The Twelve Caesars (25 page)

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 tarts, 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.

Such a pre-emptive strike on Nero’s part represented a momentum of sorts and swiftly acquired an inexorability which looked to deny the Augusta room for rearguard action. First she was
deprived of the soldiers who protected her. Then she was removed from the palace. Nero had made plain his intention towards her. She was probably still safe as long as she behaved with
circumspection and accepted the new role Nero had determined for her. But as Agrippina survives in the sources – a termagant of tunnel vision tortured by ambition – she was incapable of
such a course.