Nero_s Heirs

by Allan Massie

  Nero_s Heirs

  Allan Massie

  Allan Massie

  Nero's Heirs

  I

  To C. Cornelius Tacitus, Senator:

  I confess that I do not know whether I am more honoured or more amazed: that you, the distinguished author of the Dialogue on Oratory, and of the ever to be admired Life of your father-in-law, the Imperator C. Julius Agricola, should turn to me and request my help in preparing the materials for the History of our own terrible times, on which you tell me you have audaciously embarked.

  What can I say? I cannot deny you, all the less because I am persuaded that your History will be immortal, and this makes me all the more anxious that my name should be, however vestigially, associated with it. And yet I shrink from the task you set me, in part because I am conscious of my own inadequacy, in part because the thought of venturing into the gloomy cave of memory fills me with fear, foreboding, and self-hatred. I, like all our generation, have waded deep in innocent blood. The cries of those dragged to prison and execution still ring in my disturbed and fearful nights. And I do not know if I can summon the fortitude to set down for you what I recall – still less what I was guilty of – in the time of terror.

  You know this yourself, being, as I remember, a man of lively and sympathetic imagination – the source which feeds your genius. Yet you ask this of me, and such is my respect for you that, as I say, I cannot deny you, though every fibre of my nervous being cries out to me to do so. Even the particular reason why you seek my help makes me shudder. You do not state this reason, but I know it is in your mind. I was indeed the schoolfellow, and for some years the dearest friend, perhaps the only friend, of the tyrant Domitian. I knew, if any did, the innermost thoughts of that dark and secret man. We were brought up together, my own (reputed) father having been killed at the side of his father Vespasian in some scuffle with barbarians in the British campaign. Vespasian himself often spoke warmly of my father, and even let me understand that he owed his life to him. Perhaps he did; why say so otherwise? Then I was with Domitian throughout that terrible year when Rome stumbled and seemed about to be engulfed in civil disaster.

  Oh, yes, I know it well. I know too much. I learned, when too young for such knowledge, that the gods take no thought for our happiness, but only for our punishment.

  You tell me it is now safe for me to return to Rome, the tyrant being no more. I knew it already. It is not fear that keeps me here, in this distant town on the edge of barbarian lands, far from where the lemon trees bloom. It is rather a species of lassitude. Why should I move? I have made a sort of life for myself. The wine is thin and often sour, but there is no shortage of it. I confess I often go drunk to bed; drunkenness wards off evil dreams. And I have a woman, part-Greek, part-Scythian, who loves me, or says she loves me, and at any rate acts often as if she did. We have children, too, four curly-headed brats. What would the like of them do in Rome? What could Rome do for them? Here they will grow to be farmers or traders, useful creatures.

  Tacitus, you who have survived and continued to inhabit the Great World, and engage in public affairs, will no doubt despise me and my way of life. But you have survived by grace of qualities which I lack, perhaps by grace of virtue also (though in our time virtue has too often invited punishment) and, it may be, by a touch of Fortune also. It occurs to me that you are a favourite of the gods, if such a thing is possible. But I have too much with which to reproach myself. I have acquiesced in murder and, for a time, profited by my weakness. I was ambitious, and, to further my ambition, stood by while evil was done.

  You ask me to revisit scenes of bloodshed, to re-enter a world of treachery and malice, to confront the stuff of nightmare. You do not know what you ask of me; it is to explore memory to destroy such peace as I now possess.

  Nevertheless I shall do as you ask. There will be at least one former friend whom I have served well.

  II

  You ask me, my dear Cornelius Tacitus, for my first memories of Domitian. Your request is impossible to satisfy, for this reason: that I cannot recall any period of my life from which Domitian was absent.

  As you know, his father, the now-glorious-in-memory Emperor Vespasian, was a man of no particular birth or early renown. He was born, when the Divine Augustus was still Princeps, at Reiti in the Sabine Hills, and was brought up by his grandmother who had a small farm at Cosa. I think his father was a tax-collector employed in Asia, but I may be mistaken here. Of course, when Domitian, or indeed his brother Titus, still lived, it would have been unwise to expatiate on Vespasian's humble origins, though the man himself never troubled to hide them. Now, since you are writing a truthful history, it is as well to be clear on the matter: the family was of no significance.

  I can say this because as you know it was not so in my case. Or rather, as you think you know. My own birth was as distinguished as could be. My mother belonged to the Claudian gens, and so was connected by cousinship with the imperial family itself. My father could boast numerous consuls among his Aemilian ancestors. I belonged by birth to the highest aristocracy of Rome. It seems amusing to me now, in my present circumstances.

  But now, since nothing matters to me any more, I can confess to you what pride has throughout my life compelled me to conceal: that M. Aemilius Scaurus, himself son of that Scaurus who held a consulship under Tiberius, was my father only in law and not in actuality. A peevish effeminate man, whose lust for wealth and office far surpassed his ability, he acquiesced with a contemptible complacency in the seduction of his wife, my noble mother, by Narcissus. Do I need to remind you that he was the freedman who swayed the judgement of the feeble Emperor Claudius, was said, indeed, to have controlled him; he also commanded the detachment of the Praetorian Guard which arrested and put to death the Emperor's third wife Messalina, notorious (as you will recall) for her flagrant immorality.

  I have no doubt, my friend, that you, with your stern, if antique, ideas of Republican virtue, both deplore and despise Narcissus and all that he represented. I shall take no issue with you there; beyond remarking that he was evidently a man of some capacity. Now that, in exile, I care nothing for lineage, I can say what I would once have been ashamed to utter: that I find more satisfaction in being in reality the son of the capable, though ruthless and corrupt, Narcissus than of the feeble Scaurus whose name I bear and of whose ancestors I used to boast.

  Of course I didn't for years know my true paternity. My mother – a woman of strong character – burst out with it in one of our many quarrels. I have no doubt that she spoke the truth, if only because Narcissus was long dead by then, and rumours of her association with him could have brought her nothing but disgrace. Her admission gave me a weapon, which subsequently I did not scruple to use against her. She was stern, harsh-judging woman. Yet I adored her in youth when her beauty seemed to me to rival that of Venus herself.

  You will understand the relevance of my confession to your inquiry, for you must know that it was by the patronage of Narcissus that Vespasian rose from obscurity, obtaining first the command of a legion, then sharing the glory of the conquest of Britain, where he subdued the whole Island of Wight, subsequently being rewarded with triumphal decorations and a consulship. Without Narcissus, Vespasian would, in his middle forties, have been a retired officer of no consequence, subsisting on half-pay, and farming on a contemptibly small scale. It is indeed not by merit alone that men rise in our degenerate world!

  One consequence of my father's patronage was that Vespasian's elder son Titus was brought up in court circles where he became the companion and closest friend of Tiberius Claudius, later known as Britannicus, the son of the Emperor and the dissolute Messalina. Britannicus and Titus were some five or six years older than I was myself, and I was six months older than
Domitian. I may say that, though Domitian was designated my playmate, he was as a very small boy, shy, surly, and disinclined for any company, even mine. Titus and Britannicus, in contrast, were dazzling and alluring. Soon however both were to be cast into the shade by Nero, when he succeeded his (murdered?) stepfather as Emperor.

  Posterity will, rightly, recall Nero as a monster of depravity, and as an Emperor who disgraced the purple he wore. History will judge him severely. You, my dear Tacitus, will make sure of that. I can't blame you. I don't even wish to blame you. After all, I suffered at the beast's hands myself. Not only did he have my natural father Narcissus put to death, but once when I was a boy of eleven he seized me in the gymnasium, and crying, The wolf is ready to ravish you', attempted precisely that.

  Before Narcissus was dislodged, he had had Vespasian appointed Governor of Africa, where, though no great success, and once pelted with pumpkins by riotous provincials, he was at least at a safe distance from Nero. Actually, Nero had no dislike of him, since he neither feared nor envied him. He saw him as a butt. Vespasian's wooden countenance inspired him to all sorts of childish and malicious jests. So Vespasian was more fortunate than those who provoked Nero's jealousy.

  Yet Nero had charm. I hope you will make that clear. Even Petronius, whom he called his Arbiter of Elegance, and who despised him as only a clever and unhappy man can despise a boisterous clown, testified to that. Petronius was a friend of my mother. When I was fourteen he sought to make me his catamite, but I would not have it. I directed him to Domitian instead. He shuddered and said, That scrofulous boy? You can't be serious.' 'Well,' I said, 'I assure you he would be willing, as I am not.' He laughed. I admired Petronius but he smelled of rotten apples. It was some sort of disease, I suppose. He used to read his novel, The Satyricon, to me. I think he hoped that its obscenity would excite me to grant him his desire. But I was then in a virtuous mood. A boy of fourteen can be very priggish.

  This is not what you want to hear. You want to know about Domitian's boyhood.

  But I'm a little drunk, as I usually am by evening. I'll close this letter, and continue tomorrow. Ill My father divorced my mother as soon as Narcissus was disgraced. He hadn't dared do so before. Then he withdrew to sulk on his estates in the hills beyond Velletri, to write lame verses (his Tristia) in feeble imitation of Ovid. I never saw him again.

  My beautiful mother, whose own parents were dead and whose elder brother for some years refused to receive her or even provide for her, as was his duty, now found herself poor and almost friendless. She carried me off to a third-floor apartment in an insula, in the fourteenth region of the city on the other bank of the Tiber. It was all she could afford and was a miserable place, damp and cold in winter and, on account of the low ceilings and the fact that it looked onto an airless inner courtyard, intolerably hot in the summer which we could not escape, as people of our class were accustomed to, by retreating to the hills or the seaside. Our neighbours were the lowest sort of people, some of whom on winter nights used the common staircase to relieve themselves rather than venture forth to the icy public latrines. My own chamber was a mere cupboard, without ventilation, and on sleepless nights I lay there planning my future and the revenge I would take on the world for the misfortune which had so early engulfed me.

  My mother bore her far greater ill-fortune stoically. She spent long days polishing her jewellery and her memories. In time, to pay for my education, she sold her jewels, piece by piece. She lived, I see now, only for me, and denied herself luxuries, even on occasion necessities, in order that I might make a show in the world. At the time I understood nothing of her self-denial, and resented the demands she made on me, and her refusal to allow me to play with the ragged and often criminal boys of our wretched quarter.

  So we had few friends. That is how I came to pass so much of my childhood with Domitian. His circumstances resembled mine. He was boarded with an aunt – a sister of his father – in the Street of the Pomegranates in the sixth region, a neighbourhood little more salubrious or respectable than ours. You may think the distance between our homes makes our companionship surprising, since half the city lay between us. But the explanation is simple. His aunt revered my mother, who had been kind to her (she frequently said) in her days of prosperity. This aunt had buck teeth, stammered, and was nervous of strangers. So she would lead the young Domitian all the way over to Trastevere to pay her respects to my mother. For her part, my mother found the aunt useful. She had few domestic skills herself (how should she have had?), was reluctant to leave our apartment, despised our neighbours, or at least kept her distance from them, which incidentally increased the respect they held her in. Two lonely women, resenting the world, fearing it in the aunt's case, despising it in my mother's, they formed an alliance of convenience.

  The child, they say, is father of the man. True, I suppose, though I have known those, myself among them indeed, who react so fiercely against the constraints of their childhood that, in retrospect, it is hard to believe that the adult man grew out of the child.

  I could say more on this matter. But you do not wish my autobiography and, indeed, in bitter exile I have no taste to write it.

  Domitian then: as a child, he was silent, brooding, resentful. You know how in his time as Emperor he was said to amuse himself by stabbing flies with his pen, so that the joke went round that 'No one was with the Princeps, not even a fly.' The jest was not without substance; he was the kind of little boy who delights in pulling the wings off insects, legs off spiders, and so on. Once, I recall, he brought a live frog to our apartment and proceeded to dismember it. When I begged him to refrain from torturing the beast, and at least to kill it before he anatomised the wretched creature, he muttered, without lifting his shaggy head – you remember how he could never look one in the eye – that he learned more by dissecting what was still alive. He had, he said, a keen interest in the nervous system. I think he was ten at the time. His shaggy head was then sometimes infested with lice, for his aunt was short-sighted, and indifferent to such matters in any case. He went bald early, as you know; more cause for resentment.

  In those days he didn't care for me. I put that wrongly. He disliked me. The reason was simple: my excellence rebuked his incapacity. I learned easily what he struggled to retain. For some years we attended the same schoolmaster, a Greek grammaticus, by name Democritos. He was a rough brutal man, fond of the rod. I believe his chief pleasure lay in chastising his unfortunate pupils. Domitian, being slow and of little account socially, was a choice victim. I have often seen his legs run with blood. Furthermore, the terror he displayed when condemned to a beating merely incited our master's ardour. The more Domitian howled for mercy, the harder the strokes fell. Once, at least, the wretched boy pissed himself in his abject fear. This naturally made him an object of mockery to his fellows. You will not be surprised to learn that after he became Emperor he had his agents seek out the now aged Democritos, drag him from the dingy apartment where he lingered, and bring the wretch before his former pupil who, spurning him with his toe, ordered him to be whipped to death. 'For,' he said, 'this man is so fond of the rod that it is only fitting that the rod should be the last thing he experiences in life.'

  Curiously, it was this brutal wretch who first awoke in Domitian a warm feeling for myself. One day, when Democritos had been more than usually cruel to him, exceeding even his habitual measure of strokes, and had commanded two of our fellow-pupils to hold the boy up so that he might strike him again, something in me revolted against his barbarity. Perhaps – who knows? – I had long reproached myself for the timidity which I had displayed in tolerating the beast. Be that as it may, I now rose from my desk, ran towards him and, seizing the rod (then at the top of the backstroke) from his hand, turned it on our master, belabouring him about the neck and shoulders. 'See how you relish your own medicine,' I cried. Take that, you brute, and this, and learn to respect free-born Romans, you base Greek slave.' It was a moment of the purest exhilaration I have ever kn
own. It could not last, of course. The brute was stronger than I and, swinging round, felled me with one blow of his fist. Then, calling on his assistant and one of our fellow-pupils to help him, he regained his rod and, when he saw I was held fast over the block, thrashed me with all his infuriated strength. He thrashed me, indeed, till I fainted, and when I recovered my senses it was to find myself alone with Domitian who was sponging my face and muttering his perplexed gratitude for my intervention. We agreed to inform my mother and his aunt of what had happened, and from that day we did not return to the torments of Democritos. From that day also, for two years or more, Domitian gave every sign of being devoted to me. I mention this because you have often observed that nothing is more common than a man's resentment of his benefactor. It wasn't like this in our case. I may say, modestly, that Domitian regarded me as his hero.

  The harmony of our relationship was however to be broken. Titus returned to Rome from Africa, where he had been serving as his father's legate. He called, from courtesy, to see my mother.

  'My father,' he said, 'sends you – has asked me to convey to you -the assurance of his high regard. He is fully sensible of the debt he owes you for his advancement. He has asked me to say that he is anxious to do whatever is in his power to – oh…' He broke off, and, with a sudden smile that seemed to light up our mean apartment, extended his hands in a vaguely helpless gesture and, abandoning his tone of formality, resumed: 'I'm no good at this kind of thing, my lady, though I have been trained in rhetoric. So let me put it in my own words, however loose and lacking in proper formality they may be. He's distressed to have learned of the condition in which you are obliged to live and now I see it for myself, well, I'm horrified, that a lady like you, of your birth, one who has been so kind to us, to me as a child, should be living like this. I remember that when poor Britannicus, my dearest friend, was so cruelly murdered – I can call it murder here, I suppose, though it would be as much as my life is worth to speak the word in other quarters – I remember then that when I wept, you dried my tears and comforted me, and that in the terrible days after, when I became like a little boy again, it was with your help and thanks to your sympathy and wise words that I was able to recover and resume my life. So, to see you confined in this miserable apartment makes me sad. More than that, it disgusts me. So, if there's anything I can do, anything my father can do – not that he can do much because, in my opinion, he clings to office, to his own position and perhaps even to his life by bare fingernails and fortune -well, just let me know. I really am devoted to you and your interest.'