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

by Dando-Collins, Stephen

  The Egyptians selected for crucifixion were affixed to crosses raised in one of the imperial gardens, which were likely to have been the Gardens of Sallust. Developed by one of Julius Caesar’s deputies, Sallustius Crispus (Sallust the author), these gardens lay on the flat between the Quirinal and Pincian hills in Regio VI, close to the Salarian Gate, and had been imperial property since the reign of Tiberius. Like the Gardens of Maecenas, they had escaped the Great Fire. There, each evening for several nights, victims from among the Egyptian multitude were burned to death, “to serve as nightly illumination.”29 As Nero knew, fire played a key role in the worship of Isis, and the incineration of some of the prisoners was another deliberate insult. For sacred and symbolic reasons, November 13 is likely to have been the day set down for these “illuminations” to begin, for this was the combined festival day of Juno, Minerva, Jupiter, and Feronia—Roman goddess of fire.

  Nero was “exhibiting a show in the circus” on the day the illuminations began, said Tacitus.30 The young emperor had clearly been tempted to drive a chariot in the races at the circus himself, for although he just managed to resist that temptation, he drove into the imperial gardens that night in a chariot and dressed in the full racing garb of the charioteer: leather helmet, tight-fitting leather vest designed to protect the ribs, bottle-green tunic of the Green faction, his favorite, and leather arm-guards and leg-guards. Stepping down from his chariot once he arrived at the gardens for the spectacle, Nero “mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer,” as the public flocked to see the Egyptians incinerated.31

  This lack of imperial dignity backfired on the emperor in charioteer dress. Sympathy grew in some quarters for the victims of his persecution. “Even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion,” said Tacitus. “For it was not, as it was portrayed, for the public good, that they were being destroyed.” Not even fire could expunge the conviction among many Romans that their own emperor had set their city alight. If anything, his brutal punishments of the supposed culprits only damaged Nero’s reputation all the more. The perception now was that the executions of the followers of Isis had merely been “to satisfy one man’s cruelty.”32

  A little over a month later, on December 15, Nero celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday. At Rome and across the empire, most Romans celebrated with him, with prayers and offerings for their emperor’s good health. Throughout that month of December, “never were lightning flashes more frequent” at Rome, and a comet was seen to streak across the night sky.33 To the more superstitious Romans, who saw portents of the future in natural phenomena, this was “supposed to herald the death of some person of great importance,” said Suetonius.34 At the very least, said Tacitus, these were omens of “impending evils.”35

  XIV

  THE CONSPIRACY

  As AD 65 began, Nero, frustrated that his benevolent acts had failed to silence his critics and stung by the vitriol fueling the worst rumors and gossip about him, gave up all attempts to win public goodwill and became a recluse. He apparently decided that from now on, rather than continue to strive to please his subjects, he would please himself. The one person whom he trusted was his wife Poppaea Sabina, and they became closer during this period; by the spring, she would again be pregnant, giving Nero cause to be optimistic about fathering an heir and defying the supposed Sibylline prophesy that he would be last of the Julian line.

  The emperor was not seen by the public on New Year’s Day, nor on any other occasion as the winter passed. He had a new passion. Instead of simply rebuilding his gutted palaces on the Palatine and in the valley of the Forum, he had acceded to the suggestion of Severus and Celer that he use this opportunity to build the grandest palace that man had ever seen to replace the residence that the fire had taken from him. This pair, said Tacitus, “had the genius and the audacity to attempt by art even that which nature had rejected, and to fool away an emperor’s money.”1 They were made directors of the project.

  The new palace that they designed for Nero, to be called the Domus aurea, or Golden House, would cover two hundred acres. Like Tacitus, Suetonius decried the expense and wastefulness of Nero’s new palace: “The entrance hall was large enough to accommodate a huge statue of himself, 120 feet high.”2 This statue of Nero, which came to be called the Colossus, was several times life size and perched on a column. Combined, statue and column stood beneath the roof of the fantastic new palace’s foyer. The foyer sat at the foot of the Palatine, beside the House of the Vestals, which, in its reconstructed form, was built on a slightly different axis from the building it replaced, to accommodate the Golden House’s foyer next door.

  From this lofty entrance hall, a pillared arcade, three stories high and called the Millaria, would run for an entire mile from the Forum valley, through the Carinae and Subura districts, to the Esquiline. Many of the palace’s acres would be occupied by “an enormous pool, like a sea,” said Suetonius.3 Called the stagnum Neronis, or Nero’s Pool, this sheet of water spread over the cleared site in the valley that, prior to the fire, had been occupied for the most part by houses, including the one in which the Apostle Paul is said to have lived for two years during his first stay at Rome.

  Just seven years after it was created, this pool of Nero’s would be drained by a future emperor to make way for a new structure on this site—Vespasian’s Hunting Theater. Much later, the Hunting Theater would become known as the Colosseum. Many scholars believe that it took its unofficial name from Nero’s statue, the Colossus, which would be reerected in the Via Sacra outside the amphitheater, with Nero’s head replaced, some say by that of the emperor Titus, others by a head representing the sun god Sol. Meanwhile, Nero’s Pool, said Suetonius, “was surrounded by buildings made to resemble cities and by a landscaped garden consisting of ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodlands, where every variety of domestic and wild animal roamed about.”4

  No extravagance was spared. Parts of the Golden House would be gilded and studded with precious stones and mother of pearl. The palace’s main dining room was circular; its roof could revolve. The ceilings of all the dining rooms would be made of fretted ivory; they would open on command, with ceiling panels sliding back to allow a rain of flower petals to fall on diners below, or for perfume to waft down from hidden sprinklers. Seawater and sulfur water would be on tap in the palace’s bathhouse. The Golden House’s lavish design pleased Nero beyond measure. “Good,” he is reported to have said once it neared completion. “Now I can at last begin to live like a human being.”5

  To pay for the rebuilding of the capital and for the construction of the Golden House, all the donations from the cities and towns of Italy, the provinces, and the rulers of states allied to Rome—some donations voluntary, some compelled—were clearly not going to be enough. Much of the gold that had accumulated in the temples of Rome as votive offerings from triumphant generals and individual citizens, and rescued ahead of the flames the previous July, was now melted down into coinage, to the horror of traditionalists.

  To advise him on other fund-raising methods, Nero had sent for his retired chief secretary, Seneca, who forwarded a message in response, requesting that he be permitted to remain in rural retirement. Tacitus thought that Seneca did this so that he would not have to contribute to the desecration of temples, but it is just as likely that Seneca, who never showed the least piety in either his deeds or his writings, feared that Nero would now accept his previous offer to hand over his properties; Seneca perhaps simply did not want to contribute to the rebuilding fund.

  Nero would not take no for an answer and again demanded Seneca’s presence. This time, Seneca claimed ill health, saying that he was suffering from a nervous disposition and was totally incapable of traveling, or of even leaving his bedchamber. After this second request, Nero left Seneca alone. In his quest for more funds, the emperor soon dispatched a commission composed of two men, one of them a freedman, to rove through the provinces of Achaia and Asia co
llecting votive gold from temples there and seizing gold and silver statues of gods for melting down to coin. In at least one town in Asia, locals attempted to resist the commissioners when the region’s senior-most Roman official failed to support the imperial duo’s mission.

  Even as the new year began and Nero was poring over the plans for his growing new Golden House with designers Severus and Celer, several of the emperor’s subjects became embroiled in a secret plot, which, if successful, would ensure that Nero did not long enjoy his extravagant new residence. In fact, it would emerge that more than one conspiracy was in the making and that before long, these various designs for Nero’s demise would meld into a single plot to kill him.

  “I could not easily narrate who first planned it,” Tacitus wrote several decades later, “or whose prompting inspired a scheme into which so many entered.”6 But among the first to convert disquiet into a conspiracy to do away with the emperor were two officers of the Praetorian Guard, Subrius Flavus, a tribune commanding a Praetorian Cohort, and Sulpicius Asper, one of Flavus’ centurions. At the same time, and quite separately, Lucan the poet, nephew of Seneca and close friend of his father’s client Martial, began to conspire with Plautius Lateranus, whom Nero had selected to become a suffect consul from the beginning of July.

  Lucan brought “an intensely keen resentment” to the plot, said Tacitus, because “Nero tried to disparage the fame of his poems.”7 As for Lateranus, the emperor had restored him to his senatorial rank, early in Nero’s reign, after Claudius’ Senate had condemned Lateranus for adultery with Claudius’ infamous wife Messalina. Lateranus had originally been sentenced to death and only escaped with a loss of rank on the intercession of his uncle. Clearly, by approving his upcoming consular appointment, Nero considered Lateranus a man worthy of the highest honors. Tacitus admitted that Nero had done Lateranus no personal wrong, and the only motive that he could ascribe to Lateranus’ desire to be rid of this emperor who favored him was “love of the State.”

  Two senators soon joined Lucan and Lateranus in the plot. Neither had previously showed any great interest in politics, and according to Tacitus, they were the last men that anyone would have given the credit of plotting a revolution. Both had personal reasons for wanting Nero dead. The “effeminate” Afranius Quintianus was well known and popularly disliked for his homosexuality; Nero had lampooned him for it in one of his published poems, and, said Tacitus, Quintianus was determined to have his revenge.

  Quintianus’ colleague in crime, Flavius Scaevinus, was best known as a spendthrift and heavy drinker whose life was widely viewed as one of “sleepy languor.”8 Scaevinus was, in fact, deeply in debt. It seems that his income had been heavily reliant on rents from city apartment blocks that had been destroyed in the Great Fire. With his income stream drastically reduced, yet with a continued dedication to his usual hedonistic lifestyle, Scaevinus, said Tacitus, was being pressed for payment by his creditors, and he did not have the funds to satisfy their demands.

  Six months had passed since the fire. Despite the rumors and the gossip impugning Nero, just as no one had been identified as the source of the rumors, not a single soul had been indicted for conspiring against Nero since the death of Torquatus Silanus the previous spring. In these early days of AD 65, the four civilian conspirators, unaware that two Praetorian officers were having similar thoughts, carefully sounded out their friends and acquaintances, reviling “the emperor’s crimes” and reminding their listeners of the portents the previous December of “the approaching end of empire.” These conspirators agreed that more than just assassinate Nero, they must also select “someone to rescue the State in its distress.”9 A replacement emperor was needed. But who?

  Decades of murders and executions going back to the poisoning of Nero’s grandfather Germanicus in AD 19 had meant that there was no male member of the Caesar family’s Julian line now living, apart from Nero. So, Nero’s replacement, this “someone” who would save Rome, would have to be the first man to rule the Romans since Julius Caesar a hundred years earlier not to have the blood of the Caesars running through his veins. This thought was sufficiently daunting for the plotters to decide that it would be necessary to give Nero’s successor legitimacy in the eyes of the Roman people.

  To do this, they decided, they would marry their chosen candidate for the throne to the only other surviving member of the Julian family, the emperor Claudius’ daughter Antonia. Through thirty-eight-year-old Antonia, widow of Sulla—the same Sulla executed in AD 62—a male heir with the blood of the Caesars would arise. It is conceivable that were Antonia not alive, this plot would never have been born. As for Antonia herself, she knew nothing of what was being plotted in her name.

  The man on whom the mantle of potential emperor discreetly settled was Gaius Piso. This friend of Seneca, who, like Seneca, had escaped the accusations of an agent of Tigellinus in the Senate two years before, was a descendant of the eminent Calpurnian family, with a family tree dotted with consuls, generals, and governors. The only blot on the family record had been the AD 20 conviction of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso for the murder of Germanicus Caesar. Gaius, the Piso chosen for Nero’s throne, was tall, handsome, and an eloquent speaker and had earned “a splendid reputation with the people from his virtue.” Or, his “semblance of virtue,” Tacitus was quick to add.10

  Piso, an accomplished legal advocate, had frequently employed his eloquence in the courts defending fellow Roman citizens. He was generous to his friends and showed courtesy and goodwill even to total strangers. On the other hand, in the opinion of Tacitus, Piso was not of solid character; “moderation in pleasure” was unknown to him.11 Among those who were attracted to vice, Piso had a reputation of being of like mind, lowering his morals whenever it suited him, most conspicuously by stealing the beautiful wife of a fellow senator and by occasionally appearing on stage as an actor in Greek tragedies. He was also accused of showing off his wealth and sometimes eating and drinking to excess. In short, a Nero. But a Nero who did not lower himself to sing in public contests, or to race a chariot, or to “marry” a freedman. Above all, a Nero the conspirators could control.

  Piso was actually on good terms with the emperor and had been for some years. So much so that when Nero’s mother had taken up residence at the imperial seaside villa at Antium, Piso had offered the emperor the use of his own sumptuous villa at Baiae, on the Bay of Naples, as his coastal resort. Nero had not only taken up Piso’s offer and used the Baiae villa for escapes from the city, but had made it his base for his second venture into murder, that of his mother.

  Nero had an apprenticeship in murder in December AD 55, with the killing of his cousin and adoptive brother Britannicus, son of Claudius. Blame for that murder could be partly laid at his mother’s feet. Agrippina had reacted spitefully after Nero had dismissed her favorite, Pallas, the Palatium secretary for finance under Claudius and initially also under Nero. Agrippina had threatened to take Britannicus to the Praetorians and declare him emperor in Nero’s stead. That outburst had sealed young Britannicus’ fate. Nero had procured poison from Locusta, a convicted “sorceress” then languishing in prison. Nero made Locusta the promise that she would receive her freedom if the poison worked.

  Because slaves were employed as food tasters for the members of the imperial family to detect poison, Nero had conceived a novel way to rid himself of his cousin. In winter, Romans drank hot wine. At dinner one night, Nero had made sure that the wine served to Britannicus was much too hot, necessitating the addition of cold water to cool it. The wine was tested by Britannicus’ food taster, but the cold water added to the wine was not. Shortly after drinking the now poison-laced wine, Britannicus was paralyzed and gasping for breath. As Britannicus was carried from the dining room by attendants, Nero had assured the other members of the family at the dinner that the epilepsy from which Britannicus had suffered as a child—a complaint he shared with another member of the Julian line, Julius Caesar—had no doubt returned. Britannicus, Nero’s rival
for the throne, had been dead before daylight. And the murderer had kept his word to Locusta the poison maker: “Nero rewarded Locusta for her services with a free pardon and extensive country estates,” said Suetonius.12

  Little more than three years later, Nero’s mother was driving him to distraction, even attempting to draw him into her own bed to regain the control that she had exercised over him prior to his ascending the throne. Having succeeded in camouflaging one murder, Nero found the courage to plan another. Agrippina’s servants were much too loyal to her, so that had ruled out employing one of them to administer poison to their mistress. Nero had been forced to be more creative than that. At the games in the circus one day, he had an inspiration. In front of him, a ship that formed part of a spectacle literally fell apart, on cue. On asking how this was done, the emperor was told that the ship had been constructed in such a way that it came apart when a single pin was pulled. This had set the boy emperor’s mind to work.

  From the naval city of Misenum on the Bay of Naples, Nero had summoned Anicetus, admiral of Rome’s largest battle fleet, the Tyrrhenian Fleet. Anicetus, a freedman and a native of Pontus, had been Nero’s tutor immediately prior to Seneca’s taking on that role, so the pair knew each other well. After the emperor and the admiral had discussed the practicalities of building a ship that would float but which would fall apart on the pulling of a pin, Anicetus, aware of Nero’s plan to murder his mother, undertook to have such a ship built by the following March and to provide a captain and a crew from his fleet who would perform the murderous deed with Agrippina aboard.

  Relations between Nero and his mother had become so strained that the emperor had even withdrawn Agrippina’s Praetorian and German Cohorts bodyguard. As March AD 59 approached, Nero had written a conciliatory letter to his mother, inviting her to join him on the Bay of Naples for the forthcoming Festival of Minerva. Agrippina owned an estate at Bauli on the Bay of Naples, where she could stay; Nero, meanwhile, would stay at the villa of his friend Gaius Piso. Agrippina, while wary, had accepted the invitation. A trireme from the Tyrrhenian Fleet had collected her from the imperial villa at Antium and brought her along the coast, landing her at the door to the Piso villa on March 19.