The Nero Prediction

by Humphry Knipe

  The world's greatest musician was still asleep, his mighty audience shrunk to “Poppaea” and the man who found him, Phaon. They started like rabbits when I came in the door. I saw why when I caught sight of myself in the full-length dressing mirror. A thin frame draped in black, gaunt-faced and hollow-eyed: the image of death.

  But not Nero's. I'd made my arrangements. In two weeks I'd be in Asia. After Asia, Persia, India. A new world, a new life.

  "Let him sleep a little longer," I said.

  My light traveling bag waited for me in the corridor. I picked it up and rushed into the night. So loud was the fluttering of flight's wings that it wasn't until I was well clear of the Golden House that I first heard the swell of music, faint but ubiquitous, as if every one of the beautiful objects which surrounded me was surrendering its essence to the air.

  Wonder slowed me. For a moment I stood still, listening for the direction from which the music was richest. It was the tear-shaped lake. Rising up out of it like the fingers of a hand which stirred dreamily in the river of stars were the gilded pipes of Nero's colossal pipe organ floating on its raft. It was from these pipes that the quickening wind was coaxing a melody which mustn't be Nero's requiem.

  I hurried on, the spectral music drowned by my footfalls. The southern wall of the Golden House was less than fifty yards away and easily scaled. Not much further the Ostian Gate and the carriage with swift horses that waited for me there. I could already smell the sea.

  We'll have to wait and see, won't we? Wait a little longer, Tigellinus. Wait until the end of time.

  I was startled by a shadow stirring in the starlight directly in my path. A booming voice echoed from the past. “Epaphroditus, where are you going?”

  Mark the Lion!

  I would have fled from the apparition if I could but I was frozen with fear. The apostle had died in the Vatican Circus, I was sure of that. “Mark? Is it you or…?”

  The shadow came nearer. I could make out the vast beard now. “The time has come for you to do what you were chosen to do.”

  “I thought you died with Peter and Paul and all the rest of them.”

  “That was not my time. I have been chosen to write the good tidings of the Lord. You have been chosen for this.”

  “For what?”

  “To strike down the Antichrist.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From Phocion, your father. He read it in your stars when you were born. You are destined to destroy evil. That’s why we’ve watched over you all your life.”

  For a moment I digested the answer to the mystery that had plagued me for so long. “There’s no point in watching me any longer. It’s not going to happen. Nero is the hope of the world because he brings it art and music. What does your Christ bring the world? Sackcloth and ashes!”

  “Only in this world. But in the next, the one after the death of the flesh, there shall be rapture beyond anything the Beast can give you.”

  “Madness! There’s no such thing as life after death!”

  “Oh yes there is. The kingdom of heaven with its eternal life is about to descend upon us as soon as you purify the earth by killing the Beast.”

  “Never! Get out of my way!”

  Somewhere behind me, in the eastern facade of the house, a door burst open. As I turned three figures spilt out onto a balcony, one of them waving a torch as if he were signaling to me.

  There was an anguished cry, Nero's voice, awful in its pathos. "Where are you Epaphroditus? Have you deserted me too?"

  “You hear?” rumbled the Lion. “Do you hear how he bleats for the knife? He knows. Go to him. It’s time.” When I turned my head he was already gone, consumed by darkness.

  Mark was right, Nero knew! Nero knew that I was fated to help him die! The world sped away leaving me alone in a vast, vaulted chamber, the Mill of Time - I knew that's what it was. The mill was dark, a darkness filled with the braying of philosophers denouncing astrology. A mighty voice drowned out all the others, Balbillus's I suppose. It said, "You will kill him yourself."

  Sudden as a flash of lightning and bright as the Sun, a powerful radiance burst through the immensely high circular opening, the oculus at the mill's apex, sending the skeptics scuttling for the shadows like cockroaches. There was a tremendous outburst of discordant sounds: the triumphant crowing of cocks, the chirrup of water dripping in the whirring mechanisms of a thousand water clocks, the hypnotic ticking of metronomes, the discordant shouts and trumpets of hour-callers, the striking of gongs and behind everything else the unremitting hiss of sand falling in hour-glasses. The march of time.

  The vision faded but all the way across heaven the stars sprang to joyous life. I dropped the traveling bag, turned my back on a future that was never meant to be, set my free will free. I raised my arms to heaven and it sang to me, a song as beautiful and strange as one of Nero’s. As I returned to him, resolute and reconciled, all the dark and brilliant powers of the universe fell into lock step behind me.

  I’d heard it in his call to me. Now I heard it again. The histrionic cry of the doomed tragic hero who had already passed from flitting reality into the realm of timeless myth. "They were here again, the Furies pursuing me with flails and torches. Mother led them, her hair still wet after all these years. I woke and asked for my friends. Phaon said he couldn't find any. That's when I searched for you. I couldn't believe that you'd run away with the rest."

  I said, "Caesar, I was just making certain the grounds were secure."

  "Good. I feel much better now that you're back. You're my shield, remember, from … whatever might happen. Let's go and round up some of the others, I feel quite rested, really, ready for a little get-together, a midnight snack perhaps, if the kitchen doesn't mind. We could sing something rousing. My Hymn to Bacchus perhaps. That'll revive our spirits."

  We followed him, the three of us, to the guests' wing. The walls of the strangely shaped rooms seemed to be closing in on us. Animated by the flickering torchlight the grimacing frescoes that covered their walls swirled around our heads like bats, their grotesqueness no longer alluring, the whimsical dream become a nightmare.

  We crossed the trapezoidal hall, cavernous as a mausoleum, entered the west wing. When my half-hearted knocking on the doors of the guestrooms got no response, Nero banged on them himself.

  There was the black glitter of despair in his eyes, real despair it seemed to me. "All gone and I don't suppose you can blame them, the heat and the flies, quite unbearable really. Well if no one wants Nero any more I'll become Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus again. I never wanted to be Caesar you know. I’m a musician trapped in an emperor’s body." His voice rose to a full cry that washed back from the empty corridors, "He's here, here's Nero your emperor, ready to die! No need for the army, just send him Spiculus or anyone who's trained to kill!"

  The only answer echoes.

  His shoulders rose in a shrug, his hands turned palms upwards, his face masterfully tragic as he made the pause that announces the arrival of a telling line. "No one at all? What, have I neither friends nor enemies left? Of course I could go to the Praetorians, offer them twice what Galba has promised them. That might buy me the day I need. Oh, I can see them now, hushed as they see Nero, last of the line of Julius Caesar, standing before them dressed in penitential black. I suppose I'd better start off by saying something about mother, I know that a lot of them have never really forgiven me for having to..." The words searched for with his right hand were never found.

  "I'll end on a grand note, tell them about the return of my planets, about the new beginning this signifies, about how the very next day, the day after tomorrow in fact, my ancestor Venus moves forward again. Phaon, get the horses, Epaphroditus and Sporus, come with me, I need to dress for the occasion."

  His bedroom had been turned upside down, the bed linen gone, gone too was the golden box with its dice and sea-hare poison. In a drawer, not yet plundered, were two daggers.

  He held them out to me, once
he'd found a black traveling cloak to throw over his tunic. "Keep these."

  You will kill him yourself. A chill ran through my fingers as I touched the steel. Minutes later, astride horses, we trotted out through the kitchen gate, heading north for the Praetorian Camp. Through the Viminal gate we went. Straight-ahead was the vast rectangle of the walled camp. To the left a yellow celestial eye was about to set.

  Following the line of my eyes Nero squinted at the planet. "That's Saturn, isn't it?"

  "Yes dominus."

  "Good. He'll be gone soon. I always thought that he did me more harm than good."

  When I looked again Saturn had vanished. Moments later it thundered deep underground as if some giant abysmal portal was being rolled open.

  When the earth fell silent there was shouting from inside the camp. "Galba! Galba!" We were too late. The Praetorians had taken the earthquake to mean that Nero had fallen.

  Phaon said, "My villa, dominus. Close by." The villa Nero had given him for finding Sporus, Queen of the Damned.

  "Go!"

  We raced northward on the throbbing wings of flight, up the Via Salaria past Messalina's tomb, black as solid night, onto the Nomentan Way. There were torches burning at the roadside, lighting a cross guarded by soldiers. Near the cross knelt two figures. I was convinced that they were expecting me. One was a woman, her head covered by a black shawl. She raised her face to mine. It was Rachel. She pressed the palms of her hands together. I didn’t know if she was imploring me or praying for me. The other figure had a long white beard. It was Phocion. The man gasping for breath on the cross must have been a Christian. Phocion nodded, his face grave as he stabbed upwards at his neck with his thumb, the sign the audience makes in the amphitheater when they want a wounded gladiator killed.

  Nero's horse shied, frightened by a corpse the soldiers had already taken down from another cross and laid by the roadside. Nero lost his balance, the handkerchief fell away from his face. The centurion gave him a surprised look, a salute. That was the instant the bloodied half Moon radiant with malevolence made her appearance as she rose with the dim stars of the Fishes.

  Awe mingled with terror in Nero's voice, perfect theater. "Look the Moon has blood on her hands! Oh mother Venus, where are you? Only you can save me now!"

  Nothing could save him now, that's what Galba’s acclamation had told me. We trotted down a lane through a reedy marsh that approached Phaon's villa from the rear. Close by was a pit that led to a cave hollowed out for its gravel.

  Phaon's voice shook. "This would be safer than my house, Caesar, there'll be less chance of your arrival leaking out."

  More theater. "I refuse to go underground before I die."

  In a back room of the villa was a bare mattress. I covered it with my cloak. Nero reclined on it, gathered together the shreds of his dignity. "No, no bread. Just a little water."

  Phaon returned, sweat on his brow, with a letter just delivered by a runner. "Dominus, after the acclamation of Galba by the Praetorians the Senate -"

  Nero tore it from his hands. "Has declared me a public enemy and condemns me to die in the ancient style. 'The ancient style.' What does that mean?"

  The runner had told Phaon. "Dominus, the victim is stripped naked, his head is thrust into a wooden fork, and he's whipped to death with rods."

  "But not if I can live until tomorrow."

  Phaon again. "Caesar, there's no chance of that, that's why the runner came here. The Praetorians know where you are and who's with you, but they promise not to come before dawn."

  Nero lay back again, closed his eyes but his voice was loud as if it must reach the furthest row of seats. “You have until dawn to collect some pieces of marble for my tomb and some wood for my pyre."

  "Yes dominus," I said and nodded to the others, the instruction to play their parts in the scene.

  A resonant sigh, a gesture that began with the right hand brushing the brow. "The daggers, Epaphroditus."

  I gave them to him.

  He groaned when he tried their sharp points. "Come Nero, is it such a dreadful thing to die? No, just such a waste, such a dreadful waste."

  I was thinking of the wooden fork and the rods. I said, "Dominus, your life has come full circle."

  The actor wouldn't let his mask go. Perhaps he had become his mask. "But the evil hour has not yet come!"

  I heard myself speaking. "Yes it has. Your rising sign Sagittarius is setting, dawn approaches, look, Mars has already risen, so has Venus -"

  He leapt to his feet, suddenly quite agile. "Where is she?"

  I pointed out her great white light.

  "Oh mother Venus, my salvation!"

  "Not this morning," I said. "She's still stationary, remember? She doesn't move forward until tomorrow."

  Tears rolled down Nero's cheeks as he squinted at her. His lips twisted in masterful grief. "Dead, and such a great artist!"

  I was standing at the window, staying calm by watching the east for the astral messenger. An incandescent bubble popped over the horizon, shy Mercury, never straying far from the Sun. "Dominus, it's time," I called to him.

  Nero looked upwards at the stars that had been his undoing, exposing his neck for the final thrust like a condemned gladiator. He pricked at his throat with one of the daggers, winced but drew no blood. "This is not worthy of you Nero," he said in Greek, "not worthy at all. Come, pull yourself together!"

  There was the sound of approaching horses. I felt that I was riding too, astride the torrent of destiny. "There's no more time," I said.

  He quoted a fragment of Virgil. "Listen! It's the hooves of galloping horses."

  "Dominus!"

  His knuckles were white with the effort he was making to pierce his skin. His eyes rolled towards me. At last he dropped the mask. "Epaphroditus, help me!”

  Outside the window a cock crowed triumphantly. The Sun severed the horizon as I took the dagger from Nero. The artery in his throat throbbed as wildly as a bird's heart when I found it with my finger.

  He whispered, "I knew it would be you."

  Somewhere nearby a door burst open. There was the jingle of armor, the approach of hobnailed boots, the Praetorians coming right on time for Alexander-of-the-lyre.

  My serenity seemed to give Nero strength. He nodded, my permission to proceed, then rolled his eyes to heaven as he listened to unheard music, perhaps his own.

  With a quick upward thrust I fulfilled the prediction.

  Author’s Note

  In the historical record Epaphroditus shows up first in Tacitus' Annals of Ancient Rome where he alerts Nero to the great conspiracy of Piso. He is one of the freedmen who accompanies Nero on his final flight. Suetonius, writing in about 120 A.D., mentions that he was Nero's Secretary of Petitions, a position of enormous power. He was the man you had to go through to get the emperor’s ear.

  This was the Epaphroditus to whom Josephus dedicated his Jewish Antiquities where he refers to him as "conversant with large affairs and varying turns of fortune."

  On the Esquiline Hill, not far from where Nero “fiddled” while Rome burnt, a paradise - part palace, part park - was for centuries one of the show pieces of ancient Rome: the Gardens of Epaphroditus. In 1913 a fragment of a marble funereal inscription, originally at least fifteen feet wide, was discovered here. It states that Epaphroditus, freedman of Augustus and attendant to the Caesars, was awarded Spears of Honor (hastis puris) and Golden Crowns (coronis aureis) - high military honors normally far beyond the reach of an ex-slave. Epaphroditus' epitaph.

  Was Nero a gifted musician or have his famous last words "Dead! And such a great artist!" quite rightly been ridiculed down the ages? Not a note of his music has survived nor have any of the many histories favorable to him so we must read between the lines of his bad press.

  His enemies are keen to point out how prolific a composer Nero was because this inferred that he neglected his imperial duties. In addition to hymns and lays, he set a number of Greek tragedies to music. This is attes
ted, for example, by Philostratus (early third century) who says that during Nero's reign itinerant musicians hired themselves out to sing Nero's compositions. One of these accosted the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana in a Roman inn where, "in a voice far from harsh...he then struck up a prelude, according to his custom, and after performing a short hymn composed by Nero, he added various lays, some out of the story of Orestes, and some from the Antigone, and others from one or another of the tragedies composed by Nero, and he preceded to drawl out the rondos which Nero was in the habit of murdering by his miserable writhings and modulations." (Life of Apollonius, iv.39) The anti-Neronian bias is obvious, equally clear is that Nero may have been composing something close to modern opera.

  Further evidence of the popularity of Nero’s music among his contemporaries comes from the historian Suetonius who reports in Vitellius 11 that at a banquet the emperor Vitellius (who outlived Nero by only a year and a half) "called for something from 'the Master's Book' as an encore. When the flutist obliged with one of these compositions, Vitellius jumped up delightedly and led the applause."

  What about Nero the performer? In his Histories (2.8) Tacitus, who is relentlessly hostile to Nero, reports that one of the many Pseudo-Neros who sprang up after Nero's death was a skillful player of the kithara and singer which, "when added to a facial resemblance, made the imposture all the more plausible." However if Nero had not been a skillful performer it would not have been necessary for his impostor to be one also. Tacitus gives Nero another back-handed compliment when he admits that Nero's performances were warmly applauded but blames this on the audience's lack of patriotism (Annals 15).

  Whether or not it was because of his music, Nero was a hero to millions of people, particularly those in the cultured Greek-speaking east whose opinion he valued most highly. As with King Arthur, Barbarossa and Frederic II, a popular myth grew up that one day he would return to complete his work. The orator and popular philosopher Dio Chrysostomos writes in about 100 AD, "even now everybody wishes he were still alive. And the great majority do believe that he is..." (Orationes 21.10). The legend of Nero's return was still alive in the fifth century when St Augustine says: "Some suppose that Nero will rise again as Antichrist. Others think that he is not dead ... and that he still lives on as a legendary figure, of the same age at which he died, and will be restored to his Kingdom." (De Civitate Dei, 20.19)