THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NERO

 

CARLO MARIA FRANZERO

 

 

Book One

THE MOTHER AND THE BOY

I

IN the autumn of the year 37 Agrippina found herself six months gone with child. She consulted a Persian magician who enjoyed a great reputation in Rome, and the astrologer gave her this terrible horoscope: “You will give birth to a son, who shall be Emperor but will assassinate his mother.” Agrippina replied: “Let him murder his mother but be Emperor”. From that day the life of Agrippina’s child was written. He will be told one day by his tutor, the philosopher Seneca: “Your destiny is written in the skies and nothing can change it.”

The boy was born at Anzio, on the 15th of December. It was the eve of the Saturnalian holidays: what an omen for his life! Agrippina had an agonizing time. The child was born feet first. The midwives at Agrippina’s bed ‘shuddered.

II

The father, Domitius Aenobarbus, was a man of execrable character, and the mother was a thoroughly bad woman. The cruel character of Domitius was a byword in Rome. He had killed a freedman of his at a banquet merely for failing to drink as much as he commanded. One day, in the Forum, Domitius had struck put the eye of a Knight for some heated words in a dispute. He was so crafty and greedy that during his Praetorship he defrauded the chariot-owners at the Circus of their prizes in the races. There were other evil facets to his character: a short time before the death of Emperor Tiberius he was impeached for incest with his sister Lepida. The best that could be said of Domitius Aenobarbus was that he was an aristocrat to his finger­tips; the Aenobarbi could indeed boast of seven Consulships, one Triumph and two Censorships. So illustrious were they as a family that on being admitted into the Patrician Order they continued to use the same cognomen, with no other prenomen than those of Gneus or Lucius. And they all had red beards.

Agrippina, born in the year 16, was the eldest daughter of the great General Germanicus whom Augustus had at one time cherished as his successor. Agrippina was, therefore, a niece of Emperor Tiberius. With her two sisters, Drusilla and Julia, as well as their brother Gaius whom the people had nicknamed Caligula, Agrippina was brought up in the house of their paternal grandmother Antonia, herself a sister of Mark Antony and a niece of Augustus. But Caligula had incestuous relations with all his three sisters, who were girls of extreme beauty. Their aunt surprised him in Drusilla’s arms. Old Tiberius was told, but the family honour had to be protected against the lampoons of the populace and even more from the contempt of the aristocracy; and silence was kept. The fact was that Tiberius, tired of proscriptions, profoundly disillusioned by the treachery of his friend and councillor Sejanus, disappointed by the futility of absolute power, and disenchanted by the neverending nerd to punish, thought it better to shut his eyes to the peccadilloes of his nieces, and married them off as quickly as possible and as well as he could.

Tiberius therefore gave Agrippina for wife to Domitius Aenobarbus, and ordered them to celebrate their marriage in Rome. Everybody knew that the Emperor had chosen such a bad man as husband for his niece only because Domitius was related to the Caesars and was a grand­nephew of Augustus through his grandmother Octavia.

At the time of her marriage Agrippina was barely twelve years old. The newly married couple did not keep house together for long—they had too many grounds for detesting each other. So it happened that the boy was born nine years after the marriage. After Tiberius’s death Domitius considered it wiser to effect a reconciliation with his wife, who was a sister of the new Emperor Caligula; and the result was the birth of the boy. The peace between husband and wife was made the same night that Tiberius breathed his last and nine months later, exactly to the day, the boy was born.

Domitius was away when his son was born; impatient of Caligula’s vagaries he was spending most of his time at his villa at Pyrges in Tuscany. To his friends who offered him their congratulations, he replied: “Of myself and Agrippina only a monster can be born.”

Agrippina asked her husband to choose a name for the child. Domitius mockingly suggested calling him Claudius, in honour of uncle Claudius, the Prince who enjoyed the reputation of being a fool. This Claudius was not, although it was quite true that he stuttered so much that it was impossible to listen to him and keep a straight face. Agrippina, however, declined her husband’s suggestion and the boy, according to usage, was called Lucius and entered in the rolls as Lucius Domitius Aenobarbus.

When the baby was three years old, his uncle Emperor Caligula banished him with his mother to the island of Ponza, on a charge of conspiracy. The accusation was in a way quite true, for Agrippina had been senseless enough to conspire with her lover Lepidus, who was also a minion of her brother the Emperor. Caligula was so angry that he compelled Agrippina to travel to her place of exile carrying upon her knees the ashes of her executed lover.

Caligula was then at the peak of his madness. He had threatened to banish Jupiter to the island of Crete and had announced that he was taking the Moon as his mistress. He openly carried on incestuous relations with his sisters and opened in the Palace a public brothel from which he collected the fees.

While Agrippina was in exile, her husband Domitius died of dropsy in his retreat at Pyrges. Caligula tried to confiscate his large estate, and ordered that the boy should be taken from his mother and entrusted to his paternal aunt Lepida.

Little Lucius Domitius was thus brought into the house of Domitia Lepida, who, not wanting the boy, placed him under the care of two rather unusual tutors—a dancer and a coiffeur.

III

When the boy was four years old, Emperor Caligula was assassinated in the Circus during the annual Games in honour of Augustus’s memory. It was the month of February Of the year 41. The mad Emperor’s body was left on the spot where it was butchered by Cassius Cherea, a Tribune of the Praetorian Cohort. His wife Cesonia— an abandoned woman who used to give Caligula love philtres to inflame his passion for her—was killed with her own daughter upon the Emperor’s body, on the flagged floor of the high-vaulted gallery of the Circus.

The Senate wanted to restore the Republic, for after Tiberius and Caligula the House of the Caesars had no other pretender but old Claudius, about whom nobody bothered. But while in the Senate House the greybeards chattered about the great speech with which their Presi­dent would on the morrow announce to the sovereign people the restoration of the Roman Republic—the Speech, the great dada of democratic politicians of all. times!—some soldiers of the Praetorian Guards wandered about the Palace, and on the upper floor they came upon a foot protruding from behind a tapestry. The soldiers pulled the foot and out with it came Prince Claudius, the butt of all jokes, hiding in fright behind the tapestry. The soldiers led Claudius to a terrace, and calling to a group of comrades below, they hailed him the new Emperor. Claudius thought it another joke, in his absurd life of scholar and Court buffoon. That night the Jewish King Agrippa, who lived in Rome and knew the value of being a friend of the Caesars, went to the Guards’ barracks where Claudius had been taken by the Praetorians and had a talk with him. What was there to be afraid of in the Senate? The Senators would only quarrel among themselves, and the Magistrates, each appointed by the late Emperor, would not oppose Caligula’s uncle. As for the people, well, the people of Rome would applaud the winner, whoever it might be.

The Jewish King Agrippa was right. The Praetorian Guards and the Roman crowd hailed the new Emperor Claudius. Soon afterwards the Senate came in a body to the Palace to make obeisance. Claudius was not such an idiot after all. He offered the Senators protection against the indignant Praetorians, and soon the dotard appeared for what he really was—an old erudite but full of commonsense, fundamentally a good man; deferential towards the Senate and paternal towards the people. The medal had its reverse, for the old man had an incredible weakness for wine and women. He ate and drank till he could no longer stand, and he indulged with women to great excess. Day after day episodes occurred only too reminiscent of the jokes that had been current at the Palace under the previous Court; the Emperor fell asleep after his meals, and did not mind when some of the guests shot olive stones at him, or a courtier poked him in the ribs with his ivory stick to awaken him. And he often snored during an audience. He was tall and well built, but his foibles made him look absurd. He laughed immoderately and could be ignoble in his rage. When he walked he dragged the right leg, and his knees were always weak. And his voice, when he held forth on some pet subject—a practice of which, like many other scholarly men, he was only too fond—his voice sounded like a fog-horn.

But he was good at heart and one of the first things he did was to sign a decree allowing Agrippina to return from exile. She took back her son, and married again, this time Crispus Passienus the orator, after inducing him to divorce his wife, who was another Domitia, sister of the late Aenobarbus. Her boy Lucius lost the coiffeur and the dancer as tutors and Agrippina entrusted him to a new tutor, the freedman Anicetus. Of this Anicetus— who was to play such an important part in his future life —Nero used to say in later years: “ He was a freedman, which means that he knew the difference from being a slave; he was a decent scholar, and he had no morals.”

IV

A few years later Agrippina’s second husband died. Passienus had been a quiet and peaceful man, with only one great passion. Near Tusculum, where he had a villa, there was an ancient grove of beeches, consecrated since olden times to Diana. Passienus was romantically and strangely fond of one of the beeches and used to spend hours near the tree; embracing it, kissing it, sleeping with its shadow within his arms. Agrippina took no notice of such whims and indeed she induced Passienus to make her boy Lucius his sole heir. Thus little Lucius inherited a huge estate.

But Agrippina had higher aims, and she turned to the freedman Narcissus, who acted as Prime Minister to Emperor Claudius. Through Narcissus she ingratiated herself with the Emperor, who was readily susceptible to the wiles of scheming women. It did not take Claudius long to fall in love with Agrippina, particularly as he was more than tired of his dreadful wife Messalina. Not a good word could have been said about the Empress, and Agrippina had one great advantage over Messalina, the advantage of having been born in the House of the Caesars and having grown up amidst the intrigues and dangers of the Imperial Court. Clever and cunning, she pushed the wantonness of Messalina to the limit—and took good care to make it public.

And there were two boys: Agrippina’s son Lucius Domitius, who was now ten years old, with good features and a clever mind justifying his mother’s fondest hopes. He was the only grandchild of Germanicus and all the heritage of glory left by the popular hero stood behind him. Wherever he appeared the crowd hailed him with sympathy. The other boy, Messalina’s child, was Britannicus, a frail and delicate boy suffering from palsy, and looked upon in wonder by the people as the child of an old dotard and a dissolute mother.

It came into Claudius’s head to celebrate the Secular Games before the century ended. It was a drunkard’s whim but it kept the Court agog for months. Vitellius had returned from the Governorship of Palestine. He was so adoring a favourite of the Empress Messalina that he begged to be allowed to carry one of her slippers for ever next to his heart. On going to an audience at the Palace he saluted Claudius in oriental fashion, and felicitating with him on the resolution about the Secular Games, he added: “May you, O Divine, celebrate these Games very often!”

During the Secular Games the young sons of the most illustrious families performed in the Circus an ancient play, which was called the Trojan Game. Virgil has des­cribed this performance of noble youths in Book V of the Aeneid. “The young men, riding caparisoned horses, appear splendid, advancing en masse under the eyes of their delighted parents. Their well-dressed hair is decked by a garland, in the right hand they carry a long sharp javelin, a light quiver is suspended upon their back, and from their neck dangles upon their chest a chain of gold. The boys advance in three squadrons, commanded by three seniors. They make the tour of the Circus, amidst the applause, and many of them are recognized and hailed by name, for the people see in them the images of their glorious ancestors. It was an occasion in which the people showed to the children of the great families the affection or the indifference that their parents inspired.

In the same squadron were Lucius Domitius, aged eleven, and Prince Britannicus, two years younger, son of Claudius and Messalina, and Domitius’s cousin. Young Britannicus played his part with all the advantage that his birth and position of Heir Apparent gave him; yet, the greatest applause went to Lucius Domitius and the names of Agrippina and of Germanicus sounded loudly when Lucius was hailed.

Soon afterwards a rumour went round the wineshops of Rome that Messalina had tried to have Lucius Domitius assassinated. Who had spread the rumour? Was it Agrippina herself? Voices said that Messalina saw in this young boy a potential rival to her own son. But the Gods had protected Domitius, for at the moment when the hired murderers advanced into his room to kill him in his sleep a dragon had jumped out from the bed and chased the assassins away. Young Lucius swore to everyone that in his bedroom he had never seen anything bigger than a playful and harmless Egyptian snake of the kind that were kept to keep away mice. But Agrippina knew only too well the value of a properly presented story and she immediately instructed her jeweller to make for Lucius a golden bracelet interlaced with the skin of the dragon found near his bed, a bracelet that her son wore constantly throughout his life as a talisman and a token of gratitude to his thoughtful mother.

At last Messalina understood that she had in Agrippina a rival more redoubtable than the boy, who by now was openly considered by Agrippina’s clique as another Heir Presumptive next to Britannicus. Messalina decided to dispose of, at any price, both mother and son; but her own dissolute life proved her undoing. Blinded by amorous passion, she took the opportunity when Claudius was absent from Rome of having a marriage performed between herself and her latest lover, the handsome Silius. That the people were not shocked by such a sacrilegious scandal only emphasized the general standard of morals. Indeed, the populace laughed about it, and the Mother Superior of the Vestal Virgins spoke in Messalina’s defence. Amidst the general indifference and with the Court undecided, the Prime Minister Narcissus took the final decision. He brought the Emperor back to Rome, made Messalina depart, chased away the Mother Superior of the Vestal Virgins and endeavoured to rouse some indignation in Claudius. When he found that the old man was totally indifferent to the misdeeds of the Empress, Narcissus ordered Messalina to be killed, which was done at the very moment when Claudius was suggest­ing that the Empress should appear before him to explain her conduct. They let Claudius grumble and placed him at table for dinner. The old glutton reclined with a sigh upon his couch, and proceeded with his food. Later, when the Emperor was gorged with his meal, Narcissus informed him that the Empress was dead. Claudius glanced at his Minister with quizzical eyes; then he took the glass that the cup-bearer was proffering, and lay back on his cushions with a sigh—no one could tell whether it was of resignation or relief. As he appeared to be completely drunk, the proper slave came and tickled the Imperial throat with a peacock feather dipped into per­fumed oil, and Claudius relieved his stomach in the approved fashion. Two Nubian giants lifted him up, sound asleep, and carried him to his apartments. A few days later, when Messalina’s name was already banished from general conversation, the Emperor seating himself at the table would still ask why the Empress was late for dinner.

Some months afterwards the Emperor was officially told that it was advisable that he should remarry. Claudius was now well over sixty and looked considerably older. He was by no means a desirable husband. Pallas, the Imperial Treasurer, had been charged by Agrippina with the task of settling the wedding. Pallas was not new to the intrigues of the Imperial House for it was he who, years previously, had been sent by Antonia, Agrippina’s grandmother, to reveal to Tiberius the treachery of Sejanus. As for Agrippina, she felt that it would be wrong to use the influence and good services of Narcissus, as it would be placing her future in his hands. Therefore, she had accepted Pallas’s courtship, and granted him her favours. All things considered, it was less of a weakness on her part than an honour to the freedman; and so Claudius found himself urged to the marriage from all sides.

V

In his dotage, Claudius had long since left the conduct of all public and Court affairs to his three favourites: Pallas, who acted as Treasurer; Narcissus, First Secretary of State, and Callistus, whose duty it was to deal with the petitions addressed to the Emperor. Callistus had exercised the same office under Caligula, his title of favour was that having received from Caligula orders to kill Uncle Claudius, he had the courage, so he said, to disobey the orders. Narcissus was an efficient and loyal Secretary of State. As for Pallas, who claimed descent from the Kings of Arcadia, he kept everybody at a distance with his haughty airs. It was indeed whispered that the proud Pallas never spoke to his servants, but passed his orders to them in writing.

As for having surrendered all the affairs to those three freedmen, Claudius was telling his most trusted friend Burrus, Commander of the Praetorian Guard: “You are always railing against the freedmen who fill high positions at Court. I didn’t start this habit! It was my great- uncle Augustus who preferred to entrust the highest offices at Court to his most faithful freedmen.” Perhaps he knew that slavery generates those virtues that freeborn men so seldom possess, gratitude and loyalty.

When it came to recommending a new wife for the Emperor, Callistus supported the candidature of Lollia Paulina on the ground that she had no children and so would love the three children that Claudius already had from his previous marriages, Britannicus and Octavia, born of Messalina, and Antonia, born of Claudius’s second wife, Aelia Petina. Narcissus advised Claudius to take back his first wife Aelia Petina, whom he had repudiated for Messalina. Pallas sponsored Agrippina.

Yet, there was a great obstacle to the success of Agrippina. She was Claudius’s niece, and both Divine and Roman laws forbade the marriage.

But Agrippina was not discouraged. She knew that Claudius was very amorous. And she was beautiful. Hers was a beauty that was both sensual and pure. At thirty-two, Agrippina retained all the attractions of youth, together with an ardent ripeness; and she possessed a science of voluptuousness that was an irresistible invitation to an old and declining sensualist. When Claudius tasted Agrippina’s kisses he felt that he was for the first time savouring the pleasures of real love. He sighed, he moaned, he panted within her soft white arms, but when he tried to lie with her, she drew away: “What would her ancestors think of Germanicus’s daughter openly becoming the mistress of the Emperor who was her uncle? Of course she loved him, but there was no hope! Did not the Emperor feel that no other woman had suffered so much longing in his arms?”

Behind the scenes, whenever his duties closeted him with the Emperor, Pallas pointed out to Claudius the immense advantages of such an alliance: “Bring into your family a first daughter of Germanicus, whose memory is still revered by the Army and by the people... Agrippina is young and beautiful and she comes from the line of the Caesars. She will give you an heir—a new Augustus.”

Yet still Claudius hesitated, and grumbled, “It would be incest. What would the Senate say? And the Priests?” But all the Court was now on Agrippina’s side and one of the loudest was Vitellius, who no longer carried Messalina’s slipper against his heart. A popular demonstration in favour of Agrippina was staged and the Senate passed a decree exempting the Emperor from the Law that prevented a marriage between uncle and niece. The Roman populace marched to the Palatine clamouring that Claudius should marry his own niece. Old Claudius desired nothing better.

VI

Claudius wore himself out, or what was left of him after his bouts of eating and drinking, in the white arms of Agrippina, strange creature that she was. Her body was her weapon. She could be haughty and frigid, but when she thought it advantageous she could lend her body to contacts and caresses that would have disgusted a prostitute of the Suburra. Yet she came out of those debaucheries almost untouched. It was as if the Gods had endowed her with a capacity to be reborn afresh; night after night.

Barely eighteen months later, in the month of October of the year 50, Claudius informed the Senate that he proposed to adopt his wife’s son, Lucius Domitius. Gneus Domitius’s sardonic suggestion, when he told his wife to call the child Claudius in mockery of his uncle, had now come true. After the adoption, Lucius was named Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus. Claudius after his new father, Germanicus in memory of his maternal grand­father, Nero in memory of a paternal uncle. And Nero meant strong and valiant. The boy was far from strong, his mother thought, and not particularly inclined to be valiant, with spindly legs, and his protruding and short­sighted eyes that never seemed to look anyone straight in the face. But through a long series of divorces, second marriages, poisoning and adoptions, the House of the Caesars kept its line unbroken.

VII

Life at the Palace was dull for young Nero. Since his mother had married the Emperor, he had felt more lonely, more deserted. He now often thought of the words that his mother had spoken to him on the day of his adoption by the Emperor. He was on a terrace receiving his lessons, when his mother had advanced through the curtains of brightly-painted leather, “From today you will be Nero Claudius. One day you will be called Nero Caesar!” As she spoke the words she turned and dis­appeared again through the curtains—tall, beautiful, majestic. The tutor at the desk did not dare to interrupt the reverie of his young pupil, as he stared beyond the terrace of the Imperial Gardens stretching down the slopes of the Palatine Hill.

Nero was a mere lad of thirteen, with somewhat massive features and protruding eyes. Heavy eyelids and a hint of nearsightedness gave the pale blue eyes a dreamy air. His hair had a strong tinge of auburn, almost a copper-red, and dressed in thick masses, like a halo, it made the high forehead look pale and noble. The boy had turned to his tutor, the freedman Anicetus, and touching his head he said, “The very hair of my father.” He spoke in Greek, for it delighted him to speak that tongue so fluently and with such a pure Attic accent: “We Aenobarbs are aristocrats to our fingertips.”

He was a strange boy, who had always relied upon his beautiful and loving mother. Now every day Senators and Knights came to bend their backs or their knees before him. The worst of it was that they came secretly, introduced by Pallas or by some servant, and they came to beg favours of him. Favours? Was he, then, in a position to grant favours to men who bore such great names? Yes, they told him, he had only to pass their requests to the Empress—his mother. Young Nero was learning human baseness.

Not yet had he a clear idea of what power came from being a member of the Imperial Family, but every day he could see the signs of the stupendous prestige enjoyed by his mother. Agrippina had obtained what no other Empress had achieved before; the same honours due to the Emperor. When Ambassadors came to prostrate themselves before Claudius Caesar, they made obeisance also to the Divine Agrippina. Dressed in the paludamentum, the regal mantle of purple and gold, Agrippina took the salute of the standards. The Senate revered her. One day she surpassed all limits of pride and ascended the Capitol in the chariot reserved for the statues of the Gods. Upon the new gold coins her profile was shown next to the Emperor’s. Young Nero was fascinated by this image of Agrippina upon the bright golden coins. His mother!

A small group of carefully chosen patrician boys were now admitted to sit with Prince Nero at lessons; among them were the two sons of General Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, and, of course, young Prince Britannicus. The tutors reported regularly to the Empress on Prince Nero’s progress. They said that he seemed over-sensitive to poetry, and strangely imbued with a sense of the dramatic. The Circus, and even more the Stage, attracted him with a kind of morbid fascination. Anicetus fostered this passion for the theatre, and often took him secretly to see a new play or some famous tragic actor. When at sunset, Nero returned from having shared the enthusiasm of the delirious crowd in the Circus, in a spec­tacle that was thrilling in its terrible horror, he could no laager keep his eyes upon the book or concentrate on his wiring-tablets. One day a tutor caught him describing to his schoolmates the ghastly death of a famous chariot­driver of the “Greens,” the Imperia! racing colours. The driver had fallen from the chariot in the heat of the race and was dragged around the arena by the horses, a terrible loss for the “Greens.” The tutor asked what it was all about. Nero replied that he was describing the tragic end of Hector being dragged by Achilles behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. But why this useless lie?

Young Nero’s tastes and inclinations were developing rapidly. He was passionately fond of mimic dances. He loved painting and music, but more than anything else he loved poetical composition. He was fascinated by the poetry and beauty of drama, and was thrilled by the sense of the theatrical, in life as well as on the stage. Since his mother Agrippina was installed as Empress, Nero delighted to breathe the solemn pomp that his mother had brought to Court; the aura of sovereignty that she diffused; the ceremonial, the hieraticism by which she was surrounded. He felt that now his life too had truly become a grandiose performance. Of power, so far, he had seen only the mirage. His flatterers told him that he was full of genius.

Rapidly, his appearance was becoming very remarkable. Not very tall and rather thick-set, he had neverthe­less acquired dignity in his demeanour and in his walk. His hair, thick and naturally curled, was rather attractive with its deep colour of copper. His eyes were blue, slightly misty, overhung by the heavy arch of his eye­brows. His nose was noble and his expression disdainful, sometimes hard, but always melancholic and embittered. With a full mouth, drooping wearily at the comers so that his visage showed a pensive air, he appeared maturer than his years. It was a face that one could admire or dislike, but one that could not be dismissed as commonplace. It was a face which seldom showed a smile to remind one of how young he was. A changeable masque, disclosing the disquiet and the urge of an unstable spirit, of a passionate and restless mind, of a thirsting heart which would never be placated or satisfied. And it was the mirror of a heart that was yet untilled. So far, no master had sown upon it either evil nor good. His pleasure had been his law. Had he been born the son of an ordinary man he would undoubtedly have turned to the Arts. Perhaps Beauty was the only thing in which he seriously believed. Music and poetry and sculpture roused in him violent or delicate emotions and he spent countless hours trying to draw and model. He loved to pass his fingers over the strings of a lyre. No one took these attempts very seriously. Worst still, no one told him that the lesson of Art is a long one. full of effort and concentration. From the platform upon which Fortune had placed him, he thought the summit was near and that he could easily attain it.

It was at this stage that his mother decided to give him as a tutor the philosopher Seneca. The first result of Agrippina’s decision was to cause the eclipse of Anicetus. A small thing in itself, yet it was to have incalculable consequences, because from that moment dated the pro found, almost bestial hatred of the freedman Anicetus for Agrippina.

VIII

The tutor, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was a Spaniard bornin the year 6 BC at Cordova, where his father Marcus, himself a man of letters, was a teacher of rhetoric. While Lucius Seneca was still a child, he was sent to Rome and placed under the care of his mother’s sister. Subse­quently his father followed with the rest of the family prospered rapidly, and put his son to school under the celebrated Stoics. Young Seneca, imbibing the precepts of the Pythagoreans, scrupulously abstained from eating the flesh of animals. When Tiberius threatened to punish some Jews and Egyptians who abstained from certain meats, Seneca was persuaded by his father to give up this austere practice. Seneca soon displayed talents as an eloquent speaker, but dreading the jealousy of Caligula, who aspired to oratorical excellence, he thought it better to abandon that pursuit and gave himself to philosophy, applying at the same time for the offices of State. He soon obtained the office of Quaestor; but after being involved in a scandalous love affair Caligula banished him to Corsica.

Seneca had a rankling memory of that episode. He was a proud Spanish youth, already the favourite of fortune, engaged in teaching the doctrines of Pythagoras. Many ladies came to his lectures; one of them was Julia Lucilla, the beautiful sister of Emperor Caligula. One day, after the lecture, she asked him to explain to her a point in moral philosophy which she could not quite grasp. They sat in her sedan-chair and he explained the point to her. But Caligula, who knew his sisters only too well, did not approve of such tête-à-tête enlightenment in moral philosophy, and the adventure cost the young philosopher eight years of banishment to the island of Corsica.

The wild solitude of that island was an excellent ground for noble thought but the philosophical mind of Seneca was of the type which finds that noble teaching and the composition of lofty essays has nothing to do with one’s secret leanings and tastes; and while his beautifully worded essays and books on Life and Morals gained him a reputation in Rome as an upright mind and an unflinching character, privately Seneca wrote letters to the powerful. He begged favours. He humbled himself. He sold his soul—for ever. After that, for the rest of his life, he was to be merely a sham, a cardboard facade offered to his contemporaries and to posterity; the sham of being a great philosopher. Once, years afterwards, he was asked why he wrote such noble essays in praise of poverty, when he loved so much his wealth. Seneca tried to explain by replying that a writer should never put too much sincerity in his work, lest he should lose his balance of artistic detachment. He had written three tracts on the Consolation of Life; and he was well aware that Petronius used to say about him: “As big a humbug as a philosopher.”

When at last Seneca was allowed to return to the City, his long, lean figure was clothed in a grey toga and his face, of a yellowish colour, was tinged with the hectic flush of tuberculosis. That he was inordinately greedy for money he took great care to hide, although in Rome, where only money mattered, valuable acquisitions and wealth were the recognized signs of success. Outwardly, Seneca’s sole desire was to write brilliant essays and tracts, with solid sentences carefully polished, upon Life and Death, Youth and Old Age, or The Pleasures of a Simple Life. It was much easier to expound high principles and praise poverty from the comfort of a splendid house. Anything outside his interests left him untouched.

True, his private life remained, at least outwardly, quite decent, although the luxury he loved to surround himself with was singularly greater than what one could reasonably expect of an advocate of austerity. Rut the reasons that prompted Agrippina to choose Seneca as tutor for her son were of a different nature.

The principal reason was that in the eyes of the Senate, of the upper-classes and the sober-minded middle-classes who had remained stodgily conservative and republican, Seneca was a paragon of all the ancient virtues. At a time when few had any virtue left it was easy to assume an attitude of virtuousness by admiring virtue in some­body else. No one could reproach Seneca with any crimes; not even the supposed adultery for which he had been exiled to Corsica. Kept away from Rome for many years, Seneca appeared as the living symbol of righteous­ness persecuted by despotism. Time and distance had made him look a great character—greater than he really was.

In engaging Seneca as a tutor for Nero, Agrippina was therefore looking to the future. In this moment she had power; but what would happen when Claudius died? Only if she could assure the Throne for her son would the future be safe, and this she could do only by rallying to her side the sympathies of the moderate parties. Seneca as a tutor to young Nero was the very man to make the necessary impression.

It did not take Seneca long to size up his Imperial pupil. Even less time was needed to guess what he would be able to make of him, or more precisely what he would never be able to make of him.

Nero was now fourteen years old, an over-intelligent and over-sensitive adolescent, spoilt by flattery, ambitious and indolent, a boy whose childhood had been sad and mortifying. Now he found himself suddenly thrown into a dream world, an atmosphere of continuous apotheosis. How could a tutor explain to his pupil that absolute power is merely the antithesis of servitude?

Seneca, after all, was a man of his time. In his deepest heart he was an astute opportunist, whose uplifting speeches and books dissembled his weakness. Away from his library he was but a rhetorician who might delude himself that he was accomplishing a mission and preparing for Rome the ideal sovereign, a new Augustus.

That was Seneca, the great tutor of Nero, always ready to settle his young pupil’s difficulties with a well-turned aphorism. “The happy man,” he told Nero, “is not the one who knows, but the one who acts. Life must be lived, not idly contemplated in thought. Better a life composed of a thousand bad deeds than a splendid one only imagined in the mind.” Or he would say: “The ability to conceive and expound ethical truths is not necessarily coupled with a corresponding power to realize them in practice. In fact, a man may be justified in living a variegated life for the purpose of acquiring those experiences that will lead his mind to higher speculative thoughts.” And he would add: “To appreciate the nobility of poverty one need not necessarily be a pauper. In fact, the poor are probably the only ones who could never be converted to a life of abstinence.”

Maybe Seneca knew his own limitations, and felt that the end would justify the means. Soon indeed he realized that to preserve an influence over his pupil he must employ flattery. To instil into Nero the need for an apparent uprightness—if not the love of it—Seneca recourse to the flattering refrain of all the courtiers: “Remember that you will be Caesar!”

The same words Nero had heard for the first time from his mother’s lips: “You will be Caesar!” But how differently she spoke them 1 And Nero adoringly called her “The best of mothers.” He still found himself deeply troubled by his mother’s presence, strangely troubled indeed. He would have been unable to say what mysterious feeling composed his love for his mother. And his mother only addressed herself to the strongest and most ardent feeling of any youth—to his pride.

Seneca, too, found it easier to reach Nero’s soul through his pride. “Should one day you mount the Throne, remember that amongst all the humans you have been chosen to play the part of a God. You will carry the life and destiny of all the Empire within your hands. You will be the best loved and maybe the most hated. You will be burdened by the terrible load of your greatness.”

Yes, it was Seneca the philosopher who had been chosen to be Nero’s teacher. He brought him up on good orthodox doctrines and he babbled to him about goodness and justice and mercy, but it was all a sham.

IX

Nero was barely fourteen when he received the toga virilis, the dress of a man, three years before the legal time. It was as though the adoption by the Emperor had made him come of age.

The ceremony took place on the 16th of the Kalends of April—the 17th of March in the year 51. On the eve, he was dressed according to tradition, in a white tunic with saffron stripes, as a sign of good omen, and was put to bed in this tunic. The following morning he was called early, and before leaving the Palace he consecrated to the House Gods the gown of his boyhood and placed around the Penates his golden chain, the bulla, the golden ball that every boy wore around his neck as a charm during his childhood. An Imperial train of attendants escorted him to the Capitol. There, in the ancient temple of Jupiter, he made offerings and sacrifices and at the hands of the High Priest he received the white toga that made him a man. So dressed, he descended into the Forum, where a clamouring and applauding crowd was waiting to receive him. The whole City was in festive mood, for it was the holiday of Bacchus, the Bacchanalia. Masquerading 'bands of children ran about the streets, escorting the procession of their elder brothers who went to receive the toga on the same day as Prince Nero. At the cross-roads, the Priestesses of the God Bacchus, their heads crowned with ivy, fried small cakes dipped in honey, which they sold to the new men. The Government and the Emperor had been generous with free distributions of corn to the people and bounties of silver to the troops, and since early morning the Circus Maximus, which Claudius had recently adorned with new fences of marble and gilded pillars, had opened the gates to one hundred thousand spectators. For the first time Nero took his place in the pulvinar, the Imperial box, wearing the triumphal dress.

The following day, upon a proposal of the Senate, he was named Consul-designate; was proclaimed Princeps Juventutis, and received the Proconsular powers extra-muros, which was an extraordinary dignity, unprecedented, conferring upon him the supreme command of all the armies camped outside the City walls. And to make him more popular with people and troops, money was again distributed in his name. At his passage the popu­lace shouted “Nero Imperator! Nero Caesar! Nero Divine!” Games were held in his name. The crowds shouted themselves hoarse for this red-headed adolescent who appeared day after day in the Imperial box, impassive and yet giddy with applause, proudly dressed in the triumphal toga edged with purple and gold.

What could Seneca do? He could neither take his pupil away, nor condemn the mode of life of an Heir Apparent. Years afterwards Nero was to say: “My tutor taught me the principles of Stoicism. He told me that our soul is the image of God, and that real happiness is to be found in the peace of a pure conscience, and wise is the man who can master his passions. And he said that I must be offered all temptations and perils, so as to be trained to master my passions.” But in those days whilst he repeated his tutor’s beautiful maxims he tasted the furtive pleasures that his tutor counselled him to avoid.

“ You see,” he said one day to a friend, “one should not preach so much austerity to a young man; it makes him long to savour the opposite.”

But Seneca was an inveterate schemer. He perceived that he would lose all influence upon his pupil should he not give him the means to gain applause and admiration. So he taught him eloquence, and composed for him splendid and lofty speeches that Nero recited before a select audience, with well-rehearsed gestures and appro­priate inflections of voice. Nero loved this kind of game, which was fashionable, and many authors and poets used to be invited in the patrician houses to read their manuscripts and recite their compositions; and famous lawyers repeated in private their great orations of the Courts. Seneca engaged for Nero a master of rhetoric, who trained him to show his bravura in preparing speeches and orations according to all the technique of sophistry that was the current fashion, and Nero passed whole days learning the speeches by heart and practising the postures and gestures and accents.

X

At sixteen Nero was solemnly married to Britannicus’s sister, Octavia. In all truth she was now Nero’s adoptive sister, but the great Caesar family had always been a confused medley of adulteries and incests.

There was no love whatever between bride and groom. Octavia was a child of nine, and Nero disliked her intensely. But in Agrippina’s mind the union was designed to make sure of the Throne for her son.

The nuptials were celebrated according to the strict religious rites of the patrician classes. Nero and his kin went to the private temple of the Emperor, where Octavia was waiting with her small court, robed in a long white gown, and with a woollen girdle around her slender waist. The long veil of the Vestal Virgins, the fiammeum, enveloped her entirely, enclosing her in a cloud of purple and gold. Before the House-Gods, Nero and Octavia promised to accept one another as father and mother of their future children. There was a banquet at the Palace for friends and relatives, after which the bride was conducted by little boys and girls to the nuptial chamber, preceded by freedwomen carrying nuptial torches against the evil eye. Nero received his bride on the threshold of his apartments, where the lintel of the door was draped in white. The room was decorated with the statues of the Gods and Goddesses presiding over the marriage, the draperies were then let down to prevent indiscretions.

But it was all a farce, for Octavia was led out again through another door. It was thought useless and shameful to give the young man such a child-wife, and Agrippina felt that the consummation of the marriage might spoil the bride’s chance of having children in her proper time. It might even have scandalized the populace. Octavia would be kept apart, while completing her education, at least until she should reach puberty.

XI

During the first three months after Nero’s mock marriage to Octavia, Agrippina pondered a great deal. She felt that it was now time for action. And Pallas was urging her to it.

All Italy was resounding with festivities and celebrations. Shortly before Nero’s marriage a great gathering had taken place at Lake Pucino for the opening of the canal that was to join the Lake with the River Liri. Nineteen thousand men were amassed on ships for a splendid show of naval combat. People had come to the shores of the Lake from Latium, Apulia and Abruzzi, on foot, on mules, on donkeys, on horseback; from cities and villages peasants and townsfolk had massed on the hill-sides surrounding the Lake to enjoy the great show and above all to watch the opening of the floodgates that would let the waters into the canal and bring new fertility to the barren lands.

The Emperor and the Empress accompanied by Nero had come to preside over the display. Agrippina was dressed in a garment of golden tissue that glittered in the sun. The naumachia was a most splendid spectacle. But when the floodgates were opened, nothing happened. The gradient of the water had been misjudged; the immense work was to be done again.

Agrippina accused Narcissus, who had been in charge of the works, of having cheated the Treasury. The First Secretary of State and Emperor’s favourite answered back, “How dare you accuse me? What about your own misdeeds? Have you not pushed out of the way the very son of the Emperor?”

The situation was growing tense. But Nero, who was now the Emperor’s son-in-law as well as his adoptive son, submerged the Senate under a flood of eloquence, reciting with admirable composure the orations that Seneca composed for him. The tutor saw quite clearly that his pupil was not in the least interested in his teaching. In fact, philosophy bored him. For the time being it was a novelty and an amusement to deliver speeches, and while the? young man passed the hours in learning them by heart he was doing no mischief. Nero was thus play­ing the part of a public advocate. He defended the rights of cities damaged by fire or oppressed by taxes. He invoked freedom for the good peoples of Rhodes; and when fie spoke of Ilion, he surpassed himself: “O Father Con­scripts, if true it is that no other sentiment is more sacred to us than that which joins us with the memory of our forefathers, is not the city to which Rome owes her very birth deserving that we should love her like a mother?” After this telling speech the obliging Senators thronged round the young orator, kissing in admiration the hem of his toga.

XII

Claudius was very old. Moreover, he was becoming senile. He still ate too much and drank too much and he was too fond of women. No longer was he the Claudius of former years, always a weakling but also a .busy scholar and an excellent administrator. Now he abandoned himself to the pleasures of the banqueting hall, attended by four women—a blonde Syrian, a huge negress with purple lips, a slim Jewess who made him savour cruel caresses, and a bronze-coloured Egyptian.

Agrippina watched these scenes with inscrutable eyes. The ceiling of the banqueting hall opened, roses and perfumed water rained gently upon the guests. Naked slaves served and danced among the tables. Ephebes came to lie with the guests, conversing amiably. When the excitement of the feast seemed to flag, beautiful dancers accomplished the union of Psyche and Cupid to the accompaniment of flutes and lyres.

Narcissus made a supreme effort to outbid Agrippina. He chose the moment when the Augusta, as Agrippina was now called, had obtained the sentence of death against her sister-in-law Domitia Lepida. Narcissus took his chance, and attacked Agrippina openly. He calculated that this unjustifiable sentence would make the Empress unpopular. The only crime of Lepida was that she exercised upon Nero an influence that displeased Agrippina. Nero was commencing to show an inclina­tion to poetry. His aunt Lepida felt that such an outlet might do him good, and prompted him to cultivate his taste for Art. Nero was delighted by his aunt’s encouragement and praise.

There were in Agrippina’s life crimes big and small, some dictated by her determination to remove all obstacles from her path, others that arc difficult to explain. What caused Agrippina to do away with her sister-in-law Lepida, paternal aunt to Nero? Lepida had received Nero as a little boy in her house and the young man was not insensible to the friendship that had grown between them in his bad days. But with Agrippina, maternal love was a mixture of personal ambition, egotism and pride. Perhaps there were two other reasons. One was that Lepida could rival with Agrippina in wealth, influence and beauty; and the other was that Agrippina knew only too well that Lepida’s morals were as bad as her own and that Lepida was capable of the same crimes that she her­self might commit. Agrippina decided therefore that it was time to be rid of her sister-in-law. An absurd accusation of sorcery was brought against Lepida, and Lepida was lost. The Palace, awed with terror, remained silent.

One morning, before the crowd of courtiers, Narcissus advanced towards Prince Britannicus, paid him reverence, embraced him and cried aloud: “O disinherited Prince, when shall you have the courage to chase from this Palace those who have taken your place? May the Gods protect you till the day when you will call around yourself all those who are disgusted by incest, prostitution and treasons!”

A few days after this scene Narcissus was taken ill. His doctors advised his immediate departure for Sinuessa, in the Campania, along the shores of the Thyrrenian sea.

The situation in the Palace was now very tense. Claudius showed an unusual affection for his son Britannicus and one evening at dinner in drunken mood he went so far as to say that it was his destiny to watch the misbehaviour of his wives and punish them after­wards. He muttered vague words about giving Britannicus the toga virilis and presenting the young boy to the people of Rome “Who will, at last, have a real Caesar.”

The hour had come.

Agrippina dined with her husband, a thing that occasionally still pleased the old man; moreover, it was a good excuse for keeping away from the banqueting hall the usual favourites whose tongues were loose. Soon after the hors-d’oeuvres a dish of mushrooms was brought to the table, of a variety of which Claudius was extremely fond. Halotus, the taster at the Imperial table, tasted some of the sauce and presented the dish with his own hands to the Emperor. Agrippina ate some smaller mush­rooms and looked approvingly to Claudius pointing to the biggest ones. Claudius ate them with relish and asked for more. Agrippina lay on the couch, and watched him anxiously. Had Locusta been equal to her reputation of infallible poisoner? With Narcissus away to relieve his gout in Campania, Agrippina had found it easier to win over to the conspiracy not only Pallas but Claudius’s own doctor, Xenophon. Seneca had not been actually informed, but the old fox was certainly well aware.

The poison, Locusta had said, would act almost instantaneously. But it was not until an hour later, when the poison had entered the blood, that they saw Claudius shiver and turn pale and hold his stomach with both hands, his teeth chattering. The diners, knowing well the irascible temper of the old man, sent hurriedly for doctor Xenophon.

In that body always full of viands and wine, the violence of the poison seemed lost and produced only strong evacuations. Claudius stopped groaning. Agrippina thought he would survive.

In the meantime, the doctor arrived and examined the Emperor cursorily. It was, he said, only a touch of indi­gestion. “Let me, O Divine, tickle your throat with a feather; you will empty your stomach and feel better at once.” But the feather had been dipped into the same poison. Claudius allowed the doctor to give him the treatment, vomited and said he felt better. In fact he spoke of going on with the dinner. But the cramps in his stomach returned. “What you need,” said the doctor, “is a wash-out and some rest.” Then Xenophon turned to the Court: “It is merely a passing ailment. Tomorrow the Divine Claudius will celebrate his recovery with a new banquet.”

The slaves lifted the Emperor from the couch, and carried him to his apartment. No one saw him alive again.

The agony lasted forty-eight hours and was excruciat­ing. That enormous body, rotted by gluttony and amorous excesses, still had an extraordinary resilience. Agrippina spent long hours at Claudius’s bedside. She touched his forehead, almost caressingly, waiting for the moment when it would turn cold. She held his hands in her own, feeling his pulse which was beating hard and strong against her fingers. Would death never come? Would it not be better to order a slave to suffocate him with a pillow, as Caligula had done with Tiberius? Afterwards she could easily be rid of the slave ...

Luckily the pains prevented Claudius from speaking. When he tried to sit up, a sudden giddiness brought him down again. He moved, he rolled, and a deep nausea shook that immense stomach. Like a man tormented by sea-sickness, the retching efforts left him exhausted. His hands pressed his liver. Agrippina passed her fingers under the linen, touching the swollen body; under the taut skin she could feel a bigness, hard as a stone.

Claudius rattled. A foetid smell rose from the bed. No, Agrippina had nothing more to fear. The Emperor could no longer utter a word, no longer make an intelligible sign. At the end of the second day he passed away.

Agrippina ran to the children’s room, hysterical with relief and happiness; she hugged the children amidst kisses and tears: “My little Britannicus! O image of your Father! Octavia, my darling, whom I love as my own daughter!”

On the terrace where they had their lessons, Seneca was busy making Nero rehearse the speech that he must deliver to the soldiers in the camp and to the Senate.

At this time the Senate was making offerings to the Gods and thanked Jupiter for the better news of Claudius. The people were told that the Emperor was confined to his bed.

The deception went on all day and throughout the night. The civic crown of Augustus and the naval crown of Claudius still stood outside the Palace.

The following day at noon, the groups of idle people always lingering before the Palace saw the great doors thrown open and upon the threshold appeared not the sleepy Claudius but his adoptive son, with eyes downcast, his face pale and grave. Among the crowd some furtive messengers from the Court whispered the news: “Claudius is dead! Claudius is dead...” But suddenly the Praetorian Guards massed themselves around the Palace Square commanded by Burrus their General, in full dress. With breastplates glittering they raised their halberds and standards and let their cries ring out to the people of Rome:

“Long live Nero, Emperor and Caesar!