Nero had made munus staging mandatory for Celtic priests at the Temple of Claudius at Camulodunum, modern Colchester, capital of the province of Britannia. Prior to the AD 43 Roman conquest of much of southern Britain, the sons of British chiefs had been educated by the Druids, with many young men going on themselves to become Druid priests. Under Roman rule, Druidism was banned, and the sons of British chiefs had to serve in the Claudian Order at the Temple of Claudius. It came to be said that the staging of the muneri had so impoverished the British priests that they had conspired with rebel queen Boudicca to throw off Rome’s then seventeen-year-old rule in Britain. It appears that in Boudicca’s uprising of AD 60, these priests had given rebels access to the Temple of Claudius when thousands of Roman settlers took refuge there during the assault on Camulodunum and, in so doing, had brought about the refugees’ capture and brutal deaths and the fall of the city.
Beneventum’s benefactor was the “deformed” Vatinius, who had been born and raised in the cobbler’s shop of his freedman father. Vatinius suffered from dwarfism. During the reign of Nero’s uncle Caligula, Vatinius had been brought into the imperial court, as a joke, to amuse the emperor. Vatinius had subsequently been a member of Caligula’s entourage at the time of the short-lived emperor’s assassination. Witty, sarcastic, and knowledgeable about the peccadilloes of courtiers, the “fool” Vatinius had become a permanent fixture of the court, on call to amuse the emperor and his guests with his “vulgar wit.” In the opinion of historian Tacitus, little Vatinius, dressed garishly and frequently seen at Nero’s side making fun of the Roman elite, was “one of the most conspicuously infamous sights in the imperial court.”1
Vatinius’ imperial patron had rewarded him with money and property, so that he was now an immensely rich man, even though only a freedman. And still he amused the emperor. Only recently, he had said to Nero, “I hate you Caesar, because you are a member of the Senatorial order.”2 Vatinius had, in keeping his ear close to the ground to glean tidbits about the unguarded and impolitic words and actions of leading men and women of Rome, become a valuable source of information for the emperor. “He grew so powerful by accusing all the best men,” said Tacitus, “that in influence, wealth, and ability to cause injury, he was preeminent.”3
For all the Roman public’s enjoyment of blood sports, there had been little outcry when, for the previous years’ Great Games, Nero had ended the practice of allowing victorious gladiators to take the lives of their defeated opponents. He had not even allowed criminals to be put to death in the arena. Nero did not take away the main attraction of gladiatorial contests: gambling. Under Roman law, it was legal to bet on contests of physical skill. Vast amounts would be wagered on every gladiatorial contest.
Vatinius’ munus at Beneventum would have followed the usual pattern. Each day’s show began at dawn and ended at dusk. Free tickets had been distributed to people in his favor by the man paying for the games, called its editor. Remaining spectators had to pay for admission. Well before sunrise, the crowd, consisting of both men and women, excitedly surged up the amphitheater’s stone stairways to secure seats denoted by their numbered, clay tickets. Many had purchased the handwritten programs that had been on sale in Beneventum streets for days beforehand.
Once in their seats, the audience members excitedly perused the program, discussed the merits of this fighter and that, and laid their bets, every now and then glancing toward the enclosed tribunal, the official box, hoping to catch sight of the emperor. The most senior members of the emperor’s sycophantic entourage, former consuls such as Titus Vespasian, Petronius Arbiter, and Cluvius Rufus, were seated with Nero. A vacant seat beside the emperor awaited the editor of the games.
As the sun rose, trumpets heralded a parade around the arena by all taking part, to the cheers and applause of the spectators. Competitors were led by the editor, Vatinius, who rode in a chariot. He was followed by uniformed bestiari, the animal fighters. All the staff of the amphitheater, slaves and freedmen alike—from those who raked the blood-soaked sand covering the arena’s floor to medical attendants and arena musicians playing flute, lyre, trumpet, horn, and water organ—were uniformly dressed.
Next came the gladiators, the star attractions. Most were slaves and had ridden to the amphitheater in closed carriages. Now, wearing purple cloaks richly embroidered with gold, the gladiators paraded around the arena waving and gesturing to the crowd. Behind them came slaves bearing their armor and weapons. There were many types of gladiator, with varying types of weapons and tactics. The rebel gladiator Spartacus had fought in the Thracian style, for example. Spectators followed not only individual gladiators, but also particular fighting styles.
Perhaps two in ten of these gladiators were free men who had voluntarily taken to the gladiatorial life, for money, for thrills, for adulation. Even the occasional Equestrian or senator down on his financial luck took to the arena, to the horror of the Roman elite. Just months before this, female gladiators had appeared during the traditional ten days of gladiatorial contests held at Rome in December. Some had been ladies of distinction, from noble families. These volunteer female fighters had fought each other, not male combatants.
Now, the parading combatants halted in front of the arena’s tribunal and faced the emperor. “Hail, imperator!” they chorused.4
Vatinius’ program was a “crowded” one, according to Tacitus.5 It would have seen gladiators or troops engage in carefully orchestrated mock combat during the morning, with wooden weapons and muffled shields, as a preliminary to the later, bloodier contests. Flavius Josephus, who would witness Rome’s legions in training just three years from now, would describe legion drills as bloodless battles, and their battles as bloody drills. Vatinius may also have put on “acts”—panthers drawing chariots, lions releasing live hares from their jaws on command, tigers licking the hand of their trainer, elephants kneeling before the emperor’s tribunal and tracing out Latin phrases in the sand with their trunks. Poet Martial and author Pliny the Elder witnessed such acts in the amphitheater and recorded their enjoyment of them.
The execution of criminals and beast hunts filled the middle of the day. Wild animals were released into the arena together with criminals condemned to death, with the audience enjoying what followed, as spectators ate their lunches. Once the prisoners had met their end, the beast-fighting bestiari then went against the larger animals, “hunting” and slaughtering them with javelin, fork, sword, knife, and bow and arrow. Frequently, some animals were permitted to live until the next spectacle, but occasionally, an editor would advertise that no animal would be spared at his games.
These beast hunts came to be the single most popular attraction of Roman spectacles. After Vespasian became emperor, five years after Nero’s visit to the Beneventum munus, he would order a purpose-built amphitheater erected at Rome for beast hunts. He named it the Hunting Theater. Later generations called it the Flavian Theater. This was the Colosseum. Through its early history, the Colosseum would see many more beast hunts than gladiatorial contests.
Only in the afternoon did the best gladiators take to the sand. Many gladiators were made rich by the prize money on offer and by the gifts from admirers, including the emperor. Nero’s favorite gladiator and the most famous of his day was Spiculus, who received houses at Rome and in the country from the emperor. It was the one-on-one contests that the crowd had come to see. Each pair slogged it out with their unarmed trainers standing right behind them and issuing instructions as the fight took place, even lashing them with whips to encourage more spirited displays. Despite this nearness to the fight, and to death, no trainer was apparently injured in a contest or was set on by his own fighter or an opponent. Such was the keenly observed etiquette of the arena.
During the afternoon, Nero was called away from the sport. A message had arrived from Tigellinus at Rome. The Praetorian prefect informed his emperor that he had received information that a leading senator, Marcus Junius Torquatus Silanus, had been lavishin
g gifts on noble friends. The talk was, Tigellinus said, that Silanus was winning support for a revolution against Nero. Silanus boasted imperial blood as a great-grandson of Augustus. In the eyes of some, this gave him a claim to the throne. Silanus’ accusers also said that he used nobles as his secretaries and bookkeepers, when everyone else, the emperor included, used mere freedmen in these roles, with Seneca a notable exception. It was as if, the accusation went, Silanus were preparing his friends for loftier positions and preparing himself for the loftiest position of all, Nero’s throne.
In light of these slim accusations, Tigellinus had dragged Silanus’ most intimate freedmen off to the Praetorian barracks, where he would personally “examine” them, on the rack. Under Roman law, no Roman citizen could be tortured for information or a confession, but no such right extended to freedmen or slaves. Tigellinus personally conducted such interrogation sessions. Three years earlier, Tigellinus had racked the servants of Nero’s divorced first wife, twenty-year-old Octavia Augusta, daughter of Claudius, trying to extract evidence that Octavia had committed adultery, a charge concocted by Nero’s jealous second wife, Poppaea Sabina.
One of Octavia’s women, Pythias, had bravely gasped from the rack, “My mistress’s privy parts are cleaner, Tigellinus, than your mouth.”6
By the third and last day of the Beneventum show, Nero received another communication from Tigellinus, this one telling him that Torquatus Silanus had taken his own life. Silanus, suspecting that his arrest was only a matter of time, had “divided the arteries in his arms” with a knife, taking his own life in the time-honored fashion favored by the Roman elite, rather than face trial and conviction in the Senate and a humiliating death at the hands of a Praetorian executioner.7
Nero seemed surprised by the news. “Though Silanus was guilty, and with good reason had put no trust in his defense,” the emperor declared in a speech published soon after, “he would had lived had he awaited the clemency of the judge.”8 That judge was, of course, Nero.
Vatinius’ gladiatorial show came to an end, and as Nero’s party prepared to continue to the port of Brundisium, two hundred miles to the southeast, and a subsequent sea voyage to Greece, the emperor made a surprise announcement. He would, for the moment, not be going on to Achaia, he said, without giving any reason for his change of plan. He would instead be returning to Rome at once. Perhaps, just perhaps, Nero had been made uneasy by Tigellinus’ preemptory action against Silanus. Was the emperor wondering what else the Praetorian prefect might get up to while he was away in Greece?
So, the entire cavalcade turned around and headed back down the road to Rome.
IX
THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIANS
In Rome, twenty-seven-year-old Joseph bar Matthias was finishing his lunch, the main meal of the day for first-century Jews. To Romans, the main meal of the day was taken in the evening. Joseph was completing preparations for Pesach, the Jewish festival of the Passover, then only days away.
Just a decade later, Joseph would receive Roman citizenship as an author in the favor of Rome’s Flavian emperors. He would take the Romanized name of Flavius Josephus. This spring of AD 64, Joseph, a native of Jerusalem, was in the early stages of a lengthy stay at Rome. He was on a special mission. Descended from Levi, who was the great-grandson of the biblical Abraham, Joseph had been entitled to enter the Jewish priesthood, as only the descendants of Levi, the Levites, could do. From age sixteen, he had spent three years studying the teachings of various Jewish sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, also studying for a time under a Jewish ascetic in the desert. By nineteen, Joseph had returned to Jerusalem, where he became a priest of the Pharisee order. Eight years later, he had come on his mission to Rome.
Joseph himself explained: “When I was twenty-six, it happened that I took a voyage to Rome.” That was in AD 63. “When [Antonius] Felix was Procurator of Judea, there were certain priests of my acquaintance, and very excellent persons they were, whom on a small and trifling accusation he put into chains, and sent to Rome to plead their cause before Caesar.”1 Felix’s seven-year tenure as Roman governor of Judea had ended in AD 59, and these accused Jewish priests had been languishing at Rome, in prison or under house detention, ever since their arrest, existing on figs and nuts. It was Joseph’s mission to orchestrate their discharge.
Like Joseph, these priests would have been Pharisees. To possess the right to have their appeals heard by Caesar, they might also have held Roman citizenship, which, for Jewish priests, was unusual. No classical text or inscription records this possibility, but some priests at Jerusalem might have been granted Roman citizenship during the reign of Caligula or that of Claudius. A vast number of foreigners are known to have been granted Roman citizenship during Claudius’ reign in particular, via his wife Messalina, who took so many bribes for arranging the grants of citizenship that a joke went around Rome that it was possible to buy citizenship for just a handful of broken glass.
Claudius had been raised at the Palatium at Rome in the company of the Jew Marcus Julius Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. Agrippa, given a small tetrarchy by Caligula, had been at Rome at the time of Caligula’s assassination and had been instrumental in Claudius’ accession to the vacant throne. Claudius, in his gratitude, had crowned his friend, who became King Herod Agrippa I of Judea. To Agrippa had fallen charge of the Temple at Jerusalem and the appointment of the high priest. Under Agrippa’s authority, the Great Sanhedrin, the seventy-member Jewish religious ruling council of priests at Jerusalem, was summoned. It is conceivable that Caligula or Claudius also granted Roman citizenship to priests who were at Jerusalem and were nominated by Agrippa, perhaps those who fulfilled their duties particularly zealously. Agrippa died of a heart attack in AD 44. Perhaps the custom of granting Roman citizenship to Jewish priests had died with him.
Another Jew had been dispatched to Rome by Felix’s successor in AD 59, also to have his appeal heard by Nero. This was a Jew who certainly held Roman citizenship and who had also been a priest and a Pharisee. His Jewish name was Saul of Tarsus; his Roman name, Paulus. This was Saint Paul the Apostle. Paul’s Roman citizenship has never been questioned by historians or theologians. But no one has ever been able to explain how Paul came by that citizenship. Some scholars suggest that Paul’s father held Roman citizenship; others that the entire population of the city of Tarsus, Paul’s birthplace, might have been granted Roman citizenship. No evidence exists to support either theory. It is just as credible that Paul was granted Roman citizenship at the behest of Herod Agrippa I, ironically for his zealous hunting down of Christians. “Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God,” Paul himself wrote, “and wasted it.”2
It is likely that Joseph knew Paul, or knew of him. Saul, as he was then called, had trained as a Pharisee at Jerusalem under the renowned Jewish teacher Gamaliel I. When Joseph was a child, Paul had been a hard-line Pharisee at Jerusalem who led the persecution of Christians, during the late AD 30s and, possibly, into the early AD 40s, during the short reign of Caligula and at the beginning of Claudius’ reign. It is entirely possible that Paul’s grant of Roman citizenship came then, via King Agrippa, in the circumstances mentioned above. Only after this had Paul literally seen the light on the road to Damascus and become a follower of Christ.
In AD 59, Paul was sent to Rome in chains and under legionary guard. En route, the ship carrying the apostle and 275 other passengers had been caught in a massive storm in the Eastern Mediterranean and dashed on Malta’s rocky shore. All aboard had survived, and the Roman centurion in charge of Paul’s escort, Julius, had procured passage for prisoner and escort aboard another ship the following spring. Paul had arrived at Rome that spring of AD 60 and was handed over to the Praetorians.
Centurion Julius had put in a good word for Paul, and Praetorian Prefect Burrus, then in his second-last year of office, and of life, had ordered house arrest for the duration of Paul’s long appeal process. Paul was able to rent accommodation in Rome; Christian tra
dition puts the house on the Triumphal Way, on a site where Nero would soon build a vast pond, the stagnum Neronis, and where the Colosseum would rise within another two decades. There, with a Praetorian soldier on his door, and wearing a chain, Paul waited for his case to be heard by Nero, or by the urban praetor, who was deputized to act for the emperor on occasion. According to the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles, Paul remained at Rome for two years. Theologians believe that Paul’s case was ultimately dismissed and that in AD 62 he resumed his travels.
On his way to Jerusalem in AD 57, Paul had written to the Christians at Rome: “When I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you. For I trust to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my journey thitherward by you.”3 His arrest shortly after at Jerusalem put paid to that plan, but it is suggested that once Paul was released from custody in AD 62, he continued on to Spain as originally intended. The tradition in Spain is that Paul indeed founded the Spanish Church about this time, at Tarraco on the east coast. The late-first-century Epistle of Clement Romanus says, “he came to the borders of the West,” which some interpret as confirming that Paul did reach Spain. Theodoret of Cyrrhus claimed in the fifth century that Paul preached in islands, which some have taken to mean Britain, others, Spain’s Balearic Isles.4
During his two years of house arrest at Rome, Paul had communed with the small Christian community in the city and addressed representatives of the much larger Jewish community, Jews having flooded back once Nero had become emperor and tolerated their presence at Rome. Paul strove to increase the scope of the Christian congregation at the capital, preaching “those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.”5
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Page 8
