THE AUGUSTEAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XXI.

NERO

I

NERO’S ACCESSION. THE FIRST PHASE

CLAUDIUS once dead, the accession of Nero, expected by all—senators as well as soldiers—was carried through without a hitch. On 13 October 54 the Praetorians, who had been, promised a donative of 15,000 sesterces—the same amount as that which Claudius had paid—hailed him as Imperator, and his recognition by the Senate followed immediately, no opposition being offered by any of the provincial armies. This unanimity arose, somewhat paradoxically, from two quite different motives. The legionaries and the provincials, whom Claudius had so favoured, hoped naturally enough for a continuance of his policy: Nero was not yet seventeen, and it was obvious that the direction of affairs would lie in the hands of Agrippina and the two men she trusted, Seneca and Burrus; from a daughter of Germanicus and from two men of provincial birth army and provinces might look for much. On the other hand, the Roman aristocracy might with equal reason expect that Agrippina, her ambitions now presumably satisfied, would return to the liberal traditions of her house and would forgo suspicion and accusation, and that there would be an end to the all-pervading legal activity of Claudius’ principate.

Thus the new government, anxious both to preserve the good­will of the provinces and to abolish the unpopular parts of Claudius’ rule in Rome, stamped its early proceedings with a somewhat contradictory character. On the one hand, Claudius was deified, like Augustus, and coins commemorated Divus Claudius, on the Caelian hill the construction of a temple in his honour was at once begun (though the structure was a few years later transformed into a distributing-station for the Aqua Claudia): at the funeral Nero read a formal laudatio of the dead ruler, certainly composed for him by Seneca; one of the tribes of Alexandria—which were now reorganized, though the details escape us—received the name of Philo-klaudios, symbolizing Nero’s love for his step-father. And this was not the only formal manifestation, for when the Senate rescinded certain measures of Claudius—among them the duty imposed upon quaestors-designate of arranging for the gladiatorial games—Agrippina intervened with a protest, and the Senate had some difficulty in gaining its way. On the other hand, Nero intimated to the Senate his desire to put an end to the merging together of the private administration of the imperial house and the government of the State that had characterized the reign of Claudius, and above all to restore to the Senate its judicial powers. He claimed Augustus as his model: so had Claudius before him, but Augustus now became in official thought the term of reference that marked the difference between the new rule and that of Claudius. ‘The new Augustus’, is the title given Nero by contemporary Alexandrian coins, and the name of one of the reorganized tribes at Alexandria expresses in another form this special reverence for his great-great-grandfather. This contrast finds its most forcible expression in the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca, where the divine Augustus is one of the most formidable accusers of Claudius, and where Apollo, the Augustan deity, predicts a return to justice and liberality.

Indeed this opposition to the policy of Claudius rapidly gained the upper hand. Mildness and clemency were the tendencies most strongly stressed by the new government in contrast to the judicial murders and cruelty of the past years, dementia was the watchword that Seneca suggested to Nero for his public speeches and which he himself used as a title for the work that he dedicated towards the end of AD 55 to his imperial pupil: by ‘clemency’ he meant a synthesis of all the virtues of a government, justice, good­will (concordia), and love of peace—to employ the phrases that recur constantly on coins and in the names of the Alexandrian tribes. Poets too shared in propaganda for the programme, lulling themselves with the fancy of a new age of gold and helping to spread the fancy: such were Calpurnius Siculus in his Bucolics, the anonymous author of the Carmina Einsidlensia, and Lucan in the first book of the Fharsalia. All of them depicted the reign of Nero as initiating a new era of happiness.

All the same, the favours fell solely on the aristocracy, which was well pleased with the respect that Nero and his advisers showed for it. Every day he gave fresh proof of mildness or of modesty: he refused the title of pater patriae, recognizing that he was too young for it; he would not allow the erection of statues in his own honour or consent that the beginning of the year should be moved to December, in which his own birthday fell; he stopped the prosecution of two charges of maiestas, against a senator and against a knight; he restored Plautius Lateranus, who had been degraded on the ground of adultery with Messallina, to his rank as senator; he cut down the rewards of informers under the Lex Papia Poppaea; finally, he won the enthusiasm of all by exempting L. Antistius Vetus, who was his colleague in the consulship to which he had been nominated for 1 January 55, from taking the customary oath in acta principis, thus removing all distinction between himself and his colleague. He relieved the Praetorians of the surveillance of the games (although he was forced to restore it next year, possibly from fears for his personal safety). There was no lack of assistance for the impoverished nobles, for whom a series of subsidies was expressly instituted in 58. It could even be said that the new princeps favoured certain conservative, or even reactionary, tendencies of the aristocracy, which emerged again, as in questions concerning the control of freedmen and slaves, where Nero, in contrast to his predecessor, posed as a protector of the interests of masters. Though he would not approve off-hand the Senate’s proposal in 56 to cancel the manumission of freedmen who showed ‘ingratitude’ to their patroni, he recognized how reasonable was their anxiety to preserve the subordination of freedmen to their patrons and so granted them the right to deal with individual cases. And in 57 he allowed them to carry still further the resolutions of the senatus consultum Silanianum of AD 10 by decreeing that when a master had been killed by his slaves, even those who had been manumitted by his will (and so were still slaves at the time of the murder) must share the torture and punishments of the other slaves. Nor was this harshness merely permissive: in 61, when a slave murdered his master, L. Pedanius Secundus the prefect of the city, all his fellow-slaves, some 400, were condemned to death as accomplices, although the populace cried out against such archaic severity. One suggestion, however, that the freedmen who were in the same house should be deported from Italy, he did oppose, and that on the ground that this would mean a violation of older laws. Before that, in 57, there had occurred another sensational instance of a return to old-fashioned judicial practices, when the Senate handed a noble lady, Pomponia Graecina, superstitionis externae rea, over to her husband to try before a domestic court, and the significance of this was in no way lessened by the fact that he acquitted her.

This deference towards the Senate was seen in the delegation to it of many cases, especially accusations of extortion against governors, and a further proof was given in 61 when it was decided that in all civil cases on appeal to the Senate a deposit must first be made, as was customary in cases that went on appeal to the emperor. In coinage, too, the authority of the Senate was recognized and restored. Hitherto the right of coining gold and silver had been reserved exclusively to the emperor; now on the Neronian coins of these two metals there appears the legend ‘ex s(enatus) c(onsulto).’ Two points on these coins call for particular comment: first, the avoidance of the title Imperator as a praenomen, so that the usual formula is nero caes. aug. imp., and second, the adoption of the civic crown of oak as a type; for from the days of Brutus this had been a symbol for liberty and for the restoration of senatorial authority. The higher magistracies such as the consulship and praetorship also experienced the effects of Nero’s favour in an enhancement of their privileges and prestige in contrast with their old rivals, the tribunate and aedileship; these latter found their rights of fining and powers of coercion curtailed and restricted. Artificial though much of this might be, the general effect of this deference and respect for things Republican must have been heightened by Nero’s readiness to hold the office of consul: in fact when he had been three times consul ordinarius, in 57 and 58, the Senate on the last occasion decided to offer him a perpetual consulship, presumably in the hope that with the continued exercise of this magistracy he would be led more and more into the straight path of Republican tradition.

But he refused it, and his refusal is significant. Whoever looks below these particular measures to the real trend of affairs during the first five years of Nero will observe no restitution of Republican liberties but a stronger current of absolutist tendencies. No emperor before had ever in his lifetime been placed on such a pinnacle by perpetual harping on the sovereign benefits that he was bestowing on humanity. Everything was made to depend upon him or derive from him alone; the very liberty which he apparently granted to his subjects lost its meaning when it was recognized not as a right but as the gracious concession of a sovereign being. Indeed it was, as his responsible advisers understood it, a form of clemency, and clemency has always been a virtue of sovereigns and not of Republics. From the very beginning a tendency is visible, more marked perhaps in the East, to exalt the person of the emperor, which finds expression in what may be called the phrases of an imperial mystical creed. The events of those years in which all recognize absolutism merely continued a process that had begun and been developed in this much praised quinquennium. In the East the emperor is hailed as restorer and saviour of the world and as the bringer of good things: so too the collective cult of the imperial house, that is of the deified dead emperors and of the living emperor, spreads throughout the Eastern provinces and gains in strength and organization. But in the West the same sentiments are discernible: in 55, to celebrate some initial successes in the Parthian War, the statue of Nero was carried into the temple of Mars Ultor, and the exaltation of Nero in the Apocolocyntosis or in the proem to Lucan’s Pharsalia, written about AD 60, together with the hints at the divinity of the Emperor, are sufficient to indicate the gulf between the dominant sentiment at court and the feeling that might have been expected from one who put on his coins the civic crown of oak. In practice, though there were many small measures in favour of the senatorial aristocracy, the direction of the government rested firmly in the hands of the Emperor and of his advisers, and the Emperor, as we have seen, carefully avoided compromising his position so far as to accept a perpetual consulship.

In reality, quite apart from the need for taking account of the favour which Claudius’ policy had won in the provinces, the reaction of the new government was less marked than it imagined. It abolished the abuses that had disgraced the reign of Claudius such as the secret trials intra cubiculum principis, but its aim differed little. That aim was to win over members of the upper classes to help readily and efficiently as advisers or executive officers in the Augustan scheme by encouraging them and allaying their fears: trials, confiscations, and hasty condemnations were to be stopped; some harmless manifestations of Republican tradition were tolerated and even fostered, but these were only means to the end, and even in these means the government never overstepped the limits of its own convenience and so did not hesitate, from the beginning, to entrust some of the most important State offices to men who by their birth and education could not have the sympathies of the old traditional aristocracy. Thus the governorship of Egypt was in 55 actually entrusted to an Alexandrian who was also an astrologer, Ti. Claudius Balbillus.

One effective check there was upon the power of Nero, that is upon his advisers for the time being, and that was the power of his mother, but obviously such a check not only did not favour the aspirations of the aristocracy but was even in sharp antithesis to them. There is no doubt that Agrippina at first enjoyed a kind of co-regency with her son, although naturally this co-regency had not the definite status and the clear legal form which the co-regency of Tiberius with Augustus had possessed, with its share in the proconsular and tribunician power. The power of Agrippina rested merely on the prestige of a daughter of Germanicus and on the gratitude of her son and his immediate helpers for the share that she had taken in securing for Nero the succession to the throne. On the coins of the early years she appears facing her son on the obverse in perfect equality; and an inscription recently discovered speaks of an imperial procurator in the province of Achaea as procurator Cassaris et Augustas Agrippinas, while the inscriptions and coins that give Agrippina the title of Augusta Mater Augusti are numerous. The first to feel her power was the Senate, who, if we are to believe Tacitus, was compelled to gather on the Palatine so that the Empress, if she could not be personally present at their deliberations, could at any rate hear them from a convenient place.

Even so, the authority of Agrippina could not last long, for it was incompatible with that sovereign height on which her son had been placed. While on the one hand we may blame Seneca and Burrus for instigating and favouring this unbounded exaltation of Nero, in order to hinder the authority of the mother from equalling that of the son and to limit her influence upon him, on the other it is obvious that the very logic of his sovereignty must urge Nero to put bounds to the prestige of his mother and to drive her back into the shade; the saviour of the world could have no one as an equal. In fact neither Nero, with his ambitious character, nor Seneca and Burrus, jealous of their influence over the Emperor, were dis­posed to approve of the co-regency with Agrippina. Reasons for a difference soon arose. While Agrippina was in agreement with Seneca and Burrus in getting rid of some of the more influential freedmen who had surrounded Claudius—such as Narcissus, or Callistus, of whom we know nothing after the death of Claudius and who was almost certainly relieved of his office, she did not mean that the freedmen who were faithful to her and had secured her power in the time of Claudius should be dismissed. Pallas, in particular, the financial secretary, had been supported by her, but so long as he remained in office it could not be claimed that the rule of the freedmen had been eliminated, quite apart from the fact that Seneca was to show he had ideas of his own upon financial policy and that these ideas were likely to be very different from those favoured by Pallas during the reign of Claudius. Not that Seneca and Burrus meant to break up the organization created by Claudius, which suited well enough their own resolve not to yield all the most important posts to members of the aristocracy, but they aimed at subordinating it to the proper political authority and so were eager to get rid of those old officials who knew no intermediary between them and their sovereign. This was the more necessary for Seneca because he held no precise legal office and so had not an established position over the freedmen who were at the head of different branches of the administration; unable to exercise the control that comes from presiding regularly over a body of officials he felt it the more necessary to have in these posts men whom he could trust. Pallas was therefore at the beginning of 55 removed from his office, and in his place was put probably a freedman of the name of Phaon1; and all the threats of Agrippina, who foresaw in the ruin of her favourite the beginning of her own, could not succeed in saving him.

In fact her threats merely endangered her own position the more and perhaps helped definitely to bring ruin on Britannicus, if it is true that Agrippina in her rage foolishly hinted at the possibility of setting up the true son of Claudius against the adoptive son. But even without her threats his fate was sealed. Suspicion against all possible rivals to the throne and the use of any means to be rid of them were becoming as much a tradition of the Julio-Claudian family as of any ancient monarchy. Hardly was Claudius dead before the proconsul of Asia, M. Junius Silanus (brother of the L. Silanus who had been betrothed to Octavia) was murdered because he was a distant descendant of Augustus and so, had he availed himself of the popularity which he enjoyed, might have been able to raise a claim to the Principate. Once Britannicus was marked down for destruction the only difficulty was to make his death appear natural; if we are to follow the account of our sources, shortly after the dismissal of Pallas in 55, he was at last removed by the use of poison, the effects of which resembled at first an attack of epilepsy. But no one was deceived by this; nor is the pitiful death of a youth whose spirit and character more than matched his birth condoned by the Tacitean reflection antiquas fratrum discordias et insodabile regnum.

Seneca and Burrus cannot well have been unaware of the plot against Britannicus; in any event here as on other occasions they showed themselves prepared to accept a fait accompli complacently. Though Nero’s character showed a precocious development in cruelty, sensuality and artistic enthusiasm, his advisers, especially Seneca, actually encouraged these tendencies in the hope of keeping him bound to them by detaching him from his mother, and possibly too of drawing his attention away from political problems so that they could rule without a rival. For the time, if such was their design, it succeeded admirably. Nero, who from his young days had flitted with the ease of a dilettante from one art to another, painting, sculpturing, composing verses, singing and dancing, went on with these activities, trying to perfect himself under the greatest masters of each art, such as the harpist Terpnus who was reckoned as the most skilful of his time: artists sought him out and flattered him as their natural friend and protector. At the same time he fell in love with a freedwoman called Acte and began to gather round him a company of young men of society and fashion, such as M. Salvius Otho, the future emperor, Claudius Senecio, or the friend of Seneca, Annaeus Serenus, commander of the night watch, who affected to be the chief lover of Acte in order to avert the suspicion of Agrippina; with these and other companions Nero went out on nocturnal adventures that soon began to swell the list of disorders in the city. In return Agrippina, who saw her son led astray and separated from her by these love affairs and these friendships, evinced an increasing scorn and began to pose as protectress of her unfortunate daughter-in-law, Octavia, and in this way fatally widened the gulf. Nero began to see in his mother more and more an obstacle. Nor did her own character, headstrong, suspicious, proud, and if not ignorant of affection certainly prone to forget it, serve as a check. After a series of clashes and attempts at reconciliation, Agrippina was deprived of her guard of honour and removed from the palace. Her new residence was to be in the house that had once belonged to Antonia, the mother of Germanicus. Coins mirror faithfully the decline of her power, for after the series already mentioned in which Agrippina is on an equality with Nero, there follow others in which at first her portrait appears only on the reverse and then vanishes altogether.

Naturally there were those who, seeing the once powerful Empress in distress, were only too pleased to try to aggravate it. That same year a matron, Junia Silana, who had her own reasons for hatred of Agrippina, procured the dancer Paris to accuse her to Nero of meaning to marry as her fourth husband a grandson of Tiberius, Rubellius Plautus, and put him up as a claimant to the Empire against her son. But the falsity of the accusation was soon detected, as was a second one, which only concerned Agrippina indirectly, in which Pallas and Burrus were charged with plotting to place Faustus Cornelius Sulla, the husband of Claudius’ daughter, Antonia, on the throne. Suspicion rested only upon Cornelius Sulla, and this owing to the tendency mentioned above to suspect all connections of the imperial house; three years later, in 58, he was exiled to Massilia on the charge of having plotted to ambush the Emperor as he was returning from his usual nightly amusements.

II.

THE POLICY OF SENECA AND BURRUS

The enforced withdrawal of Agrippina left Seneca and Burrus in complete control of policy. Nero took little part in the government, and even on the rare occasions when he did come forward, we cannot be sure how much is due to him and how much to his mentors. For example, his sympathy for Rhodes, to which he sent a reassuring letter in 55, and whose autonomy he had defended earlier before Claudius, was probably inspired by Seneca, and the interest he evinced in Egypt—as attested by an enactment that evoked the gratitude of Ptolemais in Upper Egypt in the year 60—may have been equally inspired by his tutor, who wrote a work (now lost) upon that country; and if Nero approved the monarchical sentiment that showed signs of spreading slowly over the Empire from that centre, his tutor, too, was not averse from such speculations.

In the meantime Seneca and Burrus guided imperial policy with a firm hand. They aimed steadily at enhancing the prestige of imperial authority but they wished this prestige to be based upon the securing of justice and economic prosperity for the Empire. Their anxiety to bring about a change in economic policy is especially notable, for it had no connection with the government of former emperors and to a great extent determines the policy of this period.

Claudius’ policy, which aimed at bringing under the direct control of the emperor all the finances of the State, even those that came within the competence of the Senate, was maintained unaltered. By substituting in 56 two praefecti aerarii Saturni (chosen from ex-praetors) for the quaestors who up to then had managed the treasury, control was placed more firmly in the hands of the emperor, and was also entrusted to men of greater seniority and so of more experience than the quaestors. A proof of the effective unity of the two treasuries was given a year later when 40 million sesterces were transferred from the fiscus to the aerarium in order to maintain its credit, since its revenues were steadily diminishing owing to the increasing centralization of returns in the fiscus. By making prosecution for extortion against ex-governors easier, as is seen in the long series of such trials in the first years of the reign, a check was put on ill-treatment of the provincials. In addition, governors of provinces were forbidden to win the good will of their subjects as a means of avoiding accusations by giving theatrical spectacles. So, too, the agrarian prosperity of the provinces was safeguarded. For that reason in 59 the government determined that the old royal estates of the kings of Cyrene which had passed to Rome should remain in the possession of those who had illegally occupied them, in order to avoid upsetting the economic life of that region, notwithstanding the fact that an imperial commissioner with praetorian power, Acilius Strabo, who had been sent by Claudius to settle the dispute between the fiscus and the occupiers had declared that their occupation was legally invalid.

Above all there were visions of a radical reform of the economic life of the Empire, either by an alteration in the tributary system or by an increase in commerce. The age of gold was not to be simply a dream of contemporary poets; it was an aspiration of the statesmen as well. This is shown by the famous project for reform of the tribute which was brought before the Senate for discussion in 58, for, despite the words of Tacitus, it seems improbable that this project originated with Nero rather than with his advisers, Seneca and Burrus. The proposal was to abolish all indirect taxes, that is the portoria and vicesimae that tended to hamper the economic life of the Empire, in the hope obviously that the greater yield from the direct taxes, that would have been made possible by the increase in commerce due to this freedom of trade, would compensate for the abolition. Anyone who remembers the complaints and the scandals which the Roman system of farming out indirect taxes had always aroused can understand that such a project must have been considered with great care, although it is not surprising that the numerous practical difficulties to which the abolition would have given rise prevented its being put into practice. After the discussion in the Senate, Seneca and Burrus had to content themselves for the time being with less far-reaching measures which merely diminished the evil. Thus, certain special customs rights were abolished and in order to safeguard the food of the city populace corn-ships were not to be reckoned as part of the taxable property of their owners, and measures were taken to facilitate the shipment of corn. The food-supply of Rome was a particular care of the administration, and in order to guarantee it the work undertaken by Claudius on the harbour of Ostia was completed. The people of Rome received, apart from the usual distribution of corn, extraordinary largesses, such as the two congiaria of 400 sesterces per head which were distributed, one in 57, the other at a date unknown, and were celebrated by the issue of appropriate coins.

The foreign policy of the new government, so far as the frontiers are concerned, is described elsewhere. From the very beginning of the reign the task of dealing with Armenia and with Parthia was resolutely taken in hand. A rebellion in Britain was decisively crushed and in AD 64—5; the vassal kingdom of Pontus governed by Polemo II was incorporated in the empire. The Black Sea was protected from pirates by a fleet, while the assumption of this responsibility for its safety led to a curtailment of the nominal independence of the Bosporan kingdom. The Danube frontier was made good against the barbarians by arms and diplomacy. Finally, in the closing years of his principate, Nero appears to have planned an offensive against the Sarmatians, which might have resulted in a marked extension of the bounds of the empire. This later policy may be attributed to the grandiose ambitions which visited the mind of the Princeps, but it may fairly be supposed that the initial impulse towards a vigorous frontier activity proceeded from the statecraft of Seneca and Burrus. It may, indeed, have been due not only to the traditional care of Romans for security and prestige. The increasing expenses that fell upon the private treasury of the Emperor, his unbounded extravagance, the need to safeguard Roman commerce and possibly the hope of extending it supplied temptations which may have appealed to the men who were at the head of the government. Addicted themselves to luxury, they were not content only to exploit the vast estates they had received from the generosity of the Emperor, but took part also in commercial and banking enterprises which were closely connected with the course of politics. The most notorious instance is Seneca, who not only had large estates, especially in Egypt, but lent out money to provincials, so that one of the reasons alleged for the rebellion in Britain was inability to stand the burdensome rate of interest that he exacted. But many other officers of State must have imitated him, and their vast riches were long remembered.

The widening range of Roman policy meant that special care must be paid to the morale of the army, which had already experienced severe reverses in Armenia, and so new military colonies, or new settlements in older colonies, were devised to meet this need; practically all were in Italy, either because the greater part of the legionaries came from Italy or as a help in combating the increasing depopulation of the peninsula. The honour of settlement in Nero’s birthplace, Antium, was reserved for the praetorians; other veterans were placed in a new colony at Nuceria and in the older colonies of Capua and Tarentum. Probably veterans were also settled at Tegeanum in Campania, and at Pompeii, for we know that Nero raised" both these to the status of colonies, though possibly the grant to Pompeii may have been meant as a recompense for loss it had suffered in an earthquake in 63. It is likely too that there was a settlement at Luceria1, while the Augustan colony of Aroe Patrensis in Greece became Colonia Neronia Patrensis and welcomed some veterans.

But the continuation of this vast scheme must have meant that the Emperor could not remain always indifferent to politics or consider himself under permanent guardianship; in fact Nero as he grew older longed more and more for liberty of action so as to be able to gratify his dominant passion for greatness and popularity. In spite of the differences between Agrippina and Seneca and Burrus they were agreed in upholding at least an outward tone of traditionalism in all their actions. Nero on the contrary wanted to express his admiration for Greek art and life in definite enterprises; he wanted to alter Roman fashions. And in his private life he wished for no more hindrance and for that reason he probably felt himself oppressed by the presence of his mother and of his ministers. We may imagine that Agrippina above all, whose influence did not disappear with her banishment from the court, must have become for a time to Nero’s excited imagination the very embodiment of the whole order of things from which he wanted to break loose. And it is not too bold to suppose that he saw in his mother the greatest obstacle to his freeing himself from Octavia, who was merely a dead weight on his life, and so involved both in one common hatred.

His love for Poppaea was only the most important episode of this revulsion which induced Nero in the five years between 58 and 62 to free himself from all those who fettered his freedom. Poppaea Sabina, daughter of a Roman matron, who owing to her beauty had fallen a victim to Messallina, had inherited all the sensual charm of her mother and was also credited with a quick and versatile mind; unscrupulous in satisfying her own ambition, she was anxious to rise out of the circle of ordinary life and for that reason she was drawn towards eastern cults and perhaps towards Judaism, although Josephus, who knew her, does not venture to call her a proselyte but simply a believer in the supreme god. She had been the wife of Rufrius Crispinus, the Prefect of the Praetorians before Burrus, and had borne him a son; she then married M. Salvius Otho, the favourite companion of Nero, so that Nero had leisure to make her acquaintance and to feel the attraction of her personality, which in its mixture of sensuality, love of luxury and vague spiritual aspirations was extremely akin to his own. Common sympathy soon changed into passionate love and in order to satisfy it Nero removed his friend by giving him the governorship of Lusitania.

But Poppaea could not be content with being merely the mistress of the Emperor; she wished to become Empress and to achieve this she helped in her way to sharpen the discord between Nero and his mother and wife. It reached a point at which Nero, utterly unbalanced, plotted with Anicetus, a freedman who had been his tutor and was now in charge of the fleet at Misenum, to murder his mother. One evening in March 59 (during the festival of the Quinquatrus), Agrippina was invited by her son to a banquet at Baiae and afterwards at midnight was placed on a ship, so constructed as to founder, for the return voyage to Antium. The ‘accident’ duly happened, but Agrippina succeeded in saving herself by swimming to one of her villas on the Lucrine lake: well aware of the plot against her, she preferred to feign ignorance and to send a faithful freedman to tell her son she had been saved from a catastrophe. But in the excitement of the moment the court was ready for anything and apparently even Seneca and Burrus felt it was now impossible to turn back. On the pretext that Agrippina’s messenger was really an assassin sent to kill the Emperor, Anicetus, with his sailors, was bidden to invade the villa to which Agrippina had withdrawn, and kill her.

When the matricide was over, although popular account declared that Nero was terrified and for long haunted by the ghost of his mother, he did all he could, in cooperation with his ministers, to spread the story that Agrippina had tried to murder her son and on hearing of the failure of her plan had killed herself. Such was the tenour of the despatch he sent to the Senate from Naples, whither he had retired. Naturally all hastened anxiously to join in paeans of thanksgiving for the ‘deliverance’ of their Emperor; the festival of the Quinquatrus had games added in celebration of the event, while the birthday of Agrippina was declared dies nefastus. Re-assured by such enthusiasm, Nero, who at first had not dared to return to Rome, hastened there and received triumphal homage. But everyone was aware of the reality and the popular conscience reacted against this flattery by circulating lampoons against the emperor. However insensitive absolutism may render men to crimes, it is certain that nothing was to contribute so much to destroy the prestige of Nero and to prepare his fall as the impression created by this act; the Sibylline Oracles written shortly after his death mention him above all as ‘murderer of his mother.’

III.

THE PRINCEPS AND ROMAN SOCIETY

But for Nero the murder meant freedom and he could now devote fresh zest to the task that for some years he had promised himself of reforming the education of the young Roman nobles. It was the first time that he had taken a step in public life which was entirely his own and certainly not in agreement with the aims of his ministers. As early as 57 he had tried to alter the character of the Roman games to bring them as near as possible to the Greek. After building a new amphitheatre in the Campus Martius, he had introduced the rule that no combat should be carried on to the death, for such brutality was repellent not only to his own sensibilities but also to the whole character of the Greek games. And since the competitors in the Greek games had been no slaves, or criminals, or professionals, but the flower of free men, he made senators and knights of old family descend into the arena to the great scandal of Rome. But in 59 he went further still; he succeeded in introducing Greek games into Rome and in organizing the young men for their practice. Whether he knew it or not, the Greek civilization that he was imitating in this way had nothing to do with that of the classical period, founded upon freedom, but was simply Hellenistic and based upon monarchy. This is clearly shown by his establishment of a corps of Augustiani in this year, with the object of gathering in the young men of the upper classes and making them join with him in gymnastic and artistic exhibitions: he aimed at eradicating their Republican traditions and turning them into a bodyguard of nobles for the emperor’s person. Although perhaps Nero was unaware of it, these innovations too played their part in the transformation of principate into monarchy which was steadily going on, with this difference only that there was none of the prudence and respect for tradition which had marked the handling of Burrus and Seneca. The fact that this establishment played so little part, save in the games, and later vanished altogether, was due partly to lack of conviction in its members, but still more to a complete lack of any serious intention in Nero.

The Augustiani made their first appearance in 59. After many exhibitions of himself as charioteer in the circus which he had constructed for his private use in the Vatican valley, Nero celebrated the first shaving of his beard by the institution of Ludi Iuvenales, which he organized informally in his own gardens across the Tiber; in the singing contests he competed himself. A year later, giving up all pretence of informality, he established five-yearly games, called certamen quinquennale or Neronia, in imitation of the Olympic games, to include athletic contests, chariot-driving, and competitions in music, poetry and oratory. The games were repeated in 65, but lapsed after the death of Nero, and were not re-introduced until the reign of Gordian the Third in 240. Nero competed as harper in the poetical contests, but also won the prize for oratory. Although he had already succeeded in obtaining the participation of his Augustiani in the literary events and in chariot-driving, for the athletic events at both these festivals he must almost certainly have fallen back upon professionals, since otherwise our sources could not have failed to notice the scandal. His propaganda for athleticism, however, continued unabated; he built a gymnasium in Rome in 61, and, though it was burned down a year later, he had reconstructed it by 66. At its inauguration he distributed oil to the senators and knights who took part in the exercises, exactly like a Hellenistic king. In order to make the idea of life in the gymnasium more pleasing to the Romans he built the famous baths (Thermae Neronianae) close to his gymnasium, the luxury of which made Martial ask

                    ‘Quid Nerone peius?

Quid thermis melius Neronianis?

Indeed by this time luxury had reached a height of which vivid descriptions are given by Petronius, one of the most refined associates of Nero, in his Satyricon, and by Seneca in the mordant criticisms of his various ethical treatises. And in this life the most incompatible elements, from art to the pleasures of the kitchen (in which Apicius won himself a name), from sport to a passion for collecting, from the most refined connoisseurship to the grossest sensuality, were strangely blended; the fact that they could all exist together shows that even the highest things, such as Art, had become merely the object for dilettantism. Lucan was the poet of the court, and his skill in mingling flattery for his sovereign with a certain austere strain of good-old-times Republicanism perhaps helped to increase his attractiveness. Nero himself composed poetry, not so badly, if we can judge from the meagre fragments that remain. A poem on ‘The Sack of Troy’ was perhaps his most important work; others were a composition called Luscius and an ode dedicated to the blonde tresses of Poppaea. Since exhibition at the games was not enough for him, in 64 he determined to display his skill as poet and harper to the Greek or Graecized public at Naples, because it was more worthy of hearing him; but owing apparently to some accident he was unable to carry his programme through. It looks as though he had thoughts of making an artistic tour in Greece even then, but after reaching Beneventum, for unknown reasons, turned back.

Naturally enough there was no lack of those who felt the emptiness and immorality of such a type of life: the most implacable dissector of this society, Seneca, did not withdraw from it until driven by outward circumstances, but other men lived aloof, pouring into a satire or an epigram their sufferings and their impotent scorn. These were the men who had been brought up on Stoicism, whom we shall find in later years forming the stricken political opposition of the intellectuals; here we need only mention two of them, in whom the literary opposition achieved its clearest expression. Aulus Persius Flaccus, the poet who died in 62 at the age of twenty-eight, wrote satires which, even though they do not contain direct allusions to the art of Nero and much less quotations from his verses, show throughout from the first word to the last a reaction against the Neronian world: the other is Annaeus Cornutus, the Stoic philosopher and tutor of Lucan, who brought exile upon himself by telling Nero bluntly that a poem upon Roman history, which he had in mind, would be useless.

These incursions of the Emperor into the daily life of the capital were only one aspect, merely the beginning, of his greater influence in the whole of politics. We can mark the change by the increasingly suspicious temper of the government. In 60 the apparition of a comet, the fall of a thunderbolt on an imperial villa at Subiaco, and some trifling indisposition of Nero gave rise to rumours of a change on the throne. That was enough for a possible claimant, Rubellius Plautus, to be given the order to withdraw to his estates in the province of Asia. And now in 62 trials for treason began again, and for some lampoons upon the Emperor the praetor Antistius Sosianius and a certain Fabricius Veiento were condemned, the one being sent to an island, the other banished. With the Emperor in that state of mind, we can understand how a chance such as the death of Burrus became the occasion for the greatest political change in the whole reign. All our sources declare that Burrus was poisoned, and Tacitus alone raises any doubt. But the ancients had nothing to confirm this rumour and we must incline to disbelieve it; in any case it is historically unimportant. What is important is the fact that Nero did not select, as he would have done some years before, a successor whom Seneca would approve, but returned to old practice and filled the prefectship of the praetorians with two men, upon whom Seneca knew he could not rely, Faenius Rufus, already prefect of the corn-supply, and Ofonius Tigellinus, a Sicilian of low birth, who, after a vicious past for which he had been banished from Italy, had succeeded in obtaining the prefecture of the city and soon showed himself the more influential of the two. To Seneca, whose work could only go on thanks to the unconditional support of Burrus, that is of the praetorians, such a choice meant that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the Emperor and was indeed an implicit invitation to retire. An ideal which he had always preached in his books though he had never put it into practice, that of a simple life in retirement, devoted to the improvement of the mind in philosophic meditation, now gained a stronger hold on him. Down to this time the conflict between his ethical ideals and his ambitions had been to a large extent minimized or concealed by the knowledge that he was working usefully for the benefit of mankind; we need not doubt that it was this knowledge, and not mere ambition, that made Seneca ready to tolerate the crimes of Nero. Now, the time for retirement come, his resignation took the form of a conciliation with himself. His withdrawal, in spite of long and fine speeches to the contrary, was naturally acceptable to the Emperor.

No longer restrained by his former advisers, but urged on by the zealous Tigellinus, Nero allowed himself to be drawn deeper into suspicion. Sulla was murdered at Massilia, Rubellius Plautus in Asia, without, as far as we know, any exact charge being made against them. In 64 Decimus Junius Silanus Torquatus, upon whom, as upon all the Silani, fell the suspicion of claiming the throne through their descent from Augustus, had to commit suicide in order to escape the imperial police. It was now easy for Poppaea, who had found a support in Tigellinus, to persuade Nero in 62 to free himself from Octavia and raise her to the throne. After attempts to fasten on Octavia charges of adultery, attempts which failed owing to the persistent denials of her slaves, she was formally divorced on the ground of barrenness, and twelve days later Nero married Poppaea. Octavia was exiled to Campania, but she was followed by the sympathy of the people who, when the ungrounded rumour spread abroad that Nero had called her back to his side, burst into demonstrations of joy. Terrified, Nero now let himself be drawn into a fresh scheme designed to remove the burden for ever. He began a new trial for adultery against his ex-wife, and in this trial the prefect of the fleet at Misenum, Anicetus, who had been his agent in the murder of Agrippina, figured as the accomplice of Octavia; he admitted to being her lover, and depicted this adulterous relation as an attempt of Octavia to gain the fleet at Misenum and incite it to rebellion. Our sources in this mysterious story represent Anicetus as willingly helping to ruin Octavia; but the reality appears more complex. It looks as though Nero profited by the occasion to remove from one of the most important offices an inconvenient witness of his worst crime; nor must we exclude the possibility that Tigellinus co-operated on his own behalf in a desire to withdraw the Emperor from the influence of the freedman. In any case, Anicetus must have been placed in the dilemma either of confessing his guilt in adultery and receiving a light sentence for it or else of being accused and facing the whole consequences. He preferred the first alternative and ended his life in comfortable exile in Sardinia, while Octavia was banished to the island of Pandateria, which had a sinister renown in the Julian family, and shortly afterwards was brutally put to death.

IV.

THE FIRE IN ROME

This series of crimes enraged the aristocracy and alienated the affection of the Roman people from the Emperor. And now in 64, one of the most famous events of his reign, the fire of Rome, increased his unpopularity. On the night of 18 July, while Nero was taking a country holiday at Antium, there broke out in the Circus Maximus a fire which spread and raged furiously over practically all Rome for nine days, and gave rise to those scenes of panic, crime and robbery that in older days usually accompanied such calamities. Of the fourteen Augustan regions, only I (Porta Capena), V (Esquiliae), perhaps VI (Alta Semita), and certainly XIV (Trans Tiberim) were spared; III (Isis et Serapis), X (Palatium), and XI (Circus Maximus) were almost completely destroyed; while VII (Via Lata) and IX (Circus Flaminius), unharmed at first, suffered greatly from a fresh outbreak of the fire after the sixth day. All the other regions suffered in greater or less degree although tradition exaggerated the extent of the damage. The Forum, part of the Palatine, above all the Capitol escaped, but apart from an incalculable number of works of art which had been collected in the Republican period and in the early Empire, some of the most venerable monuments attributed to the regal period or to an even earlier age, such as the great altar attributed to Evander, the temple of Juppiter Stator ascribed to Romulus, the regia and the temple of Vesta ascribed to Numa, and the temple of Diana ascribed to Servius Tullius, were completely destroyed.

As soon as he heard news of the fire Nero sped back to Rome since a new building, perhaps not yet completed, the Domus Transitoria, that connected the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine with the gardens of Maecenas on the Esquiline, had been attacked by the flames. He energetically directed the work of putting out and isolating the fire and arranged relief organizations. On his initiative all public buildings and the imperial gardens were thrown open to those who were rendered homeless, and a city of huts and tents raised in the Campus Martius; furthermore, he provided for the proper feeding of this crowd of people by artificially lowering the price of corn and by requisitioning it from the country round. In spite of that, public opinion accused Nero of being the author of the fire and of having watched it from the lofty Tower of Maecenas while singing his own Sack of Troy. Naturally there are no reasons for believing in the main charge of arson, although only one of our sources speaks of it as uncertain; the more so that, as has been observed, a deliberate attempt to set fire to Rome could scarcely have gone undetected on a night of full moon as was that of 18 July 64, and under the clear sky of a Roman summer. Nor does the accusation become more credible if the story of Nero’s singing from the Tower of Maecenas is taken as authentic, which it is not. On the other hand, it is easy to find reasons for such a charge: in disasters the populace always looks for a scapegoat, and in this particular one the name of Nero was ready to hand not only because of the previous crimes that had stained it but still more on account of the grandiose works which were undertaken by him in order to rebuild Rome after the fire; thus it could appear quite likely that he had deliberately fired Rome in order to rebuild it according to his own taste.

Indeed the rebuilding of Rome proceeded rapidly under the direction of the architects Severus and Celer, who were commissioned to clean and embellish the city, to lay it out upon more modern lines and to guard against further fires. Nero himself paid towards the rebuilding of houses and this meant additions to his already heavy budget. His expenses were still more increased by the building of the new imperial palace, the so-called Domus Aurea (in substitution for the Domus Transitoria, which would, when built, have spread over a large extent of ground between the Caelian and the Esquiline. The work was unfinished when Vespasian pulled it down and placed the Coliseum upon a portion of it; but all the same the ancients could tell of the marvels of its parks, its lakes and its woods, of its waters which flowed from the sea or from the sulphur springs of Tivoli, of its three colonnades, one of which stretched for a mile, of its dining-rooms, the roof of which could be opened for showers of flowers to be thrown upon the guests, and of the colossal statue of Nero, 120 feet high, the work of Zenodorus, which stood in the vestibule. Of all this magnificence we have still a small but vivid witness in the lovely ‘Volta Dorata,' which has been known since the Renaissance thanks to the investigations of the artists at the court of Leo X. In order to decorate the city in general and his palace in particular, Nero used the art treasures that his freedman Acratus had been collecting for some years in Greece and in Asia; Secundus Carrinas had been given him as a partner, probably after the fire, in order to hasten the work. We have no exact figures for the extent of these deportations since our sources either confuse them with those that were carried out by Nero during his tour in Greece or else as usual exaggerate them. The evidence of the panic that these requisitions produced, so that Rhodes used the favour of the Emperor to gain exemption from it, shows even more plainly than notices, such as that of Pausanias that five hundred statues were removed from Delphi, how hateful this order was.

Lavish expenditure reached its height in this same year 64 with the project of linking Ostia by a canal to Lake Avernus, near Cumae (which was in its turn already linked with Puteoli), in order to facilitate the sea connections of Rome, and perhaps also to put an end to the antagonism between the harbour of Ostia and that of Puteoli. But the work had to be given up for lack of money which, from 64 onwards, in consequence of all this extravagance, became embarrassing. All the forced contributions that were imposed upon Italians and provincials for the rebuilding of Rome did not suffice to make up for it. Nero went on his way ruthlessly in the following years with partial or total confiscations of private estates, whether he profited by political condemnations, or simply put wealthy people out of the way, as happened probably about this time in a celebrated case in Africa where six landowners, who possessed half of all the estates there, were put to death in order that he could claim their estates. This lack of money explains the curious story of a Roman knight, Caesellius Bassus, who succeeded, in all good faith, in arousing great hopes by his boast that he had had revealed to him in a dream the secret hiding place of the buried treasure of Dido; he actually persuaded the Emperor to order search to be made for it. And it is to economic difficulties that we owe, probably in the first instance, the deterioration of the coinage; the weight of the aureus was reduced, about 64, from 1/40th to 1/45th of a pound and that of the denarius from 1/84th to 1/96th. But doubtless other and more technical reasons contributed to the change as is shown by the fact that it was accompanied by an improvement in the monetary system, since besides sesterce and dupondius, the As, semis, and quadrans were minted in orichalcum and a semis, in copper was added to the As and quadrans. Possibly, too, a desire to stabilize the value of the copper and orichalcum coins in relation to silver and gold, and by so doing to give Roman coins values which could be brought into easy relations with those of the Greek coins, so that the equivalence of the one to the other was made more easy, also had some influence. Even so the date of the reform, at the very beginning of the financial crisis, suggests that diminution in weight was looked upon as an expedient, perhaps purely temporary, to lessen the amount paid out by the Treasury. The reform lasted in its essentials (that is in the lowering of the weight of the gold and silver coins) down to Caracalla, while for the type of coins in orichalcum or copper, Galba, or perhaps Nero himself, finally returned to the simpler Augustan system.

But these financial measures merely intensified the hostility of the Romans towards their emperor, and the conviction that Nero had been the incendiary deepened. Extremely sensitive, as his whole life shows, to popular opinion, he must have thought it would be useful to distract notice from himself by persecuting the Christians, who were by now distinct from the Jews. The testimony of sources generally leaves no doubt that persecution was directed against the Christians as Christians, and we must suppose that Nero, in unloosing the attack, aimed rather at directing the fury of the people upon a section that was notoriously hated, and so winning back the favour of the mob, than at attributing the charge of firing Rome specifically to the Christians. It is true that the Jews too were hated; but their manner of life was less secret than that of the Christians and they were certainly protected by Poppaea. It is obvious that among the charges on which we may imagine the Christians were brought to trial, one that occurred most easily would be the accusation of being incendiaries. Naturally, too, in the excitement of the moment this charge was bound to prevail over all the others and must have determined in some part the penalties which the Christians had to undergo; if they were not thrown to beasts in the amphitheatre, they were, by a sort of retaliatory justice, used as living torches to light nocturnal games in the imperial gardens and in the Vatican circus. But it would be wrong to deduce from this that a definite charge of incendiarism was preferred against the Christians; such a charge can only have been an item in the complex of guilt which was attributed to the nomen Christianum.

It has been objected that if the persecution was directed against the Christians as such, it should have extended over all the empire, since the empire was dependent throughout upon its emperor. Full and convincing evidence alone could prove either hypothesis, that the persecution was limited to Rome or extended over all the empire; but our evidence is meagre and doubtful. Apart from a forged inscription from Spain, and one from Pompeii, which can scarcely bear the weight that some have put upon it, there remain only the notices of the Apocalypse among the texts which can be held as trustworthy; these notices allude however to isolated incidents and are merely valuable in so far as they tend to show that the Apocalypse was written about the year 68 and had reference to the Neronian persecution. The most probable hypothesis is that the persecution soon lost its force, whether owing to the Emperor’s wearying of it or to greater discretion on the part of the Christians, and so was limited to Rome, though isolated echoes occurred in the provinces.

The late texts that accuse the Jews of having denounced the Christians have no value although, once granted the existing lack of sympathy, the Jews could scarcely have regarded a persecution of the Christians with disfavour. But once admitted that the Jews were exempted from the persecution because of their protection by Poppaea, their exemption is extremely important, for it shows that Nero had no intention of checking the proselytism of Oriental cults, especially Judaism, which was then active, but merely exploited a widespread public sentiment in order to distract attention from himself. The persecution had a political rather than a religious import, but the deep echo that it awoke in the consciousness of the Christians (who were now for the first time definitely recognized as such by the government), and the ascription of the deaths of St Peter and St Paul to it (whether rightly or wrongly does not matter), have helped to give it a significance for history and for the reputation of Nero in after times that by itself it could not have.

V.

THE PISONIAN CONSPIRACY

The persecution of the Christians did not succeed in restoring the credit of Nero; rather, if we can believe Tacitus, it roused pity for the victims even among those who hated them, since the aim of the persecution was too open. Discontent reigned among the populace, but still more among the aristocracy, which now recognized more and more that it was being played with by the Emperor, its members persecuted, and the Senate deprived of all importance; besides, Nero’s crimes and his artistic displays, which were so contrary to Roman custom, could not but revolt them. One thing which must, most of all, have shocked the aristocracy, even though of recent date, was the large number of Orientals, especially freedmen, who had been given some of the highest posts in the empire; the more so because the monarchical character of Nero’s rule was thus stressed and his Oriental subjects were the more ready to accept it. Balbillus held the prefecture of Egypt from 55 to 59 and was succeeded by the son of a Graeco-Oriental nurse of Nero, C. Caecina Tuscus, who held it until 65; on his fall another Oriental freedman Ponticus ruled during the interim in 66 and was succeeded by a renegade Alexandrian Jew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who some years before had given valuable help to Corbulo in the war in Armenia. The son of a Greek courtesan, C. Nymphidius Sabinus, held the prefecture of the praetorians in partnership with Tigellinus from 65 to 68, and Tigellinus himself was scorned for his low birth and for his antecedents. Claudius Athenodorus, the prefect of the corn supply in 67, was a freedman who had been raised to the rank of knight; freedmen also the two prefects who were successively in command of the fleet at Misenum, Anicetus and Moschus. The procurator of Judaea, Antonius Felix, was a freedman and, among his successors, Gessius Florus was a Greek. Other freedmen were Patroclus, who was in charge of the public games, Polyclitus, who was sent to Britain in 61 to mend a quarrel between Suetonius Paulinus and the procurator Julius Classicianus, Acratus, who was sent over to Greece and Asia on an infamous mission to plunder works of art, and finally Helius, who during the tour of Nero in Greece remained as his representative in Italy.

All then—whether those who cherished a hope of complete restitution of Republican forms or those (henceforward the more numerous) who simply desired to replace Nero by an emperor who was more worthy and more respectful of tradition and privilege, whether soldiers who scorned the low-born men, such as Tigellinus, whom they saw placed in command of them, or finally the intellectual class who had been brought up on Stoic thought and taught to regard hatred of tyranny and the cult of freedom as ends in themselves—all were now agreed in being unable to endure the government of Nero any longer. A group of these banded themselves together in 65 (after long preparations extending back perhaps to 62), in the so-called Pisonian conspiracy, the aim of which was to murder Nero. The majority of the conspirators apparently wished to put in his place C. Calpurnius Piso, who belonged to the old Roman nobility, had won fame as a speaker, was a generous protector of artists and was celebrated by an anonymous poet in a poem which has come down to us. Others perhaps thought of Seneca, principally as a possible restorer of Republican liberty, and so must have found themselves near to the smaller group of real Republicans in the conspiracy. To apportion the names that have come down to us between these sections is extremely difficult, the more so as although they were for the moment united, we cannot exclude the possibility of a compromise once the blow had succeeded. We may be certain that among the republicans were the consul designatus Plautus Lateranus and the poet Lucan, who had been disgusted by Nero’s artistic jealousies; he could no longer love the Emperor while hating the Empire, as he had done at first, and this change inspired the greater seriousness and depth of Republican sentiment which is visible in the last books of the Pharsalia.

A military group, headed by the prefect of the praetorians Faenius Rufus, who was jealous of his colleague Tigellinus, and some tribunes and centurions, were apparently supporters of Seneca. But the majority of the senators and knights were naturally enthusiastic for Piso. The knights numbered five, among whom was Claudius Senecio who had been one of the intimate friends of Nero. The number of senators is uncertain; beyond Piso, Plautius Lateranus and Lucan, there were certainly two others implicated, Afranius Quintianus and Flavius Scaevinus; but the complicity of seven others is dubious and of five others, apart from their complicity, we cannot even be sure that they were of senatorial rank. There can be no doubt that Seneca shared in the conspiracy; his friendship with Piso, of which indeed he had been accused in 62, was common knowledge and in 65 he could not deny it; besides he was the uncle of one conspirator, and other conspirators favoured his claims. It appears therefore unlikely that he could have been kept in the dark, nor can we lightly accuse Nero of having condemned him to death without just cause of suspicion.

The conspirators, after some hesitation as to the best method of attacking Nero, decided to make the attempt during the games held for the feast of Ceres in the Circus Maximus at the end of April. But some news had already slipped out, when a freed­woman called Epicharis, who was in the secret, tried to draw into the conspiracy an officer of the fleet at Misenum. This officer, Volusius Proculus, brought the matter to the notice of Nero but was not able to give further details since Epicharis had not mentioned any names, and for that reason the inquiry could not proceed further. But on the very night before the day fixed for the deed, a freedman called Milichus denounced his patron, the senator Scaevinus, and also a knight Antonius Natalis to the Emperor as conspirators. How he came to be aware of the plot was not certainly known even to the ancients. After first denying it, Natalis, when placed under torture and also urged on by promises of pardon, revealed the plot, together with the names of Seneca and Piso; Scaevinus followed him and added fresh names. After that the inquiry pursued the course usual in all detected conspiracies. Some persisted uselessly in denial, like the heroic Epicharis, who died under torture; Lucan sank, it is said, so low as to accuse his mother. The prefect Faenius Rufus for a time sat among the judges until he was unmasked by Scaevinus. Some, such as Piso and Lateranus, were killed, others had time to commit suicide and faced death as Stoicism had taught them; such was Lucan, who died reciting his own verses. Seneca received the order for death tranquilly and had his veins opened, but only after long agony found rest at last. His wife Paulina was saved by order of Nero, although she had already tried to take her life. Others who had been charged, since they were held harmless or less culpable, were sent into exile. Among those who were driven to suicide was the consul Atticus Vestinus, apparently innocent, but suspect for his Republican sentiments and perhaps still more for having married Statilia Messallina, a favourite of the Emperor. If we also include the daughter of Claudius, Antonia (who was killed a few months afterwards on the charge of having shared in the conspiracy), nineteen persons were executed, thirteen exiled and four tribunes cashiered, without counting some victims who were involved later and indirectly. Antonius Natalis was pardoned and Milichus received, amid lavish gifts, the title of saviour.

The conspiracy must have made a deep impression upon Nero owing to the men who were implicated in it. His suspicious nature was exacerbated and he enlarged that body of secret service agents, which was so hated and feared in Rome and was one of the first things abolished by Vespasian; it is enough to record two notorious members, Aquilius Regulus and Eprius Marcellus. In fact the Pisonian conspiracy marked the definite breach between Nero and the aristocracy.

Henceforward Tigellinus had a free hand in the task of purging the State of the suspected. L. Junius Silanus, the last of that unfortunate family, was killed; the relatives of Rubellius Plautus, his wife Pollitta, his father-in-law L. Antistius Vetus, and his wife’s aunt Sextia, were driven to suicide. The aged jurist C. Cassius Longinus was banished to Sardinia, Musonius Rufus, notable as a philosopher, was relegated to Gyaros. In the following year, 66, commands to commit suicide grew more numerous: two brothers of Seneca, Gallio and Annaeus Mela, the father of Lucan, had to kill themselves1 on suspicion of belonging to Piso’s group, and the suicide of Mela carried with it that of Anicius Cerealis, who was accused, it is hard to see why, in a document attached to the will of Mela, of having taken part in the Pisonian conspiracy. So, too, Rufrius Crispinus, already exiled to Sardinia for the same conspiracy, was killed on information laid by Antistius Sosianus who hoped in this way to return from the banishment to which he had been sentenced in 62. Two nobles, P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula, were condemned to death. Tacitus gives as a reason for their condemnation a horoscope that they had had drawn up by a companion of Antistius’s exile, which would have served to show their longing to see a change in the future; but we are not bound to believe that the foundation of their accusation was so unsubstantial. Among particular victims of the hatred of Tigellinus there fell an ex-praetor Minucius Thermus, and the refined C. Petronius, the arbiter of elegance, who represented, though with a half-amused detachment, the luxurious life of the court. At Cumae he received the order to kill himself; he went to his death with the same lofty insouciance with which he had lived, and, with a last smile, smashed with his own hand his precious vases which he knew Nero coveted.

The persecution at last reached that small group of Stoics which had not so far been mixed up in any conspiracy but throughout had shown its proud scorn of tyranny. Thrasea Paetus, the senator who used to celebrate with garlands and libations the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius, who never sacrificed for the emperor, and kept away from the Senate whenever honours were decreed to the imperial family, was now condemned to death by the Senate for treason. He would not allow the young tribune Rusticus Arulenus, who was to be his panegyrist (and probably a distant source of Tacitus) and afterwards his imitator under Domitian, to postpone his fate by intercession; he refused to appear in his own defence in the Senate and awaited the announcement of his condemnation discussing in a Socratic manner with his friends the immortality of the soul. His son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, and Paconius Agrippinus were condemned to exile, and a famous passage of Epictetus records the serenity with which Paconius greeted his punishment. Finally, a former proconsul of Asia, Barea Soranus and his daughter Servilia were condemned to death; and the fact of their having consulted astrologers about the fate of the Emperor was, if not the chief accusation, as tradition records, at any rate severe testimony against them.

Even so, opposition was not broken. In 66 a new conspiracy, called the Vinician, from the name of its leader Annius Vinicianus, who had married the daughter of Corbulo, was discovered at Beneventum. We have no details about it; it seems probable that its aim was to substitute Corbulo for Nero and that it implicated more than one of the great commanders. In fact we cannot separate this conspiracy from what happened a few months later during the tour of Nero in Greece: the two governors of Upper and Lower Germany, Scribonius Rufus and Scribonius Proculus, were bidden to join Nero in Greece and hardly had they arrived before they received the order for death. So, too, Corbulo, while he disembarked at Cenchreae on the Saronic Gulf to rejoin his emperor, received the fatal order, and he too obeyed. The only possible explanation of this occurrence is that Nero had waited for a chance to lure these generals away, all unsuspecting, from their armies so as to punish them for attempted treachery without their being able to bring their troops behind them in resistance.

Although we can be sure that the account of all these victims of Nero, given us by hostile writers, has partially distorted the truth, concealing the real culpability of many of the condemned, it is none the less clear that the Emperor by this time had roused against him all thoughtful and conscientious men in Rome. The justification for their hostility lies in the very lightness with which Nero freed himself of them; for such lightness was a sign that he no longer valued those who preserved any sense of personal dignity and so were not ready to submit to him. For the principate in its transformation into a monarchy demanded the submission of all and the repression of all activity that was not at its service; and owing to the lack of all moral sense in Nero submission to the Empire too soon became submission to the personal caprices of the Emperor. And while the propaganda for this monarchical idea had aroused the hostility of the Roman aristocracy, this hostility in its turn drove Nero more and more to stress it and oppose the divine being of the emperor, all-seeing and all-provident, to the ideals of Republican freedom. The figure of the emperor towered ever higher, and his character as Saviour of the World, already expressed in the name of an Alexandrian tribe, received still greater emphasis in the East. And though after the Pisonian conspiracy he had refused the offer of a temple at Rome to himself as Divus Nero, perhaps because he realized that an anticipation of his apotheosis might be described by his enemies as of ill omen, the tendency to deification was becoming more openly expressed. Little emphasis can be placed on the vague exaltation in the proem of the Pharsalia or on the fact that he is called god (theos) on some coins of Asia Minor, for that compliment was also paid to emperors like Tiberius and Claudius, whose attitude towards deification was conservatively reluctant. But it is significant that he is identified with different deities, with Zeus explicitly at Acraephiae and on coins of Sicyon, and implicitly on Roman coins where the aegis is figured. More frequent are identifications with Hercules or Apollo, that is with gods who represented those activities that he loved above all; in Rome, on his return from Greece, he was greeted as Hercules, and coins of Patrae bear the legend Herculi Augusto. It is said by Dio that the senators acclaimed him as Nero-Apollo on the occasion of his triumphal return, and not only is he given the attributes of Apollo on coins and statues, but a recently-discovered inscription (from Athens) actually equates him with Apollo. Closely connected with this is his identification with the sun-god Helios, a title which is applied to him in the Acraephiae inscription and also in one from Sagalassus in Pisidia and is echoed in literature in the Apocolocyntosis and in an epigram from the Palatine anthology. Finally, the radiate crown which he wears on coins of this period is an attribute originally reserved for deified emperors.

This religious elevation of the Emperor was naturally reflected in the whole imperial family. When the baby daughter of Poppaea, Claudia, died after a few months in 63, she was deified as Diva Claudia. So too Poppaea, who died in 65, apparently from a kick dealt her by Nero in a moment of anger, was deified and her body embalmed like that of oriental monarchs. His third wife, Statilia Messallina, whom he married in 66, shared the deification of her husband in the decree of Acraephiae, which ordains also the erection of a statue to her in the local temple of Apollo Ptoios.

Yet another aspect of the elevation of the Emperor is the changing of names of months and even of places in his honour. After the Pisonian conspiracy, the month of April became Neroneus, and the months of May and June were changed respectively to Claudius and Germanicus, perhaps rather in celebration of the other names of the Emperor than in memory of his adoptive father and of his great-uncle. In Egypt the month of Pharmuthi received the name of Neroneios Sebastos. Among cities Caesarea Philippi, the capital of the kingdom of Agrippa II, became Neronias, and Artaxata in vassal Armenia emerged as Neroneia. Greater importance would have attached to two other changes, which may have been projected: the Acraephiae inscription leaves little doubt that Nero meant to rechristen the Peloponnese as the island of Nero, and this helps to explain (though not necessarily to confirm) Suetonius’ assertion that Rome was to become Neropolis.

Coins above all afford us some conception of the way in which every occasion was exploited to heighten the glory of the Emperor. The rebuilding of Rome is commemorated by a series of coins that bear the name of the city, and by another series that picture different buildings that were reconstructed, such as the temple of Vesta, while another issue, after the Pisonian conspiracy, refers thankfully to the Securitas Augusti, the Genius Augusti and Juppiter Custos. The culminating point in the glorification of the Emperor was reached in 66, when Tiridates came to receive from Nero the crown of Armenia. After festivities at Naples, the coronation took place in the Forum at Rome: Dio declares that the prince abased himself before Nero as his god, and worshipped him as Mithras. The temple of Janus was closed and coins proclaimed the peace which had been earned so laboriously for the Roman People by sea and land; pacep. R. terra marique partajanum clusit is the legend upon one, while others celebrate the Victoria Augusti and bear the inscription Ara Pacis. We may find it hard to understand so great an uproar over a solution that was merely a compromise and that in substance unravelled none of the eastern frontier problems, but though we may discount the exaggerations of officialdom, the spectacle, after so many years of grievous warfare, of the Parthians recognizing the superiority of Rome and of a Parthian prince coming to Rome to make his submission must have produced the liveliest emotion and the highest hopes; and all this could not fail to work on so excitable an imagination as Nero’s and confirm his own conception of his greatness. The great ‘Column of Nero’ at Mainz, dedicated to Juppiter Optimus Maximus, ‘pro salute Neronis Claudi Augusti,’ should almost certainly be assigned to this year, and is probably connected with these very ceremonies in Rome. At the top of the column stood Juppiter, below in bas-reliefs there file before us Apollo, Hercules, Juppiter again, Vulcan (perhaps signifying the conquest of the fire at Rome), Mars and Neptune (symbols of victory by land and sea), Minerva and Mercury (symbolizing the encouragement given by Nero to learning and commerce), Fortuna, Felicitas, Salus, and other abstract deities. It has justly been called ‘an imperial hymn in stone’; all the identifications with gods and goddesses that the emperor most revered and all the most widespread symbols are here united to show how Nero holds in his hands the destinies of the world.

VI.

THE JOURNEY TO GREECE

The lord of the world now made ready, after these ceremonies at Rome, to give definite convincing proof of his majesty, for after such a prelude he must astonish men by his acts, and he was now in a state of mind to do so. The liberation of Greece, the piercing of the Isthmus of Corinth, not to mention artistic and athletic exhibitions at the most important centres—for this third item was as important to Nero’s mind as the other two—were only to be the first acts of his enterprise. Afterwards he had in mind to journey to Alexandria and embark upon a grandiose policy of expansion towards the East and possibly towards the South. A concentration of legions was ordered in Egypt, but the outbreak of the Jewish revolt and the political events in the West combined to thwart his purposes, and for this reason, too, his schemes did not get beyond the tour in Greece.

The Emperor set out from Rome at the end of September in 661, accompanied by several thousand Augustiani and praetorians under the command of Tigellinus, leaving the capital in charge of his freedmen, among whom was Helius. Some weeks afterwards, he staged his first artistic appearance in Greece as a singer at Corcyra, and a few days after that at Actium took part in the games founded by Augustus. Thence he reached Corinth; and, on 28 November, at the Isthmian games, specially celebrated on the spot where the proclamation of Flamininus had been made, he announced the gift of freedom to the Greeks in a speech which is still preserved in the Acraephiae inscription, and in which genuine love of Hellas is mingled with the most naive self-praise ending in the complacent final exclamation, “Other men have given freedom to individual cities, Nero alone has freed a whole province”. Naturally this gift did not mean that Greece was to be detached from the empire: free federate cities were bound to follow the external policy of Rome, and quite apart from the arbitrary intervention of provincial governors, any territory that had been proclaimed free by a mere unilateral gesture, ran the risk of seeing its freedom revoked by the same will that had granted it; freedom meant merely a limited autonomy, but it did carry exemption from the payment of tribute, which was a very great advantage for a region so impoverished as Greece. And if we add that the Greeks, immersed as ever in past glories, ascribed to the act a value far above its real, we can understand the enthusiasm that Nero’s gesture evoked in them: a more emotional memory was preserved by the very fact that this dream of liberty was so soon dissolved by Vespasian’s revocation of the grant. The enthusiasm of the miracle-worker, Apollonius of Tyana, who saw clearly enough the incompetence of Nero, is only one voice amid many.

The Senate received Sardinia as a recompense for the province that had been taken from them. After this proclamation, Nero passed the whole of the winter in Greece without, as far as we know, accomplishing anything noteworthy. In the spring he took part in the national games, which at his express wish were all summoned to meet in the same year, so that he could have the honours of a victor in all four; for this reason the Isthmian games, which had already been celebrated in the preceding autumn, were now repeated. In addition Nero appeared at the games at Argos. He had already in 65 at the Quinquennial games shown himself frequently in public and had performed men’s and women’s parts in tragedy. Now, besides acting as driver in the chariot races, he competed as harper and as tragedian, and had the programme of the games altered so that he could appear at Olympia as harper and at the Isthmus as tragic actor. It goes without saying that he won first prize at all competitions in which he took part, and even in those in which he did not, although he was anxious to compete seriously and bestowed Roman citizenship upon his competitors as a reward for their loyalty and skill.

Towards September, at Corinth, he began work on another great enterprise, which had previously attracted Gaius, that of uniting the Saronic Gulf with the Gulf of Corinth. True, this project was not of great importance for the trade of the empire; its advantages would have been limited to Greece, and so no great effort was made in antiquity either before or after Nero to put it into execution; in spite of Nero’s solemn inauguration, after a few months’ work it was allowed to lapse in the turmoil of the year 68. But the cutting of the isthmus appealed to Nero, not because of any economic advantages, but because of the unprecedented boldness of the scheme. There is, indeed, ample evidence of the great impression that the attempt made upon the ancients, an impression so profound that it was considered as an offence against heaven. This explains the solemnity with which the work was begun; hymns were sung to Amphitrite, to Poseidon, to Melikertes and to Leukothea, and Nero himself cut the first sod; praetorians and prisoners, especially prisoners of war, were employed on the labour.

In the intervals between these enterprises, towards the end of 67, Nero toured all Greece, visiting famous places, collecting works of art, taking an interest in local life and imposing taxation on the rich to maintain himself and his suite. We need not linger over the tales of abnormal cruelty and lust that our sources attribute to Nero at this time, for such stories represent simply the rumours that were circulating in Italy against the absent emperor, and indicate his growing unpopularity. But even the most sceptical historian must admit that Nero’s tour in Greece presents psychological problems which are hard to solve; apart from the fundamental fact that he took his role of competitor with such intense seriousness (for he must have known victory was secure), it is enough to mention that he would not visit either Sparta or Athens—a whim for which we can find no reason save the rather improbable one that these cities, being already free, could not have had any gratitude to show to the Emperor.

VII.

THE DECLINE OF NERO’S POWER

But in any event the journey, though it may have excited Greece and made a deep impression on the East, had been most damaging for the prestige of Nero in the West. There was no lack, of course, of the usual official propaganda, and Roman coins afford a pale reflection of the ceremonies that must have accompanied every event in Greece, such as the arrival, Nero’s victories, and the liberation of Greece. An echo of this is found in the Alexandrian coins which not only figure a series of protectors of the games (Zeus of Olympia and of Nemea, Apollo Pythius, Poseidon Isthmius, and Hera of Argos), but at this time associate Nero with Augustus and Tiberius, thus making his philhellene policy appear a continuation of that of the founders of the dynasty. But all this propaganda could not lull the unrest that began to master the empire; the loathing of the aristocracy, cut off from the Emperor by a sea of blood, began to have an effect on the loyalty of the troops. The fate of Corbulo, the greatest soldier of the time, and of the two commanders of Upper and Lower Germany, was at once a symptom of the distrust of the generals and a reason for further distrust and anger. Nor had the inferior officers or troops any feeling of devotion to the Emperor that might have put a check on the intentions of the higher commands. Nero had kept far away from battles or from the great permanent camps of the armies, and he had taken no share in the campaigns against Parthia and the putting down of the rebellion in Britain. Now a dangerous revolt in Judaea was keeping some sixty thousand men, under the command of Vespasian, fully occupied while the Emperor was amusing himself in Greece. Naturally the soldiers must have been more devoted to their generals than to their emperor and were easily persuaded to embark on adventures that promised them booty, promotion, relaxation of discipline and a privileged position. With this lowering of the prestige of the central power, the nationalist and separatist feelings of different regions sprang into life again, roused by envy of the privileges bestowed on Greece. In consequence those provincials who were in command of an army combined a Roman soldier’s hatred of Nero with a provincial’s ambitions for greater liberty, if not autonomy, in his own country, and in the same ambiguous manner as Vindex and Civilis ended as rebels.

Towards the end of 67, though as yet there were no open outbreaks, affairs began to look so dark that Helius, the freedman governor of Rome, asked Nero to return and, seeing that he could not make up his mind, went in person to Corinth to implore him. It is unnecessary to imagine that Helius had an inkling of any particular conspiracy; we may assume that he had insight enough to read the signs of the coming storm. In Rome irritation had been increased by a famine, due to the irregular arrival of corn from Egypt, possibly because both corn and corn-ships had been impounded for the supply of the army in Palestine and also, though in a less degree, of the imperial suite. About January 68 Nero returned to Italy and for a moment succeeded in reviving the emotions of the mob by his presence. At Naples he appeared as victor in the sacred games of Greece and, according to custom, entered the city through a breach made in the walls on a chariot drawn by white horses. Passing by Antium and Albanum, he reached Rome, where the same ceremony had been prepared for him, and through an arch in the Circus Maximus, past the Velabrum and the Forum, he climbed to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, to whom he dedicated 1808 crowns that he had won in Greece. But apparently, lost in memories of the past year, he found it difficult to live save in a city of Greek customs, for by March he was back in Naples, where news reached him that the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, the romanized Gaul, C. Julius Vindex, was in open revolt.

This revolt, with its anti-Neronian cry of “freedom from the tyrant”, aimed at getting a pledge from any successor which would recognize more or less complete autonomy for Gaul, but it was scarcely a real threat to the empire, since a few months were enough for the general of the legions in Upper Germany, Verginius Rufus, to put it down. Nor is it likely that, with the collapse of this movement, any greater success would have attended the revolt begun by the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Sulpicius Galba, who on 2 April 68 made common cause with Vindex, refused obedience to Nero, and by declaring himself the legate of the Senate and Roman People put forward, doubtless in agreement with Vindex, a claim to the throne. With Gaul once pacified, this outbreak would have been isolated in the Spanish peninsula, where Galba after eight years residence enjoyed great popularity. Even so, he only won two supporters, Otho, the governor of Lusitania, and Caecina, the quaestor of Baetica, while the forces of men and money at his disposal, even after enrolling a legion of provincials (which afterwards became the VII Galbiana) and of other light-armed troops drawn from marines and non-romanized Iberians, were quite inadequate for a march upon Italy. But in Rome all were only waiting for the chance to betray Nero, and though the Senate on the first news of the revolt declared Galba a public enemy and confiscated his estates in Italy, it did so with an ill grace and soon was ready to treat with his emissaries. Orthodox Republicanism, as we have seen, lived on now only in a few, but even these few must have recognized that without support from an army they could not get rid of Nero; hence they could do nothing short of recognizing Galba. On the other hand, Tigellinus, who disappears at this moment from the scene, did not help Nero by his advice. The fact is certain, though his reasons are difficult to define. Nero by himself was quite incapable of organizing seriously any resistance. He levied a new legion from marines (the Legio I Adiutrix), but mobilization was so slow that it could take no part in ensuing events. He sent his mistress, Calvia Crispinilla, to urge the pro-consul of Africa, Clodius Macer, to intervene in his favour, but Crispinilla did not work seriously for him, while Clodius revolted and struck money on his own account. Instead of taking command personally against the rebels, Nero entrusted the troops that he had intended for his expeditions to the East to Petronius Turpilianus, commanding in Britain, and to Rubrius Gallus; they were recalled in time (among them the Legio I Italica), but though sent into Gaul they achieved nothing, whilst the conduct of Verginius Rufus who, though he would not accept the crown, put himself at the disposition of the Senate, was equivalent to an act of rebellion.

Nero’s own feelings varied rapidly between extremes of despair and excessive confidence and though the extravagances attributed to him—such as his intention to poison the Senate, burn Rome and slip away to Egypt—must have been legendary, such well-attested actions as his defiant assumption of a sole consulship towards the end of April in the hope of making a demonstration of force, betray his bewilderment. In Rome the populace, who were waiting for bread and saw ships arrive loaded with sand for the stage on which the emperor was performing, grew more and more riotous. In such a situation all that was needed, now that Tigellinus had fled, was for the prefect Nymphidius Sabinus to suborn the praetorian guard to make common cause with the Senate, for Nero to find himself without helpers and lost. He now tried (the evening of 8 June) to escape, perhaps towards Egypt, which he rightly believed loyal, and whilst waiting for his freedman to get the fleet ready passed a night in the Servilian gardens on the road to Ostia. But by now the rebellion of the praetorians was in being; the officers refused to follow him and shortly after, at midnight, the company on guard deserted. Meanwhile, Nymphidius, accompanied by the senators, went down to the barracks of the praetorians and, by telling them Nero had fled and promising a donative of 30,000 sesterces for each man, persuaded them to proclaim Galba emperor. Nero by now had found refuge in the villa of his freedman Phaon, lying some four miles from the city between the Via Salaria and the Via Nomentana. Perhaps he still hoped to escape if he could elude the first search­parties. But when he learnt that he had been declared a public enemy by the Senate, who had at once recognized Galba, with the pursuing horsemen almost upon him, he plunged a sword into his throat, helped by one of the few who had followed him, his freedman, Epaphroditus. A centurion who burst in hoping to capture him found him dying and, while he strove to staunch the wound, heard him groan “Too late, this is loyalty indeed”. It is said that before this, in the agony of his contemplated suicide, he walked about whimpering “What an artist dies in me”. His two nurses, Ecloge and Alexandra, and the ever-faithful Acte saw him buried in the tomb of the Domitii in the Campus Martius. It was 9 June 68.

Nero was just thirty years and six months old. The mysterious circumstances of his death favoured, as it happened, the spread of a belief, especially in the East, that he was not dead but had got away safely. Hence impostors could arise, giving themselves his name and trying to raise the mob; one such appeared immediately in 69 and, after arousing great expectations in Greece and Asia, which found an echo even in Parthia, ended by killing himself in the island of Cythnus, where he had been driven by a storm. Another in 79, Terentius Maximus, like his predecessor profited from the prestige of Nero’s name with the Parthians to turn for help to them, but he, too, after being exposed, ended badly, it is not known how.

But obviously this posthumous fame of Nero is not due merely to the mysterious circumstances of his death; it is rooted in the very character of his government, which was the first to give to his subjects the feeling of imperial authority as something super-eminent and above the law, sometimes terrible but sometimes beneficent; in comparison Gaius’ experiment had passed unnoticed. In the West the phenomenon had a limited importance. Naturally there were those who regretted him, especially since in him the Julio-Claudian line perished, and for that reason his tomb was for long covered with flowers and Otho, exploiting this dynastic loyalty, represented himself as the legitimate successor of Nero. But this good-will, like the hostility which was far more widespread and became official with the advent of the Flavians, remained always political and moral and never religious. In the East, on the other hand, the liberation of Greece, the journey of the Parthian prince to do homage, and the cutting of the Isthmus of Corinth appeared as so many proofs of the supernatural being of Nero and obliterated the memory of his crimes. Hence the conviction that he was destined to return and reign—a conviction that, as Dio Chrysostom shows, was still widespread in the time of Trajan and from which those impostors who took his name profited greatly. On the other hand, among Jews and Christians, who had in their different ways suffered severely during his reign, and whose higher moral sense revolted more deeply against crimes such as the matricide, the figure of Nero assumed diabolic proportions. His expected return to the throne from somewhere beyond the Euphrates (where he was imagined to be lurking) is regarded by the Jewish Sibylline Oracles as the momentary triumph of Satan, which precedes the final victory of Justice. Christian tradition was to identify him more definitely either with Antichrist or with the messenger who precedes Antichrist and prepares the way for his advent before the end of the world. This implied antithesis between the Church of Christ and the Empire of Antichrist suggests that a strange truth underlay the tradition that chose, as the personification of the Empire opposed to the Church, the emperor who first put into practice his conception of unlimited power, offset—even though in ignorance—the salvation of Christ by a salvation of his own, and like Christ wished to be called the saviour of the world.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE EASTERN FRONTIER FROM TIBERIUS TO NERO