On his father’s side Nero belonged to the Domitii Ahenobarbi—so named from the bronzelike beards that ran in the family. For five hundred years they had been famous in Rome for ability, recklessness, haughtiness, courage, and cruelty. Nero’s paternal grandfather had a passion for games and the stage; drove a chariot in the races, spent money with open hand on wild beasts and gladiatorial shows, and had to be reproved by Augustus for barbarous treatment of his employees and slaves. He married Antonia, daughter of Antony and Octavia. Their son Cnaeus Domitius enhanced the reputation of the family by adultery, incest, brutality, and treason. In A.D. 28 he married the second Agrippina, then thirteen years old. Knowing his wife’s ancestry and his own, he concluded that “no good man can possibly be born from us.”62 They named their only child Lucius, and added the cognomen Nero, meaning, in the Sabine tongue, valiant and strong.
The chief authors of his education were Chaeremon the Stoic, who taught him Greek, and Seneca, who taught him literature and morals but not philosophy. Agrippina forbade the last on the ground that it would unfit Nero for government;63 the result was creditable to philosophy. Like many a teacher, Seneca complained that his labors were thwarted by the mother: the boy would run to her when reproved, and was sure to be comforted. Seneca sought to train him in modesty and courtesy, simplicity and stoicism. If he could not retail to him the doctrines and disputes of the philosophers, he could at least dedicate to him the eloquent philosophical treatises that he was composing, and hope that someday his pupil might read them. The young prince was a good student, wrote forgivable poetry, and addressed the Senate in the graceful manner of his master. When Claudius died, Agrippina had no great difficulty in securing the confirmation of her son on the throne, especially since her friend Burrus brought to him the full support of the Guard.
Nero rewarded the soldiers with a donative, and gave 400 sesterces to every citizen. He pronounced over his predecessor a eulogy composed by the same Seneca 64 who would soon publish, anonymously, a pitiless satire (Apocolocyntosis or Pumpkinification) on the late Emperor’s ejection from Olympus. Nero made the usual obeisance to the Senate, modestly excused his youth, and announced that of the powers heretofore taken by the prince he would keep only the command of the armies—a highly practical choice for the pupil of a philosopher. The promise was probably sincere, since Nero kept it faithfully for five years 65—that quinquennium Neronis which Trajan later accounted the best period in the history of the imperial government.66 When the Senate proposed that statues of gold and silver should be raised in his honor, the seventeen-year-old Emperor rejected the offer; when two men were indicted for favoring Britannicus, he had the accusations withdrawn; and in a speech to the Senate he pledged himself to observe throughout his reign that virtue of mercy which Seneca was then extolling in an essay De clementia. Asked to sign a death warrant for a condemned criminal, he sighed, “Would that I had never learned to write!” He abolished or reduced oppressive taxes, and gave annuities to distinguished but impoverished senators. Recognizing his immaturity, he allowed Agrippina to administer his affairs; she received embassies, and had her image engraved beside his own on the imperial coins. Alarmed by this matriarchate, Seneca and Burrus conspired, by playing upon Nero’s pride, to win from her the administration of his powers. The infuriated mother announced that Britannicus was the true heir to the throne, and threatened to unmake her son as decisively as she had made him. Nero countered by having Britannicus poisoned. Agrippina retired to her villas and wrote her Memoirs as a last vindictive stroke—blackening all the enemies of herself and her mother, and providing Tacitus and Suetonius with that museum of horrors from which they drew the darker colors for their portraits of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero.
Under the guidance of the philosopher-premier, and on the impetus of the administrative organization already devised, the Empire prospered within and without. The frontiers were well guarded, the Black Sea was cleared of pirates, Corbulo brought Armenia back under Rome’s protectorate, and Parthia signed a peace that endured for fifty years. Corruption was reduced in the courts and the provinces, bureaucratic personnel was improved, the Treasury was managed with economy and wisdom. Probably at Seneca’s suggestion Nero made the far-reaching proposal to abolish all indirect taxes, especially the customs duties collected at frontiers and ports, and so establish free trade throughout the Empire. The measure was defeated in the Senate through the influence of the tax-gathering corporations—a defeat which indicates that the Principate was still recognizing its constitutional limits.
To divert Nero from interference with state affairs, Seneca and Burrus allowed him to indulge his sensuality unrestrained. “At a time when vice had charms for all orders of men,” says Tacitus,67 “it was not expected that the sovereign should lead a life of austerity and self-denial.” Nor could religious belief encourage Nero to morality; a smattering of philosophy had liberated his intellect without maturing his judgment. “He despised all cults,” says Suetonius, “and voided his bladder upon an image of the goddess whom he most respected, Cybele.”68 His instincts inclined him to excessive eating, exotic desires, extravagant banquets where the flowers alone cost 4,000,000 sesterces;69 only misers, he said, counted what they spent. He admired and envied Caius Petronius, for that rich aristocrat taught him new ways of combining vice with taste. Petronius, says Tacitus in a classic description of the epicurean’s ideal,
passed his days in sleep, and his nights in business, joy, and revelry. Indolence was at once his passion and his road to fame. What others did by vigor and industry, he accomplished by his love of pleasure and luxurious ease. Unlike the men who profess to understand social enjoyment, and ruin their fortunes, he led a life of expense without profusion; an epicure, yet not a prodigal; addicted to his appetites, but with refinement and judgment; an educated and elegant voluptuary. Gay and airy in his conversation, he charmed by a certain graceful negligence, the more engaging as it flowed from the natural frankness of his disposition. With all his delicacy and careless ease, he showed, when he was governor of Bithynia, and again when consul, that vigor of mind and softness of manners may unite in the same person. . . . From his public offices he returned to his usual gratifications, fond of vice, or of pleasures that bordered on it. . . . Cherished by Nero and his companions . . . he was allowed to be the arbiter of taste and elegance. Without his sanction nothing was exquisite, nothing delightful or rare.70
Nero was not subtle enough to achieve this artistic epicureanism. He disguised himself and visited brothels; he roamed the streets and frequented taverns at night with the comrades of his mood, robbing shops, insulting women, “practicing lewdness on boys, stripping those whom they encountered, striking, wounding, murdering.”71 A senator who defended himself vigorously against the disguised Emperor was soon afterward forced to kill himself. Seneca sought to divert the royal lust by condoning Nero’s relations with an ex-slave, Claudia Acte. But Acte was too faithful to him to keep his affections; he soon exchanged her for a woman of superlative refinement in all the ways of love. Poppaea Sabina was of high family and great wealth; “she had everything,” says Tacitus, “except an honest mind”; she was one of those women who spend all the day in adorning their persons, and exist only when they are desired. Her husband, Salvius Otho, boasted of her beauty to Nero; the Emperor at once commissioned him to govern Lusitania (Portugal), and laid siege to Poppaea. She refused to be his mistress, but agreed to be his wife if he would divorce Octavia.
Octavia had borne the transgressions of Nero silently, and had preserved her own modesty and chastity amid the stream of sexual license in which she had been forced to live from her birth. It is to the honor of Agrippina that she lost her life in defending Octavia against Poppaea. She used every plea against the proposed divorce, even, says Tacitus, to offering her own charms to her son. Poppaea fought back with hers and won; youth was served. She taunted Nero with being afraid of his mother, and led him to believe that Agrippina was plotting his fall. Finally, in the madness of his infatuation, he consented to kill the woman who had borne him and given him half the world. He thought of poisoning her, but she had guarded against this by the habitual use of antidotes. He tried to have her drowned, but she swam to safety from the shipwreck he had arranged. His men pursued her to her villa; when they seized her she bared her body and said, “Plunge your sword into my womb.” It took many blows to kill her. The Emperor, viewing the uncovered corpse, remarked, “I did not know I had so beautiful a mother.”72 Seneca, it is said, had no share in the plot; but the saddest lines in the history of philosophy tell how he penned the letter in which Nero explained to the Senate how Agrippina had plotted against the Prince and, being detected, had killed herself.73 The Senate gracefully accepted the explanation, came in a body to greet Nero returning to Rome, and offered thanks to the gods for having kept him safe.
It is hard to believe that this matricide was a youth of twenty-two with a passion for poetry, music, art, drama, and athletic games. He admired the Greeks for their varied contests of physical and artistic ability, and sought to introduce like competitions to Rome. In 59 he instituted the ludi iuvenales, or Youth Games; and a year later he inaugurated the Neronia on the model of the quadrennial festival at Olympia, with contests in horse racing, athletics, and “music”—which included oratory and poetry. He built an amphitheater, a gymnasium, and a magnificent public bath. He practiced gymnastics with skill, became an enthusiastic charioteer, and finally decided to compete in the games. To his philhellenic mind this seemed not only proper, but in the best tradition of Greek antiquity. Seneca thought it ridiculous, and tried to confine the imperial exhibitions to a private stadium. Nero overruled him and invited the public to witness his performance. It came, and applauded lustily.
But what this uninhibited satyr really wanted was to be a great artist. Having every power, he longed also for every accomplishment. It is to his credit that he applied himself with painstaking seriousness to engraving, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.74 To improve his singing “he used to lie upon his back with a leaden plate upon his chest, purge himself by a syringe or by vomiting, and deny himself fruits and all foods injurious to the voice”;75 on certain days, for the same purpose, he ate nothing but garlic and olive oil. One evening he summoned the foremost senators to his palace, showed them a new water organ, and lectured to them on its theory and construction.76 He was so fascinated by the music which Terpnos drew from the harp that he spent entire nights with him in practicing on that instrument. He gathered artists and poets about him, competed with them in his palace, compared his paintings with theirs, listened to their poetry, and read his own. He was deceived by their praise, and when an astrologer predicted that he would lose his throne he replied cheerfully that he would then make a living by his art. He dreamed of performing publicly in one day on the water organ, the flute, and the pipes, and then appearing as actor and dancer in the part of Virgil’s Turnus. In 59 he gave a semipublic concert as a harpist (citharoedus) in his gardens on the Tiber. For five years more he controlled his longing for a larger audience; at last he dared it in Naples; there the Greek spirit ruled, and the people would forgive and understand him. The auditorium was so overcrowded for his exhibition that it crumbled to pieces shortly after the audience had left. Encouraged, the young Emperor appeared as singer and harpist in the great theater of Pompey at Rome (65). In these recitals he sang poems apparently composed by himself;V some fragments have survived and show a moderate talent. Besides many lyrics, he wrote a long epic on Troy (with Paris as hero), and began a still longer one on Rome. To complete his versatility, he came upon the boards as an actor, playing the roles of Oedipus, Heracles, Alcmaeon, even the matricide Orestes. The populace was delighted to have an emperor entertain it and kneel on the stage, as custom required, to ask for its applause. It took up the songs that Nero sang and repeated them in the taverns and the streets. His enthusiasm for music spread through all ranks. His popularity, instead of waning, grew.
The Senate was more horrified by these displays than by all the gossip of sexual license and perversion that ran about the palace. Nero replied that the Greek custom of confining athletic and artistic competitions to the citizen class was better than the Roman custom of leaving these to the slaves; certainly the contests should not take the form of slowly executing criminals. The young murderer decreed that so long as he ruled, no combat in the arenas should be carried to the death.78 To restore the Greek tradition and dignify his own performances, he persuaded or compelled certain senators to compete in public as actors, musicians, athletes, gladiators, and charioteers. Some patricians, like Thrasea Paetus, showed their disapproval of his ways by absenting themselves from the Senate when Nero came to address it; some others, like Helvidius Priscus, denounced him violently in those aristocratic salons that had become the last refuge of free speech; and the Stoic philosophers in Rome spoke ever more openly against this impish epicurean on the throne. Plots were laid to depose him. His spies discovered them, and like his predecessors he countered with a reign of terror. The law of maiestas was revived (62), and accusations were brought against men whose opposition or wealth made their deaths culturally or financially desirable. For Nero, like Caligula, had now exhausted the Treasury with his extravagance, his gifts, and his games. He announced his intention to confiscate completely the estates of citizens whose wills left insufficient sums to the Emperor. He stripped many temples of their votive offerings, and melted down their images of silver or gold. When Seneca protested and privately criticized his conduct—worse, his poetry—Nero dismissed him from the court (62), and the old philosopher spent the remaining three years of his life in the seclusion of his villas. Burrus had died some months before.
Nero now surrounded himself with new aides, mostly of coarser strain. Tigellinus, urban prefect, became his chief adviser, and smoothed the Prince’s path to every indulgence. In 62 Nero divorced and dismissed Octavia on the ground of barrenness, and twelve days later married Poppaea. The people protested mutely by throwing down the statues that Nero had raised to Poppaea and crowning those of Octavia with flowers. The angry Poppaea convinced her lover that Octavia was planning to remarry, and that a revolution was being organized to replace him in power with Octavia’s new mate. If we may follow Tacitus, Nero invited Anicetus, who had killed Agrippina, to confess adultery with Octavia and implicate her in a plot to overthrow the Prince. Anicetus played his part as commanded, was banished to Sardinia, and lived out his life in ease and wealth. Octavia was exiled to Pandateria. There, a few days after her arrival, imperial agents came to murder her. She was still but twenty-two, and could not believe that life must end so soon for one so guiltless. She pleaded with her slayers, saying that she was now only Nero’s sister and could do him no harm. They cut off her head and brought it to Poppaea for their reward. The Senate, informed that Octavia was dead, thanked the gods for having again preserved the Emperor.79
Nero himself was now a god. After the death of Agrippina a consul-elect had proposed a temple “to the deified Nero.” When, in 63, Poppaea bore him a daughter who died soon afterward, the child was voted a divinity. When Tiridates came to receive the crown of Armenia he knelt and worshipped the Emperor as Mithras. When Nero built his Golden House he prefaced it with a colossus 120 feet high, bearing the likeness of his head haloed with solar rays that identified him as Phoebus Apollo. Actually he was now, at twenty-five, a degenerate with swollen paunch, weak and slender limbs, fat face, blotched skin, curly yellow hair, and dull gray eyes.
As a god and an artist he fretted over the flaws of the palaces he had inherited, and planned to build his own. But the Palatine was crowded, and at its base were on one side the Circus Maximus, on another the Forum, and on the others slums. He mourned that Rome had grown so haphazardly, instead of being scientifically designed like Alexandria or Antioch. He dreamed of rebuilding Rome, of being its second founder, and renaming it Neropolis.
On July 18, 64, a fire broke out in the Circus Maximus, spread rapidly, burned for nine days, and razed two thirds of the city. Nero was at Antium when the conflagration started; he hurried to Rome and arrived in time to see the Palatine palaces consumed. The Domus Transitoria, which he had just built to connect his palace with the gardens of Maecenas, was one of the first structures to fall. The Forum and the Capitol escaped, and the region west of the Tiber; throughout the remainder of the city countless homes, temples, precious manuscripts, and works of art were destroyed. Thousands of people lost their lives amid falling tenements in the crowded streets; hundreds of thousands wandered shelterless through the nights, crazed with horror, and listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire, was scattering incendiaries to renew it, and was watching it from the tower of Maecenas while singing his lines on the sack of Troy and accompanying himself on the lyre.VI He energetically guided attempts to control or localize the flames and to provide relief; he ordered all public buildings and the imperial gardens to be thrown open to the destitute; he raised a city of tents on the Field of Mars, requisitioned food from the surrounding country, and arranged for the feeding of the people.80 He bore without remonstrance the accusatory lampoons and inscriptions of the infuriated populace. According to Tacitus (whose Senatorial prejudice must always be remembered), he cast about for some scapegoat, and found one in
a race of men detested for their evil practices, and commonly called Chrestiani. The name was derived from Chrestus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea. By that event the sect of which he was the founder received a blow which for a time checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigor not only in Judea . . . but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world. Nero proceeded with his usual artifice. He found a set of profligate and abandoned wretches who were induced to confess themselves guilty; and on the evidence of such men a number of Christians were convicted, not indeed on clear evidence of having set the city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race. They were put to death with exquisite cruelty, and to their sufferings Nero added mockery and derision. Some were covered with skins of wild beasts, and left to be devoured by dogs; others were nailed to crosses; numbers of them were burned alive; many, covered with inflammable matter, were set on fire to serve as torches during the night. . . . At length the brutality of these measures filled every breast with pity. Humanity relented in favor of the Christians.81
When the debris had been cleared away Nero undertook with visible pleasure the restoration of the city along the lines of his dream. Contributions for this purpose were solicited or elicited from every city in the Empire, and those whose homes had been destroyed were enabled to rebuild out of these funds. The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their façades and first stories of stone, and had to be sufficiently separated from other buildings to oppose a protective gap to the spread of fire. The springs that flowed beneath the city were channeled into a reserve water supply in case of future conflagrations. Out of the imperial Treasury Nero built porticoes along the main thoroughfares, providing a shaded porch for thousands of homes. Antiquarians and old men missed the picturesque, time-hallowed sights of the old city; but soon all agreed that a healthier, safer, and fairer Rome had risen from the fire.
Nero might have earned forgiveness for his crimes had he now molded his life as he had remade his capital. But Poppaea died in 65, in advanced pregnancy, allegedly from a kick in the stomach; rumor said this had been Nero’s answer to her reproaches for having come home late from the races.82 He grieved bitterly over her passing, for he had eagerly awaited an heir. He had her body embalmed with rare spices, gave her a pompous funeral, and delivered a eulogy over the corpse. Having found a youth, Sporus, who closely resembled Poppaea, he had him castrated, married him by a formal ceremony, and “used him in every way like a woman”; whereupon a wit expressed the wish that Nero’s father had had such a wife.83 In the same year he began the building of his Golden House; and its extravagant decoration, cost, and extent—covering an area that once had sheltered many thousands of the poor—renewed the resentment of the aristocracy and the suspicions of the plebs.
Suddenly Nero’s spies brought him word of a widespread conspiracy to put Calpurnius Piso on the throne (65). His agents seized some minor personages in the plot, and by torture or threat drew from them confessions implicating, among others, Lucan the poet and Seneca. Bit by bit the whole plan was laid bare. Nero’s revenge was so savage that Rome credited the rumor that he had vowed to wipe out the whole Senatorial class. When Seneca received the command to kill himself he argued for a while and then complied; Lucan likewise opened his veins and died reciting his poetry. Tigellinus, jealous of Petronius’ popularity with Nero, bribed one of the epicure’s slaves to testify against his master, and induced Nero to order Petronius’ death. Petronius died leisurely, opening his veins and then closing them, conversing in his usual light manner with his friends and reading poetry to them; after a walk and a nap he opened his veins again and passed away quietly.84 Thrasea Paetus, the leading exponent of the Stoic philosophy in the Senate, was condemned not for taking part in the plot, but on the general ground of deficient enthusiasm for the Emperor, for not enjoying Nero’s singing, and for composing a laudatory life of Cato. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely banished, but two others were put to death for writing in their praise. Musonius Rufus, Stoic philosopher, and Cassius Longinus, a great jurist, were exiled; two brothers of Seneca—Annaeus Mela, father of Lucan, and Annaeus Novatus, the Gallio who in Corinth had freed Saint Paul—were ordered to commit suicide.
Having cleared the lines in his rear, Nero left in 66 to compete in the Olympic games and make a concert tour of Greece. “The Greeks,” he remarked, “are the only ones who have an ear for music.”85 At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free—i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories. Amid his tour he received news that Judea was in revolt and that all the West was hot with rebellion. He sighed and continued his itinerary. When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, “no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out.”86 At Corinth he ordered work started on a canal to cut the Isthmus as Caesar had planned; the task was begun, but was laid aside during the turmoil of the following year. Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1808 prizes he had won in Greece.
Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy. In March, 68, the Gallic governor of Lyons, Julius Vindex, announced the independence of Gaul; and when Nero offered 2,500,000 sesterces for his head, Vindex retorted, “He who brings me Nero’s head may have mine in return.”87 Preparing to take the field against this virile antagonist, Nero’s first care was to choose wagons to carry along with him his musical instruments and theatrical effects.88 But in April word came that Galba, commander of the Roman army in Spain, had joined fortunes with Vindex and was marching toward Rome. Hearing that the Praetorian Guard was ready to abandon Nero for proper remuneration, the Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero put some poison into a small box and, so armed, fled from his Golden House to the Servilian Gardens on the road to Ostia. He asked such officers of the Guard as were in the palace to accompany him; all refused, and one quoted to him a line of Virgil: “Is it, then, so hard to die?” He could not believe that the omnipotence which had ruined him had suddenly ceased. He sent appeals for help to various friends, but none replied. He went down to the Tiber to drown himself, but his courage failed him. Phaon, one of his freedmen, offered to conceal him in his villa on the Via Salaria; Nero grasped at the proposal, and rode through the dark four miles out from the center of Rome. He spent that night in Phaon’s cellar, clad in a soiled tunic, sleepless and hungry, and trembling at every sound. Phaon’s courier brought word that the Senate had declared Nero a public enemy, had ordered his arrest, and had decreed that he should be punished “after the ancient manner.” Nero asked what this was. “The condemned man,” he was told, “is stripped, is fastened to a post by a fork passing through his neck, and is then beaten to death.” Terrified, he tried to stab himself; but he made the mistake of testing the poniard’s point first and found it disconcertingly sharp. Qualis artifex pereo! he mourned—“What an artist dies in me!”
As a new day dawned he heard the clatter of horses: the Senate’s soldiers had tracked him down. Quoting a verse of poetry—“Hark! now strikes upon my ear the trampling of swift couriers”—he drove a dagger into his throat; his hand faltered, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him to press the blade home. He had begged his companions to keep his corpse from being mutilated, and Galba’s agents granted the wish. His old nurses, and Acte his former mistress, buried him in the vaults of the Domitii (68). Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.89