Martial was ushered into Mela’s reception room. Numerous fellow clients milled about the room; they were here, like Martial, for the morning’s levee with their patron. Some were of Equestrian rank; some were freedmen, former slaves. All had come to pay their respects to Mela, their patron. This was how the Roman social system worked. The only free man at Rome who did not have a patron or need one was the emperor.
As the system prescribed, Martial had several patrons, and after he departed Mela’s house, he would hurry to the homes of other patrons and play the good client. Petilius, another of Martial’s rich patrons, possessed, in addition to a city house, a regal country estate on the Janiculum, today’s Gianicolo, a hill that overlooks Rome from the left bank of the Tiber. Julius Caesar had kept an estate and a villa on the Janiculum; Cleopatra had famously stayed in that villa when she came to Rome. Petilius’ Janiculum estate boasted one of the finest vineyards in Italy; its product rivaled Falernian wine, the benchmark of fine Roman wine.
Martial would flatter each of his patrons and beg gifts and favors. And as he left each house, the master’s steward would drop a small collection of coins into his hand. Between his patrons, Martial would return each day to his garret on the Quirinal Hill with a total of forty sesterces. It was, he himself considered, a wretched sum, and he detested the need of it. But without his daily dole, he would starve. As it was, Martial, whose greatest pleasures were to eat, drink, and converse with friends, lived beyond his means. Moreover, there were the duties of a client that Martial must perform. Just as a patron remunerated his clients and provided them with references, recommendations, and endorsements, so the client was expected to serve his patron and return the favors.
A good client would always rush to inform his patron of news that was to the patron’s advantage. A client going on a journey would carry his patron’s mail, for while Rome had a government courier service for official correspondence (the cursus publicus velox, or the state’s very fast runner, which used coaches and dispatch riders), the Roman world had no mail service for private mail. In all things, a client would be expected to put his own needs after that of his patron, and a patron’s most lowly clients—freedmen, as a rule—were expected to act as his anteambulo, preceding their patron when he passed along the street, clearing the way for him in the same way that lictors, official attendants provided by the state, did so for magistrates and commissioners.
At Mela’s house, Martial communed with Mela’s son Lucanus, or Lucan, as we know him. Of a similar age to Martial, Lucan was a talented poet. He had exhibited that talent in readings in private houses before appearing at the public theater and the Juvenile Games. He had gone on to win the garlands in AD 60 at the first Neronian Games, with a poem entitled Laudes Neronis, or In Praise of Nero. Back then, the young emperor had rewarded Lucan. But once Lucan’s uncle Seneca had disappeared into obscure retirement, Nero, jealous of Lucan’s gift and his works, “with the foolish vanity of a rival, had forbidden him to publish them,” Tacitus notes.2
Martial, as a member of Lucan’s circle of friends, would join private gatherings with Lucan and his wife Polla to hear the poet read his latest work aloud. As Martial knew, Lucan was currently working on an epic poem entitled the Bellum Civile. In it, Lucan described the Battle of Pharsalus in Macedonia between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. It was Lucan’s intention to take the work through the subsequent battles of the civil war, to culminate with Caesar’s showdown with Pompey’s sons in Spain, where Lucan himself was born.
Martial would applaud Lucan’s latest reading and offer witty comments. In the opinion of a later friend and patron, Pliny the Younger, Martial was “a man of great gifts, with a mind both subtle and penetrating.” Great fame and respect, but little money, came the way of Rome’s best poets. Martial could not eat or drink fame or respect. He preferred money; in fact, his lifestyle demanded it. It would not be until AD 80 that he would publish poems of his own, poems “remarkable for their combination of sincerity, pungency, and wit,” Pliny the Younger would say.3 Martial’s epigrams would subsequently make his name and give him fame that would last to the present day. But they would never make him rich.
Lucan, on the other hand, did not have to worry about money. His father’s wealth permitted him to indulge his talent. Martial had no such family wealth to support him. Another Roman poet, Albiovanus Pedo, had likewise lived in a cramped Roman apartment. Pedo, a student of Ovid, was popular in the reign of Tiberius. This poet made his name, and a tidy sum, by publishing an epic poem about the German military campaigns of Nero’s grandfather, Germanicus Caesar, against the German tribes led by Arminius. Pedo had been Germanicus’ deputy cavalry commander and had written from rich personal experience. He found a ready audience, for Germanicus, who was murdered in his prime before he could succeed Tiberius as emperor, was revered by the Roman populace. Every year, they made sacrifices to his memory on June 23, Germanicus’ birthday, a custom that would continue for several hundred years to come.
Seneca had known Pedo. When the chief secretary was still Martial’s patron, Seneca told him a story that Pedo, a “delightful story-teller” in Seneca’s opinion, had once related to him.4 Pedo’s apartment sat directly above that of Sextus Papinius, whose substantial residence occupied the entire ground floor of the building, a common choice of wealthy Romans who preferred not to go to the expense of a domus, or city house. Papinius, a former consul who took his own life in Tiberius’ last days, had a reputation for being mean and grasping. He was also one of that fraternity at Rome who preferred to sleep by day and conduct their lives by night, the so-called night livers.
One night about nine o’clock, Pedo had heard the sound of cracking whips below. Curious, Pedo had gone downstairs and asked Papinius’ night porter what was going on. Papinius was inspecting the household accounts, so Pedo was informed. Come midnight, Pedo heard the sounds of shouting. Again Pedo made a polite inquiry; this time, he was told that Papinius was conducting his daily voice exercises. About two o’clock in the morning, Pedo was again disturbed, as a horse-drawn carriage drew up in the street outside, then rumbled away again; Papinius was going for his nightly drive. As the sun was coming up, there were shouts from Papinius for servants and the sound of running feet, followed by much clatter in the kitchen; Papinius had emerged from his bath and was ready for a predinner appetizer. This was the type of neighbor that Martial would also have endured.
The monotony of city life was leavened for Martial by escapes during the summer holidays. In July and August, when the summer heat scorched Rome, a series of ludi, public games, were annually celebrated at Rome as part of the religious calendar. The public flocked to these games. And as plebeian visitors poured into the city for the games, the wealthy hurried out. The Senate did not sit; the courts were closed. So, unless a man of substance had official duties to perform related to the games, he fled the city’s stifling heat to one of his country estates until after Sirius, the Dog Star, dimmed in late August.
The summer resorts of Rome’s elite varied from villas on the west coast of Italy to estates in the hills of Rome. The coastal villas offered cooling sea breezes, but the air in the hills was humidity-free, and for many, this was a greater attraction than the seaside—Romans did not bathe in the sea. Seneca had a house at Alba Longa, in the Alban Hills, and when he was still chief secretary, he had hosted throngs of clients and retainers there in the summer. That resort was no longer available to Martial, but as a client of Mela and a friend of Lucan, he could expect an invitation to one of Mela’s country houses in July.
And what a momentous July it would prove to be.
IV
THE FORMER CHIEF SECRETARY
As the mule arrived outside the hillside villa in the late evening, it was clear, by the closed doors, that the staff was not expecting the master. The handful of servants and retainers who had walked in the mule’s wake clustered around the animal to help sixty-seven-year-old Lucius Seneca down to the ground. Bald and overweight
, with double chin and paunch, he had at one time been a handsome man.
Once on his feet, Seneca stretched wearily, then groaned with the pain of aching bones. He had been worn out by the journey, “which was not so much long as thoroughly uncomfortable,” he would soon be complaining to a friend. He had done away with the luxury and show of a carriage, a slave-borne litter, or a vast train of servants and was paying the price of his self-imposed austerity. But, as he himself said, “old age has made me better at putting up with a lot of things.”1
Ever since he had withdrawn from public life two years before, Seneca had disposed of the obvious trappings of wealth and had frequently been on the move. Rarely visiting his mansion at the capital, he moved around his various country estates, only occasionally visiting friends. All his itineraries and the few friendships that he retained were, like his travel arrangements, calculated to make him politically invisible. Seneca knew that Praetorian Prefect Tigellinus would have agents everywhere, reporting his movements, his meetings, perhaps even his conversations. How dramatically life had changed since his retirement. Once, Seneca had never hesitated to show off his riches and his power. Now, without power, his money was meaningless. In fact, to suspicious eyes, Seneca’s wealth was a threat.
Seneca’s elevation to power as Nero’s chief adviser had been unparalleled in Roman history. He was a provincial, born at Corduba, capital of the province of Baetica in southwestern Spain. His father, also a Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the holder of Equestrian rank, had been a renowned teacher of logic in Rome before he and his wife Helvia returned to Corduba. There, the couple’s three sons had been born—Novatus (the eldest) and Seneca and Mela. When Novatus was a young man, he had been adopted by a wealthy senator, Junius Gallio. It was common for childless Romans to adopt grown men as their sons, to prevent the forfeiture of their estates to the state after they died, as the law provided. An adopted man took the name of his adoptive father, so that Seneca’s brother also became Junius Gallio. And when the elder Gallio died, his adopted son inherited much of his sizable estate.
The younger Gallio had gone on to become a consul and, in AD 50-51, Roman governor of Achaia. While Gallio was serving in Achaia, a Jew had been brought before him, accused of blasphemy by the leading Jews of the province. The accused man was Paulus of Tarsus—Paul the Christian apostle as he would become known in centuries to come. Paul had upset the Jewish authorities by preaching the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Finding that Paul had no case to answer under Roman law, Gallio had discharged him.
Younger brother Seneca had suffered from asthma while growing up in Rome and spent many years in Egypt, living with his uncle, the prefect of Egypt, where he outgrew the complaint. When Seneca was in his thirties, immediately after the execution of Praetorian Prefect Sejanus, he moved to Rome, becoming a client of the family of the late Germanicus Caesar. In AD 41, under the emperor Claudius, Seneca had been convicted of adultery with Germanicus’ daughter Julia, for which crime he had been banished to the island of Corsica for eight years.
While living in frustrated exile on Corsica and supported in part from Rome by his elder brother Gallio, whom Seneca later described as his mentor, Seneca had produced some of his best literary and philosophical work, much of which he dedicated to Gallio. By AD 49, another of Germanicus’ daughters, Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, had married Claudius, her uncle. Agrippina was able to convince Claudius to recall Seneca from exile and to immediately make both Seneca and his brother Gallio praetors, placing them among the most senior of Rome’s magistrates.
It was said that Seneca also had an affair with Agrippina and this was why she favored him so. Her trust in him extended also to his appointment as Nero’s guardian and tutor. This had been the beginning of the fourteen-year relationship between man and boy, as Seneca guided Nero, first as his teacher and then, once Agrippina murdered Claudius and put Nero on the throne, as his most senior bureaucrat and adviser. Together with his partner in government, the Praetorian prefect Burrus, Seneca had kept a guiding and restraining hand on Nero’s shoulder. But when Burrus’ death brought the appointment of the detestable Tigellinus, Seneca began to see the writing on the wall.
Shortly after the death of Burrus, Seneca became aware of Tigellinus’ desire for Seneca’s neck—literally—when fellow senator Fabius Romanus brought both Seneca and his friend Gaius Piso before the Senate. The alleged crime was that Seneca and Piso were guilty of “stealthy calumnies,” a charge that had the ring of Tigellinus’ authorship about it.2 Many years had passed since Seneca himself had last sat in the Senate, but this charge from Romanus had to be rebutted. So, Seneca had taken his seat among the former praetors and, once recognized by the presiding consul, had used his famous power of oratory to crush the charges against Piso and himself.
So expert was Seneca’s speech, he made it appear that if anyone were guilty of stealthy calumnies, it was his accuser. Romanus dropped the charges. But both Seneca and his fellow accused Piso had been shaken by the episode. Piso would devise his own strategy to counter future threats from Tigellinus, but Seneca saw only one course open to him. Rather than fall victim to Tigellinus’ continued plotting, Seneca had tendered his resignation.
“You have surrounded me with vast influence and boundless wealth,” Seneca had told the young emperor the day he voluntarily ended his long period of imperial service. “So that I often think to myself, ‘Am I, who am merely of an Equestrian and provincial family, numbered among the chief men of Rome?’”3
Seneca had told Nero that he could no longer bear the burden of his wealth and asked the emperor to order his agents to take over the management of Seneca’s properties, and to include those properties in Nero’s own estate. Nero had thanked Seneca for his offer, but said that people would think the worst of their emperor if he accepted it. He invited Seneca to speak up from retirement should his former teacher think that Nero had strayed from the righteous path that the older man had created for him. But both men knew that Seneca would never again dare to offer advice, just as Nero would never take it.
Now, as travel-weary Seneca stood in the portico of his Alban villa, one of his accompanying freedmen rapped on the door, and presently, there was a stirring inside. The doors were thrown back, and the doorman, with boat-shaped oil lamp in hand, looked with surprise and then panic upon the face of his master. “I find nothing ready for my arrival,” Seneca would soon lament in a letter to a friend, “apart from myself.”4
Seneca kept a baker and a cook on the permanent staff at the villa, as he did at all his properties. So now he called for bread and olive oil, for he was hungry after his journey. The doorman bustled away, calling to rouse the baker from his slumbers. Seneca sagged onto a couch in the dining room and waited. Soon the doorman returned, with the news that the baker was out of bread. Seneca strove not to let his irritation show.
“The farm manager will have some, or the steward, or a tenant,” said Seneca, who was even prepared to eat stale bread.5
Again the doorman hurried away to awaken the farm manager, to alert the steward of the house, and to run to the homes of nearby tenants. Seneca’s exhaustion now drove him to his bed. There, as he awaited his loaf of bread, he called in one of the secretaries and dictated a letter to his friend Lucilius, a native of Pompeii and the procurator of Sicily. By the time that Seneca was well into the letter, he had second thoughts about eating bad bread. “I shall wait then,” he said, “and not eat until I either start getting good bread again or cease to be fussy about bad bread.” And so he surrendered to his exhaustion and dropped off to sleep, without bread of any kind to satisfy his hunger.6
As the summer approached, Seneca would stay at various country villas. His vineyards at Mentana were considered among the best in Italy and begged regular attendance. Another of his favorite estates was at Nomentum, twelve miles northeast of Rome, which also boasted fine vines. The air there he considered favorable to his health, and once, when he came down with a fever at Rome, he had hu
rried to Nomentum, certain that the change of address would aid his recovery. His elder brother Gallio, Seneca wrote to a friend, had done something similar while proconsul of Achaia, sailing to an Aegean island in the belief that a change of air would be more beneficial to overcoming a fever than would any physician’s prescription.
As the summer drew nearer, too, Seneca was taken aside by Cleonicus, the most trusted of his freedmen. Cleonicus had a confession to make. He had been approached by agents of Tigellinus—on Nero’s command, he said. Through threat or bribe, those agents had cajoled Cleonicus to poison his master. Cleonicus had procured poison and had even prepared a deadly draught to administer to Seneca. But Cleonicus’ conscience had got the better of him, and he had come forward to tell his master all.
This proximity to a violent death shook Seneca. He reasoned that while Cleonicus had proven loyal, another member of his staff might give in to bribe or threats and be prepared take his master’s life. From this time forward, Seneca would not worry about bread or any other foodstuff produced or even handled by his servants. He would only eat wild fruit that he himself gathered, and he would only drink pure stream water that he collected personally. His life, Seneca was convinced, depended on such extreme precautions.
V
THE FLAME
March 1, the Kalends of March, was an important day on the Roman calendar. In times past, the Roman year had commenced on March 1. On that day, in a predawn ceremony presided over by the Pontifex Maximus, the vestal virgins renewed the Eternal Flame that burned year-round in the temple dedicated to Vesta, goddess of hearth and home. The March 1 date was too fixed in the routine of Rome for it to be altered. So now, Nero came to the small, circular Temple of Vesta in the Forum, for the Eternal Flame’s renewal ceremony of AD 64.
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Page 5