A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (23 page)

He chose Naples, more Grecian and lax than Rome, for his big part. The Senate, ashamed of the offence he would cause, offered him crowns for his singing and oratory, hoping he would neither sing
nor orate, but Nero wanted the real thing and brought to Naples his Praetorians and a claque of 5,000. Those who did not listen in silence and applaud noisily were reported and rebuked, giving a
special twist to the phrase ‘captive audience’. On this occasion, Nature intervened with a small earthquake, collapsing the theatre but causing no deaths (for it was empty) and
therefore being interpreted by Nero as a sign of divine approval, an excuse for a poem and yet another celebration. Although Roman historians have lingered on the monstrous aspects of his
personality, he was full of gaiety and
bonhomie
and genuinely hurt that Romans did not recognize his ability. ‘The Greeks
alone,’ he said, ‘appreciate
me and my art.’ So to Greece (where he could be sure that if he brought his lyre to a party, everyone would ask him to play) he went – on an elaborate tour, city by city. Nobody in Rome
recorded his successes. When he returned via Puteoli, Naples, Antium and Alba Longa, with processions in each, imitating the Triumph of a conquering general, riding in the chariot designed by
Augustus for such occasions, borne before him were banners with the titles of his victorious songs, as if they were the names of the cities he had captured for Rome. Such was Nero’s Triumph,
Rome’s indignity.

Enter Poppaea. Poppaea was a rich girl from Pompeii, where the family owned five houses and sponsored Games. Her father had been a friend of Sejanus, Tiberius’s disgraced number two, and
she had adopted the name of her grandfather, a consul and governor for twenty-four years of Moesia in the Balkans. She was beautiful, ambitious, enchanting and, compared to Messalina or Agrippina,
only mildly wicked, and Nero fell and remained in love with her till the end – hers. She became his mistress when he was still married to Octavia, whom he feared to divorce because she was so
popular. Octavia was a gentle, blameless lady, but Nero accused her of adultery (which her maid, under torture, denied). She was taken to an island and her wrists were cut in pretence of suicide;
the charge that she had tried to seduce Anicetus and subvert the fleet convinced no one and increased the distaste felt at her murder. Octavia’s death provoked the same reaction in the plebs
as that of George IV’s daughter Charlotte, also rumoured to be murder, provoked in the British public, both monarchs being considered by their subjects capable of any wickedness, on account
of their jealousy.

One of Nero’s friends was Otho, a young man-about-town of odd appearance, for he was knock-kneed, flat-footed,
prematurely bald and supposed to shave his body
hair.
⁵⁴
He must have developed characteristics which overrode these defects, because he did become an Emperor, but at this moment in time, he is simply a
good enough friend of Nero to oblige by marrying his newly beloved, to tide her over an awkward divorce and keep her warm in his house, until the right moment, or such was the plan. According to
Suetonius, Otho also fell for the enchanting Poppaea and, when the Emperor’s people came to claim her, he locked his doors and refused to give her up. Then Nero himself went to Otho’s
house and made a scene, enjoyed by passers-by, alternately begging him to deliver her and threatening punishment if he would not. The punishment for the twenty-six-year-old quaestor was the
governorship of Lusitania (Portugal), where he took to religion – the cult of Isis – and ruled admirably.

Poppaea became Empress and queen of extravagant fashion – the Eugénie of Rome. Her carriage mules were shod in gold and the milk of 500, yes 500, wild asses was needed for her daily
bath, so important for her complexion. She was not, like the last two Empresses, politically inclined, though she so favoured Jews at court, she might have been a proselyte, and protected them from
persecution after the fire of Rome but together with the new man Ofonius Tigellinus, who had replaced the old reliables, Seneca and Burrus, her influence on the Emperor was disastrous.

Tigellinus was a handsome two-way stud, who had had affairs with the husbands and wives of two grand Roman households before graduating to Agrippina and her sister which had earned him a spell
out of Rome. He bred horses in Calabria and met Nero when young and encouraged his
interest in racing. He was made prefect of police, then of the Praetorian Guard, where he
uncovered the conspiracy of Piso.

This was a miserable affair compared with the boldness and despatch of the groups of assassins who killed Julius Caesar and Caligula. Tyrannicide was an Ancient Roman tradition and the personnel
were always patrician, but these conspirators were different in that they invited one of their number, C. Calpurnius Piso, to become Emperor, showing how deeply the imperial concept had sunk into
the psyche of the once republican Roman upper class. The conspirators were shopped by a disloyal freedman and Piso himself developed cold feet at the last moment. Nero was shaken by the numbers of
the patriciate involved. He did not know he was so disliked. He reacted moderately, forgiving some and forgetting others, but by
AD
65, affected by the death of Poppaea and
his unborn child – had he lost his temper and kicked her in the belly? – he began to hound important senators on the usual trumped-up charges of treason.

Poppaea, too beautiful to become ashes, was, unusually, embalmed and her obsequies cost a fortune. He proved, to himself, his undying devotion to her by having a freedman, Sporus, a lookalike of
Poppaea, castrated and ‘marrying’ him in Greece.

Nero, this madman as people have said, was Emperor in Rome for fourteen years and though he contrived to alienate every section of his sophisticated contemporaries in that city, including and
perhaps especially the Stoics, he never lost the affection of the populace and was respected in the provinces, particularly in the East. He accepted and discharged the then traditional basic duties
of an Emperor to provide bread, water and circuses, the last considered even by the sage Seneca to be as important as military successes. In his foreign policy
Nero was
effective, choosing governors and procurators wisely – perhaps the success of his old companion Otho was not entirely by chance? – and behaving, even according to Tacitus, rationally in
the face of military disaster.

He was imaginative – sending a couple of centurions to look for the source of the Nile, dreaming of the Corinth Canal and driving in the first golden spike, invoking the glories of Rome,
without, it was noticed, mentioning the Senate – but the provincial event of his reign has to be the revolt of Boadicea (Boudicca or Biudica). Nero never liked the idea of Britain and would
have withdrawn from that relatively cold and unproductive island were it not for the memory of his father. Britons were quarrelsome and violent and it was said that it was only for their own
country that they did not know how to die. This was not true of Boadicea, who also ‘had uncommon intelligence for a woman’ (Dio Cassius). She was the daughter of a client king of the
Iceni (Suffolk), to which tribe Romans had lent a lot of money for the furbishing of their homes with curtains and other luxuries. Seneca, attracted by the high rate of interest, had lent 40
million
sesterces
and when a governor was imposed in replacement of the royal family, ‘called it in at once and not very gently’ (Dio Cassius). The strong-arm Roman soldiers
looted the palace, raped her daughters and flogged the queen herself. When she recovered, Boadicea raised the flag of revolt and with an army of 120,000 razed two Roman cities.

‘Every kind of atrocity was inflicted upon their captives . . . they hung up the noblest and best-looking women naked, cutting off their breasts and stitching them to their mouths, so that
the women appeared to be eating them and after this they impaled them on sharp stakes, run up the body’ (Dio Cassius). Tacitus describes how she repeated the performance in Verulamium (St
Albans) and Camulodunum (Colchester),
killing 80,000, ‘taking no prisoners, sold no captives as slaves and went in for none of the usual trading of war. They wasted no
time in getting down to the bloody business of hanging, burning and crucifying.’ (This last technique Boadicea must have picked up from her enemies, though the Romans did not adopt hers, of
attaching the blades of scythes to the wheels of her chariots – as shown in her statue on the Embankment, Westminster – because, for the Romans, the chariot was a sporting vehicle.)

The rebellion was squashed by Nero’s freedman Polyclitus, at the head of a vast army – to the astonishment of the snobbish Britons – and he not only reconciled the warring
Roman governor and procurator, but was tactful enough to play down his own role in the pacification. (Nero appreciated the talents of freedmen, who were recruited from all over the Empire to serve,
without passing Foreign Office examinations, in high office at the centre of power. He promoted Claudius Etruscus, who died at the age of eighty loaded with wealth and honour, a former slave from
Smyrna who worked for ten emperors, six of whom died under him, to be controller of finance, in place of Pallas.) After the failure of the rebellion, successive governors, including Tacitus’
father-in-law, Agricola, attempted to Romanize Britain, favouring the sons of the elite with a Roman education, building baths, assembly rooms, temples, public squares and introducing the usual
Roman apparatus, but the investment did not pay off, as Appian, writing under the Emperor Antoninus Pius a century later, says: ‘The Romans rule the greater part of it [Britain] and have no
need of the rest; in fact the part they have brings them in little money’ Nero’s instinct was correct.

The great fire broke out early a.m., under a nearly full moon,
on 19 July
AD
64, in some shops round the Circus Maximus. It lasted
six days, levelled totally three of the fourteen regions into which Augustus had divided the capital, and damaged another seven. The grandest houses in the heart of the city were destroyed and the
rumour that the Emperor was the arsonist might have begun with their owners. In fact, though Nero flung himself with zest into the town planning necessary after the event, with his new palace as
its crowning feature, he had no interest in starting the fire himself. Great fires, like that of London 1,600 years later, for which an apprentice French baker was hastily hanged, aren’t
started by anybody; they happen; but sinister persons have to be found to take the blame.

Nero, deflected by Poppaea from the Jews, chose to blame the Christians ‘on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race. They were put to death with exquisite cruelty . . . and
many were lighted up, when the day declined, to serve as torches during the night.’ This is the first reference in history to the sect, not yet named, whose members were forced to wear a
tunica modesta
(a leather jerkin) smeared with tar and set on fire, to illuminate the parties in the gardens which the Emperor opened for those made homeless by the fire. Tacitus adds that
they behaved so bravely that ‘humanity relented in their favour’. It was also the first time in history that a distinction was made between Jews and Christians, a distinction,
ironically, laboured for by St Paul. The last verse of the Acts of the Apostles reads: ‘And there [Rome] he stayed for two full years at his own expense with a welcome for all who came to
him, practising without let or hindrance the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.’

St Paul was in Rome under house arrest, waiting to appear ‘before Caesar’, in
AD
62. In fact he would not have been tried by Nero himself but by the consular
who dealt
with Syrian affairs, but he could have been still in Rome during the fire and would surely have been broken-hearted – perhaps unto death? – at the
decision of the Roman authorities, whom he had spent his life trying to conciliate, to persecute his new religion. Boadicea, Nero and St Paul were, oddly, exact contemporaries – with Seneca
as the loose connection.

Towards the end of his short life – thirty-two years – but relatively long reign – fourteen years – Nero lost touch with the real world. The palace was
run by freedmen, the senatorial and equestrian ranks having become suspect to the Emperor, whose greed had made the profession of
delator
(denouncer) the surest route to a fortune – a
quarter of the victim’s property was the reward. Seneca, trembling in a remote corner of his palace before the imperial jealousy had finally and grandly and stagily made him do away with
himself, manumitted his slaves, and so Nero had been left to the care of his freedmen, two of whom, Sporus and Pythagoras, he had ‘married’, with public simulation of the bridal nights.
Then he decided, at quite the wrong time, to leave Rome, with his freedman Helius in charge of life, death and confiscation.

Julius Vindex, a governor in Gaul, had been circulating his colleagues, proposing an uprising, and they had obligingly forwarded the letters on to the Emperor, who reacted sluggishly. Galba and
Otho, governors in Spain and Portugal and both to attain the purple briefly in the year of the four Emperors which followed Nero’s death, were in revolt. Nero was dragged back from Greece by
Helius, who went to fetch him. Vindex was defeated and committed suicide but the successful troops wanted to make their commander Emperor. He refused on the grounds that this was a decision for the
Senate and People of Rome, but the feeling in the air, shared gloomily by Nero himself, was that the present
Emperor had to go. The trouble was, where? Even the Prefect of
Egypt, the imperial province, was not necessarily sound. Then the Praetorian Guard declared for Galba, the Senate outlawed him and Nero did not have quite enough time to stab himself properly,
before the horsemen cantered up to the villa where he was hiding . . .
‘Qualis artifex pereo!’
(‘What an artist dies with me!’) were his determined last words, and
they promised not to mutilate his body. He was buried by the faithful freedwoman Acte, who had been the first of so many to share his couch, and for years afterwards there were flowers on his grave
in the spring.