Tacitus added that several other authors claimed that Nero poisoned Poppaea, but he wrote that he could not bring himself to believe such a thing: “For the emperor wanted children, and was totally in love with his wife.”10 Suetonius agreed, saying that Nero “doted on his wife.”11 In fact, said Dio, Nero “missed her so much after her death that, on hearing of a woman who resembled her, he at first sent for her, and kept her.”12 Nero, still fascinated by all things Egyptian, ordained that his wife not be cremated, which was the normal Roman custom for the dead, but be embalmed in the Egyptian fashion.
Nero gave his beloved wife a public funeral, and in sympathy with their emperor, the ordinary Roman people came out to pay their respects. From the Rostra in the crowded Forum, Nero personally delivered Poppaea’s funeral oration, eulogizing her beauty and other gifts. He then had her embalmed body laid to rest in the tomb of the Julian family. The Senate, at its next meeting, decreed divine honors to Poppaea, as if she were a goddess.
Meanwhile, the fate of Antonia, daughter of Claudius, who was to have been married to the rebel Piso to give his claim to the throne legitimacy, was never revealed by Tacitus. Suetonius, however, linked Antonia’s fate to the death of Poppaea. He wrote that Antonia was executed by Nero “on a charge of attempted rebellion” after “she refused to take the late Poppaea’s place” as the emperor’s wife.13 No other classical author commented on Antonia’s fate, but she was never again mentioned subsequent to Nero’s reign.
Poppaea’s death was “a public grief,” said Tacitus, but a delight to her enemies and to Nero’s enemies.14 Just before Poppaea’s passing or perhaps in its wake, Nero acceded to her recommendation that he dismiss the legal cases against the three Jewish priests from Judea who had awaited a hearing for so long. Joseph, the rabbi who had worked so assiduously toward this end, was able to set off back to Jerusalem with his three colleagues. Joseph, or Josephus as he became, would give full credit for the release of the trio to the intercession of Poppaea. It seems that the Jewish party’s departure came in the fall, once the sailing season had ended for the year, and that the party traveled back to Judea overland, for Joseph did not arrive home in Jerusalem until the beginning of the spring of the following year.
Nero, bitter about the loss of his wife and child, had forbidden leading senator Gaius Cassius Longinus to attend Poppaea’s funeral. Cassius was a descendant of the man of the same name, Cassius the famous “Liberator,” who with Marcus Brutus had masterminded the assassination of Julius Caesar and gone to war with Octavian and Nero’s great-great-grandfather Mark Antony. A former consul and governor of Syria during Claudius’ reign, the present Cassius was also considered the preeminent legal advocate of his day. His Senate speeches were legend, and no senator ever took the floor to argue against his opinions unless he knew he had the support of others. As the Piso affair unfolded, Cassius had remained uncharacteristically quiet. But now, something he said or did, quite probably in relation to Poppaea, seriously offended Nero and made the emperor suddenly loathe and fear the man.
“Nero, who was always timid, and now more frightened than ever by the lately discovered [Piso] conspiracy,” said Tacitus, was “fearful of a sudden attack.”15 Out of the blue, Nero sent a speech to the Senate in which he called for Cassius and his young friend Junius Torquatus Silanus to be expelled from Rome. Silanus, also a senator, was the reckless nephew of the Silanus who had been forced to commit suicide by Tigellinus the previous year, when Nero was at Beneventum watching Vatinius’ gladiatorial show.
Nero did not accuse Cassius of any specific crime, but mentioned that it had come to his attention that Cassius specially revered a bust of his ancestor Cassius the Liberator among the collection of busts of ancestors that decorated his house, a bust that was inscribed “To the party leader.” According to Nero’s letter, Cassius had intended to emulate his ancestor, sparking revolution by sowing the seeds of civil war against the House of the Caesars. In this scheme, said Nero, Cassius was associating himself with Silanus, to whom he was related by marriage.
While the shaken Senate debated what to do about this, Nero wrote to the consuls to specifically condemn Silanus, saying that he was guilty of the same crime as his uncle, that of preparing to take control at the Palatium. Silanus, said Tacitus, had in fact been terrified by his uncle’s forced suicide and, ever since, had been extremely cautious not to do anything that could be deemed suspicious.16 His fellow senators were aware of this, and there was no rush by the Senate to judge either Silanus or the much respected Cassius.
Just when the emperor’s campaign against Cassius and Silanus appeared to be going nowhere, Nero’s agents produced informants who swore that Cassius’ wife Lepida had been sleeping with young Silanus, her nephew. Lepida was also charged with being involved in “some ghastly religious ceremony”—this may have referred to the now frowned-upon bestial worship of Isis.17 Two senators and a member of the Equestrian Order were implicated by the informers with Lepida in the latter charge, but all three men were acquitted by Nero when they appealed to him directly. Cassius and Silanus were not so lucky.
The Senate now considered the old and the new charges, and sentences of exile were passed on both Cassius and Silanus, while a decision on Lepida’s fate was referred to Nero. Cassius was sent to the island province of Sardinia, where he was left to live out the rest of his days in relative comfort. No action was taken against his wife, Lepida, who apparently accompanied Cassius to Sardinia. Silanus, informed that his exile was to be on the Greek island of Naxos, in the Cyclades group, was conveyed from Rome downriver to the port of Ostia, where he and his family expected that he would be placed aboard a ship that would convey him to the Aegean. Instead, Silanus’ Praetorian escort hustled him away to the Italian village of Barium, in the Apulia district.
There at Barium, Silanus lived quietly until, sometime later, a centurion leading a Praetorian detachment arrived at his door. It was never revealed who sent these troops to Barium. A sentence of death had been passed on Silanus, said the centurion, and if Silanus did not take his own life, then the centurion would take it for him. Silanus, young, fit, and very powerfully built, exploded with rage.
“Although I have been resolved in my heart to losing my life,” Silanus exclaimed, shaping up to resist even though he was unarmed, “I won’t let a cutthroat have the glory of taking it!”18
“Seize him!” the centurion bellowed.
As the Praetorian soldiers advanced on Silanus with their swords still in their sheaths, the accused man swung powerful blows their way. Boxing with the hands bound with tape was one of the forms of “gymnastics” practiced in various ludi, including the Neronian Games. Many young Roman nobles were accomplished boxers, training and fighting at the gymnasium. Nero himself was known to box and wrestle. Silanus seems to have been particularly adept at the art. His blows floored several soldiers before he was finally overwhelmed by numbers and wrestled to the floor. As Silanus was being held down, the centurion drew his sword. Then, standing over the prisoner, the centurion plunged the blade into the prisoner’s chest and into his heart. Silanus’ head was soon on its way back to Rome.
A freedman of Lucius Antistius Vetus by the name of Fortunatus, which, as it happens, means “Lucky,” now came forward and made accusations against his employer. This was the Vetus who was fatherin-law of the late Rubellius Plautus, the cousin of Agrippina the Younger executed on Tigellinus’ orders while living in self-imposed exile in Asia. Nero had never taken any action against Vetus for warning Plautus of his impending fate, but according to Tacitus, he hated Vetus and was reminded of Plautus’ execution every time he saw the man’s fatherin-law.
Another man, Claudius Demianus, whom Vetus had imprisoned while governor of Asia, also offered evidence against Vetus and in return was released from prison on Nero’s orders. Meanwhile, other freedmen on Vetus’ staff tendered testimony on their employer’s behalf, making the counteraccusation that Fortunatus had embezzled money from Vetus and had only co
me forward to accuse Vetus to cover up his own crime. When Vetus applied to the Palatium for an audience with the emperor to personally defend himself against the accusations, he was refused.
It was the month of May, and with the summer soon to arrive, Vetus collected his daughter Pollutia and his mother-in-law Sextia and withdrew from Rome to his seaside estate at Formiae, modern Formia, halfway between Rome and Neapolis on the west coast of Italy. Nero, who had also departed Rome for the season and was staying at Neapolis, ordered troops at Formiae to keep a secret watch on Vetus and his visitors. Formiae was probably one of the towns outside Rome, like Praeneste, where subunits of the German Cohorts were stationed when not on duty at the capital, and it was likely to have been German auxiliaries who now spied on Vetus.
Vetus’ daughter Pollutia, the widow of Plautus, was furious at the accusations being leveled at her father. Ever since seeing Plautus’ executioners depart with his head, Pollutia had wasted away in her sorrow, living on a near-starvation diet. Nero had acted gallantly toward women accused of crimes, so now the pale, slender Pollutia was sent by her father to Neapolis to implore Nero to give Vetus the opportunity to personally defend himself. Once Pollutia reached Neapolis, Nero’s staff forbade her to approach the emperor. So, day after day, she stood outside the doors to the house where Nero was staying and called out to him.
“Caesar, hear an innocent man!” she cried. “Don’t surrender one who has been your colleague in the consulship to the accusations of a freedman.”19
When her pleas went unanswered, Pollutia became angry and yelled reproaches and threats directed at the emperor. These, too, were ignored. Pollutia, emotionally and physically exhausted, returned to her lodgings and sent her father a message to say that she had been unsuccessful and had cast hope aside, advising him to yield to necessity. Vetus had meanwhile received word from friendly senators at Rome, where the Senate was now in session and debating the charges against him. These friends firmly advised Vetus to take the honorable way out and to redraft his will, leaving the majority of his estate to the emperor so that at least some part of it remained for his grandchildren.
The defiant Vetus declared: “I am unwilling to disgrace a life which has adhered to freedom with a final act of servility.”20
Vetus sent for Pollutia. Once she rejoined him at Formiae, in the last days of May, Vetus called in his slaves and distributed all his cash among them, then told each man and woman on his staff to take for themselves as much of his household goods as they could carry. Vetus, his daughter, and her grandmother were left with just the couches on which each of them reclined. Vetus had resolved to commit suicide, and Pollutia and the elderly Sextia chose to join him. After Vetus produced a dagger, he, Pollutia, and Sextia slit the veins of their arms. Each had previously put on a single outer garment, and now all three hurried to the villa’s bathhouse, where a warm bath had been prepared for them. They slipped into the water and waited for death to claim them. Old Sextia was the first to die. Vetus followed her. Pollutia was the last to perish.
In early June, the Senate convened and heard treason charges against all three. They were found guilty, and despite the fact that Vetus, Pollutia, and Sextia were already dead and their bodies cremated, the Senate sentenced them to execution in “ancient fashion”—strangulation with a halter, with their bodies cast into the Tiber. Nero officially imposed his imperial veto on the sentence, so that their remains were left undisturbed. At this same session of the Senate, an Equestrian who had been an acquaintance of Vetus was found guilty of having been an intimate friend of executed Praetorian prefect Faenius Rufus and was sentenced to exile.
A final motion was approved: The names of the months of April, May, and June were changed by decree of the Senate to incorporate Nero’s names. There had been precedents for this, with the month of Quintilis changed to Julius, our July, in honor of Julius Caesar, the previous century, and the month of Sextilis renamed Augustus, our August, in honor of the emperor Augustus. Nero’s names, prior to his adoption by his uncle Claudius in AD 50, had been Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. On his taking the throne, he had changed his name to Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, honoring various imperial ancestors; apart from Julius Caesar, these were Nero’s great-great-grandfather Augustus, his great-grandfather Tiberius (who was also a Nero), his grandfather Germanicus, and his uncle and adoptive father Claudius.
Now, the name of April, the month in which the Piso Plot had been thwarted, became Neroneus. The month of May, in which Vetus had died, became Claudius. And because both the latest Silanus to be executed and his previously condemned uncle were members of the Junius family, the name of the month of Junius, our June, was now declared inauspicious and renamed Germanicus.
In contrast to the tumultuous first half of AD 65, the second half of the year was quiet and undisturbed. No accusations were forthcoming, no plots unearthed, no arrests made, no sentences of death passed. Mourning deeply the loss of Poppaea and dreading more conspiracies against him, Nero was once more a recluse, with his expected departure for Greece to enter in the competitions there now on hold. Late in the year, the city of Lugdunum, modern-day Lyon, capital of the Gallic province of Gallia Lugdunensis, was severely damaged by a fire. Only several decades earlier, it had been leveled by an earthquake. After the Great Fire, Lugdunum had sent Rome a donation of four million sesterces. Now, Nero returned the compliment, sending four million sesterces as his contribution to Lugdunum’s disaster fund.
Late that year, too, a plague erupted in Rome. “The houses were filled with lifeless forms and the streets with funerals,” said Tacitus.21 Slaves and the freeborn were equally affected by the disease, and a number of Equestrians and senators fell victim to it. This same year, Campania was devastated by a hurricane that destroyed houses and crops and swept as far north as the outskirts of Rome. Both calamities were considered heavensent, as a punishment, and there were those at Rome who would blame even these disasters on Nero.
XIX
THE INFORMERS
The new year, AD 66, was barely a month old when a fresh informant worried Nero with a tale of treason on his doorstep. Four years earlier, Lucius Antistius Sosianus, a headstrong praetor, (praetors being Rome’s most senior judges), had been convicted of reading libelous verses that he had written about the emperor to a large gathering dining at the house of his friend Marius Ostorius Scapula, son of onetime governor of Britain Publius Ostorius Scapula.
The Senate was in favor of sentencing Sosianus to death, but outspoken former consul and renowned Stoic philosopher Publius Thrasea Paetus proposed a sentence of exile, saying that he wanted Sosianus to be a living example of official clemency. The consuls referred the sentence to Nero, who, far from being thin-skinned or wishing to suppress criticism, wrote back to say that while Sosianus had uttered “outrageous insults against the sovereign” unprovoked, he would not stand in the way of leniency.1
“It was strange how amazingly tolerant Nero seemed to be of insults that everyone cast at him, in the form of jokes and lampoons,” Suetonius wrote. “He never attempted to trace the authors, and, when an informer handed the Senate a short list of their names, he gave instructions that they should be let off lightly.”2 Following Nero’s lenient lead, the Senate had supported Thrasea’s motion, setting aside the death sentence and sending Sosianus into exile.
Of late, the banished Sosianus had heard from contacts at Rome how informers had been well rewarded the previous year for exposing threats against the emperor. From his place of exile across the sea, this man who had once lampooned Nero now wrote to him to say that he would “communicate important news which would contribute to his [Nero’s] safety if he could obtain a brief respite from his exile.”3 Several Liburnian warships were dispatched by the Palatium to collect Sosianus and bring him to Italy. Light and fast, Liburnian ships relied more on oar power than wind power, so that the ships sent to fetch Sosianus were able to do so in the face of the inclement winds that prevented the sailing of sail-powere
d cargo vessels at this time of year.
Before long, Sosianus was being led into Nero’s Golden House, which was still under construction. With Nero listening intently, Sosianus informed the emperor that he had learned that a Greek freedman by the name of Pammenes, who had been exiled to the same place that Sosianus had for practicing astrology at Rome, had regularly been in communication with leading men at Rome who had previously employed his services. Among these men, said Sosianus, was the wealthy former consul Publius Anteius.
Just as Sosianus had hoped, Nero pricked his ears at the mention of Anteius, a onetime favorite of his mother Agrippina. Anteius had been regularly sending money to the exiled astrologer, said Sosianus. The accuser had also succeeded in stealing a letter to Pammenes from Anteius. What was more, he had also pilfered the astrologer’s notes on Anteius’ horoscope, which included his forecast for Anteius’ future career.
Sosianus had also discovered the astrologer’s secret predictions for the life and career of Sosianus’ friend Marius Ostorius Scapula. It had been at Scapula’s house that Sosianus had read his libelous lampoons about the emperor. Scapula had subsequently testified in Sosianus’ favor during his trial in the Senate, claiming he had not heard the lampoons in question, to no avail. Despite Scapula’s support for him, Sosianus the opportunistic informer was not going to let friendship or a debt of honor stand in the way of a permanent end to his exile.
Nero eagerly read the two men’s horoscopes handed over by Sosianus, who implied that both documents had been prepared at the request of Anteius and Scapula. The zodiac was important to Romans. Every legion, for example, in addition to its unit emblem, carried the star sign representative of the time of the legion’s founding, or “birth”—frequently the sea goat of Capricorn. But the practice of astrology, forecasting of the future using the stars, had been banned by one emperor after another, and its practitioners branded charlatans. Despite this, interpretation of the zodiac had long been attractive to ambitious Romans who were prepared to flout the ban in order to see whether they were destined for great things. Anteius and Scapula had been prying into their destinies and Nero’s destiny, said Sosianus, who accused the pair of “grasping at empire.” 4 Nero sent all this information to the Senate for its consideration.
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Page 19
