by James Romm
Nero could not save Rome, but he did what he could for the Romans. He threw open his own properties, imperial gardens in untouched places like the Vatican hill, to survivors and ordered shelters built. The Field of Mars, thus far out of the path of the fires, was converted into a refugee camp. Emergency grain supplies were brought up from Ostia and sold at a subsidized price. Those still able, and willing, to live would have the means to do so.
After six days the fire was apparently stopped by a brake, but it flared up again and burned for three more days. Finally it died out for good, mostly for lack of fuel. Perhaps two-thirds of the city had been destroyed. The only regions spared were those fenced off by barriers: the Tiber River had protected the Vatican, while the Field of Mars and the Quirinal and Esquiline Hills were shielded by a set of old ramparts called the Servian Walls, originally built around a much smaller Rome to guard against Gallic invaders.
In the camps that now sprawled in these places, stories began to spread, many demonizing Nero. Some said that torchbearers had been seen setting the blaze, who, when accosted, claimed they were acting on high authority. Others said that vigiles attempting to douse the blaze had been prevented. The most damning rumor of all claimed that the princeps had stood on his palace battlements and strummed his lyre while the city burned, reciting his own verses about the destruction of Troy. The ingenious lampoon allowed the public to feel both rage over the fire and disgust at Nero’s artistic delusions, a devastating mixture. The image thus created continues to define Nero, in popular lore, to this day.
Map of Rome showing the extent of fire damage.
Was Nero far enough gone in mind to torch his own city? Or to treat its destruction as an occasion for song? What would have been his purpose in setting the fire—to build a new Rome in his own image, a Neronopolis, as Suetonius says he planned to do? Or to lash out at disapproval of his new persona and at the Stoics, whose scowls hurt him so deeply? Rome was his conscience, the city he dreaded to enter after killing his mother, the city that had, briefly, made him ashamed to reject Octavia. If, as psychologists tell us, arson often springs from buried rage and a quest for revenge, then Nero did have motives. Whether he actually set the blaze is a question that, for Tacitus, could not be resolved, and it remains unresolved today.
What mattered to Nero was that people believed him guilty. He threw himself into the reclamation of the city and of his battered reputation. He poured fortunes from the treasury and from his own funds—the two were hard to distinguish—into relief and reconstruction. And he began a campaign to shift blame from himself to others.
The sect the Romans called Christiani, and their founder Christus, appear first in Latin literature in Tacitus’ account of the great fire. According to this famous passage, the Christians were arrested on spurious charges and brought to Nero’s palace grounds for horrendous ordeals. They were dressed in animal skins and then were set upon by wild beasts; they were wrapped in pitch-soaked cloth and set on fire; or with a significance Nero could not have intended, they were nailed to crosses to suffocate to death. Perhaps Peter or Paul, or both, met their deaths in this savage purge—though evidence is strangely lacking, in both Roman and Christian sources, on the fates of these apostles.
Rage over the fire, and the violence it spawned, slowly died away, along with the heat trapped in the smoldering ruins. Nero began to rebuild. He made certain that the new Rome would be more fire-resistant than the old; he widened streets and introduced flat porch roofs from which the vigiles could do their jobs. He paid for much of the construction himself, since most homeowners had been wiped out. The princeps, and the state, were spending on an unprecedented scale, reconstructing Rome while supporting perhaps 200,000 displaced and suffering Romans.
In such a crisis, any sane princeps would have scanted his own needs. The flames had spared many imperial properties; Nero was comfortably housed. But his precious Domus Transitoria, not yet fully complete before the fire began, had been destroyed. Nero set out to replace it with a building that would beggar Rome’s imagination—and break its bank. He began work on the Domus Aurea, the Golden House, an immense pleasure grounds occupying more than a hundred acres. At the entrance to the main building—a three-hundred-room architectural fantasy, designed largely for entertainment—he erected the Colossus Neronis, a bronze statue of himself, over one hundred feet tall.
Money had to be found. Imperial agents scoured the provinces, squeezed taxpayers, and ransacked the treasuries of Greece and the Near East. Not even temples of the gods were spared, for many contained precious statues clad in gold and ivory. The hoard of art stolen from the Greeks during Rome’s eastward expansion, two and three centuries earlier, had been largely lost in the fire. Replacements were ripped from their shrines by Acratus, one of Nero’s trusted freedmen, and Carrinas Secundus, a lackey who had been trained in Greek philosophy and could sweet-talk his way through the East.
It was the greatest transfer of wealth since the conquests of Alexander the Great. It pained all those who admired the beauty of the Greek world, or who wanted Rome’s empire to be more than merely a global shakedown. Among them was one who, despite his earnest efforts and dearest wishes, was implicated in the squeeze.
Seneca felt, as he watched the Golden House rise on mountains of loot, that he must get clear of politics without delay. Nero had become an offense to all Stoic principles, an embodiment of luxury and excess. The icons of the gods themselves were being smelted into the emperor’s tableware. The twilight realm in which Seneca dwelt had grown gloomier than ever.
The fire of Rome had destroyed part of Seneca’s property, but he was still vastly wealthy. Two years earlier, when he had tried to buy his way out of politics, Nero had refused. Now, with imperial funds draining away as never before, Seneca saw a second chance. He once again sought to surrender his wealth to the princeps. This time his offer was accepted—but on Nero’s terms. The princeps took possession of Seneca’s wealth and lands, but would not allow the sage to absent himself from court. The regime was too badly weakened to withstand a high-level defection.
Seneca’s last stratagem was the course he had urged on Lucilius, his friend in Sicily, when advising him how to practice otium. He feigned illness and stayed in his chambers. He must live a lie, if he was to live at all.
Tacitus reports that at this point Seneca discovered from his loyal freedman, Cleonicus, that Nero was trying to have him poisoned. There is no reason to doubt the information, though Tacitus indicates it did not have solid authority. Nero had the means for such a crime, thanks to Locusta, and plenty of opportunity. Simple dislike would have served for a motive, or the fear that Tigellinus had drummed into him, that serious and sober men—“schoolteachers”—meant him harm.
Seneca had already watched as Claudius and Britannicus were felled by Locusta’s poisons. He began eating simple, uncooked foods, plucking fruit off the trees on his estates, scooping water from running streams. Earth itself would nurture him, with victuals even Nero could not taint.
Death was looming all around. The question Seneca could not answer in Letters to Lucilius haunted him every day: whether to await a doom that was sure to come, or by suicide take charge of his own fate. With his actions, he gave his answer. While the fruit trees burgeoned and the streams ran pure, he would do his best to stay above ground.
CHAPTER 7
Suicide (II)
(A.D. 64–66)
Rome prepared for the second Neronia, the arts festival instituted by Nero on a five-year schedule, in a very different mood than it had celebrated the first. In 60, the city had just completed what a later emperor, Trajan, termed the quinquennium Neronis, “Nero’s half-decade,” claiming it was the high-water mark of Roman history. By 65, the city was a burned-out shell and a construction site, above which towered a monstrous pleasure palace with a colossal statue of Nero at its entrance. In that intervening quinquennium, Rome had become Neronopolis, as Nero reportedly intended, in all but name.
Promp
ted by Trajan’s comment, historians have seen in Nero’s reign a diptych of good government followed by bad, and they have studiously sought the dividing line. For some, the murder of Agrippina in 59 forms the downturn; for others, it was the death of Burrus; for still others, including Tacitus, it was the first, partial retirement of Seneca in 62. But the path of Nero’s decline was less a V-shaped turn than an arc, paralleling the arc of his own maturation. In his teens, Nero deferred to his elders, but as he grew, he took the reins in his own hands—at times quite literally, by indulging his passion for chariot driving. He finally drove Rome’s chariot, and his own life, into the ditch.
Any Romans who still in 65 read Seneca’s De Clementia, ten years after it was written, had occasion for a bitter laugh. “That which is undergirded by truth, and grows out of solid ground, becomes better and greater with passage of time,” Seneca had proclaimed, reassuring his readers that their new princeps was innately good and could not deteriorate. It turned out that age seventeen had been a bit early for such certainty. Seneca must not have believed his own words, but perhaps he thought his influence could make them true. Over time he had lost that influence. Now only one of the restraints he had imposed was still in force: Nero had not yet sung in a public theater within the bounds of Rome.
Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate, written by Seneca and later posted proudly on silver tablets, might also have evoked laughter a decade later—or tears. The emperor’s early reverence for the Senate had dissolved into paranoia and contempt, following a spiral pattern set by his two predecessors, Caligula and Claudius. Imperial anxiety had begotten senatorial fear, fear had bred opposition, and opposition had spawned cruelty. Seneca had tried to prevent the cycle from starting, and indeed he had succeeded in delaying its onset. Without his moderating influence, the quinquennium Neronis might have been a three-year span, or two, or only one.
But was the time he had bought worth the price he had paid? Nowhere in his prose works does Seneca reflect on his political successes or failures, beyond a few vague mutterings in the Letters suggesting the failures weighed on him heavily. Nowhere does he say, as the author of Octavia has him say, that he should have stayed on Corsica, beneath the benign stars of the open sky, and never seen Nero’s palace—now being fitted with a ceiling depicting that sky, a mechanical wonder that could be wheeled around by laboring slaves. Seneca tried, on at least two occasions, to leave that palace, realizing it had become his prison. But he had first entered it of his own free will. Unlike his great role model, Socrates, he had felt the pull of ambition, and he still felt it to the end of his life, if we believe an analysis he made in the Letters of his own moral state.
What could have prompted a committed Stoic, a man who thought happiness came from Nature and Reason, to also pursue wealth and rule? Seneca never referred this question to himself, but he pondered it in a mythic parallel, in his greatest verse tragedy, Thyestes.
Seneca almost certainly composed this play during his time at Nero’s court, or afterward in retirement. It is the most self-referential of his dramas, so much so that one doubts it could have been published in his lifetime. Here Seneca used the conflict between two royal brothers—Atreus, a bloody autocrat possessed by spirits of Hell, and Thyestes, a gentle sage trying to stay out of politics—to wrestle with questions that his own strange journey had raised.
When the drama begins, Atreus sits on the throne of Argos, enjoying sole power, though he and his brother Thyestes were meant to rule by turns. Thyestes has gone into an exile that Seneca depicts as a philosophic retreat, a communion with Nature such as he himself had claimed to enjoy on Corsica. But Atreus, infected by the demonic spirit of his grandfather Tantalus, is bent on destroying his brother, whom he regards as a threat. He sets out to lure Thyestes back to Argos, then enact a diabolic plan: to feed his brother a banquet of his murdered children’s flesh.
The conflict is neither a coded version of Seneca’s relationship with Nero, nor an allegory contrasting political ambition with philosophic detachment, but it contains elements of both. Atreus is challenged by a henchman to say how he will ensnare Thyestes from such a great distance. Atreus replies:
He could not be caught—unless he wants to be caught.
He yet covets my kingdom.
With the omniscient insight of the criminally insane, Atreus seems to look straight into the heart of his brother—and Seneca’s heart too. The will to power, Atreus implies, lurks in even the most detached, self-contented sage.
Thyestes now enters the scene, walking toward the trap we know is waiting. Seneca portrays him as a virtuous Stoic, disgusted by the world he long ago renounced:
How good it is
to be in no one’s way, to eat safe meals
stretched out on open ground. Hovels don’t house crimes;
a narrow table holds a wholesome feast;
it’s the gold cup that’s poisoned—I’ve seen, I know.
It is as if Seneca has turned back the clock on his own life and given Thyestes the same choice he faced on Corsica, but also given him knowledge of what awaits. Thyestes lingers agonizingly on this precipice, unwilling to go forward, sensing danger ahead, unable to make up his mind—but then takes the fatal step.
Why does Thyestes return to Argos, while claiming to hate what he will find there? He makes his choice passively, almost fatalistically. As his children urge him onward, he appears to surrender: “I follow you, I do not lead,” he tells them. He has resisted long enough to satisfy his own conscience. He will resist further when Atreus offers him the scepter, but he accepts this as well; it was, as Atreus had divined and as Seneca finally makes clear, what he had wanted all along.
Accepting tainted power rather than staying in virtuous exile—this was Thyestes’ sin, and one familiar to Seneca. The impulse behind it was deeply rooted in Thyestes’ nature, perhaps in all human nature. “All of us have done wrong,” Seneca wrote in De Clementia; “some have stood by our good designs not firmly enough and have lost our guiltlessness, unwillingly, while trying to keep our grasp on it.” Trying is what Seneca depicts Thyestes doing, but not hard enough.
Seneca’s prose works offer forgiveness, but in the bleak world of the tragedies, the sin of weakness comes back on the sinner’s head a thousandfold. In a gruesome messenger speech, we hear how Atreus butchered, fileted, and stewed Thyestes’ children. Then we watch as Thyestes unknowingly consumes the horrid casserole.
In the play’s final act, a gleeful, drunken Thyestes revels over his meal and, significantly, curses his former poverty; he has gone over to the world of pleasure and power that he once renounced. Atreus now enters to deliver the crowning blow. He reveals the severed heads of the sons on whom Thyestes has feasted. No deities have intervened to prevent this atrocity, and none care that it happened, as Seneca suggests in his nightmarish closing lines:
THYESTES: Gods will come to avenge me;
To them I entrust your punishment.
ATREUS: And I entrust your punishment—to your children.
Thyestes can pray for justice as long as he likes, but the noisome contents of his guts are all that the play endorses as real.
There is nothing left for a cosmos that has beheld such horror except to fall and cease. In Thyestes, Seneca once again imagines the advent of apocalypse, the theme that had haunted his written works from their inception. In this case, a new kind of disaster is at hand—the disappearance of the sun, bringing darkness to Argos at daytime. No one in the play understands this phenomenon, but all are aware it portends something dire.
After Thyestes’ cannibal banquet, not only the sun but the stars, too, seem about to vanish. The play’s chorus members, the citizens of Argos, envision the zodiac tumbling into the sea, leaving only black void above:
Are we, out of all generations,
deserving of the sky’s collapse,
its axis knocked from beneath its dome?
Is it on us the last age comes?
A harsh destiny has b
rought us to this:
Wretches, either we lost our sun,
Or else we drove it away.
In these words we seem to hear Seneca’s own voice, speaking about his own time. Thyestes is a bleak cri de coeur, the most despairing Seneca ever allowed himself to utter. For him, the benign stars of Corsica had been extinguished. His sky had become blind, black, untenanted.
Death was the only route out of the diseased world in which he dwelled, yet he lived on. The last words of the play’s apocalyptic chorus sound the theme that preoccupied him in his last years, suicide:
Greedy for life is he who declines
to die, along with the dying world.
It is perhaps Seneca’s exhortation to himself—or his self-reproach.
While Seneca was writing Thyestes, Lucan was working on a masterpiece of his own, the epic poem Civil War—but writing in a very different spirit than his uncle. Lucan was not ready to despair or withdraw into fatalism. He was certainly not ready to die. The young lion of the Annaeus clan was in his midtwenties and at the height of his extraordinary literary powers. As the second Neronia approached, he began to employ the potent weapon of his poetry toward a goal that most thought out of reach: standing up to Nero.
It had been otherwise five years earlier, when Lucan first arrived in Rome. He had recited Praises of Nero at the first Neronia, and in the prologue to Civil War had—apparently without irony—cautioned Nero to step carefully when he took his place among the constellations. He had eagerly adopted the ways of the court, where poets rose in stature the more highly they exalted the princeps.
Adored by both Seneca and Nero, gifted with prodigious talent, Lucan had then seemed destined for political or literary glory, or both at once. But talent, at Nero’s court, was not always a blessing. The princeps, the more his own artistic ambitions grew, had become more jealous of his protégé. Relations went downhill, and Seneca’s fall from favor accelerated the decline. Lucan continued to publish and read sections of Civil War but no longer with Nero’s approbation. Indeed, the princeps broke up one recitation by abruptly calling the Senate into session, forcing most of the auditors, and Lucan himself, to go directly to the Senate house.