The Twelve Caesars (27 page)

On a warm, moonlit night, fire broke out in Rome. It began amid the jerry-built cafés and cook-shops close to the Circus Maximus racecourse.
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Nero was out of town, at the seaside resort of
Antium thirty-five miles away, but hurried back in time either to recite a poem on the fall of Troy or to supervise the firefighting operation (only lyre-playing is ruled out categorically). His
efforts, which included the demolition of several large granaries in the path of the fire in order to halt its spread, proved unsuccessful. Wind probably fanned the conflagration, which eventually
ravaged ten of the city’s fourteen districts. In the smoke and whirling soot, rumour too took wing. Observers noted men hurling firebrands, attempting to augment the fire’s spread. It
may have been a cover for looting. Or they may have acted on higher instructions. The finger of blame pointed at Nero. It was not a response born out of popular affection. ‘To suppress this
rumour, Nero fabricated scapegoats,’ Tacitus explains. ‘He punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were called).’
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Under the circumstances it
was a sensible deflection on the emperor’s part. Disasters on such a scale were traditionally interpreted as proof of heavenly disapproval, ominous and threatening. As the embers cooled, Nero
concurred with the outpouring of prayers offered to Vulcan, Ceres, Proserpina and Juno; then he executed
Christian prisoners. He fed them, dressed in animal skins, to wild
beasts; they were crucified or burned. It was a highly public purge intended to make his point. Still the rumours persisted.

Extending the reach of his aestheticism, Nero exploited the destruction of so much of Rome to institute a city-wide rebuilding programme that was partly designed around future fire-avoidance but
also emphasized visual considerations. Dominating this new cityscape was a splendid imperial palace, the Domus Aurea or Golden House. Facilitated by recent clearances as well as land confiscations,
it stretched from the Esquiline Hill in the northeast, over the Oppian, Caelian and Palatine Hills, to the Circus Maximus in Rome’s southwest quarter.
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‘Its wonders’, according to
Tacitus, ‘were lawns and lakes and faked rusticity – woods here, open spaces and views there.’
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Suetonius describes the lake as ‘like a sea’. The astonishing size of
the Golden House was underlined by the statue of Nero himself erected in the new palace vestibule, a shimmering, golden likeness that rose 120 feet into the Roman skyline. Within the palace
complex, rooms were decorated with more gold, walls inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gemstones. Insensitive to the losses of so many Roman townsfolk, Nero announced that at last he was beginning to
be housed like a human being. Martial preferred to describe it as ‘an arrogant park which deprived the poor of their houses’.
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The taunting excess of the Golden House – albeit it
might in future provide a source of pride for Romans – undid any good opinions Nero had won through his enlightened rebuilding of Rome itself.

It may have contributed to that support from all classes of Romans claimed by Tacitus for a bungled conspiracy against Nero the following year. Although the sources disagree about the identity
of the plotters, the ‘Pisonian’ conspiracy, which may or may not have centred on Gaius Calpurnius Piso, grandson of
that Piso accused of poisoning Germanicus,
included senators, prominent thinkers and members of the Praetorian Guard (Dio offers Faenius Rufus as well as Seneca). Gossipy in its organization, the plot was betrayed by carelessness on the
part of the man chosen to strike the first blow: Flavius Scaevinus.

Nero’s retribution ignored Seneca’s one-time warning against the unseemliness of cruel and inexorable anger in kings; vanished was that moderacy which had tolerated graffiti and
lampoons. He resorted to torture to root out as many of the conspirators as possible. In doing so, he learned unpalatable truths. A military tribune called Subrius Flavius explained his motive for
joining the conspiracy in unequivocal terms: ‘I have both loved and hated you above all men. I loved you, hoping that you would prove a good emperor; I have hated you because you do
so-and-so. I cannot be a slave to a charioteer or lyre-player.’
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For his part Piso committed suicide. The death of Faenius Rufus created a vacancy in the Praetorian Guard, which was filled by
an opportunist on the make, Nymphidius Sabinus. In the long term, the latter offered Nero poor service. Meanwhile, on Nero’s behalf, Tigellinus trained his sights on the elimination of future
dissent. The senate’s victimization was determined, occasionally arbitrary and consistently cruel. Rumour claimed rapacity as a rationale: Nero needed money. Public building work in Rome
could not be blamed for the emptiness of the imperial coffers. It was the Golden House, that dream of grandeur, which threatened to impoverish Rome.

Other emperors could have claimed the exorbitant cost of war as exoneration. But Nero, Suetonius tells us, was ‘so far from being actuated by any wish or hope of
increasing or extending
the empire, he even thought of withdrawing the army from Britain and changed his purpose only because he was ashamed to seem to belittle the glory of
his father [Claudius]’. Trusting in the army’s loyalty – his inheritance from his grandfather Germanicus – Nero omitted to visit a single provincial legion. Instead, his
government’s policy in the provinces was one of reacting to changing circumstances. Significant revolts broke out in Britain (Boudicca’s rebellion of 60) and, in 66, in Judaea; in
Parthia it was only the skill of Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo which restored Roman honour after the wholesale defeat of Caesennius Paetus in 62. The glory of that reversal cost Corbulo his life. Afraid
of his general’s eminence, Nero requested his suicide in 67.

The victories Nero craved were not to be found on battlefields; the prizes he valued did not lie among the spoils of conquest. With unprecedented lavishness, his instincts those of the set
designer or Hollywood director, in 66 the emperor celebrated victory over Parthia. Then he departed Rome for Greece. He left behind him two freedmen, Helius and Polyclitus, to act as viceroys in
his absence. It may have been a calculated snub to the senate. With him, he took his ardent philhellenism and those skills in singing and chariot-racing which he had practised in Rome both in
public and in private. His efforts, which at home, as Dio tells us, had inspired laughter, in Greece earned him 1,808 prizes: among them was a prize won in the Olympic Games for a chariot-race in
which he had fallen from his chariot. Shameless it may have been, but Greek realpolitik reaped dividends. On 28 November 67, Nero declared the whole of Greece free from Roman taxation. ‘To
cities other rulers too have granted freedom,’ he announced, ‘but Nero alone to an entire province.’
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His return to Rome took the form of a triumph. In Augustus’ triumphal
carriage he processed through city streets
sprinkled with perfume. Ribbons rained like confetti. Contending with the perfume were the scents of sacrifice: victims offered in
thanksgiving lined the processional route. Over his purple robe, Nero wore a cloak patterned with stars, on his head the Olympic crown. It was an extraordinary piece of posturing, attributable in
Suetonius’ version to his need to win popular approval: ‘above all he was carried away by a craze for popularity and he was jealous of all who in any way stirred the feeling of the
mob.’ Such megalomaniac theatricality served only to assert the impossibility of incorporating within traditional Roman mores tendencies that were alien, out of sympathy, a challenge.

He forfeited popularity. He had antagonized the senate and distanced the people by long absence from Rome. His misdeeds were all known, the tally (beginning with those murders
in his own family) a long and painful one. He had squandered the riches of empire, the loyalty of troops and commons alike. Not Claudius’ divinity, Germanicus’ lustre or the distant
shadow of Augustus availed him now. In the spring of 68, a provincial governor of high birth and old-fashioned inclinations issued a proclamation repudiating Nero. In the aftermath of Galba’s
bid for the purple, Dio writes, Nero found himself ‘abandoned by everybody alike’.
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In the first instance, the historian overstates the case. Nero responded with calmness and indifference to the news of Galba’s revolt – and did nothing. Inertia was the expression of
his contempt. Was he drugged by detachment, too lost in the echoing chambers of his private world of Greek triumphs to recall himself to the business of Rome? In truth he had been absent for a long
time. He declared himself sole consul for the
year, unaware of the irony of seeking refuge in the tatters of Republican office-holding. He summoned legions from Britain and
Illyricum and made plans to supplement their numbers with sailors stationed at Misenum. By the time he took decisive action, it was too late. A part of him wanted it that way. He wanted to escape
to Egypt but there was no one left who would go with him. The Praetorians had defected, Nymphidius Sabinus resorting to bribery in their transfer of allegiance to Galba. In this Rome of the
principate, loss of the Praetorians probably amounted to an insuperable obstacle. In the garden of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta, where a laurel sprig received by the old Augusta as a portent
had grown into a hedge supplying branches for wreaths, the laurels were dying. There would be no more crowns for Augustus’ heirs, no more garlands for scions of the Julii or the Claudii; that
day was past.

Events were pressing in on Nero. The palace, when at length he returned to it, stood empty. It had to be so, in Suetonius’ story the figure of a forlorn emperor lost among empty rooms and
echoing corridors repeatedly an image of tyranny unmasked. Nero fled to the house of a freedman outside Rome. Sporus was among the small party who accompanied him. Disguised as a slave, Nero bore
little resemblance to the young man who, fourteen years earlier, had roamed Roman streets at night in pursuit of easy violence and cheap thrills. An excess of good living had made him bloated and
waddling; the sway of early good looks was all gone. When the moment came, the surfeit of self-indulgence even stopped him from steeling himself for suicide.

He played the last scene badly, this emperor whose reign is bequeathed to us as a series of gaudy
tableaux vivants.
A slave steadied his hand as he plunged a dagger deep into his neck:
perhaps this understudy even made the fatal stroke for him.
Bulging in agony, in those final seconds Nero’s goggle eyes were not accorded any clarity of vision. He went
to his grave still in a state of self-delusion. ‘What an artist the world loses in me!’ he gasped. Thanks to the public nature of kingship, there were those on hand to record his dying
fall. He knew better at any rate than to ask with Augustus if he had done well in his role in the comedy of life.