The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Before that, Messalina’s downfall. Sluttishness alone did not undo the emperor’s well-born wife. As she cherry-picked the flower of Roman manhood (the sources would have us believe), diverted alike by aristocrats and the ballet dancer Mnester, she distracted Claudius with a stream of pretty maids and serving wenches. Until, in the autumn of 48, Messalina succumbed to momentary madness. Taking the opportunity of Claudius’ absence from Rome, she ‘married’ a consul designate, Gaius Silius, who, in Tacitus’ account, meant to adopt Britannicus and usurp Claudius’ throne. She did not do so discreetly in a secret room of the palace but in a formal service conducted in semipublic surrounds. Afterwards she followed her indiscretion with a revel that sounds like a Bacchic fête champêtre. The outcome provides an example of dishonour among thieves. The same freedmen who had once forwarded her schemes of vindictiveness and greed turned against Messalina: they persuaded two of Claudius’ mistresses to report her to the emperor. As news seeped out that Claudius was returning to Rome, the wedding throng dispersed and Messalina herself hastened to Ostia to intercept Claudius and explain herself in person. She was forced to hitch-hike in a garden refuse cart. The encounter of husband and wife proved unsatisfactory, thanks to the intervention of an implacable Narcissus. Messalina won a temporary stay of execution, but was later killed on Narcissus’ instructions before Claudius had a chance to relent. In the best Roman tradition, her mother Domitia Lepida looked on with apparent dispassion, having already tried to persuade Messalina to commit suicide.

  Suetonius exploits the corollary to this puzzling and extraordinary interlude to illustrate Claudius’ absent-mindedness: the emperor, who does not respond to news of his wife’s death other than by requesting more wine, ‘asked shortly after taking his place at table why the empress did not come’.

  Claudius was months short of his fifty-seventh birthday. In contrast to earlier periods of his life, the first seven years of his principate had seen a marked stabilization in his physical health (which may suggest a psychosomatic aspect to his illness); it was now that the period of deterioration began. Until now there had been notable successes. Aulus Plautius’ campaign in southern England had brooked no resistance in claiming a fabled new province for the Empire. In the triumph voted to him by the senate the following year, Claudius had briefly enjoyed intimations of that glory once associated with his father and brother; coins depicted images of a fallen Britannia. Similarly successful were early campaigns on the German frontier (against the Chauci and the Chatti) and Suetonius Paulinus’ campaign in Africa (for which the senate also voted Claudius a triumph: on that occasion he demurred). Largely without bloodshed he had extended Roman citizenship in the provinces. He had rebuilt the Circus Maximus and the Theatre of Pompey and celebrated these public works with lavish unveiling ceremonies. He had commissioned the draining of the Fucine Lake in an attempt to increase available arable land. At the unveiling of the new harbour at Ostia, Pliny records, the assembled crowds were treated to the unlikely sight of the emperor leading an attack on a killer whale. The animal had become trapped in sandbanks. Claudius ordered that nets be strung across the harbour mouth. He then boarded a ship in the company of the Praetorian Guards and exhorted them to action as they showered the stranded animal with lances, to the delight of the viewing public.

  On the debit side, he had failed to overcome that senatorial antipathy which had greeted his accession. Despite his much-vaunted respect for the senate, his paranoia in the face of conspiracies real or imaginary had resulted in frequent executions. Claudius had also persistently perpetuated that process of senatorial marginalization which had been a feature of all his predecessors’ reigns. Dispensing with consultation in several areas of government, he had organized the imperial administration into a number of informal ministries, each under the control of one of his own freedmen: Narcissus, his secretary, the minister of letters; Pallas, the finance minister; Kallistos, who helped Claudius with judicial matters; and Polybius, to whom Seneca said, ‘You owe the whole of yourself to Caesar’, who effectively controlled imperial appointments but was nominally minister of culture and the emperor’s librarian. The loyalty of freedmen, as Seneca indicated, was to themselves and Claudius alone. It was not a recipe guaranteed to garner senatorial good graces and it gains short shift in surviving sources. Suetonius regards it as part of a larger pattern of malign influence which characterizes the entirety of Claudius’ principate: ‘almost the whole conduct of his reign [was] dictated not so much by his own judgement as that of his wives and freedmen, since he nearly always acted in accordance with their interests and desires.’ In the ancient sources, this is central to any assessment of Claudius’ reign: it underpins his reputation for folly and injudiciousness. It is an unfair dismissal, shaped at least in part by succeeding events. For the most powerful influence of Claudius’ principate was Agrippina the Younger: her will to power was of an indomitability Claudius could not resist. And Agrippina was the mother of the emperor Nero. Susceptibility is a human frailty. In those writers we consider ‘primary’ witnesses, among them Suetonius and Tacitus, that susceptibility by which Claudius overlooked the claims to the throne of his own son Britannicus in favour of his stepson Nero acquires a quasi-criminality in the light of aberrances to come.

  A competition. The competitors the emperor’s freedmen. The prize a bride for Claudius and untrammelled influence for the winner. Three competitors, Narcissus, Kallistos and Pallas, each with their own candidate for the princeps’ shaking hand. Narcissus favoured Claudius’ former wife, Aelia Paetina; Kallistos backed Gaius’ ex-wife, Lollia Paulina. But it was the judgement of Pallas which prevailed. The woman who became Claudius’ fourth wife, after an adjustment to the incest laws, was his thirty-something niece Agrippina the Younger, youngest daughter of Claudius’ brother Germanicus (hero and martyr) and Agrippina the Elder (heroine and martyr) and a great-granddaughter of Augustus. Among the baggage she brought to the marriage was an upbringing scarred by family feuding – and her son Domitius Ahenobarbus. Tactfully, soldiers of the Praetorian Guard overlooked Claudius’ suggestion after Messalina’s death that they kill him if he decided to marry again: they may have been won over by Agrippina’s Julian credentials and upright reputation compared with Messalina’s lurid disgrace. Flirtation played its part in Agrippina’s winning suit: Suetonius describes her as ensnaring the emperor with her wiles (kisses and endearments), a suggestion which raises questions about the role of Pallas’ pimping and, by extension, the veracity of the literary tradition of a three-way race masterminded by the freedmen.

  But what sex was to Messalina, so the story goes, power was to Agrippina. She was not distracted by bodily appetites: arrogance and an undeviating focus steadied her performance. She engineered the exile of her rival Lollia Paulina and subsequently her suicide, and banished one Calpurnia, whose good looks had momentarily turned Claudius’ head. She also rewarded Pallas by becoming his mistress. He repaid the compliment by suggesting on Agrippina’s behalf that Claudius adopt Domitius Ahenobarbus. In 50 the emperor complied, winning votes of thanks in the senate for his misjudgement. The adopted Domitius Ahenobarbus changed his name to Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar. Agrippina became the first wife of a living emperor to be styled Augusta; her public prominence increased accordingly. Nero took the toga virilis, was nominated princeps iuventutis (‘Prince of Youth’), and, in 53, married Claudius’ daughter Octavia. For Britannicus, an intelligent boy who, unlike his father, saw the way the wind was blowing, the outlook was bleak. Even his slaves were taken from him. As a final indignity, his ‘brother’ Nero buggered him. How Claudius envisaged his blood son’s incorporation into Agrippina’s scheme is not clear: Nero was adopted in the first instance as a guardian for Britannicus, a fiction of short duration. After long years outside the fold, Agrippina’s pursuit of her personal agenda was systematic and undeviating, ‘a rigorous, almost masculine despotism’, in Tacitus’ assessment. Like Messalina before her, she played on Claudius’ horror of co
nspiracy as a means of eliminating rivalry. Unlike Messalina, she never lost her head. At the critical moment, she acted with ruthless decision.

  ‘Careless talk costs lives,’ posters once admonished. Too late would Claudius learn the truth of that wartime injunction. He was ageing quickly. There had been signs of a slackening of his faculties, weakness his new wife seized upon to consolidate her position and extend her sphere of influence. Claudius had announced to his freedmen ‘that it had been his destiny... to have wives who were all unchaste, but not unpunished’. Then in public he gave signs once again of favouring Britannicus over Nero. These were dangerous indiscretions in 54. Agrippina was prepared to countenance neither her own punishment nor Nero’s disenfranchisement from the purple. She acted swiftly and with deadly resolve. She poisoned Claudius with mushrooms and gruel, assisted by a convicted poisoner called Locusta, Halotus the eunuch taster and a doctor lacking scruples named Xenophon. Locusta poisoned the mushrooms, which Halotus gave to the emperor. At first diarrhoea saved Claudius – that or his habitual drunkenness. With the mushrooms expelled or otherwise ejected, Xenophon administered a second draught in a bowl of gruel, or on the tip of a feather inserted into the sleeping emperor’s throat. It was a poison chosen with care, neither too fast nor too slow in action. And on the second occasion it worked.

  But posterity was not hoodwinked. Agrippina’s murder of Claudius as Britannicus’ majority loomed transformed her into the quintessence of the scheming stepmother. In time her villainy was matched only by that of the son she served. She would pay for the crime of regicide. ‘Never yet has anyone exercised for good ends the power obtained by crime,’ Tacitus commented in a different context.16 So, in Nero’s case, it would prove to be. By then Agrippina had completed the hat-trick: sister, wife and mother of men who ruled the world. In doing so, she revealed another secret of the principate: that the person of the princeps could be a conduit for the ambition of third parties. It was a dangerous development. Especially, in Roman eyes, when that person was a woman. The casual reader does not doubt that Agrippina murdered Claudius: the historical sources come too close to consensus for refutation. It is a tale spiced by misogyny, by sexual politics, by fears of a world turned upside down, by the sensationalism of the natural order subverted. It is the story of an emperor turned lightning conductor. As we will discover, it was an appropriate introduction to the reign of Claudius’ successor.

  NERO

  (AD 37–68)

  ‘An angler in the lake of darkness’

  Nero: Marble head of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus © Lagui

  His pack mules shod with silver, Nero travelled far from Rome. To Greece and back again, though metaphorically he flunked the homeward journey. Philhellenism was not a virtue in the Caesars’ Rome. This philandering poetaster cherished ‘a longing for immortality and undying fame’. He sang, raced, fiddled and fucked his way to ignominy, all in public view: in private he kicked and he killed. His infamy lives yet. The Greeks rewarded him with prizes. ‘They alone,’ he said, ‘were worthy of his efforts.’ Only the Greeks had an ear for music. But Nero’s ‘Greek’ tastes embraced more than singing or the cithara. One of his spouses was a young boy called Sporus. Nero had him castrated, so that he could serve him lifelong as his ‘wife’. (Sporus was indeed loyal to the end, a rare example of fidelity in this story.) He also married his freedman Doryphorus: in this case it was Nero who played the wife, ‘going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered’ as Doryphorus set to work. Riding in a carriage with his mother, Nero offended even that primordial relationship: stains on his clothes betrayed the guilty couple. (Happy, then, that this spendthrift emperor, who fished with a golden fishing net, never wore the same clothes twice.) Nero’s was a reign of histrionic excess: thanks to Monteverdi and Handel, its tortuous and hazardous relationships survive today in the opera house. After his death his memory was condemned by decree of the senate: his historiography offers rich pickings for scandalmongers. Perversion, incest and murder notwithstanding, for the layman he is damned by his response to Rome’s biggest bonfire night: the emperor who, in AD 64, made music while his people perished and the city tumbled to torches of fire.

  He was born feet-first, an unlucky sign in Rome, and his birth was attended by portents promising murder and a throne (perhaps a convenient afterthought on the part of our chroniclers). In addition to ‘acts of wantonness, lust and extravagance’, his topsy-turvy career, standing his world upon its head, embraced ‘avarice and cruelty’. Suetonius describes him once as beguiled by dreams of the lost treasure of Queen Dido (when his rest was not shattered by nightmares, haunted by the ghost of the mother whom by then he had killed). That mythical booty was promised to him by a Roman knight, who had glimpsed it in huge caves in Africa. Such cavalier promises were the stuff of life to Nero, the quotidian replaced by poetry, dreams in place of action: illusions – or delusions – of grandeur. When he sat down to dinner in his brand-new palace, the Golden House, the ceiling revolved, a heavyweight mechanism operated by nothing more complex than water. Through a tracery of ivory panels flowers and perfume rained down upon the emperor’s guests. In Nero’s Neverland, albeit the man himself stank mightily (his skin pocked with blemishes, ‘his body marked with spots and malodorous’), for twelve hours at a stretch life could be a bed of roses. His banquets were daylong affairs. He rose only to cool himself down in snow-chilled water or warm himself up, never in the interests of business. Like Gaius before him, Nero was emperor part-time. As elderly senators were quick to note, he was the first princeps of Rome to employ a ghostwriter for his speeches. His choice, made for him by his mother, fell upon no less a luminary than writer and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. At the time it may have been sensible: later it looked like detachment – even worse, like play-acting.

  His horrible father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, ‘a man hateful in every walk of life’, committed incest with his sister, killed a boy for kicks and, in full view of the crowds in the Forum, gouged out the eyes of a colleague who criticized him. Vicious and untroubled by public contempt, he is a challenge to historians’ impartiality. As a young man, his son Nero roamed the streets after dark, disguised by a wig or cap or dressed as a slave. In company with friends and members of his guard, he raided brothels, smashed and looted shops, and attacked passers-by with blows and daggers. In 56, he came close to losing his eyes in such an encounter: a senator called Julius Montanus took the opportunity of darkness to avenge himself on an affront made by Nero to Montanus’ wife. With grim complacency Domitius had claimed that no one of whom he was father and Agrippina mother could be anything but a scourge and a terror to the public. And so, in a shadowy alley-way in the second year of Nero’s reign, it seemed to be. But Nero’s cruelty did not long delight in casual violence. Chariot-racing, wrestling bouts, acting and singing competitions cooled the heat of his temper. By contrast the killings of his reign were directed at political opponents. Unlike his three immediate predecessors, we have no reason to assume that Nero particularly enjoyed their deaths.

  In time, he threatened that he would blot out the entire senatorial order ‘and hand over the rule of the provinces and the command of the armies to the Roman knights and to his freedmen’. Whether he meant it or not, it was a plan the ancients could not permit. The result may be a fictionalized Nero emerging from the styluses of the earliest writers, an archetype of evil offensive to the national myths of the Republic still dear to Tacitus et al. Little wonder this senate-hater is accused of sexual incontinence and tyranny. Such, we know, are the aspersions cast by our sources upon their political opponents. The story repeats itself: Julius, Tiberius, Gaius, even Claudius. In Nero’s case, much of his startling waywardness may be true: there is a homogeneity to the sources’ extremism which is persuasive in itself.