The Classical World (73 page)

Tiberius had lived awkwardly at Rome among two elderly imperial widows, each of whom became honoured in due course as ‘Augusta’. One was Augustus’ wife Livia, the great survivor. The other, also a great survivor, was Mark Antony’s second daughter, Antonia: she had a beauty and an orderly style which preserved her even during long years of refusing to remarry. On Augustus’ death, some had suggested honouring Livia as ‘Mother of the Fatherland’: it was in
AD
20 that the Senate decreed and circulated praises of her for ‘serving the commonwealth exceptionally, not only in giving birth to our First Citizen but also through her many great favours towards men of every rank’: they also affirmed that Antonia was the stated object of their ‘great admiration’, ‘excellent in her moral character’.
⁶
Republican traditionalists would have been scandalized by the reference to Livia’s ‘many great favours’ and would have enjoyed the rumours that she had in fact poisoned Augustus and his adopted grandsons. Eleven years later Antonia was probably quick to bring down the Emperor Tiberius’ controversial favourite, Sejanus, by a well-judged letter in the interests of her terrible grandson, Gaius. However, when Gaius took power she quickly proved irritating to him and had to commit suicide.

Feminine influence on Claudius was more overt. It was not only that he lived among women at Rome who were ‘gaping for gardens’, in the historian Tacitus’ fine phrase,
⁷
even to the point of pressing him
for the death of a rich garden-owner so that they could take his property. Claudius’ own third marriage was to the well-born and passionate Messalina (twenty years old or more at the time); she bore him a son, and then encouraged him in condemning enemies and rivals (she cited the warning dreams which were granted to herself and a freedman). In 48 she herself went too far with a younger senator, consenting to a sham ‘marriage’ during the grape-vintage in the absence of her ignorant husband. Claudius then took the bad advice of a freedman and married the formidable Agrippina instead. She was the sister of Gaius and thirty-three years old; disastrously, she brought a son of her own with her (born by Caesarian section). During six memorable years of new-wife syndrome the old drama of the Hellenistic royal families was played out all over again. To assure her son’s succession, the new wife, Agrippina, arranged for Claudius’ murder on 13 October 54. Supposedlyit was done bya mushroom laced with poison, although a second dose on a feather was said to have been needed.

Agrippina’s young son Nero then succeeded and proved another political disaster. Like Tiberius, he had a proud and noble ancestry, but extreme cruelty ran in its past. Members of his family had staged exceptionally bloody gladiatorial shows and one had even driven a chariot contemptuously over a member of the lower classes. After the boy’s birth Nero’s own father was said to have told a well-wisher that ‘nothing born of me and Agrippina can be other than detestable and a public menace’.
⁸
He was quite right. Like Gaius, Nero had no military experience and no experience of public service. He became emperor when he was far too young, before his seventeenth birthday. For five years the combination of his mother, his tutor Seneca and his able Praetorian Prefect Burrus kept him relatively steady. Thereafter it was ever more clear that he combined vanity with irresponsibility. He expressed both in the way such people still do, by a misplaced wish to perform as an artist in public. He competed as a charioteer and worse, he sang and played the lyre. He was serious about it all, exercising with lead weights to improve his lungs and drinking the diluted dung of wild boar to help his muscles.

The natural outlet for such aspirations was Greece, and Nero did at least make the most of it. On tour in 66/7, he competed at Delphi
and Olympia, and the rumour was that he won more than 1,800 first prizes, even in a ten-horse chariot race where he fell off. In return, he gave Olympia a new club-house for athletes, the first Roman emperor to do anything for the site. Spectacularly, he even declared Greece free and ended its tribute. Athletics, being nude and queer, were bad enough for traditional Romans, but with his elaborate hairstyle, Nero was an embarrassment to right-thinking Roman opinion. He was also inexcusably savage: in 59 he had his own mother murdered. He did attract the most glamorous wife, ‘auburn-haired’ Poppaea, but when she died, he picked the freedman who looked most like her, had him castrated and used him as a sex-object in her absence. His extravagance was atrocious. He was not to blame for the Great Fire which destroyed much of the city of Rome in the year 64, but his plan to build a huge Golden House for himself afterwards in the centre of the city was megalomaniac. His continuing lack of restraint and moral standards encouraged two major conspiracies against him. The second was backed by important provincial governors and proved mercifully successful. On 9 June 68 Nero anticipated events by killing himself, saying ‘What an artist dies in me.’ It was his final vanity.

In this Julio-Claudian household, one ancestor was taking his genetic revenge: Mark Antony. Tiberius’ dangerously popular young rival, Germanicus, was Antony’s grandson; so was Claudius; Gaius was Antony’s great-grandson, as was Nero too. It was a dreadful time to be a senator at Rome, when the unopposable palace guards protected, and even promoted, such people as emperors. For some thirty years senators had to compromise under a mad wastrel, a cruel and susceptible spastic and a vain and self-obsessed profligate. The best place to be was in a province, away from spies and informers. At Rome, the same inadequacies kept recurring in bad rulers: impossible financial extravagance (Gaius and Nero), a touchiness about the lack of military prowess (Gaius, Claudius and Nero), excessive trust in non-senatorial favourites (Tiberius, Claudius and Nero), sexual perversion (Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero) and an inappropriate line between the palace, including wives and mothers, and the traditional rule of law (Claudius and Nero). Young Nero’s initial ‘honeymoon’ period owed something to the wise counsels of the philosopher Seneca, but he was then encouraged in his natural extravagance by the odious Tigellinus.
‘Obscure in parentage and debauched in early life’,
⁹
Tigellinus was a Sicilian bybirth who capitalized on his good looks and his breeding of racehorses. They were passions to which Nero was highly susceptible.

Once again, luxury, justice and freedom played important roles in the Julio-Claudian family’s history. ‘Luxury’, as personal extravagance, continued to increase with the general progress of crafts and the rivalry of consumers. It was not just that the volume of wine consumed by all classes at Rome rose sharply: a ‘vigorous drinking-place culture’ among urban communities in Italy has also been detected.
¹⁰
In the Julio-Claudian era we begin to have firm evidence for senatorial landowners’ involvement in vine-growing. Much more extravagantly, we have evidence for their spiralling pursuit of ‘luxuries’, especially those in limited supply. In the Roman upper class, a personal fortune might as well be spent now, as otherwise it would be left partlyto the emperor on death; legacies left bychildless donors would be penalized, anyway, under Augustus’ moral laws. In Tiberius’ reign the prices of special luxuries, whether bronzes in pseudo-Corinthian Greek style or big mullets in the fish market, were rising so sharply that there was legislation by the emperor to control them. In 22 there were fears that Tiberius would restrict spending on anything luxurious, ranging from silver plate to dinner-parties. In fact, Tiberius wrote to the Senate that he wished that such restrictions could be effective, but that the problems were insoluble. Indeed, there was so much more now to want. Romans had discovered a taste for much that was rare, including tables made from the beautiful wood of the citrus tree, native to north Africa: the trees were wiped out as they gratified it. Craftsmen had developed the complex technique of fluorspar and of cameos in which layers of precious metals were set in glass. Like modern house-prices or salaries on Wall Street, the unchecked cost of bronzes and villas, paintings and pearls were topics of conversation at the very Roman dinner-parties which flaunted them. According to the historian Tacitus, there was also discussion of the ‘effeminate’ dress of rich men.
¹¹
Female hairstyles at court were still relatively classical, but their accompaniments did become recherché. We can compare the rather simple recipe for toothpaste of the Empress Livia with the infinitely more exotic compound of Messalina, requiring mastic gum from Chios (still used in the fine
local toothpaste), salt from north Africa and powdered stag’s horn, which was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

Since the fourth century
BC
historians had so often cited luxury as a cause of defeat or disaster: in the 60s
AD
it did at last claim its first major victim, the Julio-Claudian household itself. Nero’s hopeless extravagance was a direct cause of his overthrow and the ending of the family line. Justice, meanwhile, was more subtly corrupted by the emperors’ habits. In the Senate, Tiberius had sat in on cases which included alleged slights to his own ‘majesty’: how could senators then be impartial in his brooding presence? Claudius heard far too many cases in private; he often refused to hear more than one side of the argument and simply imposed his own personal view. The underlying trend throughout was for officials, both at Rome and abroad, to hear cases and pass judgements in their own right. Appeals to authority thus developed a new range.

As for freedom, it had had a real chance with Gaius’ murder in January 41, but the failure to secure it was revealing. It was a hundred years, on a long view, since freedom had really been rooted in the Republic, since the gentlemen’s agreement between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus in 59
BC
. In the face of a vast Empire, an army loyal to a dynasty and a populace fearful of senatorial rule, how ever could freedom be restored by senators who had now never even known it? Nor would that sort of freedom have been workable. Rather, the survival of the underlying imperial structures during these four grotesque emperors is evidence of their increasing strength and necessity. When the provincial governor who led the western rising against Nero declared himself to be acting for the Senate and people, the declaration led to his recognition by the Praetorian guards at Rome and then to his being empowered by the Senate as the next emperor. What senators most hoped for was a defined area of business which the Senate, if possible, should decide, while the emperor retained a restrained, moral competence in all settings. Affability and accessibility without extravagance were the crucial attributes for a good emperor.

In protest under Nero, there were senators who took a principled stand against his tyranny, partly by drawing on a veneer of ethical ‘Stoic’ values. Upper-class Romans were not true philosophers, but these principled ethics did at least suit the moral aspirations of new
men, rising into the ruling class: theylacked the world-wearycynicism of the older intake and they wished to be principled and rather too earnest when placed in apparent honour at the centre of affairs. For other, more quizzical characters, there was always the possibility of noble and eloquent suicides, acts which were not in any way condemned by Roman religion. Seneca the philosopher cut his veins; the engaging Petronius, ‘arbiter of taste’,
¹²
compiled an exact list of Nero’s sexual debaucheries with men and women and sent it to him while opening his veins and joking meanwhile with his friends. Above all, there was the example of the immensely rich senator and ex-consul, Valerius Asiaticus. By origin a Gaul, he had inherited by marriage a fine park on the Esquiline hill in Rome. ‘Gaping for gardens’, Claudius’ wife Messalina then urged his destruction. Among all the various charges laid against him, Claudius hesitated before giving in. But he did allow Asiaticus to choose his own death. So Asiaticus exercised, dressed up and dined well. He then opened his veins, but not before he had inspected the siting of his funeral pyre. Small freedoms still remained: he ordered the pyre to be moved so that the fire would not burn his trees.
¹³
Claudius then confiscated the park as soon as Asiaticus was dead.

Ruling the Provinces

It is the most unjust thing of all for me to tighten up by my own edict what the two Augustuses, one the greatest of gods (Augustus), the other the greatest of emperors (Tiberius), have taken the utmost care to prevent, namely that anybody should make use of carts without payment. But since the indiscipline of certain people requires an immediate punishment, I have set up in the individual towns and villages a register of those services which I judge ought to be provided, with the intention of having it observed or, if it shall be neglected, of enforcing it not only with my own power but with the authority of the best of princes [Augustus], from whom I received written instructions concerning these matters
.

Edict of Sextus Sotidius Strabo, legate of
Galatia, soon after
AD
14

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain
.                           Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew 5.41

Outside Italy, nonetheless, Rome’s provinces are said to have viewed Augustus’ new order as not unwelcome. Perceptions, as always, will have varied with social class and cultural background, but in western Asia, with the governor’s encouragement, a new calendar was adopted, beginning on Augustus’ birthday. From Spain to Syria, cults of emperors, both dead and alive, proliferated in varying forms. What was there to celebrate? From Augustus onwards there were certainly changes in the appointment and regulation of governors, including
new procedures for trying them for extortion and (eventually) a fixed annual wage, or ‘salary’, for their tenure of office (the first instances of the word in this sense). Their republican predecessors had left bad memories on this score. But what counted most to the provincials was the return of peace and the ending of all the looting, money-raising and damage done abroad in the 40s and 30s during Rome’s Civil Wars. Their total population is likely to have fallen sharply in all the chaos: an Empire-wide figure of 45 million has been suggested, 25 per cent below the levels reached later after a century of peace.