The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City

by Dando-Collins, Stephen

  Plautus, who lived austerely and discreetly, encouraged none of this talk. Guided still by Seneca at that time, Nero had written Plautus a letter in which he had suggested that for the sake of “the tranquility of Rome,” Plautus “withdraw himself from mischievous gossip.” Plautus had inherited large estates in the province of Asia Minor, and Nero said that there Plautus “might enjoy his youth safely and quietly.”7 Taking the hint, and taking his wife and a few close friends with him, Plautus had departed for Asia and a quiet life.

  The second man feared by Nero was Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix, brother of Messalina, who had been the late, unwise, and unlamented wife of the emperor Claudius. Though comparatively poor, Sulla was descended from the same Sulla who had ruled Rome as dictator during the youth of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Well known and well liked, Sulla had in AD 47 married into the imperial family, wedding Nero’s cousin Antonia, one of the daughters of the emperor Claudius. The couple had produced a son, who would have had a claim on Nero’s throne in adulthood, as the next most senior male of the Julian line. But the sickly boy had died at the age of two.

  Several years after Nero came to the throne, one of the imperial freedmen, the elderly Graptus, had invented a story that Sulla had planned to murder Nero one night as the emperor returned from his revels at the Milvian Bridge, on the northern outskirts of the Campus Martius. The bridge was then a famous haunt of prostitutes, male and female, and Nero used to go there so that he could take his pleasures more freely outside the city. No proof was produced to support this accusation, but Sulla was ordered to depart Italy and confine himself within the walls of Massilia, modern-day Marseilles in the south of France. Sulla had been living at Massilia ever since.

  In an AD 62 meeting with Nero, not long after Seneca’s retirement, Tigellinus had made his move against the two men. With Sulla in southern Gaul in self-imposed exile, and Plautus in Asia, Tigellinus had used their very absence from Rome against the men, claiming that their distance from Italy actually exacerbated the threat they posed to Nero.

  “I have no eye, like Burrus, to two conflicting aims,” Tigellinus had said, implying that his Praetorian predecessor Burrus had divided his loyalty between Agrippina and Nero. His one thought, he said, was for Nero’s safety, “which is at least secured against treachery at Rome by my presence. As for distant uprisings, how can they be checked?”8

  He claimed that Sulla could lead an uprising of the Gauls against Nero, using his family connection with Sulla “the great dictator.” At the same time, he said, he did not trust the nations of the East, which had fond remembrances of Drusus, Plautus’ grandfather by marriage and cousin and adoptive brother of Nero’s own grandfather, Germanicus Caesar. Drusus had won acclaim for his work as a statesman in the East. Plautus’ familial connection with Drusus might be enough, said his accuser, for the people of the East to rise up to support him against Nero.9

  Sulla had given no indication that he had ambitions to replace Nero. In fact, he showed complete apathy toward politics in general and had never made a single noteworthy speech. This was no defense, according to Tigellinus. That air of apathy displayed by Sulla, said Tigellinus, was a fabrication, designed to deflect suspicion, “while he is seeking an opening for his reckless ambition.”10

  Convincing Nero to authorize Sulla’s execution, Tigellinus had acted without delay. Six days after the co-prefect’s meeting with Nero, a Praetorian execution party landed at Massilia by ship. The executioners burst in on Sulla while he was reclining at the dinner table with friends. The Praetorian centurion in charge promptly dragged Sulla across the table by the hair and lopped off his head while Sulla’s companions watched in disbelief.

  It was only necessary for a condemned man’s head to be returned to Rome as proof of his execution. The head was displayed in public, usually on the Gemonian Stairs, which ran down the southern slope of the Capitoline Mount between the Tabularium and the Tullianum to the Forum Romanum. Sometimes, these heads were displayed on the Rostra in the Forum. When Nero saw the grisly object before it was put on public display, he nervously commented that the victim’s hair was prematurely gray.

  Plautus’ removal was not as easy to accomplish. His wealth made him well placed in Roman society, with many influential men owing their loyalty to him—because they were his clients or were literally in his debt. So, it was necessary to fabricate a story about his “crime.” Tigellinus had a rumor circulated that Plautus had attempted to bring Nero’s famous general Corbulo, who was now governor of Syria and controlled a number of legions, into a plot against the emperor. According to another fabricated story that ran around the streets and bathhouses of Rome, troops had been sent to execute Plautus but the people of Asia had taken up arms in his defense, and the soldiers sent to be his executioners had gone over to his side, necessitating the dispatch of a larger execution force.

  These rumors also reached the ears of Plautus’ fatherin-law, Lucius Antistius Vetus, in Rome. Vetus had shared the consulship with Nero several years back and had also served as governor of Asia—one of the most prestigious and sought-after of Rome’s proconsular appointments. When Vetus learned that Tigellinus had received Nero’s approval to execute Plautus and that a centurion was to lead a party of sixty Praetorians to Asia to carry out the act, the fatherin-law sent one of the freedmen that Plautus had left behind at Rome hurrying to warn his master. With the benefit of good winds, the freedman’s ship had landed him in Asia ahead of the Praetorians, and he was able to pass on Vetus’ warning to Plautus.

  Vetus’ message cautioned Plautus to react not by taking his own life, as many a Roman would have done in the same circumstances, suicide being legal and considered a noble resort by the Romans. Instead, Vetus had said, Plautus should rally supporters around himself and seek every resource to repel the Praetorian detachment. Then, said Vetus, in the delay caused by a message being sent back to Tigellinus by his centurion seeking reinforcements to complete the mission, Plautus could raise an army and go to war against Nero.

  Plautus ignored the warning from his fatherin-law. Under the influence of two teachers of philosophy, who counseled that he “await death with firmness rather than lead a precarious and anxious life,” Plautus went about his regular routine.11 At noon one day shortly after, he was at the bathhouse. Stripped down to a tunic and an undergarment, he was exercising before entering the baths. The doors burst open, and in trooped the Praetorian centurion and his death squad. At their head was Pelago, a freedman on Nero’s personal staff, who had been sent with the Praetorians to ensure the task was completed.

  Without any ceremony, the centurion forced Plautus to kneel on the tiled bathhouse floor and ordered him to stretch out his neck. Unsheathing his gladius, the centurion hacked off Plautus’ head, which Pelago promptly bore away. The dead man’s distraught wife, Antistia Pollutia, came running to find her husband’s headless body. Dropping to her knees, she clutched Plautus’ corpse to her, ignoring the blood that covered her clothes. For the rest of her short life, Pollutia would retain the bloodstained garments worn by her husband at the time of his violent end.

  The removal of Sulla and Plautus brought no outcry at Rome. This lack of public reaction, along with the very act of their removal, was a great relief to Nero, who heaped rewards on Tigellinus. These events cemented Tigellinus and the emperor’s relationship and increased the distance between Faenius Rufus and Nero, as Tigellinus had hoped. By early AD 64, Tigellinus’ power was increasing with each passing week.

  That power was both financial and political. Nero had made Tigellinus a wealthy man with his gifts and rewards. One of those rewards was, apparently, either the entire Basilica Aemilia, or the basilica’s portico fronting the Forum, which contained a number of shops. This massive building, 330 feet long and 100 feet wide, with two floors supported by columns and massive arches and topped by a third, attic floor, was one of Rome’s major retailing precincts, the shopping mall of its day. At the intersection of the Via Sacra (Sacred Way)
and the Argiletum, itself a street known for its cobblers’ shops and booksellers at this time and fronting the Forum Romanum—the Fifth Avenue of ancient Rome—these Aemilian shops occupied prime retail real estate.

  Five centuries earlier, there had been butchers’ shops here. A century later, bankers had taken over the site. After a subsequent fire, the shops were renovated and became known as the tabernae nova, or new shops. In 179 BC, work began here on a basilica that was completed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The Aemilian family had added to the building down through the decades. In 55 BC, a new, grander building, the one that now stood in AD 64, was erected on the site by Lucius Aemilius Pailus.

  Early in the imperial era, the building had come into the possession of the imperial family. After another fire, in AD 14, the emperor Augustus had it restored. Another renovation eight years later was at the expense of Marcus Lepidus, of the Aemilian family. And now, the structure, or part of it, was Tigellinus’ property. Indoors, rows of marble-floored shops lined a central nave. The basilica’s restored portico, fronting the Forum, was similarly lined with shops and was dedicated by Augustus to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius.

  Considered by some the most beautiful building in Rome, the Basilica Aemilia was certainly one of the most profitable, with the shops returning prime rents. To the Basilica Aemilia hurried slaves and freedmen each morning to shop on behalf of their masters and mistresses who lived in the mansions on the nearby Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, and Aventine hills.

  By a 59 BC edict of Julius Caesar, most wheeled traffic was banned from Rome’s narrow streets during daylight. So, it was in the night that merchants’ heavy four-wheeled wagons and farmers’ two-wheeled carts streamed into the city from the outskirts and the Tiber River docks, laden with both manufactured goods and produce, fish and livestock. And dodging around them would be the carriages and litters of the “night livers,” and parties of revelers out on the town, eating, drinking, and whoring. Rome was the original city that never slept. Provincials coming to Rome for the first time would complain that they could not sleep for the din that filled the city from dusk till dawn.

  The Basilica Aemilia was not the city’s only shopping center. Rome possessed markets dedicated to the sale of livestock, produce, wine, clothing, footwear, and even markets specializing in the sale of herbs and flowers. Meanwhile, every winding street of old Rome was lined with businesses. Once their tall shutters were pushed back, all shops were open to the street, and a passerby could see the freedmen shopkeepers, their families, and their slave employees hard at work. Many shopkeepers slept on the premises, in cramped lofts above the store, with their families. In the ruins of Pompeii and Ostia today, a visitor might see four or five steps at the rear of typical Roman shops, leading nowhere. In Roman times, there would have been wooden ladders at the top of these steps, extending up to the lofts above the shops.

  Countless grimy workshops operated in back streets: tanners and leather workers, with the smell of ammonia thick in the air; carpentry shops; iron foundries, with slaves toiling over hot, smoky forges. Brothels, which were legal in Rome, were usually in the back streets. Some taverns offered prostitutes on the second floor, as their wooden signs decorated with erect phalluses advertised. Brothels, called houses of seduction by some Romans and disorderly houses by others, only operated by night. Many fronted the street. A description exists of a first-century Roman brothel that had a quilt hanging in the doorway, to dampen noise but encourage entry. Inside, where customers and naked prostitutes nonchalantly roamed about, the premises were divided by wooden partitions into small bed cubicles, with a sign outside each chamber naming the prostitute working inside.

  Surviving reliefs depicting shops at Rome show a butcher wielding a meat cleaver while various cuts of meat hang behind him; a green-grocer pointing out his fresh produce; a knife seller with his vast array of knives; and a pharmacist prescribing medicine for a patient, while an assistant pounds a pestle in a bowl. Another relief shows a store with fowl hanging by their feet; a woman hands fruit to a slave; wild birds occupy a closed wicker basket; cages contain live rabbits; a pair of chained monkeys sit forlornly on a counter. Wine bars occupied many city corners. More substantial taverns were also prevalent. Wine flagons were chained to columns outside, as advertisements. Large clay amphorae at the rear of the tavern were full of imported wine. When they were empty, these elegant amphorae, which look like giant cigars to modern eyes, were frequently smashed; there was no market for secondhand amphorae.

  Hot-food establishments sent tantalizing aromas wafting on the air. Rome’s bakeries and pastry shops offered everything from the standard Roman loaf—round, like a pie, and sliced the same way—to tempting pastry delicacies. In Pompeii, one of the towns that would be buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and which had a population of roughly twenty thousand, more than one hundred wine bars, twenty taverns, and forty bakeries have been identified. Multiply these numbers by at least fifty for Rome, whose first-century population exceeded a million people.

  In Rome, as elsewhere in the Roman world, shopkeepers displayed their goods outside their doors. Hairdressers and barbers sat their customers on stools on the pavement, working on them with razor and knife in full public gaze while exchanging gossip. A poet of the time would complain that Rome was one vast shop. The open doors of Rome’s small, street-side schools revealed young students on stools, reciting the Twelve Tables, Rome’s basic laws, or verses from Homer or Virgil. One of the students in one of the better schools, this winter of AD 64, was the nine-year-old Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the future historian.

  Bankers, scribes, and up-market stores occupied the Basilica Aemilia: the best jewelers; importers of ridiculously expensive food delicacies; purveyors of the finest wines, including Italy’s prized Falernian vintages. The brightly colored imported fabrics, particularly silks, of fabric merchants attracted Rome’s wealthy ladies. A relief shows one such fabric store, with rich cushions hanging from the ceiling. Two staff members unravel a roll of cloth for several seated female customers. Fashion and fad drove the shopping impulses in Roman times, just as much as they do today. After he had ceased to be a man of power and of extravagance, Seneca wrote to a friend: “Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re in most people’s houses.”12

  All this shopping activity generated a hubbub that meant a visitor approaching Rome on the morning of any business day would hear the city before seeing it. The visitor might also see or smell evidence of it on the wind; according to Seneca, the air of Rome reeked of smoke and poisonous fumes from all the cookers of the metropolis, and ashes commonly floated on the breeze from the same source.13 Here was Horace’s famous “smoke, splendor and noise of the city,” in this the commercial heart of the empire.14 Tigellinus the Praetorian prefect had a tidy share of that commerce, but he would always be looking for more profit, more rewards, more real estate.

  Greed was the driving force of Rome. More than one landlord of the city’s forty-seven thousand insulae, or apartment blocks, had been guilty of setting fire to their own properties in the past. Not for insurance money; insurance was one innovation that escaped the otherwise business-savvy Romans. Landlords would then hastily build larger buildings on the ruined sites, providing smaller rooms and demanding larger rents. The landlords’ profit in such instances was a long time coming. Tigellinus was interested in more immediate rewards.

  III

  THE POETS

  Marcus Valerius Martialus, or Martial, as later generations would come to know him, rose before dawn as usual this winter morning. From his small apartment, three floors up in a nondescript apartment block sandwiched between countless others on Rome’s Quirinal Hill, where once Cicero’s good friend and correspondent Atticus had lived, and girding his cheap cloak around him, Martial made his way across the city though crowded, darkened streets to the house of Annaeus Mela, one of Rome’s wealthiest men.

  In his twenties, Martial
had been born at Bilbilis in Spain. Although he boasted Celtic blood, Martial was a Roman citizen and the son of a Roman citizen. His parents had given him a good education, including tutoring in grammar and rhetoric. When Seneca was still Nero’s chief secretary, the young Martial had come to Rome seeking to make his fortune. Martial rated earning above learning. “My parents were stupid enough to have me taught literature, a paltry subject,” he would say, years later. “But what good were teachers of grammar and rhetoric to me?”1 He had arrived from Spain with an introduction to Seneca, a fellow Spaniard. Their shared heritage paid dividends: The rich and hugely powerful chief secretary had taken Martial on as one of his many clients.

  This promising start to Martial’s career soon hit a major obstacle. Seneca retired from office not long after Martial arrived at Rome. Determined to melt into obscurity so as not to antagonize Nero, Seneca had divorced himself of most of his clients. Cast aside were men such as the wealthy and very social Gaius Piso, the noted author Fabius Rusticus, who, through Seneca’s patronage, had risen to fame, and complete unknowns such as Martial. Only Seneca’s physician, his in-laws, and one or two other useful people remained in the former chief secretary’s now very limited circle. In divesting himself of clients, Seneca had passed Martial on to his younger brother Mela.

  Mela had amassed an immense fortune as an astute businessman, but he did not mix in the same circles as Seneca, kept a low public profile, and had little or no political influence. Mela easily met the financial qualification for elevation to the Senatorial Order from the Equestrian Order—a personal net worth of 1.2 million sesterces. But Mela preferred to remain an Equestrian and keep well away from the Senate and from politics. He concentrated on making money. To Mela’s mind, an Equestrian was the equal of even a former consul. So good was Mela at making money that after an introduction from Seneca, he had even been employed by the emperor to manage some of his private business affairs.