Several men stood behind the young emperor on the tribunal, also attired in their best armor—among them the two Praetorian prefects, Sophonius Tigellinus and Faenius Rufus, and, in their purple-bordered white senatorial robes, the two new consuls for the year, Gaius Laecanius and Marcus Licinius. All joined the applause until it faded away. Silence returned. The white-cloaked Praetorian tribune of the duty cohort, charged today with the duty of narrator, now stepped to the front of the balcony and barked a command. He then proceeded to lead all the men in reciting an oath. Again, thousands of voices sounded around the colonnaded parade square in a unified chant:I swear, that I will obey the emperor willingly and implicitly in all his commands, that I will never desert, and that I will always be ready to sacrifice my life for the empire of Rome.1
It was New Year’s Day, AD 64, and the men of the Praetorian Cohorts, Roman citizens all, Italians all, were renewing the oath of allegiance that all citizen soldiers around the Roman Empire took on January 1 every year.
Nero was in good spirits as he departed the barracks after the oath-taking ceremony, carried in a litter by brawny young slaves, with a cohort of tall, blond, bearded men of his bodyguard of the Germani corporis custodes , the so-called German Guard, marching in close order around him. The men of the ten “German” cohorts came from along the Rhine, primarily from the old kingdom of Batavia, modern-day Holland. They wore the same armor and helmets that the Praetorians wore, but the “German” shields were flatter and carried a different emblem, and their cavalry-style swords were longer.
Cheering, applauding members of the public lined the street. Children looked in awe as the closed litter of their emperor passed. An entourage of imperial freedmen and slaves trailed along behind the litter. The emperor was heading back to his palace, the Palatium, on the Palatine Hill in the center of the city, to conduct his business for the day before preparing for a lavish banquet with his most intimate friends. Before the sun had risen that morning, Nero had gone to the Capitoline Mount, where a great crowd of plebeians had gathered to declare their allegiance to him and offer prayers for his health, safety, and prosperity in the coming year, as was the custom each New Year’s Day.
At dawn, in his capacity as pontifex maximus, chief priest of Rome, Nero had presided when the special New Year sacrifice was conducted in the Arx, the most sacred area on the Capitoline Mount, in the presence of the augurs and the priests of Rome’s various religious orders. The organs of the sacrificial bird had been unblemished, and the haruspex, the chief augur, had declared that the omens were auspicious for a good year for Rome and for the emperor. All was well in Nero’s world. All was well in the Roman world.
“Never had there been so profound a peace,” historian Tacitus said of this period.2 A revolt in Britain that had almost seen the province overrun by the Celtic war queen Boudicca and her hundreds of thousands of rebel Britons had been brutally put down three years before, and Roman rule and Roman commerce were again flourishing in Britain. Trouble in the east, which had seen the Parthians occupy Armenia and threaten Syria and other Roman provinces, had finally and convincingly been terminated just a year back by Nero’s doughty, determined general Lucius Domitius Corbulo. Not only had the Parthians been thrown back, but Corbulo had forced the Parthian-born king of Armenia, Tiridates I, to become a Roman ally and promise to come to Rome to bow down to Nero and acknowledge him as his sovereign lord. What a boost to Nero’s prestige that would be!
For several years now, Nero had been expressing his artistic side, on a limited scale. “Nero from early boyhood turned his lively genius” to the arts, said Tacitus. “He carved, painted, sang.” Nero also exhibited some ability as a poet. Tacitus begrudgingly credited him with “occasionally composing verses that showed that he had the rudiments of learning.”3 Nero’s biographer Suetonius would write that Nero “would dash off verses enthusiastically, without any effort,” and that after Nero’s death, his enemies would claim that he had stolen his best poems, which were published in Nero’s lifetime, from other authors. But, said Suetonius, Nero’s notebooks, in his own handwriting and complete with his corrections, came into the biographer’s possession, and they proved, to him, that Nero was indeed the original creator.4
Nero possessed a singing voice of which he was proud, and he had become an accomplished player of the lyre, a stringed instrument like a small harp, with which he accompanied himself. “Music formed part of his childhood curriculum,” said Suetonius, “and he developed a taste for it early.”5 Not long after he came to the throne, Nero had summoned the greatest lyre player of the day, Terpus, to sing to him after dinner at the Palatium. For several nights, Terpus had performed for the emperor, singing and playing until a late hour. Inspired by Terpus, Nero himself had taken up the study of the lyre and mastered it.
Nero had made his first public appearance as a singer by competing in the Juvenile Games as an adolescent, prior to becoming emperor. Since taking the throne, he had sung in the houses of friends and in the imperial gardens, before small but appreciative audiences made up of his intimates and retainers. These performances, he decided, were “on too small a scale for so fine a voice.”6 Now, with the coming of the new year, Nero had made a resolution—to take his talent to a much broader audience and compete in public singing contests.
Yet, for all his confidence in his own singing prowess, Nero was nervous of how the ordinary people of Rome would receive their emperor’s performing on the public stage. Such a thing had never before occurred. He was not alone in this concern. When, back at the Palatium, Nero informed his senior advisers of his intention, they expressed fears that it would demean the emperor and detract from his authority. He would not give up the idea entirely, but the advisers were able to convince him to at least make his first public singing appearances away from the capital.
Public opinion was very important to Nero. He cared little for the ambitious, fickle, back-stabbing Roman nobility; his most intimate friends were almost entirely Equestrians and freedmen. The esteem of the ordinary people, on the other hand, mattered to him greatly. Suetonius said that Nero had “a thirst for popularity.”7 It was not so much a thirst as a perceived need. At the commencement of his reign his sage adviser, Seneca, would have counseled him to heed the mood of the masses if he wanted to retain his throne.
Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first emperor, had been a master of gauging the public mood and pandering to it. Unlike Julius Caesar, who, in his determination to eclipse Pompey the Great, had ostentatiously celebrated every victory, accepted every honor, and paid the ultimate bloody price for his egotism. Augustus had known the limits of his people’s tolerance and had died in his bed after a reign of almost half a century. His successor Tiberius, conscious of public opinion, had begun his reign with caution and restraint, but eventually lost touch with the man in the street and almost lost his throne to a usurper, Sejanus, as a result.
The next emperor, Gaius, or Caligula as we know him, had at the outset of his reign been buoyed by public expectations, as the son of the wildly popular Germanicus Caesar. This had, ironically, made him oblivious to public opinion. Caligula soon perished, dispatched by his own bodyguards and unmourned by his people. Claudius, Caligula’s successor, had known how to keep the public amused and died popular because of it. To lose the goodwill of the people of Rome was a dangerous thing, and Nero was wise enough, or perhaps insecure enough, to know that an appearance by the emperor on stage at the capital before a public unprepared for such an unprecedented event could prove disastrous.
Nero now decided that once the season for competitions had begun, he would enter the annual contest held at Neapolis, modern-day Naples, on the west coast of Italy. Neapolis had been founded by Greek settlers in about 600 BC, and despite being captured by Rome in 326 BC, it had always retained a Greek flavor. The Greeks were considered by the Romans to be the great artists of their time, in all the arts, and Nero felt that an artist such as himself should appear among the Greeks and win their praise, and
their prizes. Only then would he feel confident enough to appear on stage in front of the people who mattered, the public of Rome.
The idea of acclaim from the Greeks soon convinced Nero that after he made his debut at Neapolis, he would travel on to the province of Achaia, in southern Greece. There he would appear in all the major singing contests, which had been held for centuries, confident of “winning the well-known and sacred garlands of antiquity.” Having won the Greek contests, Nero was convinced, said Tacitus, he could return home and to the stages of the capital, having evoked “with increased fame, the enthusiasm of the citizens” of Rome.8
II
THE RIVAL PREFECTS
The Praetorian prefect Tigellinus stood in the Forum, looking approvingly at the bustle of early-morning activity around the shops of the Aemilian Basilica. If business for the shopkeepers of the Aemila this winter’s day was good, then that was good for Tigellinus. For, not only was Tigellinus one of the two prefects in charge of the Praetorian Cohorts. Tigellinus was also a man of business.
The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, had resumed the ancient practice of putting two prefects over the Praetorian Cohorts. Rome’s oldest military unit had been created by the praetors of Rome as their personal protection force after the formation of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. Later, the two consuls elected to power each year had controlled the Praetorian Cohorts, with each appointing one senior officer to jointly command them. By the time of Julius Caesar, the Praetorian Cohorts had fallen into disuse, only to be reformed by Mark Antony in 44 BC in the wake of Caesar’s assassination, again as a personal protection force. At that time, the most senior Praetorian officers were their tribunes. This changed with the coming of the emperors. Augustus made the Praetorians more than bodyguards. Employing the hand-picked auxiliary troops of the Germani corporis custodes for his close personal protection, he had turned the nine Praetorian Cohorts that then existed into his political police; they had become his enforcers and executioners, and via their muscle and steel, they and their commanders wielded enormous power.
It had been wise Augustus’ intent that a check should be placed on the misuse of Praetorian power by emulating the old custom of putting not one but two men in overall charge of these household troops, with both men holding the equal rank of prefect. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, had learned the wisdom of this through bitter experience when his sole appointee, Sejanus, had attempted to usurp him. Later emperors adhered to the policy of appointing a pair of Praetorian prefects, but Claudius, several years before his death, and under the influence of his last wife, Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, had appointed a single Praetorian prefect, Afranius Burrus.
Burrus, a physically imposing man, had overcome the disability of a withered left hand to become a soldier of great renown before he took command of the Praetorians. He proved to be an honest and able prefect and a clever military strategist, serving in the capacity of what in modern terms would be considered a secretary of defense. Retaining his post when Nero came to the throne, Burrus had been, in combination with Nero’s chief of staff (the famed and flawed philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca), another of Agrippina’s favorites, a steadying influence on the boy emperor for the first five stable years of Nero’s reign.
In AD 62, Burrus had died from throat cancer, although the gossips would claim that Nero, tiring of the prefect’s strict influence, murdered Burrus by sending him a poison-laced medicine for his throat. Following Burrus’death, Nero, on the advice of Seneca, had reverted to the custom of two Praetorian prefects. To satisfy Seneca and the public, he first chose Faenius Rufus, yet another favorite of Agrippina. Nero had earlier appointed Rufus to the post of commissioner of the corn supply. The poet Juvenal said that Romans would be content just as long as they were provided with bread and circuses, and there was much truth in this. The man who controlled the capital’s supply of corn, most of which had to be shipped in from the wheat fields of Egypt and North Africa in vessels of the Mediterranean grain fleet, controlled the lives of the people of Rome. Some of the 150,000 tons of grain shipped into Rome each year was sold to bakers, but since the reign of Augustus, most was doled out free of charge to the poorer residents of Rome and sold to soldiers at a subsidized rate.
Some past holders of the post of commissioner of the corn supply had been lazy; others had been inept, and others still, corrupt. Rufus was an exception; he had gained “vulgar popularity,” according to Tacitus, through “his administration of the corn supplies without profit to himself.” 1 Yet, just as Rufus was widely known as a virtuous man, he was equally well known as a passive, if not downright timid man. And this admirably suited both Nero and his second choice for prefect.
This was Tigellinus, who, like Rufus, was by AD 64 a middle-aged man. A senator of lowly birth, Tigellinus had been banished from Rome by Caligula in AD 39 for having an affair with Nero’s mother, Agrippina. Once Claudius came to the throne and Agrippina became his wife, Tigellinus was allowed to return to Rome. Early in Nero’s reign, he had been appointed prefect of the Cohortes Vigiles, or the Night Watch. He had soon wormed his way into Nero’s favor by encouraging and participating in the young emperor’s worst vices, particularly his night revels around the taverns, brothels, and back streets of Rome. Tigellinus, who was famous for personally keeping a veritable harem of concubines, had gone on to become Nero’s procurer; whatever Nero wanted, Tigellinus would organize.
It was Tigellinus’ “inveterate shamelessness and infamy,” according to Tacitus, that put him, and kept him, in Nero’s most intimate circle of friends.2 In return, Nero had heaped money, property, and favors on Tigellinus. On one occasion, when Tigellinus’ son-in-law was banned from the Senate by a vote of the House for an undisclosed crime, Tigellinus, with Nero’s support, had the ban overturned.
Tigellinus’ co-prefect Rufus, once appointed to head the Praetorians, “enjoyed the favor of the people and the soldiers.”3 Tigellinus, meanwhile, began office universally despised and devoid of respect at all levels of society. Rufus’ popularity meant that Nero dare not antagonize the men of the Praetorian Cohorts by removing him, so Tigellinus set to work to undermine his fellow prefect. After Seneca had retired from the post of chief secretary in AD 62, within months of the death of Burrus, Tigellinus launched his campaign. He began by discreetly reminding people that Rufus had been a favorite of the emperor’s mother. Officially, Agrippina’s name had been mud ever since her murder, on Nero’s orders in AD 59, with the Senate declaring Agrippina guilty of conspiring to kill her son. Still, association with the disgraced Agrippina alone was not enough to destroy Rufus’ reputation or his popularity. Tigellinus had more work to do to increase his power at his colleague’s expense.
Tigellinus progressed to hatching plots against leading men of Rome. According to Tacitus, Tigellinus thought that “wicked scheming” was all he needed to bring him power and that his schemes would be all the more successful if he “could secure the emperor’s complicity in guilt.”4 To do this, Tigellinus would, at dinner with the emperor or while out carousing with him, delve into the young man’s most secret fears. And fears he had aplenty. Having grown up in a Palatium rent by intrigues and sullied by murder, Nero was, not surprisingly, insecure.
Like many an emperor before and after him, Nero above all feared being overthrown. Seneca, while serving as his chief secretary, had counseled him not to live in fear, for he could never execute his successor; it did not matter how many men he executed, someone would take his place. But with Seneca out of the picture, no such wise counsel existed, and Tigellinus was able to play on his employer’s insecurities.
Crafty Tigellinus identified the two men whom Nero dreaded most. Rubellius Blandus Plautus had several marks against him. Plautus’ mother was, like Nero, a member of the Julian family, making Plautus distantly related to the emperor. And Plautus had married a granddaughter of the emperor Tiberius. So, Plautus could claim imperial credentials on both scores. And to add to his illustrious name, Plautus, y
oung, charismatic and rich, was capable of charming the people and buying allegiance, should he set his sights on the throne.
Nero had originally been alerted to a potential threat from Plautus a year after he took the throne in AD 54. One of his mother’s female friends had accused Agrippina of planning to marry Plautus, her cousin, and then take the throne from Nero and give it to Plautus. When defending herself against the charge, Agrippina had said that no one would testify against her, even “if Plautus or any other were to become master of the State and sit in judgment on me.”5 The charge had come to nothing, and neither Agrippina nor Plautus suffered on account of it. But Nero would not forget that Plautus had the credentials to replace him.
In AD 60, Nero had celebrated his first Neronian Games, which he had created as a festival of contests of both mind and body, along the lines of games conducted in Greece for centuries past and which Augustus had emulated at Rome and Actium with his Actiaca, Greek games held every four years during his reign. Not long after the last poet had spoken his last line in the Neronian Games and the last naked boxer had been crowned victor with a laurel wreath, a comet was seen to blaze across the night sky. According to Tacitus, to superstitious Romans the appearance of a comet was a portend of revolution.6 It soon reached Nero’s attention that many people were suggesting that should the emperor be dethroned in such a revolution, then Plautus would make the ideal successor.
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Page 3