The Twelve Caesars (24 page)

Nero
: Marble head of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus © Lagui

H
is pack mules shod with silver, Nero travelled far from Rome. To Greece and back again, though metaphorically he flunked
the homeward journey. Philhellenism was not a virtue in the Caesars’ Rome. This philandering poetaster cherished ‘a longing for immortality and undying fame’. He sang, raced,
fiddled and fucked his way to ignominy, all in public view: in private he kicked and he killed. His infamy lives yet. The Greeks rewarded him with prizes. ‘They alone,’ he said,
‘were worthy of his efforts.’ Only the Greeks had an ear for music. But Nero’s ‘Greek’ tastes embraced more than singing or the cithara. One of his spouses was a young
boy called Sporus. Nero had him castrated, so that he could serve him lifelong as his ‘wife’. (Sporus was indeed loyal to the end, a rare example of fidelity in this story.) He also
married his freedman Doryphorus: in this case it was Nero who played the wife, ‘going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered’ as Doryphorus set to
work. Riding in a carriage with his mother, Nero offended even that primordial relationship: stains on his clothes betrayed the guilty couple. (Happy, then, that this spendthrift emperor, who
fished with a golden fishing net, never wore the same clothes twice.) Nero’s was a reign of histrionic excess: thanks to Monteverdi and Handel, its tortuous and hazardous relationships
survive today in the opera house.
After his death his memory was condemned by decree of the senate: his historiography offers rich pickings for scandalmongers. Perversion,
incest and murder notwithstanding, for the layman he is damned by his response to Rome’s biggest bonfire night: the emperor who, in
AD
64, made music while his people
perished and the city tumbled to torches of fire.

He was born feet-first, an unlucky sign in Rome, and his birth was attended by portents promising murder and a throne (perhaps a convenient afterthought on the part of our chroniclers). In
addition to ‘acts of wantonness, lust and extravagance’, his topsy-turvy career, standing his world upon its head, embraced ‘avarice and cruelty’. Suetonius describes him
once as beguiled by dreams of the lost treasure of Queen Dido (when his rest was not shattered by nightmares, haunted by the ghost of the mother whom by then he had killed). That mythical booty was
promised to him by a Roman knight, who had glimpsed it in huge caves in Africa. Such cavalier promises were the stuff of life to Nero, the quotidian replaced by poetry, dreams in place of action:
illusions – or delusions – of grandeur. When he sat down to dinner in his brand-new palace, the Golden House, the ceiling revolved, a heavyweight mechanism operated by nothing more
complex than water. Through a tracery of ivory panels flowers and perfume rained down upon the emperor’s guests. In Nero’s Neverland, albeit the man himself stank mightily (his skin
pocked with blemishes, ‘his body marked with spots and malodorous’), for twelve hours at a stretch life could be a bed of roses. His banquets were daylong affairs. He rose only to cool
himself down in snow-chilled water or warm himself up, never in the interests of business. Like Gaius before him, Nero was emperor part-time. As elderly senators were quick to note, he was the
first
princeps
of Rome to employ a ghostwriter for his speeches. His choice, made for
him by his mother, fell upon no less a luminary than writer and philosopher
Lucius Annaeus Seneca. At the time it may have been sensible: later it looked like detachment – even worse, like play-acting.

His horrible father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, ‘a man hateful in every walk of life’, committed incest with his sister, killed a boy for kicks and, in full view of the crowds in
the Forum, gouged out the eyes of a colleague who criticized him. Vicious and untroubled by public contempt, he is a challenge to historians’ impartiality. As a young man, his son Nero roamed
the streets after dark, disguised by a wig or cap or dressed as a slave. In company with friends and members of his guard, he raided brothels, smashed and looted shops, and attacked passers-by with
blows and daggers. In 56, he came close to losing his eyes in such an encounter: a senator called Julius Montanus took the opportunity of darkness to avenge himself on an affront made by Nero to
Montanus’ wife. With grim complacency Domitius had claimed that no one of whom he was father and Agrippina mother could be anything but a scourge and a terror to the public. And so, in a
shadowy alley-way in the second year of Nero’s reign, it seemed to be. But Nero’s cruelty did not long delight in casual violence. Chariot-racing, wrestling bouts, acting and singing
competitions cooled the heat of his temper. By contrast the killings of his reign were directed at political opponents. Unlike his three immediate predecessors, we have no reason to assume that
Nero particularly enjoyed their deaths.

In time, he threatened that he would blot out the entire senatorial order ‘and hand over the rule of the provinces and the command of the armies to the Roman knights and to his
freedmen’. Whether he meant it or not, it was a plan the ancients could not permit. The result may be a fictionalized Nero
emerging from the styluses of the earliest
writers, an archetype of evil offensive to the national myths of the Republic still dear to Tacitus et al. Little wonder this senate-hater is accused of sexual incontinence and tyranny. Such, we
know, are the aspersions cast by our sources upon their political opponents. The story repeats itself: Julius, Tiberius, Gaius, even Claudius. In Nero’s case, much of his startling
waywardness may be true: there is a homogeneity to the sources’ extremism which is persuasive in itself.

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.