The Nero Prediction

by Humphry Knipe

  Four men, who had been chanting in a language I didn’t understand and who were also bare from the waist up, prostrated themselves in front of her. Her voice was loud and rich when she recited something, presumably in the same language, probably some ancient Syrian dialect. When she finished they wailed, in what sounded like supplication. As if in answer to their prayers Atargatis whipped them so hard I winced. Their cries were far closer to ecstasy than pain. When she had bloodied their backs to her religion’s satisfaction, the men followed her through a curtain.

  Nero, his face flushed with excitement, jumped to his feet. “I’m going to see what they’re up to!” he announced.

  I was rigid with shock but Tigellinus had a grin on his face. Shortly after he disappeared I heard Atargatis go to work on someone else’s back, this time eliciting howls that seemed a lot more of pain than pleasure, at least at first.

  Half an hour later Nero emerged, looking very cheerful. “Thank you Tigellinus,” he said, rearranging his tunic. “That was certainly very uplifting. Particularly afterwards, when she got me alone. She had me confess all my sins. Made me feel a lot better. I never realized how much I had on my mind. I’m really very taken with her. Make sure we get her again next time.”

  It wasn’t my imagination that Tigellinus’s brow darkened, because that night’s Atargatis never returned and when another one, equally lovely, took her place, she didn’t ask for Nero’s confession. I made some inquiries, at Nero’s request, about the fate of the first one. She’d disappeared, my informant told me.

  Tigellinus also encouraged Nero’s passion for disguising himself like a commoner and spending his nights doing the rounds of seedy taverns, drinking and eating with the plebs. There was nothing unusual about this, it was a fashionable way for patrician youths to sow their wild oats. And not only youths. Marc Anthony, Nero’s great-grandfather, was adored by the Egyptian mob for carousing incognito in Alexandria.

  One evening the litter carrying an irascible bully, senator Julius Montanus, ran us off the road.

  "You're a pig sir!" Nero shouted at him. “Who’d be better off as bacon!”

  "At them!" Montanus bellowed to his bodyguard, watching the result with deep bellows of pleasure which were supplemented by shrill squeals of delight from his wife who sounded as drunk as he was. One of Montanus’s guards, a battered pugilist, attacked Nero, perhaps because it was obvious he was our ringleader. I threw myself at him, allowing Nero to escape. The thug turned on me and I thought I was done for. Before he could throw a punch someone flew from the shadows sending him crashing to the cobblestones. The rest of the bodyguards drew their swords and we ran for our lives. I looked back to see who’d rescued me. He was gone.

  "Dominus," I said as I stood by watching a physician bathe Nero's eye which had already swollen shut, "at night Rome is alive with street gangs. Surely it can only be a matter of time before we run into one of them. The few of us who accompany you couldn't possible defend you from those hooligans."

  Nero, who seemed rather proud of his black eye, was in high spirits. “Not necessary. All I need is you. It’s in your stars.”

  He had no idea how that cut me, because, thanks to Tigellinus’s revelation, I no longer believed that. "Dominus, even last night, you might have been killed, senator Montanus is a brutal man."

  "I know, and he's apologized for it. Don't you see? I'm the only one who can do that, tame the arrogance of the patricians, make them think twice about lashing out at anybody who doesn't have a consul swinging from a branch of his family tree. Besides I'm not the only ruler who has gone out among his people. Even Augustus did it once a year when he was younger. Disguised himself as a beggar and rattled his bowl on street corners with the worst of them although that was more for religious reasons, come to think of it, something he picked up from India. I do it to get close to my people, to see life through their eyes, to get inside their heads, to find out what they really want from their emperor, even Tigellinus thinks that's a good idea and he's pretty down-to-earth. What they want me to be is a hero, not the sort of hero who slaughters barbarians on some remote frontier. They want their emperor to be their kind of hero. A charioteer, an actor or a singer right here in Rome. That's the kind of hero they need and that's the kind of hero I want to be! A musical warrior, nothing will stop me you know, when the time comes."

  It came the following summer, two-and-a-half years after his discovery of musical war. It was then that Corbulo crushed the Armenians, the first great military victory of Nero's reign, and nothing said by either Nero's ex-tutor-turned-speech-writer Seneca, nor Burrus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, meant anything to him anymore.

  He seemed hurt by my reticence. "Come on Epaphroditus, even Tigellinus says it's time."

  I couldn't let Tigellinus, of all people, take Nero away from me by being the only one who encouraged his obsession with music. "Dominus I hesitated because it's a dangerous step and you know I always err on the side of caution. But you're right. It is time."

  Of course Agrippina was outraged when musical war was leaked to her. During that interim period, between the death of Britannicus when she’d been exiled from the palace and Corbulo's victory, to my immense relief I'd seen her only at a distance. I'd began to hope that she'd forgotten about me, that she thought that I'd finished playing my little part in Nero's destiny. But Agrippina hadn't allowed banishment to her paternal grandmother's mansion dampen her interest in her son's destiny, or mine. Instead she found that being distanced from Nero allowed her to see him in a way that was less clouded by emotional dross.

  There was the problem of her son’s new mistress, Poppaea Sabina, his friend Salvius Otho's new wife, a beauty who retained a flawless complexion at the age of thirty by means of a daily bath in asses’ milk. Nothing was wrong with a man having a mistress as long as he was discreet about it. But Nero had recently begun flaunting his relationship with Poppaea in public which seemed to have convinced everyone that Otho, as a favor to Nero, had married her so that she had an excuse to be close to the imperial bed. More than once Agrippina had very pointedly reminded Nero that this was a dangerous political insult not only to Octavia, the wife who had brought him the empire as her dowry, but also to the powerful Claudian faction. Nero, quite rudely, had abruptly changed the subject.

  Infinitely worse was Nero's growing obsession with music and the curious rumors that were circulating to which the absurd label "musical war" had been attached. From what Agrippina could make out Poppaea, a selfish opportunist, had the gall to encourage these childish fantasies. Now there was nothing wrong with listening to music or even amusing oneself by tickling a melody out of a harp or a lyre, a number of eminently respectable men did that. But her son had not stopped there. Important state affairs were ignored while the ruler of the world, the ruler she had set on the throne of the Caesars, sang duets with Greek music teachers.

  And the object of these exercises? There lay the true horror. Nero had actually conceived of the idea of becoming a performer. A performer who was quite unashamed of his ambition to appear in public, no not a public of his peers, but a public made up of the common people and foreigners as well!

  Unthinkable. No self-respecting Roman patrician would put himself at the mercy of the mob, to be cheered or jeered as its fickle whims inclined it. What her son planned to do was a crime, yes there were laws on the books which lumped the Roman citizen who performed in public with the thief, the slanderer and the pimp. A Roman citizen who caught his wife in bed with an actor was legally entitled to execute him on the spot. Marriages between Roman citizens and the sons and daughters of actors and musicians were illegal. But here was the noblest Roman of them all, the emperor himself, announcing that he was about to join the ranks of the unclean!

  Her son, that was the dreadful irony.

  I was there when Agrippina confronted Poppaea over musical war on an unseasonably warm evening in late February. I was alone, cooling off in the palace gardens, looking up at the heavens which
now seemed so empty, when I heard Agrippina's loud whisper coming from the other side of a box hedge.

  "You have to remember that he's only twenty-one and that he remains very much a child at heart," she was saying. "You, of course, are much more mature although I do wonder if you have thought through the consequences of your influence over him."

  "I'm not sure I know what you're driving at," said Poppaea.

  "The way you encourage his absurd musical pretensions of course."

  Poppaea's voice remained calm and melodious. "They're not absurd. He plays and sings very well."

  "Yes, as well as any Alexandrian playing on the street corner with a begging bowl at his feet."

  "He's spoken to me at length about his ambitions. He's had a vision. I'm not sure I understand it completely but it centers around a conception of the arts as an expression of social and political power."

  Agrippina snorted with contempt. "What is that supposed to mean? That we must replace the legions with actors and musicians?"

  Poppaea paused before she answered. "I know it sounds fanciful, but he is convinced that, sooner or later, he will bring this about."

  "How can he possibly believe that? He has already tried to remove the police from the theaters. The consequences were so disastrous he had to put them right back."

  "He believes the population of the empire has been reared on a diet of blood. He wants to re-educate the people by putting an end to all gladiatorial shows and substituting dramatic and musical contests."

  "That's ridiculous. The mob worships violence. Nothing will change that."

  "Nothing except the worship of Caesar."

  Agrippina stopped in her tracks. "Worship?"

  "If the mob worships Caesar, and Caesar is the essence of art, the mob will worship art."

  "Are you telling me that he really believes that?"

  "Yes."

  "And how does he suppose that he will become the 'essence of art'?"

  From where I stood, behind the hedge, I could hear Poppaea very well and there wasn't a trace of uncertainty in her voice. "He will use all of his enormous resources, both personal and political, to become the greatest, the most famous musical artist in the empire. He will be the principal performer in majestic concerts which will do more to expand the power and influence of Rome than a thousand legions."

  Agrippina's tongue cracked like a whip. "You're a fool and a traitor for encouraging this lunacy!"

  "I don't think so. He talks to me about his horoscope, you know, says that his House of Power falls in Libra which of course is ruled by Venus, patroness of the arts. He is therefore destined to be a powerful artistic force. Are you sure that you're not trying to stand in the way of Fate?"

  I peered cautiously over the hedge. Poppaea was walking calmly back to the palace.

  Agrippina was looking up at the stars. The breeze brought me her whisper, soft as its passage through pine trees. "Epaphroditus!"

  "It has been too long since we talked," read the note I received from her the next day. "It is time we did so again. Please be so kind as to attend me in my old quarters where the emperor has graciously allowed me to spend the night."

  I had to go.

  Agrippina looked like someone who had not yet recovered from a long fever. "You know that your Fate is tied to my son's, that in some way, up to now unclear, you will help him achieve his destiny?"

  Of course I couldn’t tell her that my horoscope was a fraud, so I said, "Haven't I already done so, Augusta?"

  She shook her head, a slow, regretful motion. "There is one final thing that you are destined to do for him, one final, fateful act. I mentioned it to you ten years ago when they first brought you to me."

  This was the moment that I’d hoped would never come. "What is it Augusta?"

  There was pain in her eyes, not fresh pain, but pain that had once raged fiercely like a fire but now lived only in blackened embers. The thin lips barely parted. "You will kill him."

  The room was very quiet. In the distance, from Nero's wing of the palace, music drifted. Someone was singing, probably him. "What?"

  "Yes, yes you are fated to kill him. Last night Brutus, Rome's first consul, appeared to me in a dream. 'Agrippina,' he said, 'I killed both my sons because they plotted to restore the monarchy. Now you have to kill yours because he plots to make Rome the laughing stock of the world.' Yes, Epaphroditus, you will kill him on the night of the Moon of the Year, at precisely four hours before dawn. You will do it with a dagger that a freedman of mine will give to you, a dagger that has been purified in the sacred fire of the Vestal Virgins. You do it not for his mother, who would gladly take his place if she could. You do it for them, the glorious dead of Rome, so that they did not die in vain."

  I was convinced, then, that she'd lost her mind but convinced also that this made her more dangerous, not less so. "Domina, I understood you to say that I was destined to be your son's shield. How then can I also be fated to kill him?"

  "Yes, 'the shield bearer of an emperor who would risk his own life to guard the safety and honor of his prince', Nechepso's words. You must shield him from dishonor, that's why you must risk your life to kill him. Do you recall the fate of the man who set that dog on me?"

  I also remembered the iron horse on which he died. "Yes Augusta."

  Her long, slender fingers touched a scroll on the table in front of her. "Here is your horoscope. I have read your stars again, this very night. When Nero was born, Balbillus predicted that he would cause my death, did you know that? That's why I searched for you, and found you, because your stars predict that you are the one who will destroy him. You see, I cannot allow Nero to live without me because his planet Saturn is an evil star and must be tempered by the benevolence of my Moon. After you have dispatched him, you will be hailed as a regicide and a liberator, a hero, a man almost worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Brutus. You will be given your freedom, voted honors that you never dreamt of. You will become a great man. Public buildings and gardens will be named after you. I will se to that. However if you attempt to deny your fate, that will be proof that you are not who I think you are and with equal certainty your life will come to an end. The death of Lollia Paulina's dog handler will be merciful compared with yours."

  I had fallen out of love with Fate, so I didn't believe I was fated to murder Nero. But how was I going to avoid doing it all the same? Of course I could go running to Nero and tell him that his mother was planning to use me to kill him but what then? Agrippina would deny it and then she would certainly keep her promise to kill me in the most painful way she could think of. Doing nothing while Agrippina plotted away was equally unacceptable because once she’d set up the assassination she could get someone else to do the deed if I failed her.

  Tigellinus. Just the name was enough to ruin my day but whom else could I turn to? Nero was his patron now, not Agrippina. He had everything to lose if Nero was rushed into the underworld.

  "I have to see Tigellinus immediately," I told Euodus at the Circus that evening.

  Euodus examined me thoughtfully. He glanced to make sure that my bodyguards were out of earshot. "What's the matter?"

  "Something dreadful has happened, something Tigellinus will want to hear directly from me."

  Another long pause punctuated by a sharp intake of breath and a curt nod. "Very well. Meet him in the north latrine in half an hour."

  I didn't think I'd heard clearly. "The latrine?"

  "Might as well, you look like you're about to shit yourself. Sit near the center and remain seated. We'll be there in fifteen minutes."

  Visitors to the latrine, a row of stone seats, came and went, grooms mostly at this late hour. My buttocks were numb from the hard stone by the time two figures hitched up their brown servile robes and sat down on either side of me, Tigellinus and Euodus.

  Tigellinus made appropriate use of his time until we were alone. "Well?"

  "Agrippina, she's ordered me to kill Nero."

  Tigellinus
's eyes were velvet pools, his voice took on the softness of someone who is speaking to the terminally ill. "Did she say when?"

  "In a month's time, the night of the Moon of the Year, four hours before dawn."

  "Are you sure you have the time right?"

  "Yes. She believes that I'm destined to kill him. But of course I'm not."

  Tigellinus shifted his position and from below I heard something plop into the stream of water that carried away the waste. "How do you know that?"

  "Because you'll warn Nero."

  "Will I? Until I tell you otherwise, do exactly what Agrippina asks you to do. But always tell me first."

  Anger drummed at my temples. "You mean you're not going to warn Nero?"

  "I haven't decided what I'm going to do."

  "Then I know what I must do."

  Tigellinus applauded my show of defiance with a fart. "All right, suppose you run to Nero and tell him Agrippina believes you are destined to kill him, what do you suppose he'll do?"

  "Confront her, of course."

  "Perhaps. But what will he do to you?"

  "I'll tell him everything, that the Copy Master forged my birth time, that I’m an imposter. He’ll question you and torture Euodus. Eventually the truth will come out.”

  When he grinned Tigellinus’s teeth shone in the gloom. “I have to hand it to you Epaphroditus, you’ve become a lot more interesting.”

  Blood On The Moon

  March 17, 59 A.D.