by James Romm
Like the great fire that had preceded it, Nero’s conflagration of killing appeared to die down but blazed up again with renewed force. A second round of executions, extending many months past the first, fell on men who could be tied to the Piso plot only by hearsay evidence. Gaius Petronius went down, according to Tacitus, merely because Tigellinus, jealous of a court rival, suborned testimony from a slave. This bon vivant made his death, like his life, that of an antiphilosopher, chatting merrily and trading light verse and jests with friends as he bled to death. His final composition, dictated in his last hours, was no moral treatise but an insider’s guide to Nero’s bizarre sex romps.
The fires raged on, consuming prose writer and poet, senator and soldier, moralist and merry hedonist. Rome was scorched clean of all whom Nero or Tigellinus considered threats. It was as though the ekpyrosis, the world-ending conflagration of the Stoics, had arrived but in a different form than expected. Rather than cleansing the world of a corrupt human race, the blaze claimed only the best and the brightest, the flowers of Rome’s literary elite and military officer class.
Among the last to go into the inferno was Thrasea Paetus.
Noble Thrasea, so much revered for his effort to preserve dignity and avoid servility, had, like Seneca, stayed clear of the plot against Nero. Indeed, he had stayed out of public life entirely for the preceding three years. But that very withdrawal could be used against him. Cossutianus Capito, Tigellinus’ son-in-law, caricatured Thrasea’s proud solitude in a brutal Senate speech. The man was a new Cato, he claimed, a scowling secessionist using Stoicism to rally dissent. Moral gravity—the same quality that had helped bring Seneca low—could easily, in the carnival world of Neronopolis, be portrayed as a crime.
Thrasea was condemned by a Senate that met in the presence of Nero’s armed troops. In a private room of his estate, accompanied by his son-in-law Helvidius and his Cynic guru Demetrius—the same man Seneca had admired and lionized in De Beneficiis—Thrasea had his veins opened. As his blood flowed onto the ground, Thrasea echoed Seneca’s words—already well known by this time—and declared a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.
Tacitus quotes the final prayers of the two men in precisely the same language. Did he mean to link the two great Stoics, one who colluded with absolute power and one who opposed it, in an eternal bond of amity? Or was he contrasting a meaningful sacrifice, made in blood, with a more facile one done with bathwater?
Only one man, according to Tacitus, sought to stop the purge before it claimed Thrasea’s life. An ardent young tribune named Arulenus Rusticus offered to use his power of veto to overturn Thrasea’s conviction. But Thrasea himself forbade it. He pointed out that the veto would be overridden and would likely cost Rusticus his life. “You’re only at the beginning of your career in office,” he counseled the young man. “Consider well what path you will walk, in times like these, through politics.”
After all the deaths he had witnessed, on the verge of meeting his own, Thrasea could advise only nonresistance. Rome was better off, he felt, with good men like Rusticus compromising their principles. Better they stay in public life, and lend it some shred of moral dignity, than hurl themselves into the flames.
The time of the second Neronia was at hand. The nightmares of April—the month now known, by decree of the Senate, as Neroneus—had passed, and Rome was slowly stabilizing. Nero had achieved an annihilation of his aristocratic opponents, guilty and innocent alike. But there was one victory he still hungered for, a prize that had eluded him for years, largely because Seneca had kept it from him.
Nero had by now sung in Neapolis and on other regional stages, but he longed for the acclaim that only Rome could grant. He planned to make his Roman debut at the Neronia, but the prospect horrified the Senate, even a Senate stripped of the noncompliant. The senators tried to forestall the debacle by voting the princeps first prize in advance. But Nero turned this diplomacy aside, vowing to defeat all comers in a genuine, unbiased musical contest.
Nero took the stage of Pompey’s Theater and recited a poem of his own composition, a miniepic about the Trojan War. Then he tried to exit, but a faction of the crowd, coached in advance, shouted their demand to hear the “divine voice.” Nero offered them a private performance in his gardens, but the crowd kept chanting, and Praetorians approached Nero to beseech him on its behalf.
Finally Aulus Vitellius—son of Claudius’ most supple courtier, now following his father’s profession—made himself spokesman for the crowd and, in a carefully choreographed sequence, demanded aloud that Nero enter the citharode contest.
Feigning reluctance, Nero cast his token into an urn, signifying he would compete. When his turn to perform arrived, the crowd beheld the strangest spectacle yet of the many Nero had provided. There was the princeps, dressed in a long flowing robe and high boots, with the two Praetorian prefects carrying his lyre, and a file of soldiers and senators behind them. An ex-consul, Cluvius Rufus, stepped onto the stage to announce the emperor’s aria. The princeps, he said, would sing Niobe, the lament of mythology’s most tragic woman, a mother bereft of her children.
With the focus and earnestness of a diva, Nero launched into his song. Observing competition rules, he declined to clear his throat, to use a cloth to wipe sweat from his brow, or to sit down, though the song went on for hours. When he finally concluded, late in the afternoon, he humbly bent down upon one knee in a gesture of deference. The crowd raised a mighty cheer, employing the applause cadences first introduced and now led by the Augustiani, the emperor’s hired claque.
Among the crowd walked Nero’s soldiers, newly confirmed in their loyalty. Some had helped execute their comrades, even commanders, in the recent purge; all had received a bonus of two thousand sesterces, plus a lifetime allowance of cost-free grain. The imperial treasuries were already exhausted, but Nero had to go deeper in debt if his regime was to stay in power.
The Praetorians observed carefully who in the crowd failed to applaud and who had fallen asleep while Nero sang. They beat and struck the commoners who did not clap loudly enough and those who disrupted the fine rhythms of the Augustiani by clapping out of time. Men of higher rank had their names taken down so that punishment could be enforced later on. At the theater entrances, panicked throngs were trying to shove their way in—now aware that absence from the performance might be a criminal offense.
Buoyed up by the wild cheering, Nero gazed into the stands and savored the fruits of victory. He was rid of Seneca, and the old moralist’s tiresome restraints, forever. He had killed off his enemies and rivals, along with his mother, wife, and stepbrother; he had terrorized Rome into adoring him. He could at last take center stage in the greatest city on earth. His new golden age had begun.
EPILOGUE
Euthanasia
(A.D. 68 AND AFTER)
Seneca allegedly once told Nero—the occasion of the remark is not known—“No matter how many you kill, you can’t kill your successor.” But in this case, as in many others, Nero proved his teacher wrong. He had indeed eliminated all possible successors, men belonging to the Julian line, by the end of 65.
Even those outside the family who fancied themselves rivals had been done away with. Nero’s stepson Rufrius Crispinus, the child of his wife Poppaea by a previous marriage, was killed after imprudently impersonating a princeps in some of his childhood games. Nero sent him on a fishing trip in an open boat, then had his slaves toss him over the side and leave him to drown.
While rubbing out successors whom he feared and dreaded, Nero also caused the death of one he desperately wanted. Poppaea was pregnant in the summer of 65, perhaps with the son who would cement Nero’s rule. But just after the second Neronia, the princeps, riding high on a wave of acclaim for his singing, threw a tantrum at Poppaea. Suetonius says she had carped at him for coming home late from the chariot races—an endearingly domestic vignette. Whatever the cause of his rage, Nero kicked his beloved wife hard enough to cause internal bleeding and the death of
both mother and fetus.
Nero never fathered another child. He tried to wed Antonia, daughter of Claudius, but she would not have him, and he killed her for intransigence. Instead he married Statilia Messalina, a noblewoman in her early thirties, with whom he had already carried on an affair. But Statilia never became pregnant. Perhaps Nero missed Poppaea too much to make the effort; he allegedly had Sporus, his male castrato love pet, made up to look like the woman he had adored.
Nero tried to replace familial love with celebrity. He toured the Greek world as a citharode and competed for age-old musical prizes, winning every time. He staged a fantastic ceremony in Rome for the visit of Tiridates, an Armenian king who had come to pledge subservience. He received this pledge in the Theater of Pompey, the place of his earlier singing triumph, on a stage that had been covered with sheets of gold.
Nero spent wildly on such spectacles, bankrupting the state but winning the hearts of the masses. The aristocracy, however, whose fortunes helped fund his debauches, were not so easily impressed. Nor was the army, defenders of a stauncher, less decadent ethos.
In the spring of 68, three years after quashing the conspiracy against his life, Nero faced rebellion—not within Rome this time, but in the camps of the provincial legions. By summer, he had so lost control of events that he faced the question his teacher Seneca had once pondered: whether to wait, patiently and passively, for a death that is sure to come, or forestall it by taking one’s own life.
At the time of the crisis, Nero had poison with him, since Locusta, his staff toxicologist, had prepared a special draught. In early June 68, when rebellion had swelled to the point that Nero was planning to abdicate, he placed this venom in a golden box and kept it with him, but only as a last resort. He had plans for his future—several conflicting ones that, in his panic, he pursued all at once. He would get the Praetorians to accompany him and take flight in a ship; he would seek asylum with the Parthians; he would go to Alexandria and devote himself to a performing career; he would appeal to Rome by making a public address in the Forum, begging for a second chance as princeps. While he pondered these alternatives and slept fitfully in his palace, his bodyguard removed the golden box from his room and deserted.
It is strange that the Praetorians, who had long propped Nero up but now turned against him, chose neither to kill him nor allow him access to Locusta’s toxins. One of the soldiers supposedly asked Nero, as the princeps cast about desperately for a means of escape, “Is it as awful as that, to die?” The line is from Vergil’s Aeneid, where it is spoken by the great warrior Turnus. The soldier was challenging Nero to live up to the martial code of that epic hero—to die by the blade, his own or another’s, rather than by the gentle oblivion of poison.
Seneca, had he lived, would have appreciated the irony: his wayward pupil, in the end, became a student of his hardest lesson. The questions of when and how to die had preoccupied Seneca in his last years. Seneca too had stored up poison, the means to a clean, quiet end, but in the event he had preferred the blade and the shedding of blood. Even that had not killed him, but Seneca had suffered in death, a point he considered crucial. It was what set Cato, Seneca’s great moral hero, apart from ordinary men.
Nero woke in the middle of the night to find the palace guard posts abandoned. He called out for a gladiator named Spiculus, one of his favorites, or some other percussor—expert swordsman—to come to his aid. He felt now that his life must end, but he wanted a capable executioner to end it. Instead two Greek freedmen, Phaon and Epaphroditus, answered the summons, and Sporus, the youth whom Nero had dressed to resemble Poppaea. Along with one or two others, they became Nero’s last cohort and honor guard. They disguised the princeps and helped him sneak out of Rome, a city that was already at that moment declaring allegiance to Galba, one of the mutinous legionary commanders.
Huddled on a thin mattress in a villa outside Rome, aware now that the Senate had declared him a public enemy, Nero contemplated his choices. He had brought two daggers with him—not sacred objects, like the blade once sharpened for his murder, but adequate to their task. As his companions dug a shallow trench for his burial, Nero tested the daggers’ points against his skin. The sensation was more than he could bear. He replaced them in their sheaths, telling his entourage, “The fated hour is not yet here.”
But the pain he would undergo if he was captured was far worse than a knife thrust. His companions described for him the requisite punishment: Nero would be held immobile with his neck in the fork of a tree, then beaten to death with stout rods. His ravaged corpse would be flung from the Tarpeian Rock, in imitation of the death reserved for Rome’s worst criminals. These were agonizing details, for Nero had become morbidly anxious about mutilation of his body. In his last hours, he several times begged his loyalists not to allow his captors to sever his head.
As mounted soldiers approached the villa, Nero begged piteously for one of his companions to “show by example how to achieve death.” Staff members of other imperials had, out of devotion or desperation, followed their masters to the grave. Nero, uniquely, was asking that someone precede him. No one responded to his plea. Then hoofbeats were heard on the ground outside, and Nero could postpone his choice no longer.
As he picked up one of his daggers, he might have reflected on the writings of Seneca, if he had ever read them. The power to die, Seneca had promised, was present at every moment and transcended every oppression. Any vein in one’s body, he had written in De Ira, furnished a high road to freedom. Even a German slave forced to fight in the ring, the lowest of the low in Roman society, had found this road, though guarded night and day. In the solitude of a privy, he had choked himself on a lavatory sponge.
Nero grasped a dagger firmly and struck it into his throat. It was a desperate move, for killing oneself in this way, by severing the carotid artery, was difficult. Perhaps he was afraid to attack his vital organs, or unsure that his dagger would reach them beneath layers of clothing and fat. Or perhaps he needed to punish his “divine voice,” now that his singing career had brought ruin on Rome and on himself. Whatever his reasons, he made only a painful and bloody, but not fatal, incision. It appeared that the soldiers were going to take him alive after all.
The freedman Epaphroditus now stepped forward to perform a last service for his master. He took hold of the dagger and enlarged the wound, opening the vital artery. Almost thirty years later, he would pay with his life for this act of mercy, when another besieged princeps, Domitian, wanted to make a point about assassination. Nero was still conscious enough to perceive that he was being euthanized. He was grateful and rasped out through his injured throat, “This is loyalty.”
A centurion burst into the room and found Nero lying on the floor, still barely alive, blood streaming from his neck. The soldier made a desperate effort to stanch the wound with the edge of his cloak—seeking to preserve Nero’s life, so that it could be driven out more painfully and publicly, in the center of Rome, with thousands taking part. But the princeps knew he had found freedom at last. “Too late,” he said, as though in triumph, and died.
Nero was dead at age thirty-two, having ruled since before his seventeenth birthday. By his crackdowns of 65 and 66, the savage purge that took the lives of Lucan, Thrasea Paetus, Seneca and his brothers, and many more, he had bought himself less than three more years on the throne, time he had largely squandered on singing tours in the East. Rarely in dynastic history has such a small gain been won at such a steep price.
Nero was buried as he had lived, with extravagant expense. His first love, the freedwoman Acte, still devoted despite his stunning decline, oversaw the interment of his ashes in a coffin of fine stone, in the tomb of a father he never knew.
The Julian line had come to an end. Nero had survived in power long enough to eliminate all potential heirs. The principate was up for grabs, and many pairs of hands were reaching to grab it. Rome was destined for a four-way civil war, though mercifully it lasted only a year. A new imperial
family, led by the general Vespasian and his son Titus, took over the palace, and a new dynasty was begun.
As Rome recovered stability, it looked back at the era of Nero and the curious man who had loomed so large in it, the philosopher Seneca. The long debate over who this man was, and whether he should be admired or hated, had begun. It has not yet ended.
Seneca’s prose works were by this time all the rage among Roman youth. Quintilian, a literary critic, wrote that they were “in everyone’s hands” while he was young himself (perhaps meaning in the 60s and 70s). The trend worried him because he disapproved of Seneca’s epigrammatic style and feared that readers would be seduced by it. Fortunately, Quintilian remarks in his Institutio Oratoria (a work written in the 90s), the young men of Rome loved reading Seneca but did not want to write like him. Their more learned elders, he says, never went for Seneca’s bait.
Seneca’s tragedies too were attracting fans in the years after his death, whatever their diffusion in his lifetime. Someone living in Pompeii scrawled a half-line from his play Agamemnon on a wall: “I see the groves of Mount Ida” (Idai cernu nemora). The quote seems to have no particular reference; it was merely a phrase the graffitist admired or could not get out of his head. When Pompeii was covered in volcanic ash in 79, the inscription was preserved, along with many other scribblings on the town walls. Someone else in Pompeii wrote Seneca’s name, slightly misspelled, perhaps in the way a modern fan might scrawl the name of a celebrity, and this too has survived.