A Criminal History of Mankind (33 page)

At this point, Nero’s former tutor produced an ingenious suggestion. He had been appointed commander of the fleet and told Nero that it should not be too difficult to construct a boat that would fall to pieces when at sea. Accordingly, Nero invited his mother to join him at the festival of Minerva at Baiae, on the Bay of Naples. The evening before, they dined at Bauli, not far from Baiae; the party was arranged by Nero’s millionaire friend Otho, who was also his go-between with Acte. Nero seems to have paid special attention to his mother and treated her with a kindness that suggested remorse; the aim was to lull any suspicion she might feel when he told her she was to travel by sea, he by land. Then the ship with Agrippina sailed for Baiae. It seems to have been fairly large - perhaps twenty or thirty feet long - and covered with a wooden roof. It was a still, starlit night, and Agrippina was in a good mood as she sat on a settee, with her feet in the lap of her friend Acerronia, and discussed the change in Nero’s attitude towards her. At a signal, the roof suddenly caved in, under pressure of heavy lead weights. One of Agrippina’s friends, Crepereius Gallus, was standing, and caught the full force, which killed her immediately. But the back of the settee took the weight and, since Agrippina and Acerronia were reclining, they were untouched. The ship should then have fallen apart; but apparently it failed to do so. Oarsmen who were in the assassination plot tried to capsise the ship by throwing their weight on one side. Acerronia, in an attempt to save Agrippina - for by now it must have been obvious that this was a murder attempt - began to call out: ‘Help, I’m the emperor’s mother.’ At this, the crew beat her to death with oars. The real Agrippina slipped over the side in the confusion; in spite of an injured shoulder, she managed to swim to some sailing boats, one of which took her back to Bauli.

There she sent a message to Nero saying that by the grace of the gods she had escaped a serious accident. This was undoubtedly a mistake; she should have hurried back to Rome and allowed rumour of the murder attempt to circulate so that, if Nero tried again, no one would have any doubt about the instigator.

When Agrippina’s freedman arrived with the message, Nero did some quick thinking. He had to make it appear that it was his life that was in danger, and that his mother was responsible. He dropped a sword on the ground, and then cried out that the man had been sent to kill him.

News of the attempted drowning had spread in Bauli. Crowds gathered on the seashore but were dispersed by troops. Meanwhile, Nero sent his ex-tutor - inventor of the collapsing ship - with two henchmen to kill his mother. As they forced their way into her bedchamber, she seems to have assumed that they had come to find out if she was well; then, when one of them struck her on the head with a club, she grasped the truth. Tacitus says that, as one of the men drew his sword, she presented her belly and told him to strike her there - in the womb that had borne Nero. She was hacked to pieces.

Nero, typically, was now in a state of funk, probably expecting a general revolt when the news became public. He began to feel better when two of his praetorian guards came to congratulate him on his ‘narrow escape’; it no doubt dawned on him for the first time that the emperor could do exactly as he liked. So he wrote a letter to the senate, accusing his mother of an attempt on his life; he added that, conscious of her guilt, she had paid the penalty - implying that she had committed suicide. Then he hurried to Bauli - no doubt to make sure that his mother was dead and to remove the evidence that would prove she had not died by her own hand. He is reported to have viewed the body and admired its beauty - although, in view of his dislike of blood, this is probably an invention. What is certain is that Agrippina was promptly cremated. Even so, Nero was unable to summon the courage to return to Rome and face the senate and the populace; he stayed away from March 59 A.D. - when the murder took place - until September. When he finally arrived in Rome, he was relieved to find that his popularity with the mob was unimpaired. Rome was far too accustomed to murder to be shocked at a little matricide, and an emperor who gave them such magnificent public spectacles was not to be upset.

Without the frowns of his mother to restrain him, Nero was able to fling himself into his amusements with total abandon. He began to spend his evenings in taverns with selected companions - such as Otho - break into shops, and attack late night travellers. He seems to have lost his distaste for blood to the extent of stabbing them if they struggled. His banquets lasted from midday until midnight, and, according to the
Satyricon
, a vast novel by his friend Petronius, aphrodisiacs played an important part in the menu.

Not long after his mother’s death, Nero fell in love again; the new mistress was Poppaea, the wife of his friend Otho. At first they seemed to have shared her favours; then Nero grew jealous at the thought of her sleeping with her own husband. Otho would probably have died of poison; but Nero’s tutor Seneca - a distinguished dramatist and philosopher - managed to persuade Nero to send his former friend to Portugal as a governor. Soon afterwards, to Nero’s delight, Poppaea became pregnant; he had always wanted an heir. There was only one obstacle in the way of marrying Poppaea, Nero’s wife Octavia. They had been, betrothed as children - she was the daughter of Claudius and Messalina - and she was now only just out of her teens. Her conduct was irreproachable, so she had to be ‘framed’. The commander of the guard, Tigellinus, was given the job of torturing her slaves until he had enough confessions to ensure a divorce. At this point, the unpredictable Roman populace suddenly decided to take the part of Octavia and demonstrated in front of the palace. More evidence was needed, so Nero’s friend Anicetus - the one who had designed the collapsing ship - made a public confession that he had committed adultery with Octavia and that she had aborted a child. The divorce went through. Octavia was exiled to an island and then ordered to kill herself. When she protested, Nero’s henchmen bound her and opened up her arteries. To hasten the process, she was placed in a steam bath. Tacitus states that her head was sent to Poppaea to convince her that her former rival was dead. It was something of an anticlimax when Poppaea presented Nero with a daughter.

In the following year, 64 A.D., Rome was devastated by a fire that lasted a week. The later rumour that Nero started this fire is undoubtedly false; on the other hand, there seems to be some evidence that he ‘fiddled’ while Rome burned - in fact, he took his lyre and sang a tragic song of his own composition called The Fall of Troy’. Since the fire lasted so long, Nero can hardly be accused of callousness for singing during that period; but when the story became current, it caused a steep decline in his already plummeting popularity. When the fire was finally halted - by demolishing public buildings - Nero seems to have behaved rather well. He organised relief, had large quantities of corn brought in from Ostia, and cut its price to one sixteenth of normal.

Why should Nero have wanted to start a fire? According to the historians, because he wanted to clear a large area in the centre of the city to build himself a new palace. In fact, Nero did build himself an immense and magnificent palace called the Golden House. He also rebuilt a great deal of the rest of Rome. But the rumours of his responsibility for the fire persisted, and Nero looked for scapegoats. This was no problem, since Rome was now full of members of a ‘deadly superstition’ called Christianity. (Tacitus mentions that its prophet, Jesus, had been executed in Tiberius’s reign by Pontius Pilate.) Rumours of the ‘notoriously depraved Christians’ spread. The Romans disliked Christians partly because they were associated with the Jews, and the Jews were regarded as religious fanatics who caused endless trouble. Tacitus also remarks that the Christians hated the human race. To the Romans, this foreign religious sect, with its belief in the imminent end of the world, must have seemed almost insane. If the Christians hated ‘earthly things’, then it seemed quite possible that they might have started the great fire. What struck the Romans as even more incredible and disgusting was that many of these Christians seemed to have no fear of dying for their religion and confessed to it willingly. So the Christians were killed with exceptional ferocity. They were smeared with tar and tied. to posts, to be ignited as living torches after dark. They were dressed in animal skins and then set upon by wild dogs, who tore them to pieces. They were thrown to wild beasts in the arena, and crucified in enormous numbers. And yet, paradoxically, Nero’s good intentions backfired. He had overestimated the bloodthirstiness of the Roman populace. People were sickened by so much torture, and his popularity declined yet again.

Nero’s problem was that he was too self-absorbed to react to the state of public opinion. It seemed to him that he was an excellent emperor who was always giving the public what it wanted. As to being bloodthirsty, he felt it was shockingly untrue. In 61 A.D., the prefect of the city had been murdered by one of his slaves - probably in a homosexual quarrel - and law decreed that every slave under the same roof be executed, including women and children. The populace rioted on behalf of the unfortunate slaves - four hundred of them - and Nero, who was a liberal in theory, agreed entirely with the people. The senate felt otherwise - they were afraid that, if murder by slaves was tolerated, they might all be murdered in their beds. So soldiers had to line the route when the four hundred men, women and children were taken to execution, and the populace had put the blame on Nero. He felt that he was a misunderstood saint. His reaction to this latest misunderstanding was to spend more money, organise more games and entertainments, and to spend more time in the company of selected sycophants such as the elegant aesthete Petronius. (But Petronius eventually fell from favour; accused by Tigellinus of plotting against Nero’s life, he committed suicide by severing his veins in his bath.)

In 65 A.D., Poppaea died; Nero had lost his temper and kicked her when she was pregnant. Her death shattered him; the funeral was of unparalleled lavishness, and the spices that were burned were the equivalent of a full year’s supply from Arabia. Poppaea was pronounced a goddess; Nero’s fancy fell upon a eunuch named Sporus, whose looks reminded him of Poppaea. Suetonius alleges that it was Nero who made Sporus into a eunuch by castrating him, attempting to turn him into a girl. He then went through a wedding ceremony with Sporus, dressed him in female clothes and treated him like a wife. The orgies became wilder, Nero seems to have discovered the pleasures of binding, and invented a new game. Men and women were tied to stakes, and Nero, dressed as a wild beast, came bounding at them and pretended to eat their genitals. The game ended with Nero being sodomised by his freedman Doryphorus. Apparently anxious to try every sexual experience, Nero had another ‘wedding ceremony’ performed - according to the scandal-loving Suetonius - with himself as the bride and Doryphorus as the groom; while being deflowered he imitated the screams and moans of a girl.

Nero found it easy to slip into the Roman habit of ordering executions whenever he felt like it. A half-hearted conspiracy to murder him, led by an aristocrat named Piso, provided him with an admirable excuse in 65 A.D.; Petronius was one of the victims on this occasion; so was Nero’s old tutor Seneca. Unlike Claudius, Nero derived no pleasure from watching men die; instead, he preferred to order them to commit suicide. Soon he was adding disapproving senators to the list, in the best tradition of Tiberius and Caligula. It began to dawn on the senate that getting rid of Nero was a matter of self-preservation.

Meanwhile, Nero was preoccupied with grandiose schemes. He was rebuilding Rome, with wide streets and buildings of stone and marble. His own Golden House had an arcade a mile long, and his apartments were plated in gold set with jewels. The ceilings slid back so that showers of perfume could be sprinkled down, or a rain of flowers. (Flowers were a kind of status symbol in Rome - one rich man spent a hundred thousand pounds - four million sesterces - on roses for one banquet.) At the entrance stood an immense statue of Nero, twelve storeys high.

In 67 A.D. - the twelfth year of his reign - Nero set off on a tour of Greece, taking part in various games and contests. He continued to be obsessed by the thought of plots against him and, while he was in Greece, sent for his greatest general, Corbulo, and ordered him to commit suicide; as he died, Corbulo murmured the ambiguous phrase ‘Serves me right’. Nero also suspected the loyalty of his Rhine armies - completely without reason - and sent for the two brothers who commanded the provinces on the Rhine. Without being allowed to defend themselves or see Nero, these were also ordered to commit suicide.

But things were already drifting towards the point of no return. In Judea, the Roman prefect was causing deep offence by trying to force the temple treasury to pay enormous tax arrears, and when he allowed his men to plunder parts of Jerusalem, Jewish terrorists organised a revolt; the Roman population of Jerusalem was massacred. The governor of Syria tried to recapture Jerusalem and was driven back with heavy losses. Nero appointed a middle-aged general named Vespasian to suppress the revolt. Then, in March 68, he heard that the governor of Gaul, Gaius Vindex, had also rebelled, after issuing a proclamation denouncing Nero’s extravagances. He was supported by Galba, the governor of Nearer Spain, and by Nero’s one-time friend Otho, governor of Portugal. The neurotic emperor was thrown into a panic by the news, and it was obvious to his guards that he was totally incapable of dealing with the situation - he left the dining-room one day with his arms around the shoulders of two friends, explaining that he intended to go to Gaul, stand in front of the rebel army and weep and weep until they felt sorry for him; then, he said, he would stroll among his troops singing paeans of victory - which, come to think of it, he ought to be composing at this very moment. What really seems to have cut him to the quick was a comment by Vindex that Nero played the lyre very badly.