The Twelve Caesars Page 15

  Nero is alone among the twelve Caesars in succeeding to the throne without political experience: even Gaius and Claudius managed a magistracy apiece (Gaius the quaestorship, Claudius a consulship). Instead, at the outset, he ruled with the assistance of a philosopher of academic bent who delighted ‘in boys past their prime’ – Seneca;1 and a guardsman with a deformed arm who had begun his career as overseer of estates belonging to Livia – Burrus. It was a notably successful arrangement. The hostile nature of the sources makes it difficult to form an accurate assessment of Nero’s own capabilities. On the face of it, this seventeen-year-old of violent temper was ill placed to negotiate unaided the challenges of the principate – an arbitration between determined and implacable factions advocating arguments he may not have understood. All we can conclude with certainty is that, at a certain point, he put behind him Seneca’s lessons. ‘Cruel and inexorable anger is not seemly for a king,’ the latter wrote in the treatise On Mercy at the beginning of Nero’s reign: the good ruler is one ‘whose care embraces all, who, while guarding here with greater vigilance, there with less, yet fosters each and every part of the state as a portion of himself; who is inclined to the milder course even if it would profit him to punish’.2 Nero’s downfall embraced a failure of vigilance, the duty of care neglected or misapplied: it is partly attributable to his lack of interest in ‘each and every part of the state’.

  At the outset, however, a ‘milder course’. The poet Calpurnius Siculus hailed the return of the Golden Age, an era of tranquillity and peace. Coins in Alexandria acclaimed Nero as the New Augustus. Nero asked the senate’s permission to erect a statue to his father Domitius (family piety satisfied); he declined a senatorial grant of his own statues in gold and silver.3 Like Gaius and Claudius emperor by descent, with no claims of merit or auctoritas, he stated ‘that he would rule according to the principles of Augustus’, a deliberate avoidance of the complex legacies of Augustus’ successors; according to Suetonius, he missed no opportunity for acts of generosity and mercy or displays of affability. He signed a death warrant with a heavy heart and the lament, ‘How I wish I had never learned to write!’ Briefly he made use of his status as son of the deified Claudius, no more a believer in fact than those senators who had jeered at Claudius’ elevation or the audiences who applauded Seneca’s satirical dramatization, the Apocolocyntosis, performed during the Saturnalia of 54. Four decades after Augustus’ death, his remained the only model of government by princeps sufficiently successful for imitation. It was an indication of a deeply fissured system and the impossibility of extending indefinitely one man’s vision. For a young man untrained in government, already betraying signs of distraction, it was a toxic prescription. Nero may have been doomed to fail. Perhaps he is a victim as well as a villain.

  His early aversion to bloodshed, as we shall see, evaporated. So too that stage-fright which, at the beginning of his reign, preserved his imperial dignity. (By the time of his death, Dio tells us, he was making desperate, but nevertheless serious, plans to earn his living as a lyre-player in Alexandria.4) Song, slaughter, sex, subversion and a search for sensation became the stuff of his supremacy. As Edgar describes him in King Lear, ‘Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.’ In the end he simply ignored unpalatable truths. Inertia cost Nero his throne, ever after dismissed as fiddling while Rome burned. The lake of darkness yielded only further depths of black.

  With hindsight, diverted by the rainbow hues of ancient scandal mongering, it is easy to dismiss Nero’s principate as an interlude of madness, when every extremism thrived and the business of government took second place to the spectacular unravelling of one man’s fancies. The emperor himself certainly took a novel line on Roman leadership. But Nero was not Gaius. His interpretation of the principate was distorted not by mental instability but by wilfulness, distraction and a misinterpretation of the political power base of his position. He pursued an agenda of stage performances, chariot-races, singing competitions and, in the form of his Golden House in Rome, an architectural extravaganza of unprecedented magnitude and lavishness. These efforts wowed crowds in Italy and Greece. Yet real influence remained the possession of a traditional senatorial elite, which was alienated by behaviour it regarded at best as undignified, at worst as un-Roman and subversive. Where we are misled by the sources – written by upper-class conservatives – is in accepting their verdict of a Nero who was universally detested. On the contrary, those public demonstrations of profanity exposed Nero to a larger audience than any previous Roman ruler. In conjunction with his sumptuous generosity in the matter of public games and spectacles, they won him the foundations of a large, partly apolitical following and created those well-springs of popular feeling which survived his death and were afterwards exploited in the short reign of his former confidant Otho. Decades after Nero’s suicide, a ‘false’ Nero was reported in the eastern Empire. This second coming set hearts a-flutter. Even in Rome, his tomb in the family grave of the Domitii, on the Pincian Hill in sight of the Campus Martius, was for many springs and summers decorated with garlands of flowers. For a man who had revelled in godlessness, secretly sneering as he expedited Claudius’ divine honours, despising all cults bar that of the Great Mother (and even pissing on her statue), it was immortality after a fashion.

  It was also suggestive of an approach to love, an ingredient in short supply in any account of Nero’s life. His father had died when he was three. His banished mother had abandoned him, leaving him in Rome while she journeyed to temporary perdition. He was brought up by an aunt in straitened circumstances, Domitia Lepida, whom he claimed to revere like a mother but later poisoned in old age in order to lay hands on her estates at Baiae. In Domitia’s house his education was entrusted to a dancer and a barber, low-grade tutors for a prince of the imperial house. Rome’s sixth Caesar was greater than the sum of these parts. Despite ancient historians’ emphasis on heredity – Suetonius furnishes the reader with vivid examples of his family’s miscreancy ‘to show more clearly that though Nero degenerated from the good qualities of his ancestors, he yet reproduced the vices of each of them, as if transmitted to him by natural inheritance’ – we can understand Nero as much as a product of his times as an amalgam of bloodlines. He was fond of quoting a Greek proverb, ‘Hidden music counts for nothing.’ And indeed his life acquired over time a flaunting, prodigal quality, no light too dim to merit concealment beneath a bushel. To waste and to squander were the hallmark of the great nobleman, he believed: he admired Gaius for nothing so much as the speed at which he ran through Tiberius’ carefully hoarded surplus. The last of the Julio-Claudians embodied the weaknesses of a dynasty and a generation. With him died much of that culture of riotous excess which was the antidote to centuries of determined Republican austerity, when sumptuary laws had sought to legislate even the quantities of jewellery a woman might wear.

  At a moment when the rule book was being comprehensively challenged, Nero played the lord of misrule, a thrill-seeking potentate who elevated pleasure more than principle and deluded himself that art and life could merge. ‘Pleasure is extinguished just when it is most enjoyed,’ wrote Seneca in On the Happy Life.5 With no interest in philosophy, an aspect of his education overruled by Agrippina, Nero worked hard to hold that extinction at bay. Intermittently he transformed the capital of empire into a playground of the senses. In 64, assisted by the Praetorian prefect Tigellinus, this emperor, whose ‘unshaken conviction [was] that no man was chaste or pure in any part of his body’, threw a party which reinvented the Campus Martius, one-time training-ground of soldiers and would-be soldiers, as a giant brothel and drinking den. While Nero cavorted on a purple-draped raft floating in the centre of the Stagnum of Agrippa, naked prostitutes patrolled the shores or languished in gimcrack pavilions alongside virgins and noblewomen all dedicated for one night only to the thrill of easy sex. Taverns ran with wine. Lust and drunkenness contended for the upper hand: rape and violent, bloody orgies were the outcome. Nero himself, rowed by male ta
rts, underwent a marriage to an ex-slave, Pythagoras, the emperor dressed as a bride.6 On the shore, brawling led to a handful of killings.

  It was a night of ecstatic subversion in which Nero failed to countenance the possibility of reprisals, an outcome similar to that of Messalina’s marriage travesty fifteen years earlier. But if the commons revelled in this unashamed pandering to baser instincts, that kernel of steel-spined conservatism which was still engrained in a minority of Roman aristocrats refused to yield to persuasion. Nero’s mistake, like that of Gaius before him, was to imagine that he could discount lip-service to a past he did not remember. In ruling without apologies, he exposed the hypocrisy of Augustus’ magnificent deceit. But it was he, not Augustus’ memory, who suffered. As the civil wars following Nero’s death would show, Romans were not yet ready to dispense with the fabrications Augustus had bequeathed them as he robbed them of their liberty. An emperor there must be, the army demanded it. But an emperor whose dialogue with Rome extended beyond salacious gewgaws to a meaningful political exchange, the flexibility to alternate the master’s and the servant’s part in pursuit of a greater good.

  A marble statue survives of Nero as a child. He was not called Nero then, we know, but Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, named for his father’s family. Around his neck, he wears the gold bulla (locket) of upper-class Roman boyhood; his face is broad, open and untroubled. His eyes – afterwards short-sighted – appear large and somewhat staring. In one hand he extends a document rolled into a scroll. It is an image of adulthood in miniature, patrician precocity, the iconography of the insider. Given its probable date (post-dating Agrippina’s marriage to Claudius but preceding the latter’s adoption of her son), it is partly an exercise in wishful thinking. Nero owed his career to his mother, as we learn from Dio that she reminded him on at least one occasion. In his veins, as in her veins, flowed Augustus’ blood. This was the nominal justification for Nero’s pre-eminence, but as the example of countless imperial heirs from Agrippa Postumus to Tiberius Gemellus attested, it was not a guarantee. The path to the purple, as mother and son understood and as we have seen, was not so straightforward.

  It was accomplished satisfactorily, however, on 13 October 54. Agrippina stage-managed the announcement of Claudius’ death, waiting until the day’s resolutely bad omens showed signs of improving. Nero, accompanied by the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Afranius Burrus, an appointment of Agrippina’s, delivered a speech to the Guard written for him by Seneca and promised a generous cash donative. All went smoothly. Murder, mendacity, money and an obdurate mother made Nero emperor.

  Far from protesting, the teenage princeps acknowledged his indebtedness by giving ‘The Best of Mothers’ to the tribune of the Guards as the first watchword of the reign. ‘He left to his mother,’ Suetonius announces, ‘the management of all public and private business.’ Dio’s account suggests that the ‘giving’ may have been taken from him by that redoubtable parent, a subtle shift in subject and object, active and passive, which is undoubtedly important: ‘At first Agrippina managed for him all the business of the empire.’7 This unorthodox arrangement, unique in Roman history to date and posing insuperable constitutional problems, was recorded in gold and silver coins minted between 4 and 31 December. Nero occupies one side of the coin, Agrippina the other. The position of their twin busts is significant: it is Agrippina who takes the obverse, Nero the reverse, the emperor placed physically and symbolically below his mother. ‘My youth has not been steeped in civil war or family strife. I bring with me no feuds, no grievances, no desire for vengeance,’ Nero had announced with careful disingenuousness in his accession speech to the senate.8 Seneca, who also owed his position to Agrippina, may have written the words without irony. But family strife, feuding and grievance lay close at hand. Their source was Agrippina’s overweening ambition, testified by those coins created by a mint which we assume that she, rather than Nero, influenced. By 55, a second series of coins had been issued, Nero’s bust joining Agrippina’s on the obverse side, the emperor’s likeness in the position of greater significance: unparalleled honours for the emperor’s mother still, but surely a falling-off from the dizzy apotheosis of weeks earlier. So swiftly was the Augusta’s supremacy checked.

  She may not have been surprised. In Dio’s account, Nero’s lack of interest in governing the Empire is not something which emerges gradually but a characteristic of his response to the purple from the outset: ‘he was not fond of business in any case, and was glad to live in idleness.’9 The thirst for power was Agrippina’s. Nero’s loyalty belonged to those who facilitated his idleness with least hectoring. The major development of the first year of his reign was the transfer of that baton from Agrippina to Seneca and Burrus, described by Tacitus as two men connected by a unity rare among partners in power and, by different methods, equally influential on Nero. ‘Burrus’ strength lay in soldierly efficiency and seriousness of character, Seneca’s in amiable high principles and his tuition of Nero in public speaking.’10 It is difficult to exonerate Agrippina from all responsibility. Anti-female bias aside, the record of the sources suggests that she wilfully overreached herself.

  In late 54, Armenian envoys travelled to Rome. Tacitus relates with indignation Agrippina’s behaviour at their reception at court. The Augusta ‘was seen to be about to seat herself alongside the emperor and preside over the tribunal with him’ when Seneca intervened: his quick-fire suggestion that Nero descend the steps of the dais to greet his mother and thus deflect her advance averted scandal and enabled Tacitus to breathe freely again.11 It was a careful rebuke. What we cannot know is whether Agrippina’s action was simply in line with her customary behaviour during her marriage to Claudius.

  At Seneca’s instigation, Nero held the consulship in 55. It was an appointment that brought with it enhanced dignitas of a sort which Agrippina as a woman could not rival. Its award was also, as she would have understood, in line with the policy followed by the majority of Nero’s predecessors of monopolizing this senior magistracy in order to assert more fully their own dominance of the senate. Agrippina’s mistake in 55 did not consist of claiming consulships for herself or opposing Nero’s appointment: her attempted governance was of a more overtly petticoats variety. She intervened in Nero’s first recorded romantic entanglement.

  Acte was a freedwoman from Asia Minor. Suetonius lists the liaison within an inventory of Nero’s sexual and marital misdemeanours and claims that the youthful emperor came close to marriage with the former slave, ‘after bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves by swearing that she was of royal birth’. But in 55 Nero remained unhappily married to Claudius’ daughter Octavia, whom he had wed, presumably as a result of Agrippina’s machinations, the year before Claudius’ death. Irked by a combination of jealousy and snobbery – a former slave exerting greater influence in the imperial household than a granddaughter of Augustus and the emperor’s mother – Agrippina requested Nero to break off the relationship. Her behaviour lacked the woman’s touch or even simple charm. She dismissed Acte as ‘her daughter-in-law the maid’ and, torrential in her anger, trained her attention on Nero’s friends too, loud in her condemnation (among their number was the future emperor Otho who, as we will see, acquired a history of playing gooseberry in Nero’s flirtations).12 When Nero refused, Agrippina resorted to threats. Even given Nero’s limited political acumen, he must have recognized the hollowness of her intimation that, having once made him emperor, she could now imperil that position. Doubtless Seneca discreetly corrected any misapprehensions. Since Seneca had encouraged the liaison with Acte – an indication that, despite Suetonius’ demonizing of the relationship, wise, moderate counsellors considered it essentially harmless – the outcome was to push Nero further from his mother and closer to his tutor. A pattern had been set which would last for the next five years, with almost uniformly happy results for everyone bar Agrippina. Temperamentally incapable of quiet retreat, Agrippina briefly adopted a course of dissembling, offering herself in the
role of pander and aiding Nero’s meetings with Acte. The emperor’s friends blew her cover and Agrippina embraced again her preferred mode of attack, making overtures to Britannicus in Nero’s place and leaving Nero to draw his own inferences. Nero for his part turned his attention to Pallas, Agrippina’s freedman helpmeet and lover, whom he sacked, perhaps on grounds of financial irregularities. It was a double blow for Agrippina. There was worse to come.

  Suetonius’ Life of Nero includes a ghoulish account of a series of experiments in poisoning conducted in the emperor’s private apartments at the palace. The poisoner is again Locusta, at Nero’s order her intended victim on this occasion apparently Britannicus, ‘not less from jealousy of his voice (for it was more agreeable than Nero’s own) than from fear that he might sometime win a higher place than himself in the people’s regard’, a neat dismissal which simultaneously accuses Nero the karaoke king-turned-killer of murder and silliness. Once Locusta had developed a mix strong enough to inflict instant death, Nero made plans to administer it to Britannicus. Predictably the latter ‘dropped dead at the very first taste’, a result which shocked his fellow diners, including Agrippina and his sister Octavia. Wholly unconcerned, Nero attributed the mishap to epilepsy.6 Dio admits no possibility of death by epileptic seizure. Nero’s poison, he claims, turned Britannicus’ body livid. Slaves covered the tell-tale blotches with gypsum, but the furtive funeral took place in driving rain, which washed off that thin enamelling of innocence, exposing Nero’s guilt. The emperor rewarded Locusta with large estates in the country. No one sought retribution on Britannicus’ part; indeed, Tacitus suggests that Nero’s popularity overrode any serious examination of the implications of his misdeed. Agrippina was forced to reach her own conclusion on her future wellbeing in the light of Nero’s revelation that, in pursuit of his own ends, he (like his mother) baulked at few constraints.