and axes. When this was settled, Nero called the Roman commons to arms; but no eligible recruit came forward, so he forcibly enlisted a number of slaves, choosing the best from each household and refusing exemption even to stewards or secretaries. All classes had to pay an income-tax, and every tenant of a private house or flat was told that he owed a year’s rent to the Privy Purse. Nero insisted on being paid in none but newly-minted coins, or in silver and gold of high standard; hence many people would not contribute anything, protesting that he would do much better if he reclaimed the fees from his informers.

  45. He aggravated popular resentment by profiteering in grain, which was already priced far too high. And unluckily for him, word went around, during the general shortage of food, that a ship from Alexandria had just unloaded a cargo of sand for the Imperial wrestlers.

  Nero was now so universally loathed that no bad enough abuse could be found for him. Someone tied a tress of hair to the head of one of his statues, with a note attached in Greek: ‘This is a real contest for once, and you are going to lose!’ A sack was draped around the neck of another statue, with a similar note reading: ‘I have done what I could, but you deserve the sack’—presumably the sack reserved for parricides. Insults were scrawled on columns about his crowing having aroused even the cocks—for Galli means both ‘cocks’ and Gauls—and several people played the same trick, pretending to have trouble with their slaves at night, and shouting out: ‘Vengeance is coming!’—a reference to Vindex’s name.

  46. The implications of auspices, of omens old and new, and of his own dreams, began to terrify Nero. In the past he had never known what it was to dream, but after killing his mother he dreamed that he was steering a ship and that someone tore the tiller from his hands. Next, his wife Octavia pulled him down into thick darkness, where hordes of winged ants swarmed over him. Then, the statues of the nations, which had been dedicated in the Theatre of Pompey, began to hem him in and prevent him from getting away; while his favourite Asturian horse turned into an ape, or all except the head, which whinnied a tune. Finally, the doors of the Mausoleum opened by themselves and a voice from inside called: ‘Enter, Nero!’

  On 1 January the Household-gods, which had just been decorated, tumbled to the ground during preparations for the New Year sacrifice, and as Nero was taking the auspices Sporus gave him a ring engraved with Proserpine’s descent to the Underworld. Then a great crowd gathered to pay their annual vows to Nero, but the keys of the Capitol were mislaid. Again, while his speech against Vindex was being read in the Senate, a passage running: ‘…the criminals will soon incur the punishment, and die the death which they so thoroughly deserve,’ was hailed on all sides with cries of: ‘Augustus, you will do so!’ People also noticed that Nero, at his latest public appearance, sang the part of Oedipus in Exile and ended with the line:

  ‘Wife, mother, father, do my death compel!’

  47. When a despatch bringing the news that the other armies, too, had revolted was brought him at dinner, he tore it up, pushed over the table, and sent smashing to the ground two of his ‘Homeric’ drinking cups—so called because they were engraved with scenes from Homer. He made Locusta give him some poison, which he put in a golden box; then crossed to the Servilian Gardens, where he tried to persuade the Guards officers to flee with him—because his most faithful freedmen had gone ahead to equip a fleet at Ostia. Some answered evasively, others flatly refused. One even shouted out the Virgilian tag: ‘Is it so terrible a thing to die?’

  Nero had no idea what to do. A number of alternatives offered—for example, throwing himself on the mercy of the Parthians, or of Galba; or appearing pathetically on the Rostra to beg the people’s pardon for his sins—they might at least make him prefect of Egypt, he thought, if they could not find it in their hearts to forgive him altogether. A speech to this effect was later found among the papers in his bureau, and the usual view is that only fear of being torn to pieces before he reached the Forum prevented him from delivering it.

  Nero suspended his deliberations until the following day, but woke at midnight to find that his bodyguard had deserted him. He leaped out of bed and summoned his friends who were staying in the Palace. When they did not appear he went with a few members of his staff to knock at their doors. But nobody either opened or answered. He returned to his room. By now even the valets had absconded with the bed linen and the box of poison. He shouted for Spiculus the gladiator or any other trained executioner, to end his misery at one blow. No one came. ‘What? Have I then neither friends nor enemies left?’ he cried, and dashed out of the Palace. Apparent
ly he intended to hurl himself into the Tiber.

  48. Changing his mind once more, however, he said that all he wanted was some secluded spot where he could collect his thoughts at leisure. Phaon, an Imperial freedman, suggested his own suburban villa, four miles away, between the Nomentanan and the Salarian Ways. Nero jumped at the offer. He was in undershirt and slippers; but simply pulled on a faded cloak and hat, took horse and trotted off, holding a handkerchief over his face. Four servants went with him, including Sporus. Suddenly a slight earth-tremor was felt and lightning flashed in their eyes, which terrified Nero. Then, from the near-by camp soldiers began shouting about the defeat which Galba would inflict on him. He heard one man exclaim as they passed: ‘Those fellows are in pursuit of the Emperor,’ and another: ‘What’s the latest news of him in Town?’ Then Nero’s horse took fright at the smell of a dead body lying by the roadside; which made him expose his face. He was immediately recognized and saluted by a Guards’ veteran. They reached a lane leading to Phaon’s villa and, abandoning their horses, followed a path which ran through a briar patch and a plantation of reeds to the rear wall of the house. Because the going was difficult Nero made them spread a cloak for him to walk on. When begged by Phaon to lie low for awhile in a gravel pit, he answered: ‘No, I refuse to go underground before I die.’ While the servants tunnelled through the wall he scooped up some water in his hands from a neighbouring pool and drank it, saying: ‘This is Nero’s own special brew.’ Then he pulled out all the thorns from his ragged cloak and crawled into the villa by way of the tunnel. Finding himself in a slave’s bedroom, beside a couch with a poor mattress over which an old cape had been thrown, he sank down on it and, although hungry, refused some coarse bread; but confessed himself still thirsty and sipped a little warm water.