The Nero Prediction

by Humphry Knipe

  "Permit me to insist. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion."

  "What? Of poisoning me? Why on earth would you want to do that? You do exactly as you p-please as it is."

  Although she didn't smile, the compression of Agrippina's lips softened. "Husband, I hope that you realize what a burden of suspicion the comet's omen has rested on my shoulders. Should you fall ill, all fingers will point at me. I would rather die with you than live in a state of opprobrium."

  Claudius held out his wine goblet for a refill. "Very well, my dear, if that's what you want."

  That night Agrippina locked herself away with her almanac of the future planetary positions and her horoscopes, the future written in code. She told no one what she was up to, asked for no assistance, not even from me. But there was only one explanation for why she was doing the mathematics to decode them. Here was an inquiry that she could share with no one, especially not Claudius's friend the imperial astrologer Balbillus. That must mean that she was searching for the day that Nero was destined to succeed Claudius and therefore the day that Claudius was destined to die.

  For four weeks the comet, setting later every day as it moved north east, cast its pall of doom over the city. Everyone knew by now that when it first appeared its tail had pointed at Hydra's head and that therefore Claudius was about to be poisoned. Everyone also knew who the regicide was going to be: Agrippina who had already been responsible for at least one death, Messalina's, in her quest to put her son on the throne. True, she was now supposed to be acting as the emperor's personal taster, but that was mere subterfuge to lull her husband into a false sense of security. Sooner or later, at the predestined time, she would poison him.

  When the time came for Claudius to die Agrippina sent for me. It was the evening of October 12, almost exactly three months after the comet's disappearance. "You are Fate’s Anointed, destined to help me raise my son to the ultimate power," she said. "This fact has already been demonstrated by the part you played in the destruction of Messalina. Therefore it is you who will poison Claudius."

  This dreadful statement was delivered in a tone of voice that could have been instructing me to close a window because of the draft or open a door to admit someone who knocked. Quite suddenly I was wishing that Fate had anointed someone else. "Domina?" I croaked, "how..."

  Besides for the enormity of the crime it was clearly impossible. Since the appearance of the comet everyone was searched to the skin before being allowed to enter the imperial presence. Claudius's cooks would be the first to be tortured at the merest suspicion of poison. German bodyguards rested their brawny backs against the walls of the dining room, their chilly blue eyes watching every move. Their commander was the famous gladiator Spiculus whose image was everywhere on glass drinking cups. Recently freed by Claudius, Sting (this is what spiculus means in Latin) was a frightening young man who moved with the grace of a cat. Narcissus, Claudius's plump private secretary, stood unsmiling behind the imperial couch. Nothing, it seemed, could induce him to blink. Before Claudius (and now Agrippina as well) touched anything it was first sampled by his taster, the eunuch Halotus, who had a palate so sensitive that he could tell from which sea an oyster had been plucked.

  Agrippina reached into her dinner robe and brought out her star diary. "Here, in my diary, is the poison from which my husband is fated to die. Towards the end of dinner, just before the hour caller announces the beginning of the second hour of night, Halotus will have a dish of mushrooms brought in. As soon as they are set down for him to taste I shall signal you for my diary which I shall pass to you before I sit down to eat. When it is above the dish this is what you will do with it."

  She removed one of the wads of paper that now plugged both ends of the scroll and tipped out a brownish powder that looked like ground pepper but smelt of fish. "Take care that the powder falls onto the large mushroom at the center of the dish and that one only. Do you understand?"

  "Domina, the Germans, Narcissus. At any point during the meal I could be searched!"

  "But no one dares to search me and besides for you," she said with the grim specter of a smile, "has anyone dared to read my star diary? I have read your stars, you will not fail."

  Fear froze me as still as a statue behind the couch on which Agrippina and Claudius reclined. The star diary that Agrippina had given me to hold for her as she sank onto the imperial dinner couch lay as heavy as a lead pipe in my pocket. A step away from me Halotus fussed over the dishes coming in from the kitchen, tasting everything and then commenting at length on ingredients and gastronomic quality. I could tell he was aware of me because at no time did he allow me to catch his eye.

  In came the mushrooms, a pyramid of them topped with an enormous specimen, ugly as a toad. Halotus's bulk hid the dish from the diners' view. There was sweat on his smooth upper lip and terror in his eyes. A roast peacock, its resplendent tail feathers artfully replaced, hid the mushrooms from the Germans. Working in my pocket I removed the paper wad from the higher side of the scroll.

  "The second hour of night has commenced," came the clear voice of the boy who watched the water clock.

  Agrippina half turned her head, her hand reaching for her star diary. With a movement I'd practiced a thousand times in my mind I dusted the back of the toad in the center of the mushroom dish with the powder. It looked like ground pepper. Agrippina's thin white fingers had barely closed on her messages from the stars when Halotus began to crow about the mushrooms. By the time Agrippina had settled back on her cushions the deadly platter lay on the low table at the focus of the couches.

  "Ah mushrooms, food of the gods!" exclaimed Nero reaching down to the table from the couch opposite Claudius and Agrippina.

  His mother reached quickly across the table and slapped his hand with the star diary. "Wait your turn," she said picking up a morsel from the edge of the platter. "And don't even think of touching the big one in the middle, that's a special treat for your father."

  "Thank you dear," said Claudius stuffing the lethal one into his mouth. "Oh, what an unusual f-fishy seasoning!"

  Five minutes later he started hiccuping so violently that he spilt his wine. "Oh dear," he wheezed, "I've suddenly got a t-terrible stomach ache. Time for the v-vomitorium." He left the table hanging between two Germans. Just outside the door he began to puke.

  Agrippina's knuckles whitened as she drove her nails into the palms of her hands. I understood why. The poison was being evacuated before it had time to do its mischief! Within minutes the cooks, screeching their innocence, were being dragged to the rack. Within the hour Rome was in uproar. Agrippina had poisoned her husband, that was the rumor.

  It was the second hour past midnight when I confirmed Agrippina's fears. "The pains are subsiding, domina. His doctors say that he's going to recover."

  At first I thought that she'd fallen asleep with her eyes open because she didn't appear to hear what I'd said. I was about to repeat myself when she said a single word. "Narcissus."

  I followed her train of thought. Narcissus, Claudius's private secretary who hated Agrippina for the hold she had over his master, must have prayed for an opportunity like this one. Only the fact that he wasn't in Rome had saved Agrippina from losing her liberty when Claudius's stomach pains began.

  "Bring me Xenophon," she said.

  The imperial physician was about to close the door in my face when she whispered, "The boy comes in."

  The room seemed a lot colder than when I'd left it a few minutes earlier, as if a window had been opened to let in the crisp October air.

  "I hear that my husband is going to recover."

  "Yes, the gods be praised," said the doctor.

  "Will you praise them from your cross, I wonder?"

  A confused silence. "Augusta?"

  "I am going to be accused of attempting to poison Claudius. Before I kill myself I shall make a full confession, part of which will be that you assisted me by supplying the poison with which I laced the emperor's mushrooms. For that
you will be crucified."

  Xenophon knew what he was being asked to do. "Augusta, my physician's oath forbids-"

  "Do you think that I wish to do this thing? I do not but the cup will not pass. The comet predicted that Claudius would be poisoned. Its opposition to Nero's Sun indicated that it would be for Nero's sake that he would die. Because my son's Moon controls his Lot of Fortune and I am this Moon, it is I who am destined to arrange the emperor's death. Xenophon, whatever my personal wishes are, Fate commands me to poison Claudius. Are you attempting to halt the machinery of the universe?"

  The doctor didn't seem to understand the astrology any better than I did. "No Augusta, no man can do that but-"

  "Help me fulfill the prediction and you will attend the new emperor. Defy destiny and you will soon be ministering to the dead."

  The physician's eyes rolled around the room as he looked for a way out. He never found it. "How? He's been unable to take medication, even liquids. Nothing stays down."

  "Nothing must. In fact you've decided that even what little he has inside him has to come out."

  A puzzled frown. "Augusta?"

  "Use a black feather to induce vomiting." She indicated a bottle on the table in front of her. Inside was more of the brown powder. "Dust the feather with this."

  "Bring me Balbillus," Agrippina told me when the physician had bowed himself out of the room.

  Although it was the dead of night I found the astrologer in an anteroom.

  Agrippina' spoke in a soft murmur when I showed him in. "The time has come for you to discover the propitious moment for my son to be acclaimed emperor."

  The vertical furrow between the astrologer's eyebrows, the product of decades of concentrated thought, deepened. "Augusta?"

  "You heard what I said."

  "Augusta, the emperor's physician believes that he will recover."

  "Xenophon has changed his diagnosis. My husband will be dead before dawn. I need the acclamation time by then."

  The astrologer's eyes blinked with confusion.

  Agrippina went on, "Be sure that the Moon is well placed. Fate decrees that my son needs my help."

  Balbillus glanced at the water clock as hurried into his study, he told me many years later. It showed that the Sun would rise in two hours. It had taken him three days to find the propitious moment for Nero to be born, that dreadful morning when Agrippina had his birth induced precisely at sunrise to ensure him his imperial destiny. She had then murdered both the physician and the midwife so the birth time would remain a secret. But now the astrologer had no more than two hours to find the moment when all the brilliant promises he’d made were destined to be kept.

  Making an effort to steady his hands, he unrolled the chart. Just the sight of a horoscope calmed him, the perfection of the wheel, the precision of the degrees separating the planets, the elegance of the angles, the sublime profundity of the mathematical relationships. Astrology was the medium that translated the language of heaven into the language of earth. It soared far above the sweat and squabble of mundane affairs. It was unsoiled by human spittle. It was the tongue of god.

  Serene now, he examined Agrippina’s horoscope. “Be sure that the Moon is well placed,” that's what she'd told him. Well, the most powerful place for the Moon to be was in Cancer because that was the Moon's celestial home. When would the Moon be in Cancer? It was then that he cursed myself for allowing emotion to debase his intellect. He was asking himself a question to which he already knew the answer! The Moon was already in Cancer, at twenty two degrees of Cancer, to be exact, not yet exactly in a fortunate sextile to Nero's Saturn, but so very close to it that...

  That's when Balbillus made the discovery and it made his head reel. Agrippina reason for choosing tonight to murder Claudius was written across heaven. This was no sudden homicidal impulse. It was murder in cold blood, planned four months previously, immediately after the appearance of the comet and then, when the appointed time came, ruthlessly executed. Yes the evidence was clear enough, but the crime was so monstrous that he had to make sure.

  Since the appearance of the comet the Moon had passed through the twenty-sixth degree of Cancer four times, once every month during its orbit around the earth. Yet only during the coming day, during the Moon's fifth passage, would Mars be conjunct Nero's Jupiter, a configuration that indicated magnificent power. That's what Agrippina must have discovered soon after he'd explained that by pointing its tail at Hydra's head the comet was foretelling that Claudius would be poisoned. For four months she'd waited, sleeping in Claudius's bed, tasting his food, wiping away the spit that drooled from his mouth when he got angry or sexually aroused. Then on the night that preceded the Moon's fifth transit of the twenty-sixth degree of Cancer she'd murdered him, or rather tried to murder him. When Claudius had begun to recover, she'd somehow persuaded Xenophon to change his diagnosis, that chilling euphemism.

  Of course Agrippina had known that Balbillus would find her footprints in the future, footprints that oozed with the blood of the man he'd been honored to call his friend. Now he was an accessory to regicide, everyone would assume that he'd computed the day of the murder for Agrippina. She held him in the palm of hand.

  "As you know." Those were the words Balbillus succeeded in holding back when he returned to the room where she waited. “Tomorrow is the auspicious day, Augusta,” he said instead. “The moment is half an hour before midday."

  To Agrippina it was no coincidence that just then, from the direction of Claudius's bedroom, the death-wail sounded. Her smile was as serene as the summer sea. "Balbillus you belong in the company of the greatest astrologers of all time for so correctly predicting the succession of my son and the death of his adopted father Claudius. Your reward is the prefecture of Egypt, prepare for your immediate departure."

  Balbillus dropped his eyes to hide his humiliation, lifted them only when he'd purged them of emotion, when he'd forced himself to accept that he was about to look into the face of the most powerful mortal on earth, someone who would from now on explore the uncharted realms of the future safe from his prying eyes. “Thank you Augusta, I am most honored."

  In fact he felt defiled.

  I watched with Agrippina from a balcony when precisely half an hour before midday, to the surprise of most of the battalion of Guards stationed outside, the palace gates were thrown open and out came Nero at the side of Sextus Afranius Burrus, the Praetorian commander. Spiculus the Sting, who seemed to stalk as he walked, was one step behind with his Germans, Nero’s bodyguards now.

  "Claudius is dead," Burrus announced, "he died peacefully in his sleep from a congestion which took hold of him last night. I present to you his son, Nero Claudius Drusus Caesar. He grants you his generous patronage. I'm certain that in return you will give him your unqualified allegiance, just as you once gave it to his great-great-grandfather Augustus. Hail Caesar!"

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  "Hail Caesar!" shouted a claque of voices, just a little too soon to be spontaneous. "Hail Caesar, hail Nero Caesar!"

  Nero was bundled into the litter that would carry him to the Guards' camp. The escort commander asked Nero for the customary password.

  A dramatic pause, then his reply. "The best of mothers."

  "Hail Caesar! Hail Nero Caesar!" became a mighty roar as the cry spread through the city.

  Triumph glowed from Agrippina like heat from a furnace. She turned to me. "Now do you believe me Epaphroditus? You are who I think you are!"

  Fratricide

  March 17 – May 13, 55 A.D.

  You are who I think you are. A creature of the stars , a conduit of destiny, an instrument of Fate reaching down from heaven, my instrument.

  First Messalina. Then Lollia Paulina. Now Claudius. How long was the list of Agrippina's victims? Was I destined to play my part in killing them all? What was the final, fateful act that must remain unrevealed until the appointed time? That she was destined to kill me too?

  Balbillus, a
bout to depart for Egypt now that the sailing season had recommenced and at pains to show that he was eating out of the hand of his new patroness, revealed the identity of her next victim at his Moon of the Year reading which he delivered an hour before sunrise on the day of the Liberalia, Freedom Day. The Moon of the Year was an opportunity for astrologers to interpret the meaning of the current planetary positions for their clients. It was timed to coincide precisely with the new Moon or the full Moon preceding the spring equinox which was when the Sun crossed the cusp of Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac. The seed of everything was in its beginning.

  Agrippina was with Nero in his study when I entered. She sat motionless in a chair, hands folded on her lap, staring out of the window into the darkness.

  Nero paced up and down, picking nervously at a plate of dried Syrian figs whenever he passed it. "Ah, there you are, Epaphroditus. Mother insists you take down every word because this is my very first reading as emperor. Personally I think I'd rather not know the future seeing nothing can be done about it anyway."

  An indulgent smile relaxed the compression of his mother's lips. "That is not entirely true, my son. Knowledge of the future allows us to compose ourselves for the inevitable. Surely Seneca has taught you that. He’s a Stoic."

  The chamberlain Graptus cleared his throat at the door. "Tiberius Claudius Balbillus, dominus," he said.

  The torchlight lit up the planetary symbols embroidered onto the astrologer's midnight blue robe. He threw up his arm. "Hail Caesar."

  Nero seemed embarrassed by the military salute. "No need for that, Balbillus, we're all civilians here. Now what have you discovered?"

  The astrologer unrolled one of the two scrolls he was carrying under his left arm and weighed down the corners with gilded crescents. "Here are the charts Caesar."

  Nero leant over the table, squinting for focus - he'd been growing noticeably more nearsighted during the past few years. He traced the two circles of symbols that were drawn around the wheel. "My planets surrounded by today's transits. You see mother, I've taken your advice and picked up a bit of astrology. Well, Balbillus, don't keep us in suspense, what does Fate have in store for me?"