A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (22 page)

His compassion was muted by greed. Though one of the few to disapprove of slavery, he did not even attend the debate in the Senate which agonized all night about whether to execute the 400
household slaves of the murdered prefect of police, Pedanius. (They were all led off to their deaths, the troops pushing back a hostile crowd.) Seneca spent much of his time lending money –
cf. Proust’s daily communications with his stockbroker – and through this occupation became one of the richest men in Rome, with over 100 citrus wood and ivory tables
(one
of
which was a status symbol in ancient Rome), yet Plutarch describes his lecturing Nero on the virtue of true poverty.

With Burrus, his partner in power, Seneca became a friend of the Emperor,
amicus Principi,
in an autocracy more important than any official position. Their immediate concern was the
Emperor’s mother, still implacable, whose need to rule was disruptive. ‘They both,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘waged a crusade against Agrippina’s ferocity’ Her first move,
advancing in public session to sit beside her son on the imperial dais, was deflected by Nero, rising to greet his mother and escorting her to another
curule.
Subsequently she would hide
behind curtains to observe proceedings. Then the partners told Acte, a freedwoman mistress they had provided, to explain to the Emperor that his mother’s boasting of her influence was
alienating the soldiery. Nero, alone of his line, was naive. However, he reacted by depriving his mother of her personal Praetorian Guard and by firing Pallas,
⁴⁸
Claudius’ freedman,
and so a creature of Agrippina, from his position of financial controller, thus honouring his pledge to keep palace influence out
of public affairs.

Roman historians make the death of young Britannicus the crime of Agrippina, as consistent with her policy of removing any obstacle (including and especially her husband’s son) to her
son’s enjoyment of power; but Nero’s latest biographer, Miriam Griffin,
⁴⁹
has her in a panic, switching sides and deciding to support
Britannicus as the rightful heir in a move to unnerve Nero and force him into submission. It did not work. Britannicus was poisoned at a children’s party at the palace during the holidays and
much later many famous children claimed to have had tummy troubles from the same cakes. A reconciliation between Nero and his mother in
AD
55 did not last.

Nero grew irritated at the failure of his advisers (who, he was beginning to reflect, had been hers) to suggest a method of ridding him of this turbulent mother, and asked help of his old
mentor, the ingenious Anicetus, now Prefect of the Fleet at Misenum.

Like George IV, who installed the first gaslight system in England, at the Pavilion in Brighton, and turned the apparatus on himself, with the courtiers standing well back, Nero, also an
extravagant builder, encouraged inventors. He imported a team of mechanical engineers from Alexandria (who had previously come to the notice of Julius Caesar and who had invented amongst other
extraordinary artefacts, a toy
steam-engine). He employed them to realize his dream of the Golden House, of which more anon, and they may well have conceived the collapsible
boat, seen by Nero on stage and used in an attempt to drown his mother. (The roof descended automatically as the hull let in water.) The Empress Mother was induced to embark at Baiae in this
strange vessel, imagining a nautical promenade in her honour. The devilish machinery performed as advertised, but, in front of a large crowd, Agrippina swam safely to the shore. Nero was terrified.
He appealed to Burrus, who told him to do his own dirty work. He ordered a military tribune to kill her and when the moment came Agrippina was not surprised – the second half of the
astrologer’s prediction had to come to pass – and simply directed that the first blow be to her womb, whence the Emperor had (with difficulty) once emerged. Seneca, ready as always with
the quill, composed a letter to the Senate describing how the Empress had been discovered in a plot against her son and the farcical, seedy matricide was in this way converted to a sick little
triumph of deliverance.

Liberation from his mother (but not from nightmares about her death, which caused him to avoid numinous places like Delphi and Eleusis with their attendant Furies) triggered the release of
Nero’s inhibitions. He began his
nostalgie de la boue
trips, in disguise, like Caligula, to the seedy parts of the city, beating up passers-by in the way of rich bored young men in
pursuit of kicks throughout the ages (cf. the ‘Mohawks’ in the twenties in London). Oddly Nero was a private but not a public sadist and his Hellenism revolted against the Ancient Roman
pleasure in the Games, which he tried to suppress in favour of mock gladiatorial combats among the patriciate. Of course he failed here, but he persisted till the end – and it
was
his
end – in conceiving his mission as the re-education of the Roman people. If only his
fellow human beings were as committed to the arts as he, as talented, as
extravagant, as gifted, as generous and as peaceable as he – the world would surely be a better place! He was a genuinely naive artist and once proposed to appear before an enemy host and
cry.

The first indicator of his ethics and aesthetics was his reception of Tiridates, the client king, the Roman general Corbulo, of whom Claudius had been so jealous, had imposed on Armenia, as part
of a deal with the Parthians. The first day passed in the traditional way, as practised by Augustus, and the king knelt in homage to the Emperor seated on the rostrum in front of an army parade. On
the second day, Nero, who was for centuries after his death acknowledged on medallions as the world’s greatest ever party-giver, had the whole of Pompey’s theatre gilded (in twenty-four
hours) and an awning stretched over the auditorium depicting the heavenly orbs with the sun at their centre, and in the centre of the sun, his face. (For Nero saw himself as Apollo, the Sun King, a
conceit emulated by Louis XIV, imitating that god by playing the zither and driving a chariot with two white horses.) King Tiridates prostrated himself before the Emperor, reciting a Persian prayer
of oriental adulation which would have embarrassed the Roman audience had they understood it. Some scholars have solemnly dated and stated Nero’s conversion to Mithraism from this event, and
certainly Tiridates was well paid for his performance, with an 800,000
sesterces per diem
expense allowance and 100 million
sesterces
‘take home’, but Suetonius denies
Nero any serious religious belief and, knowing as we now do from excavations of the Domus Aurea – the Golden House – about Nero’s taste, it is more likely to have been an
expression of his pleasure in the very high camp.

This enormous, breathtaking, environmentally unfriendly – because, with its dimensions of 2,000 by 1,000 metres, it took up so much of other people’s
environment – complex of palaces and pavilions, disliked as much by his contemporaries as George IV’s miniature at Brighton was by his, was revolutionary in concept, design, decoration
and even construction; for a technique of combining rubble with cement to create vaulted domes was used for the first time, models for Hadrian’s revised Pantheon and many churches of the
Renaissance, and was as significant architecturally as the discovery of reinforced concrete.

Nero was a science buff. In the middle of the Vindex revolt he insisted on taking a day to show the consuls and
praetors
a new hydraulic organ from the
‘polytechnic’
⁵⁰
in Alexandria which he proudly dismantled and reassembled himself. The wonder of the Golden House was a revolving dome which
turned day and night in harmony with the stars. No Roman historian has bothered to tell us how it worked, but it must have been powered by a flow of water, like the ‘machine’ which
produced such a heavenly show for Louis XIV in the gardens of his pet palace at Marly.

The
magistri et machinatores,
master workmen and engineers, must have been thrilled to be employed by an autocrat (cf. Speer and Hitler) on grand and glamorous enterprises, quickly
decided, quickly executed and quickly paid for. The Neronian team of technicians, headed by two Italians but manned by experts from Alexandria or supplied, at a price, by Tiridates, ‘were
clever, and bold enough,’ explains Tacitus,
‘to use technical means to overcome Nature itself, and make light of the requirements of the Prince’. The
imperial
fiscus
was quickly exhausted and Nero began to raid the rich, driving them to suicide having first forced them to make him their substantial heir. One man, seeking to protect his
grandchildren, slit his own, his mother’s and his daughter’s wrists in the same bath, having manumitted and tipped all his slaves, rather than comply.

The style of the Golden House, as well as the depredations necessary to create it, offended the older and richer of Roman society. The traditional
domus
of a good family in Rome was
modest, introvert, familial and severe, like the Domus Livia where Augustus lived and died, symmetrical and, in every sense, square. Nero’s dream palace was vast and open, yet at the same
time secretive, curved, carved, despotic, more of a harem than a house, designed to impress and even terrify. The person of the patron was represented by a bronze statue, 100 feet high, impressive
enough to be left standing until the Goths captured Rome. The swamp where the Colosseum was later built became a lake with an imitation port, surrounded by artificial meadows, plenished with wild
animals and beeches designed to look like forests. Within, according to eighteenth-century reproductions like Tiepolo’s, the ceilings and walls were heavily ornamented and decorated –
the work of one Fabullus, a correct, middle-aged Roman gentleman, who wore his toga as he executed the bizarre romantic frescoes. The Golden House, still unfinished at Nero’s death, ruined
the treasury, and, more than any other extravagance, the reputation of its builder. At first his successors tried to finish it, but finally Trajan, contemptuous, buried it. However, the chance
discovery, intact, of some parts of this fantasy in cement, 1,500 years later, astonished and inspired architects and artists of the Renaissance
like d’Udine and
Caravaggio, who went underground to scratch, in admiration, their names on Nero’s gilt.

All in the Julio-Claudian clan were skilled in the deployment of their Latin tongue, which became as crucial an element of conquest in the Roman Empire as English, or perhaps really American,
after the Second World War.
⁵¹
They were the most literate rulers the world has ever known – Charlemagne could not read or write – and rejoiced
in the Latin language, that most pungent, vivid, versatile vehicle for human expression, writing their own speeches (except for Nero, who had Seneca, but then who has a thoroughbred dog and barks
himself?). Unselfconsciously, and for pleasure, they practised all forms of
belles lettres.
Caesar the military historian and master of the soundbite, wrote a play, suppressed, it was said,
out of kindness. Augustus wrote long letters to Horace and Virgil and had a sharp line in obscene epigrams (pornography being considered a legitimate art form). Tiberius wrote Greek and Latin
verse. He also wrote his memoirs, as did Agrippina hers, both suppressed by their alarmed descendants. Caligula was an impressive orator but threatened to remove the works of Virgil from the public
libraries simply because they bored him. Claudius wrote volumes of history, eight of them in Greek, and gave public lectures, but Nero was the most lavish, effective and genuine patron of them all.
‘Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus!’ wrote Lucillius, the epigrammatist, ‘I would be finished, had not Nero Caesar given me cash.’

Nero’s phil-Hellenism was such that he fell for a Chatterton-style forgery, buying the translation of a diary
of the Trojan War, written in Punic, allegedly
discovered in a collapsed tomb in Crete. Troy obviously fascinated him. The biggest mural in the Domus Aurea depicted the wooden horse arriving within the walls of Troy at night and just after the
fire of Rome – he did not start it, he was not there, he did not fiddle – he sang about the capture and fire of Troy in his private theatre, or so the rumours ran. He had, all agreed,
an agreeable voice.

His first ‘Neronia’, a literary festival, was in
AD
60, and at the second, in
AD
65, he recited (part of) his epic
Troica,
whose hero was, typically, not the macho figure Hector, but the soft-skinned androgynous Paris. Quite a bunch of talent, some found by Seneca, assembled at Nero’s literary
‘academies’, at whose ‘working’ dinners Nero was accepted as a fellow, and though Tacitus was bitchy
⁵²
about them, even he allowed
that Nero could be considered a serious poet. Nero patronized wildly the young and the unknown but his most famous protégé was Petronius, whose
Satyricon,
coruscating with
charm, corruption and subversion, is a constant world-seller. The satire is set in Puteoli, a new city, encouraged by Nero, in the Bay of Naples; the characters are culled from the lower classes
and the richest; Trimalchio, who gives the dinner party where a sow is revealed to be stuffed with live partridges, is a fabulously vulgar freedman. The love interest is homosexual.

Those of the figures round Nero’s literary dinners who were knights and senators were his only link with the upper classes of Rome, but even this was broken when in
AD
65–6 they joined Seneca’s nephew in the conspiracy of Piso, also a
poet. Indeed Miriam Griffin thinks they joined the political opposition out of
literary pique towards the Emperor, who had become aggressively jealous of their success.

‘Music,’ a headmaster of Eton once observed, ‘is the least dangerous of the arts’,
⁵³
but it was the stage performances of the
Emperor which caused his downfall. The acting profession was not esteemed in Ancient Rome. Actors, as we have seen, were synonymous with male tarts and it was often proposed, for one reason or
another, that they be flogged. Nero began quietly, performing as a charioteer and actor in his private circus and private theatre, but he craved awards and public applause, accepting the former
before a contest and organizing the latter. (Vespasian once fell asleep during a performance by the Emperor and was sharply nudged by an attentive freedman.)