The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  26. It might have been possible to excuse his insolent, lustful, extravagant, greedy or cruel early practices (which were, I grant more furtive than aggressive), by saying that boys will be boys; yet at the same time, this was clearly the true Nero, not merely Nero in his adolescence. As soon as night fell he would snatch a hat or cap and make a round of the taverns, or prowl the streets in search of mischief—and not always innocent mischief either, because one of his games was to attack men on their way home from dinner, stab them if they offered resistance, and then drop their bodies down the sewers. He would also break into shops, afterwards opening a miniature market at the Palace with the stolen goods, dividing them up into lots, auctioning them himself, and squandering the proceeds. During these escapades he often risked being blinded or killed—once he was beaten almost to death by a senator whose wife he had molested, which taught him never to go out after dark unless an escort of senior officers was following him at a discreet distance. He would even secretly visit the Theatre by day, in a sedan chair, and watch the quarrels among the pantomime actors, cheering them on from the top of the proscenium; then, when they came to blows and fought it out with stones and broken benches, he joined in the fun by throwing things on the heads of the crowd. On one occasion he fractured a praetor’s skull.

  27. Gradually Nero’s vices gained the upper hand: he no longer tried to laugh them off, or hide, or deny them, but turned quite brazen. His feasts now lasted from noon till midnight, with an occasional break for diving into a warm bath or, if it were summer, into snow-cooled water. Sometimes he would drain the artificial lake in the Campus Martius, or the other in the Circus, and hold public dinner parties there, including prostitutes and dancing-girls from all over the City among his guests. Whenever he floated down the Tiber to Ostia, or cruised past Baiae, he had a row of temporary brothels erected along the shore, where a number of noblewomen, pretending to be madams, stood waiting to solicit his custom. He also forced his friends to provide him with dinners; one of them spent 40,000 gold pieces on a turban party, and another even more on a rose banquet.

  28. Not satisfied with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria. He nearly contrived to marry the freedwoman Acte, by persuading some friends of consular rank to swear falsely that she came of royal stock. Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him—dowry, bridal veil and all—which the whole Court attended; then brought him home, and treated him as a wife. He dressed Sporus in the fine clothes normally worn by an Empress and took him in his own Utter not only to every Greek assize and fair, but actually through the Street of Images at Rome, kissing him amorously now and then. A rather amusing joke is still going the rounds: the world would have been a happier place had Nero’s father Domitius married that sort of wife.

  The passion he felt for his mother, Agrippina, was notorious; but her enemies would not let him consummate it, fearing that, if he did, she would become even more powerful and ruthless than hitherto. So he found a new mistress who was said to be her spit and image; some say that he did, in fact, commit incest with Agrippina every time they rode in the same litter—the state of his clothes when he emerged proved it.

  29. Nero practised every kind of obscenity, and at last invented a novel game: he was released from a den dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes. After working up sufficient excitement by this means, he was despatched—shall we say?—by his freedman Doryphorus. Doryphorus now married him—just as he himself had married Sporus—and on the wedding night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered. According to my informants he was convinced that nobody could remain sexually chaste, but that most people concealed their secret vices; hence, if anyone confessed to obscene practices, Nero forgave him all his other crimes.

  30. He believed that fortunes were made to be squandered, and whoever could account for every penny he spent seemed to him a stingy miser. ‘True gentlemen,’ he said, ‘always throw their money about.’ He professed deep admiration for his uncle Caligula, merely because he had run through Tiberius’s vast fortune; and never thought twice, himself, about giving away or wasting money. Believe it or not, he spent 8,000 gold pieces a day on King Tiridates, and made him a parting gift of more than a million. He presented Menecrates the lyre-player and Spiculus the gladiator with houses and estates worthy of men who had celebrated triumphs, and showed equal generosity to his monkey-faced banker Paneros, whom he later buried in almost royal style. Nero never wore the same clothes twice; he would stake 4,000 gold pieces on each pip of the winning throw at dice; and when he went fishing used a golden net strung with purple and scarlet thread. He seldom travelled, it is said, with a train of less than 1,000 carriages; the mules were shod with silver, the muleteers wore Canusian wool, and he was escorted by Mazacian horsemen from Morocco, and outriders with jingling bracelets and medallions.

  31. His wastefulness showed most of all in the architectural projects. He built a palace, stretching from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which he called ‘The Passageway’; and when it burned down soon afterwards, rebuilt it under the new name of ‘The Golden House’. The following details will give some notion of its size and magnificence. A huge statue of himself, 120 feet high, stood in the entrance hall; and the pillared arcade ran for a whole mile. An enormous pool, more like a sea than a pool, was surrounded by buildings made to resemble cities, and by a landscape garden consisting of ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures, and woodlands—where every variety of domestic and wild animal roamed about. Parts of the house were overlaid with gold and studded with precious stones and nacre. All the dining-rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let a rain of flowers, or of perfume from hidden sprinklers, shower upon his guests. The main dining-room was circular, and its roof revolved slowly, day and night, in time with the sky. Sea water, or sulphur water, was always on tap in the baths. When the palace had been decorated throughout in this lavish style, Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark: ‘Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being!’

  He also had men at work on a covered bath surrounded by cloisters and stretching from Misenum to Lake Avernus; all the hot springs in the Baiae district would be canalized to feed it. Another project would have connected Lake Avernus with Ostia by a ship canal 160 miles long, and broad enough for two quinqueremes to pass. Prisoners from every part of the Empire were to be used for this task, even those convicted of capital crimes.

  Nero’s confidence in the national resources was not the only cause of his furious spending; he had also been excited by tales of a great hidden treasure, vouched for by a Roman knight who swore that the hoard brought by Queen Dido to Carthage centuries before, when she fled from Tyre, still lay untouched in certain huge African caves and could easily be retrieved.

  32. When this hope failed to materialize, Nero found himself bankrupt—and his financial difficulties were such that he could not lay hands on enough money even for the soldiers’ pay or the veterans’ benefits; and therefore resorted to robbery and blackmail.

  First he made a law that if a freedman died who had taken the name of a family connected with his own, and could not show adequate reason, five-sixths of the estate, not merely one half, should be forfeited to the Privy Purse. Next, he seized the estates of those who had shown ingratitude by not bequeathing him enough; and fined the lawyers responsible for writing and dictating such mean wills. Moreover, any man whose words or deeds offered the least handle to an informer was charged with lèse-majesté. He recalled the presents he had given to Greek cities in acknowledgement of prizes won at musical or athletic contests. On one market-day he sent an agent to sell a few ounces of the amethystine and Tyrian purple dyes which he had forbidden to be used, and then closed the businesses of dealers who had bought them. It is said that he once noticed a lady wearing this illegal colour at one of his recitals,
pointed her out to his servants and had her dragged off—whereupon she was stripped not only of her clothes but of her entire property. His invariable formula, when he appointed a magistrate, was: ‘You know my needs, eh? You and I must see that nobody is left with anything.’ Finally he robbed numerous temples of their treasures and melted down the gold and silver images, among them the Household-gods of Rome—which Galba, however, had recast soon afterwards.

  33. Claudius was the first victim of his murderous career: because, though Nero may not have been actually responsible for the poisoning of his adoptive father, he knew all about it, as he later admitted by appreciatively quoting a Greek proverb which calls mushrooms (the cause of this death and deification) ‘the food of the gods’. And he did his utmost to insult Claudius’s memory, accusing him either of stupidity or of cruelty. It was a favourite joke of his that Claudius could no longer ‘play the fool on earth’, lengthening the initial syllable of morari ‘to linger on’, so that it meant ‘to play the fool’. Nero annulled many of Claudius’s decrees and edicts, on the ground that he had been a doddering old idiot; and enclosed the place where he had been cremated with nothing better than a low rubble wall.

  He tried to poison Britannicus, being not merely jealous of his voice, which was far more musical than his own, but afraid that the common people might be less attached to Claudius’s adopted son than to his real one. The drug came from an expert poisoner named Locusta, and when its action was not so rapid as he expected—the effect was violently laxative—he called for her, complaining that she had given him medicine instead of poison, and flogged her with his own hands. Locusta explained that she had reduced the dose to make the crime less obvious. ‘Oho!’ he said. ‘So you think that I am afraid of the Julian law against poisoning?’ Then he led Locusta into his bedroom and stood over her while she concocted the fastest-working poison in her pharmacopoeia. This he administered to a kid, but when it took five hours to die he made her boil down the brew again and again. At last he tried it on a pig, which died on the spot; and that night at dinner had what remained poured into Britannicus’s cup. Britannicus dropped dead at the very first taste, but Nero lyingly assured the guests that the poor boy had ‘long been subject to these epileptic seizures.’ Britannicus was buried hastily and without ceremony on the following day during a heavy shower of rain, and Nero rewarded Locusta generously for her services with a free pardon—she had been condemned to death as a poisoner even before Agrippina employed her to murder Claudius—and actually supplied her with students.

  34. The over-watchful, over-critical eye that Agrippina kept on whatever Nero said or did proved more than he could stand. He first tried to embarrass her by frequent threats to abdicate and go into retirement in Rhodes. Then, having deprived her of all power, and even of her Roman and German bodyguard, he expelled her from his Palace; after which he did everything possible to annoy her, sending people to pester her with law-suits while she stayed in Rome, and when she took refuge on her riverside estate, making them constantly drive or sail past the windows, disturbing her with jeers and cat-calls. In the end her threats and violent behaviour terrified him into deciding that she must die. He tried to poison her three times, but she had always taken the antidote in advance; so he rigged up a machine in the ceiling of her bedroom which would dislodge the panels and drop them on her while she slept. However, someone gave the secret away. Then he had a collapsible cabin-boat designed which would either sink or fall in on top of her. Under pretence of a reconciliation, he sent the most friendly note inviting her to celebrate the Feast of Minerva with him at Baiae, and on her arrival made one of his captains stage an accidental collision with the galley in which she had sailed. Then he protracted the feast until a late hour, and when at last she said: ‘I really must get back to Baiae,’ offered her his collapsible boat instead of the damaged galley. Nero was in a very happy mood as he led Agrippina down to the quay, and even kissed her breasts before she stepped aboard. He sat up all night, on tenterhooks of anxiety, waiting for news of her death. At dawn Lucius Agermus, her freedman, entered joyfully to report that although the ship had foundered, his mother had swum to safety, and he need have no fears on her account. For want of a better plan, Nero ordered one of his men to drop a dagger surreptitiously beside Agermus, whom he arrested at once on a charge of attempted murder. After this he arranged for Agrippina to be killed, and made it seem as if she had sent Agermus to assassinate him but committed suicide on hearing that the plot had miscarried. Other more gruesome details are supplied by reliable authorities: it appears that Nero rushed off to examine Agrippina’s corpse, handling her legs and arms critically and, between drinks, discussing their good and bad points. Though encouraged by the congratulations which poured in from the Army, the Senate and the people, he was never thereafter able to free his conscience from the guilt of this crime. He often admitted that the Furies were pursuing him with whips and burning torches; and set Persian mages at work to conjure up the ghost and make her stop haunting him. During his tour of Greece he came to Athens, where the Eleusinian Mysteries were being held, but dared not participate when a herald ordered all criminals present to withdraw before the ceremonies began.

  Having disposed of his mother, Nero proceeded to murder his aunt Domitia Lepida. He found her confined to bed with severe constipation. The old lady stroked his downy beard affectionately—he was already full-grown—murmuring: ‘Whenever you celebrate your coming-of-age and present me with this, I shall die happy.’ Nero turned to his courtiers and said laughingly: ‘In that case I must shave at once’—which he did. Then he ordered the doctors to give her a laxative of fatal strength, seized her property before she was quite dead, and avoided all legal complications by tearing up the will.

  35. After getting rid of Octavia, he took two more wives—first Poppaea Sabina, a quaestor’s daughter, at that time married to a knight, and Statilia Messalina, great-great-grand-daughter of Augustus’s general Statilius who had twice been Consul and won a triumph. To marry Statilia he was obliged to murder her husband, a consul. Life with Octavia had soon bored him, and when his friends criticized his treatment of her, he retorted: ‘Being an emperor’s wife ought surely to be enough to make her happy?’ He tried to strangle her on several occasions, but finally pronounced that she was barren, and divorced her. This act made him so unpopular and caused so great a scandal that he banished Octavia and later had her executed on a charge of adultery. Her innocence was proved by the refusal of the witnesses called by him to testify against her even under torture; so he bribed his old tutor Anicetus76 to confess (falsely) that he had tricked her into infidelity. Though he doted on Poppaea, whom he married twelve days after this divorce, he kicked her to death while she was pregnant and feeling very ill, because she dared complain that he came home late from the races. Poppaea had borne him a daughter, Claudia Augusta, who died in infancy.

  There was no family relationship which Nero did not criminally abuse. When Claudius’s daughter Antonia refused to take Poppaea’s place, he had her executed on a charge of attempted rebellion; and destroyed every other member of his family, including relatives by marriage, in the same way. He committed an indecent assault on young Aulus Plautius and then put him to death, remarking: ‘Now Mother may come and kiss my successor’; he explained that Agrippina had been in love with Aulus and induced him to make a bid for the throne. There was also his step-son, Rufrius Crispinus, Poppaea’s child by her former husband. Nero had the boy’s own slaves drown him on a fishing expedition simply because he was said to have played at being a general and an emperor. He banished Tuscus, the son of his foster-mother and now Procurator of Egypt, for daring to use the baths which he had built in preparation for the Imperial visit to Alexandria. When his tutor Seneca repeatedly asked leave to retire, and offered to surrender all his estates, Nero swore that he had no cause to suspect the old man, whom he would rather die than harm; but drove him to commit suicide nevertheless. He promised Burrus, the Guards’ commander, a cou
gh mixture, but sent poison instead; also poisoning the food and drink of the rich old freedmen who had originally arranged for him to be adopted as Claudius’s heir, and were now acting as his Privy Councillors.

  36. Nero was no less cruel to strangers than to members of his family. A comet,77 popularly supposed to herald the death of some person of outstanding importance, appeared several nights running and greatly disturbed him, His astrologer Balbillus observed that monarchs usually avoided portents of this kind by executing their most prominent subjects and thus directing the wrath of heaven elsewhere; so Nero resolved on a wholesale massacre of the nobility. What fortified him in this decision, and seemed to justify it, was that he had discovered two plots against his life. The earlier and more important one of the two was Piso’s conspiracy in Rome; the other, detected at Beneventum, had been headed by Vinicius. When brought up for trial the conspirators were loaded with three sets of chains. Some, while admitting their guilt, claimed that by destroying a man so thoroughly steeped in evil as Nero, they would have been doing him the greatest possible service. All children of the condemned men were banished from Rome, and then starved to death or poisoned.