Not only had fiddles not been invented in Nero’s day but he probably wasn’t even in the city when the blaze started. However, the legend of fiddling while Rome burned stuck, and the fire did a very convenient urban clearance job, giving him just the space he needed to build his vast palace complex, the Domus Aurea or “golden house”, subsequently demolished by the Flavians.
Nero gets a deservedly bad press but I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the death of Poppaea – no angel herself and implicated in a number of dynastic murders. I’ve shown her as dying in childbirth rather than following the versions offered by three men who disliked Nero: Suetonius, Cassius Dio and Tacitus, all of whom blame some kind of domestic violence, meted out by the emperor in the last weeks of her pregnancy, as the cause of death. Although in fairness to these august gentlemen, given that Nero had his own mother murdered, adding wife-beating to the charge sheet is hardly stretching credibility.
Nero considered himself a great musician, actor and poet and forced audiences to sit through agonisingly long and dreadful recitals. Men did indeed feign illness, sometimes even death, as an excuse to leave these performances and women pretended to go into labour. If the emperor was in a particularly bad mood, the penalty for falling asleep could, on rare occasions, be death. Vespasian, as a repeat offender, was banished from Nero’s court but this happened in Greece, not Rome, and the story of Josephus interceding to save the senator from execution is a convenient invention to fit the plot and to provide a reason for his sparing Josephus’ life after Jotapata.
By 66 AD Josephus was back in Judea where the first stirrings of revolt were in the air – for a highly readable account of the collision between the Roman and Jewish worlds I recommend Martin Goodman’s excellent book, Rome & Jerusalem – the Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Josephus subsequent claim that he was forced against his will to become a leader of the revolt reads very much like an after-the-event, “a big boy made me do it and then ran away,” excuse. Whatever the truth, he was a poor general and, as we’ve seen, may well have changed sides in order to save his own skin: his own people certainly thought so at the time and they also blamed him for helping Titus’ army to take Jerusalem three years later while supposedly acting as a negotiator. Nice guy.
Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian, were highly generous to Josephus throughout his remaining years – again, no one’s entirely sure when he died but the range 100-102 AD seems to get the most votes – but there’s no evidence of this generosity extending to the gift of a villa in Pompeii. It seems that he remained in Rome, living in what had been Vespasian’s villa, granted to him when his patron became emperor.
As for the fate of the apostles, with few exceptions, nobody seems to be very sure how, when or where they died – such vagueness is a great help to writers of fiction; with no pun intended, an absolute godsend. Even for Peter and Paul, both martyred in Rome, there seems to be no agreement over when the executions took place so once again I’ve picked dates, places and events to suit the narrative of my fictionalised Josephus’ quest for vengeance. One thing that isn’t fictionalised is the Plutonium at Hierapolis where a lethal concentration of CO2 from a volcanic fissure gathered in a hollow over which the shrine to the god was built. Given that nobody seems to know what happened to the Apostle Matthew, I thought it convenient to have Josephus kill him there.
Finally, William Sunday University isn’t real either, although it’s named after William Ashley Sunday, a baseball player turned evangelist who lived from 1862-1935 and it bears no resemblance to any US Bible college whether alive or dead (just in case any lawyers are reading – one never knows).
Now, if anything in this book causes offence, please remember that it’s only a novel: I made it up.
Simon Leighton-Porter
August 2012
The Seven Stars Page 41