Nero_s Heirs

by Allan Massie

  Otho then begged us all to take our leave. It was in our interest, he said, to depart at once, in case Vitellius and his generals should interpret our remaining with Otho as a mark of defiance. He ordered boats and carriages to be made ready and it seemed that he was more assiduous in planning the flight of his entourage than he had ever been in organising his army for battle. He commanded his secretaries, too, to destroy all his correspondence.

  'I should not wish,' he said, 'for Vitellius to discover that any of you had abused him in writing to me.'

  Then he dismissed us, so that I was not a witness to his death. Nevertheless I later questioned one of his freedmen who attended him to the end. Therefore the account I now give you, Tacitus, is as authentic as any you may receive, even though I was not an eye-witness.

  When he was alone, except for his domestic staff, he lay down to rest for a little. But his rest was disturbed when he heard shouts and cries from around the house. He sent to enquire. The soldiers, who refused to believe that Otho had abandoned the struggle, were attempting to prevent anyone from leaving the camp. (I myself had to bribe a surly fellow with five gold pieces before he would let me depart.) Otho rebuked them and said it was his will that his friends should be free to go. Despite this, the detachment of the Guard itself remained with him, though, aware of the hostility that the German legions felt for them, they must have feared their own fate. This was a remarkable example of loyalty. I have never understood what in Otho attracted it. I had come to like him myself, but I had been privileged to be his confidant. The soldiers, on the other hand, were now being abandoned by him.

  After speaking to a few who had not yet dared to leave the camp, where however they feared to remain, Otho drank a cup of water mixed with only a very little wine. Then he retired to rest. Sometime before dawn he stabbed himself falling forward on his dagger. There was but one wound, sufficient to kill him. Plotius Firmus, the loyal centurion, arranged his funeral. Otho had left a request – he was past the stage of giving orders – that this should be done at once; he had been troubled by the thought that Vitellius might command his head to be cut off and put on display. The cohort of the Praetorians covered his face and body with kisses; or so my informant said.

  XXVII

  Tacitus: have you ever marched with the remnant of a defeated army? I suppose not.

  It is a degrading experience. Even the horse on which I began our retreat died under me, and I was compelled to footslog it like a common soldier. There were no marching songs, and every morning when we struck camp, we found that a few more men had taken advantage of the darkness to desert. But our numbers did not dwindle, for all along the road we were joined by stragglers, men who had been separated from their companions, and found among us that the company of the dispirited was nevertheless preferable to solitude. When the men talked, which was seldom, it was of their wives or mothers, never of the battles we had just fought.

  It was raining the day I limped back into Rome. Water ran yellow in the gutters, and puddles stood like fords in the cobbled lanes. News of Otho's defeat and death had preceded us. The city wore the heavy clouds that obscured the Janiculum as if they were funeral garments. Nobody knew when the victors might be expected; everyone dreaded their arrival, except for those partisans of Vitellius who had already emerged from hiding, and who alone spoke in loud confident voices.

  Near the Pantheon I came on a stout equestrian berating a group of dirty bedraggled Praetorians. They bent their heads under his insults, and lacked the spirit or nerve to reply.

  As ever in anxious times, only the taverns and the brothels did good business. Most of the foodstalls had been emptied of their goods by people stocking up, and preparing to keep to their houses till times were more certain.

  At last, the equestrian, having vented his spleen, departed, no doubt satisfied by having had the courage to insult broken men. I approached the Praetorians, one of whom I recognised as a centurion who had sworn his devotion to Otho with peculiar force, and the appearance of sincerity. I gave them money, small coin only. 'What will you do?' I said. 'Drink it. What else can we do?' 'If you could take passage to the East…?'

  'There's not a ship's captain would carry us, not without we had gold to offer him. And we have no gold,' the centurion said. I recalled that his name was Frontinus. I drew him aside.

  'You find the ship and square the master,' I said. 'I'll undertake to furnish you with the gold. You deserve to escape, and I should wish you to carry a letter to Vespasian's camp, to his son Titus.'

  I arranged to meet him at a tavern in the Suburra at the same hour of the day following. Was such secrecy necessary? I did not know. 'Why not travel with us yourself, sir?' he said before we separated.

  The temptation was strong. I was, I discovered, afraid, as never before. Yet I shook my head. Why? Because Titus would despise me as a coward, if I ran to him, as to my nurse? Perhaps. Because I could serve his cause better in Rome? Again, perhaps, though for the last fortnight I had felt my devotion to the Flavians cool, as my respect and pity for Otho grew warmer. Because some curiosity held me in Rome? I could not deny that reason; yet it irritated me.

  I went first to my mother's house, and told her all that had happened. I urged her, in turn, to retire to the country, to one of her brother's villas.

  'I'm in no danger,' she said. 'Besides, I spend all my wars in Rome.'

  That sounded like bravado, or foolishness. There had never been wars in Rome, in her lifetime. Then I understood that she was speaking for her own amusement, at the same time fitting herself for a role: the severe Republican mother. Perhaps also she sensed my nervousness – fear has its smell, apprehension likewise – and spoke to stiffen my resolution. 'What sort of man is Vitellius?' I asked.

  'No sort of man. The favourite of three Emperors. So the basest sort of man.'

  'I've heard he murdered his own son, Petronianus, some name like that.'

  'I doubt it,' my mother said. 'The other version of the tale is that the boy prepared poison for his father, but drank it himself in error. I doubt that, too. It's also said Vitellius was one of Tiberius' catamites on Capri, and that story is believed by those who believe that the poor old man did indeed indulge in depraved lusts. The truth is, son, that Vitellius all his life has been the sort of man of whom rumour has been fond, the sort of man who is the subject of dirty and nasty stories, simply because he is contemptible. He is a man with no true virtue, but that doesn't signify that he is a monster. He is merely base and mean. As for sex,' my mother paused; it was not a subject that she had ever discussed with me. Perhaps her willingness to do so now was a sign that at last she regarded me as fully adult. 'As for sex, it's my opinion that he is a pimp, a pandar to others' lusts, rather than a performer. You're surprised that I should speak to you in this manner, even that I know such things. Well, you must learn that anyone who has lived in Rome as long as I have knows much of what she does not choose to speak. Then, think only that I now speak about matters concerning which I would rather keep silent, because it is expedient in your situation that you should not remain in ignorance of the nature of the man who now wears – for how long I cannot tell – the imperial purple.'

  Then, having had her say, she had the slave set before me a dish of pork and beans and a jug of wine, and watched me eat, while she questioned me about the manner in which Otho had met his death. 'I always knew,' she said, 'that there was virtue in the boy.'

  Angry words of contradiction formed in my mind, remained unspoken. It would serve no purpose to tell my mother that elegant suicide served no purpose but to make a show and that, in my opinion, a man who had seized the Empire by an act which moralists would denounce as criminal should have had courage enough to pursue the struggle for mastery or die in the attempt. So I ate my beans and drank my wine, and took leave of her, saying I must go to the baths, for I was still travel-stained, and only my need to assure myself of her safety had brought me to her house in that condition.

  The baths were
busy for, since it was still some days before even the vanguard of the victorious army was expected in the city, men had come there the more eagerly to learn the latest news and feed on the most recent rumours. After I had been in the hot room I reclined on the bench where Lucan had first eyed me up, and thought of him and his friend Caesius Bassus, and that line of verse – 'Stark autumn closed on us, to a crackling wind from the west' – and tried to recollect the other lines as he had spoken them to me in my room by the gatehouse. But they deserted me. I felt his pervasive melancholy, his weariness with life; and then, running my fingers along my thighs, was aware of the admiration with which I was being viewed by several, but which, being a man now, I no longer desired. So I turned over on my belly and slept.

  I dreamed, horribly, for in my dream I saw Domitian deflowering my Domatilla. Her initial resistance lost itself in her brother's embraces. Arms, raised to fend him off, closed around him. She thrust her mouth against him in an eager play of tongues. Her legs wrapped themselves round his thighs and buttocks, and she cried out in painful joy as he thrust. I woke with a cry and lay there shaking.

  Dreams may not portend the future, but they may foreshadow the future that we fear.

  When that evening I went to the apartment in the Street of the Pomegranates where the brother and sister lodged with their aunt, I watched them with narrow suspicion. In each glance they cast on each other I read a guilty complicity. When Domatilla spoke to me with the affection I had been accustomed to hear in her voice, I now detected hypocrisy and, though I told myself it was absurd to be so influenced by a dream, I could not be at ease with them.

  Domitian himself was afraid. Tacitus does not believe me when I tell him (if I send the account of these days to him it will have to be heavily doctored) that Domitian was no coward. Because he hates him, he would like to despise him, too. But Domitian, in reality, was cursed with a too lively imagination, which led him to anticipate dangers – always more fearful in prospect than in reality. Now he was convinced that, as soon as Vitellius arrived in the city, or even earlier, his partisans would seek out Vespasian's son and murder him. He had infected Domatilla with his fears, and perhaps this was the new bond between them which so discomforted me. The next morning the air of excitement in the city was palpable. Though no one knew when Vitellius would arrive, many swore that acts of vengeance had already been performed on the partisans of Otho. Therefore Senators and equestrians who had given their allegiance to Otho had fled the city or were making preparations to do so. Some who had departed were confidently pronounced dead. Others now wished to conceal their support for the late Emperor, and either pretended it had not been willingly given or sought to bury it in a tumult of praise for his successor. I encountered several who assured me that Vitellius was a worthy heir, not of Nero, to whose vices he had served as pandar (as my mother had told me) but of the Divine Augustus himself. In short, there were many signs that in their alarm and apprehension, some of the noblest-born of Rome had taken leave of their senses.

  As for me, I wrote a lengthy account of all that had happened, and, meeting the Praetorian centurion Frontinus, as we had arranged, gave him my document and a purse of gold (which I had borrowed with great difficulty from my mother's banker, a cousin by marriage) and advised him to make haste to the ship whose captain he had suborned. I was fortunate, I told myself, to have come upon him. There were few I would have trusted with my letter. But he had an honest face, and he still spoke of Otho with respect, and of Vitellius with manly scorn.

  There was nothing to do but wait, than which nothing is more difficult when the worst is expected. Unlike Domitian I disdained to hide myself, and frequented the baths as usual. Though I could not achieve equanimity, and though nothing in my experience nor in what I had learned of comparably turbulent periods, inclined me to hope, my pride – that insensate Claudian pride – held me from despair. What must be, will be, I told myself. Things being as they are, why should I seek to deceive myself by pretending they are otherwise? At the baths, men talked of Vitellius' progress towards the city.

  He had insisted, it was reported, on visiting the battlefield of Bedriacum where his lieutenants had won him the Empire. There he saw mangled corpses, severed limbs, the rotting bodies of men and horses, picked over by carrion crows. The soil was still wet with blood. Still more horrible, it was said, was that part of the road which the citizens of Cremona, eager in their customary manner to flatter and seek to please the victorious general (though he had taken no part in any fighting) had spread laurel and roses in his honour, and where they had raised altars and sacrificed victims, as if he had been some king from Asia. Then Caecina and Valens indicated to him the salient points of the battlefield, tribunes and prefects boasted of their individual feats of arms, commingling fictions, facts and exaggerations. The common soldiers, too, turned aside from the line of march and gazed with a more healthy wonder, it was said, on the wreckage of war.

  But Vitellius, exhilarated, carried away by the evidence of what men had done for him, and already, it may be, a little drunk, declared that, 'Nothing smells more sweetly in my nostrils than the corpse of a dead rebel.' He was speaking of his fellow Romans, citizens like himself.

  As he advanced ever closer on Rome, word came of his terrible extravagances. His soldiers looted, unpunished, the towns and villages through which they passed. The Emperor, so-called, paid no heed, being delighted in the evening by troops of comedians who had attached themselves to his army, and being ever surrounded by a cloud of fawning eunuchs. Even Nero, it was muttered, had not conducted himself more disgracefully or with less regard for the imperial dignity and the decencies of Roman life.

  'If you want to know how Vitellius will conduct himself when he is installed on the Palatine,' someone said to me at the baths, 'you should consult a creature called Asiaticus, who keeps a low tavern in the Street of the Little Frogs on the other side of the Tiber.' 'Why?' I said. Who is this Asiaticus?'

  'Once Vitellius' catamite – a slave born no one knows where, but presumably somewhere in Asia or born of parents from that part of the world. Vitellius was infatuated with the boy, who was certainly very pretty in those days and also, I'm told, an adept at varied forms of love-making. Then Vitellius freed him, no doubt in return for disgusting services. Eventually, it's said, the creature grew tired of his master and ran away. He took up the tavern trade then, but Vitellius sought him out and was so angry that he sold him to a trainer of gladiators. That might have been the end of him, but Vitellius decided he still couldn't live without the youth and bought him back, just as he was about to enter the arena, and pissing himself with terror, I daresay. Then Vitellius set him up in his present tavern, on the understanding that he would procure free of charge whatever creatures took his former master's fancy. You may know that Vitellius has a taste for under-age virgins. Oh yes, our new Emperor is the most degraded of men.'

  Not knowing my informant, I had no means of judging how much of what he said was true, and how much was spiteful rumour. But it was remarkable that he should have been so ready to tell me what, if I were to divulge it, would certainly lead to his arrest and execution. I asked him why he was so bold.

  'I care for nothing,' he said. Vitellius betrayed my two sons to Nero's lustful vengeance, and now I look forward only to death. But first I should like to spit in this so-called Emperor's face.'

  'Why should you suppose that this Asiaticus, who must owe a debt to Vitellius, should tell me anything to his discredit?'

  'Because it is impossible for anyone to speak of such a thing as Vitellius without revealing him for what he is.'

  XXVIII

  I confess I was tempted to seek out this Asiaticus. It was not that I hoped to learn anything. Already I knew as much of Vitellius as I cared to know and it was, in any case, improbable that the degraded creature described to me could tell me anything of value. My motive -or rather, the inclination which I felt draw me to his tavern-brothel -was of a still lower sort. All my life I have k
nown in myself an impulse towards acts which in anticipation excite me and which in retrospect fill me with self-loathing. I could picture so vividly the type of women and boys who would frequent the tavern, and the knowing leer with which this Asiaticus would make my choice available to me. I saw my hands push a tunic away from yielding flesh, and felt myself thrust at a creature I despised only less than I despised myself for wanting it. My lust was sharpened by the thought of my terrible dream and by the doubts it had, however absurdly, inspired concerning Domatilla's virtue. I held the image of my lust in action before my inward eye till my balls ached.

  The memory of that moment rises sharp and exciting at a distance of more than thirty years. The rain spat from the cobbles and a north wind from the mountains cut through the city. Darkness fell.

  The wind blows outside my villa now, from the waste plains to the far north, a barbarian wind. Balthus lies among the hounds before the stove. His soft boy's legs show their inviting nakedness to me. In sleep his hand has crept under his tunic. I think his dreams are not of the Christian chastity of which he, barely comprehensibly, has spoken. This religion of which he has told me much perplexes me. It brings him peace. I can't doubt that. And yet it is absurd. Its greatest prize would appear to be renunciation of the world we inhabit. You might think this would appeal to me in my fallen state. But I have not renounced the world; the world has rejected me. When I talk to him about the desire for power and the struggle for honour which, to my mind and in my experience, informs all men's conduct in affairs of state, he listens, with his soft inviting mouth a little open, his red lips quivering with, perhaps, disgust, and shakes his head. It makes no sense to him. I have tried to explain to him what we mean by virtue – that determination to be whatever becomes a man – and he sighs and says, 'Master, I fear you have lived your life in the Kingdom of the Wicked.' He speaks, curiously, with affection. I think he is indeed now fond of me, perhaps because he is grateful for my restraint in regard to him.