by Ed West
Nero, just an adolescent, was a mixture of Joffrey and Ramsay Snow. He enthralled the people with shows, pandering to their desires and worst excesses, thrilling them with spectacles beyond their dreams, such as recreating great sea battles off the coast—but this frivolity came with a very dark side.
As he was growing up, Nero seduced boys and married women alike, and also raped a Vestal Virgin, the priestesses of Rome whose chastity was considered so sacred that intercourse with one was a capital offense. He also indulged in incest—with his own mother—and it was said that whenever he and Agrippina rode together in the same litter they would act on their passions and “the stains on clothes when he emerged proved it.”4
As emperor, he had men and women tied to stakes and himself released from a “den” and, while dressed in wild animal skins, he rushed at them and attacked their genitals. Suetonius wrote that “after working up sufficient excitement by this means, he was dispatched—shall we say?—by his freedman.”5
After a great fire destroyed much of Rome that in AD64, Nero used the disaster as an excuse to greatly expand his palace and gardens by knocking down the slums and pinned the blame on a small and eccentric religious cult who followed a rabbi put to death thirty years earlier. As well as famously putting Christians in the arena with lions, he also had them installed as candles at his garden party, so that as evening fell the poor victims were nailed to crosses and then burned to light up the party. There he walked and talked among his guests while dressed as a charioteer, which left even the not especially humanitarian Romans shocked and filled with pity, since “the Christians’ annihilation seemed to arise not from public utility but from one man’s brutality.”6
Eventually Nero grew tired of his mother and had her murdered. After the emperor deliberately had her boat sunk, a friend of hers, struggling in the water, frantically tried to get one of her rescuers’ attention by calling out “I am Agrippina”—and was immediately beaten to death with oars and poles. Agrippina silently swam away from the wreck, but not long after her son had assassins stab her to death.
Ignoring scandal, Nero revelled in his depravity. After he kicked his wife Poppaea to death by accident, he ordered his minions to find a doppelgänger, and ended up with Sporus, who was perfect in every way except that he was a boy; and so, he was dressed up in Poppaea’s robes, his hair styled to resemble her, and the same makeup applied. Afterward, the emperor toured Greece with his new “wife” who was carried in the litter reserved for Caesar’s spouse, attended to by maids. He then held a mock wedding with his bride dressed in saffron and with grand celebrations, as well as traditional prayer that the gods might grant them children.
Nero went too far eventually. In March 68, the governor of northern Gaul rebelled and was joined by Galba, governor of Hispania; soon the head of the Praetorian Guard—the elite body of men charged with protecting the monarch—turned against the mad emperor, too. Cornered, Nero asked his private secretary to finish him off, his last words being Qualis artifex pereo, “What an artist dies in me.” The Julio-Claudian dynasty was at an end—and the country fell into a civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors.
THE HILL FOLK
Julius Caesar’s rise and fall would ultimately lead to the republic’s dissolution, but before that he added to victory in Gaul by planning his next conquest—Britain. In 55BC, Caesar led a force across the sea, arriving in Cantium, which was home of the Cantiaci tribe whose name is preserved in Kent, which would become one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. (In Westeros the seven kingdoms originate with the First Men, but Kent was the only kingdom definitely known to have pre-dated the Saxons’ arrival in Britain.) The following year Caesar returned, but again after a few days left for Rome, and in 50BC the empire descended into chaos.
It was Claudius who eventually conquered the island of Britannia. At the time the journey was daunting for many, as it was variously believed that the Britons were either cyclopses or practiced human sacrifices. Certainly, various mass burial sites suggest a country not unacquainted with extreme violence, but as for written evidence we only have the Romans’ word for it. (In Martin’s world, contemporary educated people are sceptical of their ancestors’ belief that the First Men did this.)
As in Westeros, where the Valyrians arrive after an invitation from a native king, so too a British tribe sought assistance from Rome, and in AD45 a force of forty thousand men under Aulus Plautius assembled at Boulogne for the crossing. Among the twenty or so tribes they encountered on the island were the Hammerers, the Hill Folk, and the People of the Deep, although we know them better by the names given to them by their conquerors—the Ordovices, Brigantes, and Dumnonii respectively. Their gods carried clubs and were mysterious even to those who followed them: Dagda the lord of knowledge, Lugh the god of arts and crafts, and Lud (or Nud) the closest thing the barbarians had to a supreme deity, and whose temple may have been on or close to the current site of St Paul’s cathedral (now Ludgate Circus). Some traditions have lasted a very long time: in ancient Britain it was believed that a cockerel defended against thunderstorms, which is one explanation for why cocks are still found on top of weathervanes.
The Britons, like their near relations further west in the even more mysterious Hibernia, or Land of Winter, celebrated Samhain during the time of year when the animals were slaughtered before the cold set in; this later evolved into Halloween, which was brought to America by Irish immigrants, where it became the child-centered celebration it is today.
Although the Romans easily overran the flat south of the island, it was not long before rebellion erupted, led by a woman who became a military leader after the death of her husband, and was known for her striking hair.7 According to the contemporary Roman historian Tacitus, Boudicca was “possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women,”8 while Cassius Dio said that she had “a harsh voice and piercing glare, and habitually wore a large golden necklace (perhaps a torc), a many-coloured tunic, and a thick cloak fastened by a brooch.”9 With her distinctive appearance, this woman, with her freed slave army hell-bent on revenge against their masters, must have been a terrifying figure.
Boudicca’s Iceni tribe, from the east of the country, had been allies of the Romans until their king Prasutagus died in AD60. As was the custom, Prasutagus left half his possessions to the Roman Emperor, while the other half of his estate went to his wife Boudicca. But the Roman officials took Boudicca’s land and had her whipped, and also raped her two daughters—and the Iceni erupted, joined by others as the rebellion snowballed. It was only eventually put down with great bloodshed, and after three cities had been sacked, including Londonium.
Yet in the coming years the south of the island—Britannia Superior—was easily tamed. In these flat pastures, the Romans cut roads out of forests; the natives were introduced to exotic luxuries such as olive oil and ate Mediterranean fruits and vegetables. The north, or Britannia Inferior, was far tougher, and the Romans distinguished between the semi-Romanized Britanni of the south and the belligerent Brittones of the north, with its rocks and crags and hills. The Britanni almost certainly came to speak a form of Latin like their cousins in Gaul, who had become Romanized after many years; although French contains a number of Celtic words, some of which have come into English, such as brave, bribe, galon/gallon, greve/gravel, mouton/mutton, petit, and piece. The Brittones mostly still spoke the native Brythonic language.
Further north, the even stranger peoples of Caledonia were a different proposition altogether. These dark Picts, uniquely in Europe, traced their lineage through their mothers, not fathers, and were a terror to the people of the south.10 The indigenous people of Scotland are thought to have arrived from Iberia several thousand years earlier, and their language was a mixture of Indo-European and older, ancient tongues of which we know little. They maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until far later than the Britons, and so may have been dark skinned; a protein-rich diet from hunting would not have favored mutations for pale
features, which only became advantageous when Europeans turned to cereals, and so rickets became a problem (pale skin converts Vitamin D from the sun more efficiently and so reduces the risk of the disease). Cheddar Man was certainly dark-skinned and it’s likely Britons would have remained so until the arrival of agriculture.11
In 83AD, the Romans headed north and defeated the natives at Mons Graupius, deep into the north of Caledonia. The contemporary historian Tacitus recorded a speech by the Caledonian leader Calgacus telling his enemies: “We, the most distant people of the earth and of liberty, our very isolation and the obscurity of our renown have protected us up to this day: now the farthest boundary of Britain lies open, and everything unknown is considered marvellous, but now there are no people further on, nothing except waves and rocks.” He concluded it, in the famous phrase used to condemn empires: “they make a desert, and call it peace.”12
Despite this victory, in which as many as ten thousand natives died as opposed to just 180 or so Romans, Caledonia remained a wild and forbidding place. Among the stories told about their untamed homeland was that of the famous Roman IX Legion, which disappeared in the 120s after an expedition beyond Britannia. Their fate remains unknown.13
The Picts continued to menace the north of Britannia until Emperor Hadrian resolved to solve the problem by building a wall to keep them out. Work began in 122AD, taking fifteen thousand men six years to build, and at its completion Hadrian’s Wall was eighty miles along, eight feet thick, and 15 feet high, with forts every fifteen miles and a ditch on each side, sufficient to keep out the wild Picts beyond. Martin’s creation is four times as long and seventy times as high, being three hundred miles in length and seven hundred feet tall (even the Great Wall of China was only twenty-six feet at its highest point, and the world’s tallest wall today is 164 feet, a climbing wall in Nevada). However it’s likely that, like the wall of Westeros, it was once white, painted by the Romans to maximize its visual impact.
After Hadrian’s death in 138AD, his successor Antoninus Pius built a second wall further north, in the narrowest spot in the central lowlands of Scotland—although this was abandoned soon after. (Aerys the Mad King also proposed building a second wall further north before other things got in his way.)
Much of Hadrian’s Wall was subsequently taken away over the years to build roads and was only saved by a nineteenth century lawyer called John Clayton, without whom it might have been lost. It now attracts many sightseers from around the world, including George R.R. Martin, who made a trip there during his visit to Britain in the early 1980s. As the slow northern twilight crept over, he pictured himself as a legionary, at the edge of the known world and facing barbarians outside of civilization:
We climbed to the top of Hadrian’s Wall and I looked north and tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman soldier stationed there in the first century. At the end of the known world staring at these distant hills and wondering what lived there and what might come out of it. You were looking off the end of the world. Protecting the civilized world against whatever might emerge from those trees.14
And then, he asked himself, “What if the legionaries were facing something worse than barbarians?”
At its peak, about ten thousand troops were stationed on this northern frontier of civilization, and each fort could hold as many as six hundred men, with cavalry units of up to one thousand at each end. Northumbrian winters are harsh, and the Roman soldiers stationed here wore woollen cloaks, trousers, and sheep-skin boots, but life on Hadrian’s Wall was not as grim as one might expect—records show that many soldiers had heated baths, toilets, a hospital, and a wide selection of food, as well as plenty of holiday time, and there was little daily threat from beyond the wall. For the officers, they even had a form of under floor heating called a hypocaust. In fact, some historians believe the wall may have been as much a question of prestige as anything else, but the structure lasted as a manned fortress for three hundred years, even some time after Rome abandoned Britain in 410.
It was garrisoned with soldiers from across the Empire, men who hailed from as far as Syria.15 Among those who travelled to this most militarized part of the imperium were 5500 horsemen from Sarmatia, steppe nomads from what is now Ukraine who spoke an Iranian language. They were described by historian Cassius Dio as “a savage uncivilized nation . . . naturally warlike, and famous for painting their bodies to appear more terrible in the field of battle. . . . They lived upon plunder and fed upon blood mixed with the blood of horses.”16
These Sarmatians were eventually settled in a temporary colony in what is now Lancashire, in the northwest of England, but which became permanent. Today the Ossetians, who live in the Caucasus mountains in the very south of Russia, trace their descent from the Sarmatians and speak an Eastern Iranian language. Among the legends of Ossetian folklore is the story of a dying warrior who asks his friend to throw his sword in a lake lest it fall into the hands of his enemies; the man cannot bear to be rid of such a magnificent weapon and twice lies, only for the hero somehow to know. Eventually he flings the weapon into the water and it is caught by a woman’s hand coming out of the lake. That this strange tale exists nowhere else but among the Ossetians and Welsh suggests that Sarmatians may have brought the idea of King Arthur to late Roman Britain or that, as the 2004 film King Arthur suggested, he was a Sarmatian.17
More fatefully, from the third century the Romans imported as soldiers Angles and Saxons from across the cold German Sea.
A GOLDEN CROWN
Perhaps the height of Roman civilization was the period of the Five Good Emperors, from Nerva in 96AD to Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180AD. The last of these was a philosopher as well as a warrior, but his unhinged son Commodus would begin what in retrospect was the rot.18 Commodus insisted on taking part in the games, and this became a regular event; on one occasion “he killed a hundred lions with a hundred javelins.”19 The emperor then started decapitating ostriches, at which point some senators started to question whether he was entirely suitable for the role and decided to poison him; that failed, and so they found an athlete to strangle him. The emperor was finished, although as he had recently appointed the athlete in question governor of Syria, might have felt he was rather lacking gratitude. Commodus and his father have famously been portrayed in two films, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator, although neither are considered accurate portrayals of Commodus by serious historians, something that would surely vex him.*
In 193AD came the “year of the five emperors’” and in the third century civil wars sparked up between rival generals, often splitting the empire. During a fifty-year period of the third century, twenty-six emperors and more usurpers claimed power. Real power now rested with the Praetorian Guard, tasked with protecting the emperor, but more often prone to killing him and installing a successor. Without a legitimate structure for passing on authority, power did indeed reside where people believed it resided.
In 260 a Roman emperor, Valerian, was captured by the Persians, a great shock and humiliation to the empire; he never came home, and according to one theory was used as a human footstool by the Emperor Shapur. One source suggested that after Valerian offered large amounts of money for his release, Shapur forced him to swallow molten gold and then had him skinned alive and his skin stuffed with straw and placed as a trophy in a temple.20
The Doom of Valryia was a natural cataclysm, caused by a rupture in the earth that literally sinks the capital of the empire, leading to a century of chaos. It is recalled that every city within five hundred miles was incinerated and even dragons in the sky burned, red clouds raining down “the black fire of demons,” causing water three hundred feet high to drown the land.21 This has some historical resonance with the disaster that struck the late bronze age societies, and which may have been responsible for the Biblical flood myth.
The doom that faced Rome, however, was man-made. The Romans had been concerned about barbarian birth rates from at least the first century; a Roman m
ilite might spend twenty-five years in the profession and soldiers stationed along the frontiers that lined the Rhine and Danube would have heard from older comrades that the number of barbarians seemed to grow and grow each decade (although by now most of his comrades might be barbarians themselves). From the fourth century, Germanic tribes began to settle in the western Empire, often to protect its frontiers from other tribes, for the Romans had run out of men willing to fight for them. On December 31, 406, a number of barbarian groups led by the Vandals and Alans crossed the Rhine and walked into Gaul, almost unopposed; they were refugees, and also invaders.
Across the continent enormous war bands of German nations moved into imperial territory, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons, and Angles among them. From the late fourth century, Saxon ships were being sighted in twos and threes off the coast of Britannia, but as the years went by they came back in greater numbers. Looking east out to the North Sea from the flat, eastern coast of Britain—what is now Essex and East Anglia—one looks into the ice-cold vastness of what was once called the German Ocean and can imagine the terror the natives must have felt upon seeing the Saxon ships make their way along the coast of continental Europe and across to this poorly-defended island.
In Britannia, pirate attacks become more frequent; in 367, they suffered raids from the east and west, from Saxons and Irish; a later raid is attribiuted to Ireland’s high king, Niall of the Nine Hostages. According to legend, he found his beautiful wife when a group of his friends were stopped by an old hag guarding a well and had to kiss her in exchange for water. Only Niall satisfied the crone, after which she turned into a beautiful maiden and they produced an abundance of sons who became the heads of many successful clans. This is the legend, but in 2006 geneticists discovered that one in twelve Irishmen are descended from one very fecund individual directly through the male line, and 2 percent of New York men, and numerous other Americans such as Stephen Colbert, Bill O’Reilly, and Henry Louis Gates.* Certainly Niall, or some other figure at the time, had a large number of surviving sons who in turn were hugely successful in producing offspring.