The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  In its wake, there was an immediate attempt to travel over to the island, rescue Agrippa Postumus and take him north to the troops. There was another attempt, two years later, to impersonate him (people did not remember what he really looked like): it was carried out by the very slave who had set out in ad 14 to ship him away and it met with considerable success among the plebs. In fact, Agrippa Postumus had been killed promptly on the first news of Augustus' death, on 19 August. The murder was organized by the discreet Sallustius Crispus, the great-nephew and adopted son, no less, of the acerbic historian Sallust. Under Roman law, Agrippa Postumus had not been disinherited when he was banished, and so he could claim a share in Augustus' inheritance. In the final months of his life Augustus went over to see him, perhaps to be sure of his unsuitability (the boy was exceptionally fond of fishing), and if so, to arrange cold-bloodedly for his removal.

  Not unfittingly, the subsequent Julio-Claudian era began with a dynastic murder. There were to be so many more. The first heir was the elderly Tiberius, a tall, austere figure of a man, already in his mid-fifties. His ancestry was extremely aristocratic and he was already a proven general who was known as a severe disciplinarian. Yet he was very much a last resort, the man Augustus had had to choose. Public generosity, the popular touch and a wholehearted sense of style were not parts of his haughty nature; revealingly, he gave few public shows and exhibited no interest in those he attended. At public dinners, he was said never to have served a whole wild boar when half a one would do. He professed a wish to be the 'servant of the Senate' and to be an 'equal citizen, not the eminent First Citizen', but both wishes were unrealistic.2 The army and the provinces now looked up to an outright emperor, whatever the niceties of the constitutional position at Rome. The First Citizen was the main source of patronage for much of the Roman upper class, and his huge finances were the essential supplement to the Public Treasury. His public spending and his jurisdiction were indispensable and, as Augustus had demonstrated by standing back between 23 and 19 bc, he was the indispensable protector and provider for the vast mass of common people at Rome. Tiberius could not behave as if he was only one member in an old-style Senate: he had asserted his succession in a manner which was very different. He had received an 'oath of allegiance', first of all from the consuls. It was then sworn in their presence by the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and the Prefect of the Corn-supply, jobs which were Augustan innovations: they would be crucial ever after to each emperor's accession and the stability of the city crowds. Next swore the 'Senate, the soldiers and the people': the soldiery, intruding here, were a sign of the new realities.3 This oath is telling evidence of Augustus' 'best order', as Augustus had called it. The strength of that 'order' was to be highlighted by the inadequacies of his first successors: it proved strong enough to survive them unscathed.

  The recurrent lesson from Tiberius and subsequent emperors is not only that 'absolute power corrupts absolutely': it is that emperors were only as good or bad as they had been before becoming emperor. They ran true to form and never improved with the job. Each of them began his reign with a modest, judicious statement of intent, but matters soon deteriorated, partly through their own characters and weak spots, and then through complex manoeuvring for a potential successor. This process involved frequent deaths in their own families and the liquidation of yet more palace-factions and senators, as poten­tial heirs became ever more widely scattered in branch-lines of the Julio-Claudian 'household'. As emperors married repeatedly, the number of possible heirs correspondingly increased.

  In Tiberius, the Romans had someone who was cunning and inscru­table but temperamentally unsuited to populist gestures or to giving senators a clear lead. After nine years he was talking vainly of 'restor­ing the Republic' and giving up his job: the death of his own son disenchanted him and was followed by other bereavements. Five years later he withdrew from Rome altogether, ending up on the island of Capri where he was credited with horrible sexual orgies. In his late sixties he looked repulsive, too, bald and gaunt with blotches on his face, only partly concealed by plasters. Nonetheless, he ruled for twenty-four years, the longest reign until Hadrian's. In March 37 his death was joyfully received by the common people. The senators conspicuously refused to honour him posthumously as a god. They also annulled his will and accepted his grandson Gaius as sole heir. The decision was disastrous.

  Unlike Tiberius, Gaius was only twenty-four, with no military com­petence whatsoever and only one minor magistracy behind him. His main appeal was that he was the son of the popular Germanicus, nephew of Tiberius. Despite fair promises, he turned out to be vicious, impossibly egocentric and mad. Some of the stories are almost too bizarre to be credible, that he promised to make his favourite horse a consul, that he ordered a big army for an invasion of Britain to pick up shells on a beach in northern France and then return home, or that he had sex with his sister and enforced an extravagant cult of her as a goddess after her death. He certainly promoted worship of himself as a god and tried to force it on the Jews and their Temple in Jerusalem: at the end of his brief reign, he was said to be dressing up as the gods and goddesses in his palace at Rome. He was even said to have split up the ancient temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum, so that an approach-road to his own 'shrine' up on the Palatine hill should push through it, with the twin gods as his 'doorkeepers': this story has some support from recent archaeology in the Forum. A soothsayer had once declared that Gaius had no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding across the Bay of Naples. To refute him, Gaius had a wooden bridge built across two points of the Bay, about three and a half miles apart, and galloped flat out across the planks while wearing what was said to be the breastplate of Alexander the Great. Gaius then held a huge drinking-party, threw some of his companions off the bridge and attacked others in a warship, leaving them to drown.

  In January 41, after four ghastly years of taunting and terrorizing the senators, Gaius ordered the torture of a pretty young mime-actress during an interrogation for treason. Even he was shocked at the effect on her body. The tribune of the guard who had supervised the torture was also disgusted. When Gaius left the theatre on the Palatine hill for a lunch-break, the tribune stabbed him in a palace corridor.

  The murder, on 24 January, was a cardinal chance for freedom: Gaius had no children of an age to take over. However, the senators behind the murder were divided. Should they destroy the whole beastly Julio-Claudian family? Should they keep the system but insist on electing the next First Citizen? Should they go further and somehow restore the Republic? Like Julius Caesar's murderers, they dithered, despite their talk of restoring 'liberty' and the rule of law. The power of the palace troops then asserted itself. One of the German body­guards found an ignored Julio-Claudian who was hiding behind a curtain in the Palace. The guards then acclaimed him as emperor and forced the divided conspirators to give in. The new emperor, Claudius, was on the face of it preposterous. Fifty years old, he drooled and could not co-ordinate his movements; he laughed uncontrollably and his voice sounded like some hoarse sea-monster. He has been plausibly diagnosed as suffering from cerebral palsy. Augustus had found him a public embarrassment and even his mother used to describe him as 'a monstrosity of a human being, one which Nature began and never finished'.4 Claudius may have been aware of the plan to murder Gaius, but it seems he was unaware, like the participants, that the result would ever be power for himself.

  Claudius began with severe disadvantages. The senators promptly declared war on him when they heard that the guards had championed him. He himself had no military experience, but he did raise the guards' wages, an effective substitute. An attempted revolt by the respected governor of Dalmatia in the following year collapsed within five days because the legions were still loyal to Claudius. In their eyes, he had a crucial quality: he was a proper household heir. He claimed a kinship with Augustus and he was grandson of Mark Antony.

  Claudius went on to rule for thirteen years in a fascinating mixtu
re of application and cruelty, over-compensation and attempted popul­ism. To compensate for his lack of military prowess, he invaded Britain in 43: he even crossed the river Thames on an elephant. But he kept on citing his victory 'beyond the Ocean' and accepting military salutations for a campaign to the action of which he had personally contributed nothing. Perpetually at odds with the Senate, he relied excessively on the accessible freedmen in his own household. He was not creating a new 'Civil Service': he was simply turning to would-be wise advisers who were near to hand. He also had an antiquarian mind. He had written copiously during his years as a marginal figure, finishing eight books on the Carthaginians and twenty books on the Etruscans, while writing an ongoing history of Rome, unfortunately lost to us. He had even written a book on gambling with dice, one of his passions. However, he had the vanity and vengefulness of the academic manque. In power, he fussed about such sillinesses as adding new letters to the alphabet; his speeches in the Senate were conceited and poorly constructed; he ordered that his long Etruscan history should be read aloud monthly in the Museum at Alexandria.

  Lacking senatorial credibility, Claudius found an alternative in the responses of the Roman populace. He would sit, in popular style, on the tribunes' bench; he played up to the crowds at public shows, especially the gladiatorial ones where his taste was definitely for blood. He encouraged overdue improvements to the grain-harbour for Rome; he improved the city's aqueducts and he attended to popular shows. His displays, however, were excessive and fatuous. At Ostia, he showed off by personally fighting against a whale which had been trapped in the new harbour. On his return from Britain he boated in and out of the harbour at Ravenna in an extravagant mock floating palace.5 He even forced through a massive plan to drain the Fucine Lake near Rome, and at the grand opening in 52 he staged an enor­mous sea-battle to amuse the crowds. Some L9,ooo combatants were encouraged to fight, shedding blood, but the waterworks went wrong and drenched the spectators, including Claudius and his wife, who was dressed in a golden robe, like a mythical queen.

  These massive displays for the crowds did nothing to endear him to the senators. They saw him as a self-willed bungler. They said that 321 knights and 35 senators were killed off by him in secret trials, and his habit of judging these cases personally in private rooms in his household was detested. Lacking senatorial friends, Claudius was recognized as a soft touch for those who had access to him, whether they were his personal doctor, prominent Gauls from the region of his birthplace Lyons or corrupt palace freedmen (who sometimes took bribes for arranging gifts of citizenship). Most memorably, there were the strong, self-willed women, a distinctive presence at court in the Julio-Claudian years.

  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. Supposedly it was done by a 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.

  Between 59 and 67, his performances built up in range and pub­licity. In 59, he gave games to celebrate the shaving of his beard and first sang in public to the lyre, flanked by voice-coaches and a backing of 5,000 chanters and cheerleaders. In 64, he first drove in public as a charioteer. Summer 66 saw 'Golden Day', the public reception of the king of Armenia at which Nero sang and drove yet again. The natural outlet for such aspirations was Greece. In 66/7 Nero went on tour to compete at Delphi and Olympia. The rumour was that he won more than 1,800 first prizes, even for a ten-horse chariot race in which he fell off. In return he gave Olympia a new club-house for athletes, the first Roman emperor to do anything for the site.

  This performing was not the fine outlet of a sympathetic 'friend of the arts'. Nero was pathologically vain and jealous: he assaulted his rivals and even had others' honorary statues destroyed. His increasing performances were accompanied by gross debauched parties, of which a river-party in 64 was particularly notorious. Nero was towed down­stream on a carpeted raft, pulled by boats which were rowed by male prostitutes. On either river bank, naked females were available for sex, prostitutes and noblewomen alike. A few days later Nero married one of his male sex-slaves. He wore a wedding veil and even squealed like a virgin bride when the wedding was apparently consummated.

  Like the 'fatal charades' in Rome's arena, Nero's performances and orgies were sometimes enhanced by allusions to Greek mythology. But they are not excused or dignified by it or made into a consistent whole, as if they were being conducted by a role-playing master of 'revelry'. Egotism and cruel perversion prevailed, and the cost and extravagance ruined public funds. In 59, after all, Nero had had his mother Agrippina murdered and then publicly celebrated his 'rescue' from her plotting. His married life began relatively quietly, despite his taste for 'roving' at night with parties of friends and harassing even the better-born women in the streets. He did not care for
his first wife Octavia whom he married as a child, but he compensated with a willing freedwoman. He then took a friend's wife away and married her, the lovely 'amber' haired Poppaea Sabina who was said to bathe in the milk of 500 donkeys. When she died, kicked to death by Nero, he picked the freedman who looked most like her, had him castrated and used him for sex instead. He nicknamed him 'Sporus' ('seed') and even 'Sabina' too. Throughout, 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.