Before striking at Sejanus, Tiberius took the precaution of coordinating with the chief of Rome’s fire brigade (a military organization), Quintus Sutorius Macro. Afterward, Tiberius named him the new commander of the Praetorian Guard. That was no help for the Senate. In fact, Macro carried out even more treason trials than did Sejanus. Tiberius ordered the execution of everyone in prison on suspicion of supporting his former advisor. Their corpses were left first to rot and then were dumped into the Tiber. The emperor and his two Praetorian prefects destroyed most of what little independence was left in the old nobility of Rome.
Tiberius survived, but at a price. He had to recognize that Sejanus had tricked him. Worse still, Tiberius knew that he had trusted the man who possibly ordered the murder of Tiberius’s own son. No wonder the emperor spent his last years in bitterness.
GERMANICUS’S REVENGE
Tiberius was responsible for the death of two of Agrippina the Elder’s sons by Germanicus, but he saved the third son, Gaius, and brought him to Capreae. The emperor had a grandson through his biological son, Drusus the Younger, and he left open the question of which young man would succeed him. Tiberius surely preferred his own grandson, but Gaius had the popularity of Germanicus and the blood of Augustus.
The sources say that Tiberius sensed Gaius’s bad character and even liked it, since it would make Tiberius look good in retrospect and hurt his enemies in the Senate. Tiberius supposedly saw Gaius as a viper. “When I am dead, let fire overwhelm the earth,” Tiberius supposedly said. Good stories, but they arouse skepticism.
Yet the student of history pauses at the thought of the cynical old emperor and the corrupt and spoiled young prince together on a beautiful island in the Mediterranean. As they passed the fate of the world between their hands, perhaps they shared lessons in political realism that each had learned at the knees of Livia—Tiberius’s mother and Gaius’s great-grandmother. She raised Gaius in her own house after the death of his mother. Perhaps Tiberius noticed that not only was Livia gone now, but also so were nearly all the other women of Augustus’s extended family who’d so influenced Tiberius’s life: beautiful and scheming Julia, loyal Vipsania, and vengeful Agrippina. Bold, generous Antonia was still alive, but she outlasted Tiberius by less than seven weeks. For all intents and purposes, the imperial family boiled down to the old goat and the young viper.
On March 16, 37, when Gaius was twenty-four and his great-uncle Tiberius was seventy-eight, the old emperor finally died. Some said that Gaius had Tiberius poisoned or starved or smothered with a pillow. Others attributed the deed to Macro, commander of the Praetorian Guard. The troops hailed Gaius as emperor, and the Senate followed two days later. Gaius is better known today by his childhood nickname, Caligula—“little soldier’s boots,” after the miniature uniform that his parents dressed him in when, as a boy, he lived with them in a military camp in Germany. The son of Germanicus, the great-grandson of the divine Augustus, and descended from Mark Antony as well, Caligula practically overflowed with geneological greatness. So Germanicus exacted a kind of revenge on Tiberius in the end.
Tiberius would not be remembered fondly. People in Rome were so happy with the news of his death that they ran about crying, “To the Tiber with Tiberius!” Caligula declined to deify his predecessor, making Tiberius one of the few emperors in the principate’s first two centuries to be denied that honor.
Yet Tiberius was one of Rome’s most successful emperors if judged by policy results: abroad, he secured the borders of the empire; while at home, he permanently subordinated the Senate. He reversed Augustus’s imperialism and stopped any serious domestic opposition to his rule. He continued the conditions that promoted trade and prosperity. Above all, Tiberius ensured that the principate would continue. The Caesars would go on ruling Rome. Not, however, without problems ahead.
Augustus started his reign with violence and ended with persuasion and benevolence. He thus followed Machiavelli’s rule for a successful prince. Tiberius, by contrast, did exactly the reverse, starting mild and ending severe and violent.
Tacitus portrayed Tiberius as a sly and gloomy tyrant, but most scholars today consider this judgment exaggerated. Certainly it leaves out Tiberius’s many positive qualities. Yet there is no denying the ferocity that he inflicted on Rome’s nobility; no gainsaying the barracks of the Praetorian Guard that now broached Rome’s new political reality. With them Tiberius “riveted the fetters of his country,” as British historian Edward Gibbon wrote in the eighteenth century. There is a case to be made for Tiberius as an enlightened despot, and his character was surely more complex than Tacitus allows. Yet we can’t deny the label of tyrant to the man who persecuted his political opponents on vague charges of treason and drove them to their deaths.
As a result, Tiberius lifted the veil from Roman monarchy. All that was missing to turn Rome into an autocracy without enlightenment was a megalomaniac. As it happened, he was just over the horizon; in fact, two of them were. The big test facing the political system that Augustus had built would soon become whether it could remove a bad emperor without causing chaos.
Tiberius considered himself strong and masculine, and he had the military record to prove it. Yet women played a big role in his career: from his savior, Antonia; to his estranged wife and stepsister, Julia; to his rival and adoptive daughter-in-law, Agrippina; and, above all, to his mother, Livia. She was the most powerful woman Rome had ever known. Tiberius was in love once, with his first wife, Vipsania, but this most guarded of rulers has left no portrait of their marriage.
The clashes between Tiberius, on the one hand, and Livia, Julia, and Agrippina, on the other hand, personify the sea change going on in Roman life. Assertive manliness, supported by women on the home front, won Rome its empire. Yet now the point was to defend the empire, not to expand it. Strength and prowess were less important than intelligence and calculation. Only societal prejudice and the rigors of childbirth kept women from competing on an equal footing.
Yet that left men in search of redefinition. Tiberius may have thought that he solved the problem of heroic leadership and the sense of mission it gave to the empire, but, in fact, he merely left it to return in a new form. After Tiberius, the wheel turned again back to charisma. For the next three generations of emperors after him, the Roman government was all about Germanicus: first an autocratic version (his son, Caligula); then a lame version (his brother, Claudius); and then a bacchanalia (his grandson, Nero). Then, at last, Rome returned to a second Tiberius, as it were—a soldier-emperor, but this time one with much more popular appeal—Vespasian, the builder of the Colosseum.
The more the emperors succeeded in making the empire about peace, the less edgy and dangerous they rendered the Roman army. The more the emperors made Roman government an autocracy, the less energetic, strong, and efficacious they rendered individual Romans, especially elite Romans. A republic made up of potential Caesars could not stand, but a republic made up of sheep and voluptuaries could not defend itself.
Tiberius was a transformational leader but not a charismatic one. How ironic it is, then, that the greatest religious revolution in Western history began during his reign: the mission of Jesus Christ. After preaching the Gospel in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem circa the year 30. His followers hailed him as the Messiah—in Greek, the “Christ.” They believed in his resurrection and came to see his mission as the start of a new religion, Christianity. Tiberius knew nothing of this, of course, as he sat in the Villa of Jupiter on faraway Capreae.
Bust of Nero.
3
NERO
THE ENTERTAINER
On the night of July 18–19, 64, fifty years after the death of Augustus, a fire broke out in Rome. It started in the shops at one end of the Circus Maximus. Winds sent it roaring down the circus, then through adjacent valleys and up the hills. People fled, many losing everything, and gangs of looters soon prowled the streets.
Fires in Rome were frequent and hard to put
out. The city was a firetrap, full of narrow winding lanes and houses that were made mostly of mud-brick with wooden beams or wooden lattices daubed with clay. Brick and marble building materials were the exception, not the rule. Homes often shared party walls, and few homeowners kept firefighting equipment on hand. Rome’s oppressive summer heat and frequent droughts made it easy for fires to roar out of control. Augustus gave Rome its first fire brigade, but it was small and relied on buckets that had to be refilled from aqueducts. In the summer, water levels were often low, due to rich malefactors siphoning off water for use in their stately homes. Tearing down buildings as a firebreak was the best way to put out a big blaze.
This blaze, the worst in the capital’s history, raged for five days. Only on the sixth day did crews pull down enough buildings to stop the flames, but then the conflagration started up again elsewhere. By the time it was finally done, the Great Fire burned three of Rome’s fourteen districts to the ground, left only a few damaged buildings standing in seven others, and spared only four districts. The loss of life was considerable.
When the fire began, the emperor Nero was in his seaside villa south of Rome. Unlike previous rulers faced with tragedy, he didn’t hurry back to town. In fact, he delayed his return until his own palace was in danger from the flames. The great new House of Passage, as he called the palace, crossed over a valley and linked two of Rome’s hills. It burned on one of them but was still standing on the other. It was there that Nero set up his command post in the beleaguered city.
Next comes one of the most famous scenes in ancient history. The historian Tacitus states: “A rumor had gone forth everywhere that, at the very time when the city was in flames, the emperor appeared on a private stage and sang of the destruction of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity.”
This is, of course, the basis for the modern expression “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”
Nero could not literally have played the fiddle, since the instrument was not invented until the Middle Ages. Singing was his passion, especially to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument called a lyre, an art form that was as quintessentially Greek then as the classical guitar today is quintessentially Spanish. Now twenty-six, Nero had already given public performances in Rome, to the disgust of conservatives, who saw him making a spectacle of himself in a manner beneath the dignity of the Roman nobility. So the story of his performing while Rome blazed is plausible if not proven.
That his subject was allegedly the burning of Troy adds piquancy, since Romans believed that refugees from Troy had founded their city. In addition, Nero and his ancestor Augustus both traced their ancestry to the Trojan leader Aeneas—a tale told in that superlative work of Latin literature, Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, which was in turn based on Greek models. So a song about Troy to the sound of the lyre suggested aristocratic love of all things Greek. And if Nero’s blood flowed from Rome’s beginning, maybe his song announced its end.
But did Nero “fiddle” in the other sense of the word? That is, did he do nothing while Rome burned? He was certainly guilty of delaying his return to the suffering city until his own personal interests were threatened. Then he made amends by opening public buildings and parks to the dispossessed, bringing food into Rome from nearby cities, and slashing the price of grain. The tale of his singing outweighed these gestures in some minds. Anger grew when, after the fire, Nero confiscated much of downtown Rome to build an enormous new palace. So, as far as the Roman people were concerned, not only did Nero fiddle while Rome burned, but also he turned a profit on the catastrophe. Perhaps this was the source of another, even deadlier rumor about Nero: that he didn’t only ignore the fire but also actually caused it in order to advance his private agenda.
The Great Fire of Rome took only one week of Nero’s many years in power, but it defines his reign in both real and symbolic terms. The fire opened the way for a new city of Rome and a new age in Roman building that left its mark on Roman culture as well as on world civilization. And Nero himself was like a fire that cleared out the old senatorial elite and blazed the trail for a new ruling class from the provinces.
Nero was a master of manipulating symbols such as the fire, so there is something appropriate about the attention it gets in history, but there is also something misleading. Before the fire, Nero was wildly popular with the Roman people. They doubted him afterward, but Nero worked hard to win them back. The Great Fire was a bad show. Nero knew that because he lived and died by his showmanship. So after the fire, he put on another bizarre and ghastly show that turned prisoners into human torches—better box office, as he no doubt reasoned.
Nero is a paradox. In some ways, he was the worst of emperors: cruel, murderous, immoral, unmilitary, and ultimately poison in most of the provinces. Yet in other respects, he was a success: well liked, a builder, benefactor, peacemaker, and entertainer of the people. Nero was both mad autocrat and brilliant populist.
Few emperors are as infamous or as famous as Nero. No emperor’s story is as encrusted with myth and misperception. Yet even the most sober examination leaves us with a ruler who would have horrified Augustus, his great-great-grandfather. Nero’s rule raises the question of whether the monarchy that Augustus founded and Tiberius honed could even continue.
How had things reached this point? For the answer, consider the two emperors who followed Tiberius and preceded Nero.
THE HOUSE OF GERMANICUS
Caligula aroused high hopes when he replaced Tiberius. He was young, son of the beloved Germanicus, and great-grandson of the divine Augustus. He spent part of his youth in the home of his great-grandmother, Livia, a good teacher of the art of ruling if ever there was one. He even delivered her funeral oration when she died in the year 29. He was seventeen at the time.
Unfortunately, Caligula soon disappointed. It would have taken epic self-control to come through his upbringing well adjusted, and Caligula was no hero. He inherited Livia’s cunning and ruthlessness but without her restraint or decorum. He proved to be autocratic, cynical, and murderous to his elite rivals.
Caligula’s decadence is legendary, delicious, and, alas for historical accuracy, vastly exaggerated by hostile later sources. Such tidbits as a short-lived marriage to one of his sisters and incest with the others or stabling his favorite horse in marble and ivory while planning to make the beast a consul—these are unlikely to be true.
Still, Caligula was clever and fluent and vicious in his wit. So perhaps he really did boast to his horrified, aristocratic grandmother Antonia that he could treat anyone as he pleased. Maybe he, in fact, summed up the extravagance of his court by saying a man ought either to be frugal or be Caesar. And maybe, just maybe, it is true that when the crowd at the races cheered for the team that he opposed, he said, “If only the Roman people had but one neck!”
We are on firmer ground in saying Caligula earned popularity with the people by sponsoring games and entertainments, unlike the stingy Tiberius. Meanwhile, he executed numerous senators. He seems to have seen himself as an absolute monarch and demanded deification while still alive. One sign of this desire to be a god: he built a new and grander palace and extended it to the podium of a temple.
Caligula accumulated so much power that his actions gave birth to several plots against him—until, finally, one succeeded. In the year 41, a conspiracy of senators and the Praetorian Guard killed the emperor. It was a throwback to the assassination of Julius Caesar eighty-five years earlier but with a new twist: Caesar’s assassins had left his wife alone, but Caligula’s killers also slaughtered the emperor’s wife and daughter. The chief conspirator was an officer of the guards. Caligula supposedly used to subject the man to sexual taunts and then make him kiss Caligula’s hand with the middle finger extended. It seems that finally the guardsman had endured enough. Caligula had ruled for less than four years. After his death, his images were pulled down and his name erased from inscriptions.
His successor, Claudius (Tiberius Claudiu
s Nero Germanicus), who ruled from 41 to 54, was Germanicus’s younger brother, and so, Augustus’s grandnephew. Still, Claudius was an unlikely emperor. He was born with a limp, trembling, and a speech defect due possibly to cerebral palsy. He was passed over for high office by Augustus and Tiberius and allowed to become a historian instead. Caligula finally made Claudius consul at the start of his reign but then spent the rest of it insulting and humiliating him.
On the day of Caligula’s assassination, a Praetorian found Claudius in the palace and brought him to the guards’ barracks. There he was saluted as emperor while the Senate was debating restoring the republic. The senators quickly reversed course and approved Claudius—the first but not the last ruler to be chosen by the Praetorian Guard. Talk of the republic was, manifestly, just talk. Meanwhile, the Guard showed once again that behind the brick-and-concrete walls of its fortress lay power to compete with that of the Senate in its marble-columned halls.
Claudius proved to be a good emperor when it came to opening the door to the provincial elites. He granted citizenship to many men from the provinces and persuaded the Senate to allow more of Gaul’s elite to enter its ranks. He broke with Tiberius’s peace policy and had his generals conquer Britain, which Caesar had invaded but never settled.
Claudius had little interest in sharing power with the Senate. Under his rule, government came under the control of the palace, particularly his two powerful wives and his freedmen. The new emperor was fifty years old and had little experience in government and none in the military. But he had spent his life in the palace and had observed things carefully. And the palace was an important place because, like all monarchs, the Roman emperor stood at the center of a court. Wives, relatives, bodyguards, flatterers, and, increasingly, freedmen and even slaves had the emperor’s ear. Senators rarely did. In fact, some senators knew the palace only as the place where they were forced to stand trial behind closed doors.
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