The Twelve Caesars (26 page)

Nero’s thoughts had already turned to his musical career. In Britannicus’ death he had eliminated one challenger. It was not
enough. His early
education had included a musical component. Now as emperor he summoned the leading lyre-player of the time, Terpnus, to play and sing for him. For many nights, Nero simply listened. Then he
embarked on a course of practice and a strenuous training regime which involved abstinence from fruit, regular emetics and self-induced vomiting, and lying on his back under a lead plate in order
to strengthen his chest. At one level it testifies to a degree of self-discipline that was alien to Gaius; it also outlines the first stirrings of an obsession.

The combined influence of Seneca and Burrus prevented Nero’s wholehearted surrender to his artistic ‘vocation’ at this stage. ‘The senate shall keep its ancient
powers,’ Nero had asserted in his accession speech. It would become no more than a form of words but in the beginning it implied a two-way compact in which
princeps
and senate both had
roles to play. Nero delivered judgements carefully, not as many as Claudius but less capriciously, after deliberating over written opinions; he prevented sons of freedmen from becoming senators, a
conservative policy which ought to have won golden opinions among the political classes; and following the killing by one of his slaves of Lucius Pedanius Secundus, former city prefect, Nero upheld
unpopular legislation which insisted on every slave in Pedanius’ household being killed. After the power struggles of emperor and senate which had characterized recent reigns, the city
fathers were surely impressed by Nero resisting so obvious a chance to win popularity at their expense. Either the emperor or his advisers re-examined tax-collecting and, in keeping with another
accession-speech promise, Nero distanced himself from the culture of informing. It was a parade of good behaviour managed with something of that amiability to which he laid claim as part of his
inheritance from Germanicus. In relation to Rome’s upper classes, it served the same purpose as
Nero’s accession gift to every Roman citizen of a sum of money
which has been estimated as equivalent to a year’s supply of wheat (Romans’ staple diet).
¹³

After Acte, a less benign temptress. Once the
egoïsme à deux
of Nero and Agrippina had been unthinking. Jointly they had publicized a story that Nero was
defended by snakes. (When Messalina sent assassins to kill Nero in bed, a snake emerged from his pillow and routed the would-be killer. In the process it shed its skin. Agrippina had the skin
fashioned into a bracelet, which Nero wore as a guarantee of his safety.) But in Rome, snakes took many forms. The serpent that finally outmanoeuvred Nero’s mother bathed in asses’ milk
to dispel ‘all diseases and blights from her beauty’. Graced by every quality save virtue, Poppaea Sabina first became a sexual obsession for Nero, afterwards a wife whom he loved with
angry intensity (and as angrily killed) – that aspect of Poppaea’s life which survives in Monteverdi’s opera
The Coronation of Poppaea
with its emphasis on love. Like
Agrippina, discounting baroque opera, Poppaea has fallen foul of history. Her contemporaries disliked her too, publicly demonstrating against her. In 59, Poppaea was married to Nero’s fellow
reveller Marcus Salvius Otho. Unwilling to share her, Nero banished Otho to provincial governorship in modern-day Portugal. (In doing so, he provided the basis for Otho’s later claims to the
principate.) Sources describe Poppaea as no more willing to share Nero than he was to share her. The price of her love was Nero’s divorce of Octavia – and the removal of Agrippina. In
Tacitus’ hands it becomes one of the great dramatic set pieces of classical literature. In the history of the principate it represents a critical development. ‘Everyone
longed for the mother’s domination to end. But no one believed that her son’s hatred would go as far as murder.’ The emperor not only killed his mother but escaped
unpunished, the ‘happy’ outcome celebrated in acts of thanksgiving in shrines and temples and a vote of annual games at the Festival of Minerva. Even senators added their voices to the
clangour of untruths, a single arch conservative, Thrasea Paetus, walking out of the senate in protest at this policy of whitewash. Such blanket acquiescence is a symptom of debasement, one ground
for that lowly estimate placed on the crown during the year of upheavals which followed Nero’s death.

The plan depended on an ingenious if far-fetched contrivance: a collapsing ship. It was the brainchild of Nero’s boyhood tutor Anicetus, now commander of the fleet at Misenum. The
unpredictability of the sea offered a cloak for dark deeds and Nero invited Agrippina to join him at Baiae to celebrate Minerva’s festival. He installed her in a splendid mansion; offshore an
equally splendid ship lay becalmed at anchor. That night, in his own house, Nero hosted a banquet of long-drawn splendour. Afterwards he conducted his mother to the jetty for her homeward journey.
The brightness of the moon was a blow to best-laid plans, but there could be no retreat. On a millpond sea, stilly reflecting a million stars, the ‘accident’ happened. Heavy lead
weights caused the ceiling of the ship’s cabins to fall. There were casualties but Agrippina was not among them. The high sides of her couch protected the Augusta and her waiting woman.
Instead, both fell into the sea. The waiting woman, Acerronia, shouted that she was Agrippina and must be rescued. Sailors in Nero’s pay battered her to death with oars. Silently, stealthily,
Agrippina swam for her life. A fishing boat rescued her and returned her to the house from which all peacefulness had vanished. She saw everything.

Agrippina sent word to Nero of her terrible ‘accident’ and her survival. He knew already, reduced by the knowledge to a frenzy of panic. Nero summoned Seneca
and Burrus for advice, but again it was Anicetus who seized the initiative. When Agrippina’s messenger arrived, Nero dropped a sword at his feet and promptly had him arrested on suspicion of
trying to kill him. With a convoy of men, Anicetus set out for Agrippina’s house. He dispelled the crowds of watchers who had gathered, drawn by curiosity. Then he slew each and every slave
who stood between him and the bedroom in which, half in darkness, Agrippina waited with a single maidservant. Through the flickering lamplight, this former employee bent on revenge advanced towards
his quarry. The maidservant fled. But Agrippina stood resolute. ‘I know my son is not responsible,’ she said. ‘He did not order his mother’s death.’ A truncheon blow
to the head shortly silenced her. Stunned but still, in Tacitus’ account, mistress of the dramatic scenario, schooled in the dynamics of the Roman way of death, she placed her hands above her
womb. Two last words: ‘Strike here!’ Like rain the blows fell.

For the first time in his life, Nero found himself dreaming while he slept. Dark, portentous dreams – in Suetonius’ history, the wages of sin, restlessness the tyrant’s lot.
The emperor was twenty-two. The biographer does not countenance the possibility of remorse. Although his conscience pricked him so hard that he summoned priests to conjure up his mother’s
shade and beg her forgiveness, he did not utter a single penitent word. When, probably in 64, Nero made his debut on the Roman stage, his repertoire included a song Suetonius calls ‘Orestes
the Matricide’. It told the story of Clytemnestra’s murder by her son. That such a performance should have been contemplated tells us something of the moral temperature of the times, as
well as
the collapse of that policy once pursued by Seneca and Burrus of distancing Nero’s public life of rectitude from his private viciousness.

The year after Agrippina’s murder, the appearance of a comet was interpreted as a presentiment of a change of ruler. (A descendant of Tiberius, Rubellius Plautus, was suggested; Nero
requested his banishment and killed him later.) Perhaps the ancient authors invented the phenomenon to underscore Nero’s unsuitability and demonstrate that alternatives existed within the
emperor’s own extended family. If so, the time was not ripe. Nero’s hold on power remained strong. With Agrippina dead, awaiting immortalization by Handel, he later divorced Octavia on
trumped-up charges of adultery and barrenness.
⁷
Nero banished Octavia to Pandateria and there ordered her death. Then he married Poppaea. He
created her Augusta and the couple had a daughter, who shortly died. Poppaea died too, in 65, after a miscarriage and severe haemorrhaging. The sources preserve a rumour that Nero caused his
wife’s death, also her miscarriage. Furious at Poppaea for criticizing his late return from the chariot-races, he kicked her repeatedly in the stomach. His reputation permits such an
explanation.

Throat cancer was the most likely cause of Burrus’ death in 62. Having murdered his mother and his brother, Nero could not expect to escape without accusations of poison.
Burrus’
replacements as Praetorian prefect were Faenius Rufus and Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus. The former had acquired a reputation for honesty and efficiency in his
organization of Rome’s grain supply; the latter proved the dominant personality despite – or perhaps because of – the considerable animosity felt towards him by the senate.
Following their appointment, Tacitus claimed, ‘decent standards carried less weight... now Nero listened to more disreputable advisers’, and Seneca petitioned Nero to allow him to
retire, having first offered to give up his fortune.
¹⁴
Nero declined both offers, though a plea of illness on Seneca’s part had the same effect as resignation; he transferred much of his
dependence on his former tutor to Tigellinus, a man whose interests like his own emphasized debauchery at the expense of statecraft. Nero’s marriage to Poppaea in the same year had completed
the shift in tone of the imperial regime. The new empress’s inclination was for magnificence: her funeral would later suggest affinities with Eastern concepts of royal divinity closer to
Gaius’ preoccupations than those of the Nero of the early years. If it is possible to discern a turning point in the conduct of government in Nero’s reign, it occurred in 62. The
emperor made further breaks with the past. This was the year of Pallas’ death as well as that of Nero’s former freedman lover Doryphorus; Tacitus claims poisoning on Nero’s
instructions in both cases. In a development which presaged a revival in
maiestas
(treason) trials, the emperor expelled from Italy a scribbler called Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento,
after the latter had written a wittily slanderous spoof will which included Nero among the targets of its mordant maligning. In this case Veiento escaped with his life. But attitudes were hardening
on the Palatine. The senate looked on with unease.

Despite his misgivings, Nero’s entry into Rome following the death of Agrippina was received with rapture. For the observant there were signs that
that feeling was neither universal nor deeply engrained. Suetonius reports Nero’s relaxed response to lampoons circulating in the city. Graffiti proliferated: it accused the emperor outright
of matricide. It may not have been benign. The most famous event of Nero’s principate, occurring in 64, demonstrated the depth of ambivalence which existed towards the emperor ten years after
his accession.