TWO
Caesar was a tall, handsome, tirelessly energetic man from a family which, while ancient and patrician, was not unduly rich. He wore his clothes with a kind of flamboyant elegance which in a later age would have been considered that of a dandy; and he took great trouble with the arrangement of his hair, which became increasingly scanty as he grew older. His political sympathies seemed to lie with the Populares but whether this tendency was due to conviction, to ambition or to family influences – his aunt had been married to Marius and his own wife was the daughter of Cinna – no one could be sure. Certainly the Dictator, Sulla, had not liked or trusted him, and his family had thought it as well to obtain for him a post away from Rome in Asia Minor where his obvious ambition and the disconcerting gaze of his dark, penetrating eyes would arouse less apprehension. There he had come to the notice of the homosexual King of Bithynia in whose bed, it was widely reported, he had spent many libidinous hours; and this supposed affair was to be held against him by his enemies throughout the coming years.
Yet after his return to Rome on Sulla's death he had soon gained a reputation in the courts as a talented pleader whose rather high-pitched voice was offset by firm, impassioned and eloquent gestures. To improve these oratorical skills he had gone to Rhodes to pursue his studies under a celebrated Greek rhetorician who taught on the island. He had certainly improved his skills; he had also become renowned for his ruthlessness: on the journey out his ship had been attacked by pirates who had held him to ransom. They had treated him well enough and had released him unharmed when the ransom was paid. But he had sworn that he would have his revenge; and, as soon as he could, he went after them with a company of soldiers he had raised for the purpose. He came upon them, captured them, and had them all crucified, their throats cut first by way of mercy.
Back in Rome once more, Caesar had reappeared in the courts. He had become active in the College of Priests to which he had been elected in 81 B.C., and, after a time spent in the army as a junior officer, had come to the fore as a young aristocrat who, while proudly tracing his ancestry back through Romulus as far as the goddess Venus, had no patience with the unyielding conservatism of the established government. He had also, following the death of his first wife, married again, having carefully chosen a bride who could provide him with the ample wealth which was not only demanded by his extravagance and taste for luxury but which was still essential for the pursuit of high political office in Rome.
3. Julius Caesar, who became Dictator for life in 44 B.C. Soon afterwards he was murdered and died at the foot of Pompey's statue.
For the moment the great names in Rome remained Crassus and Pompey; and in order to promote his own ambitions, Caesar was prepared for the moment to further theirs. And so the three men rose together. In 65 B.C. Caesar was appointed Aedile, an office which, since it included responsibility for the provision of entertainments for the people of Rome, as well as for the maintenance of the city's buildings, gave its holder unrivalled opportunities to make himself popular. Eagerly seizing these opportunities, Caesar put on more spectacular circuses, wild beast shows and gladiatorial combats than Rome had ever witnessed before. From the office of Aedile, he quickly progressed to that of Pontifex Maximus, and in 62 B.C. to that of Praetor which took him to Spain where he showed himself to be as gifted a general as an orator and where he extracted so much money from defeated tribesmen that he was able not only to add to his own wealth and to gain the loyalty of his soldiers by lavish rewards but also to secure useful allies in Rome by sending part of the plunder home.
So, step by step, Caesar advanced to power, divorcing his second wife and marrying instead Calpurnia, daughter of a Senator soon to be Consul. The consulship was now almost within Caesar's own grasp. And, following merciless campaigns in Gaul and two invasions of Britain, which won him even greater renown and riches, he was ready to challenge Pompey for supreme power.
Caesar's other former colleague, Crassus, had already been killed in Mesopotamia; but the elimination of Pompey, by 52 B.C. sole Consul in Rome, was not so easily obtained. Caesar had thought at first of strengthening his alliance with him by suggesting that he should divorce Calpurnia and marry Pompey's daughter while pompey himself should marry a young relative of Caesar. Pompey chose, however, to marry the daughter of one of Rome's oldest and most distinguished families, the head of which he invited to share the consulship with him. And, after this, Caesar gradually came to the decision that was to lead him in 49 B.C., at the age of fifty-one, to take his army south across the Rubicon, the small stream between Ravenna and Rimini which divided Gaul south of the Alps from Italy, even though this meant defying Rome's law of treason which forbade a provincial governor to lead troops out of his territories. As he approached the Rubicon he said to his officers, ‘Even now we might draw back; but once across that little bridge, then the whole issue will be with the sword.’
So it was to be. At first there was little resistance as Caesar marched south through Italy. He was joined at Rimini by Gaius Scribonius Curio, an influential Tribune of the People from Rome, whose support he had bought by paying off his debts. He was also welcomed there by another Roman Tribune, the intelligent, strong and forthright Mark Antony. Together they marched on Rome, while Pompey retreated southwards into Campania, thence to Brindisi and across the Adriatic towards the Balkans to the place where the decisive battle between him and Caesar was to be fought.
Disappointed in his hopes of winning the support of Cicero who, disliking him intensely, went off to join Pompey, Caesar was also disappointed by the halfhearted reception accorded to him in Rome by the Senate. Although distrustful of
4. and 4a. A book illumination based on Mantegna's ‘Triumph of Julius Caesar’, depicting soldiers carrying booty.
Pompey, most of the senior Senators were equally suspicious of Caesar, particularly after he had appropriated the contents of the state treasury in the Temple of Saturn. But, with or without the concurrence of the old aristocracy, Caesar was determined to rule in Rome; and, since he could not become Consul, as elections for this office had to be supervised by the Senators who currently held the office, both of whom had left the city declaring their support of Pompey, he had himself created Dictator instead. Then, having done what he could to deal with the financial crisis in Rome precipitated by these disturbances, he set off to fight his rival.
Overwhelming Pompey's forces on the plain of Pharsalus, Caesar pursued him to Egypt where Pompey was murdered by officers of the boy King Ptolemy XIII who offered his head to Caesar as a peace offering upon his landing at Alexandria. Caesar was not, however, to be so easily persuaded to re-embark. He needed to raise money in Egypt, and he made up his mind not to leave until he had it. To remain, indeed, became not so much a necessity as a pleasure once he had met King Ptolemy's 21-year-old half-sister, the joint-ruler of the country, Cleopatra VII. Driven into exile by Ptolemy's regency council, she now returned secretly and was brought to see Caesar in the palace where he was staying in Alexandria, smuggled into his presence tied up in a sleeping-bag. Caesar was immediately enchanted by her, and she was intrigued by him. They became lovers, and she had a child whom she called Caesarion. This liaison with the young and captivating Cleopatra, whose beautiful voice was ‘like an instrument with many strings’, brought Caesar into conflict with the Egyptian army which supported Ptolemy XIII. But the army was defeated, Ptolemy was killed, Egypt became a client state, and Cleopatra was confirmed as queen, with her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, as joint sovereign for mere convention's sake. Then, after further victories in Asia Minor and in Africa, Caesar returned to Rome to celebrate his glorious successes in four Triumphs which eclipsed even the magnificence of those of his dead rival Pompey.
The immense cost of the spectacular Triumphs of Caesar, which were to be commemorated in the canvases of Mantegna, would have exhausted the fortunes of most other generals. But Caesar still had money to spare for more lasting celebrations of his victories, and he decided upon a complete reconstruction and enlargement of the Forum,1 that traditional meeting-place, the heart of all the public life of the city, the scene of speeches and elections, of funeral services and sacrifices to the gods, of Triumphs and religious processions, sometimes of executions and of gladiatorial combats, often of celebrations such as the banquet Caesar himself gave here in 45 B.C. to 22,000 guests. Not content with the reconstruction of the Forum, Caesar also spent huge sums of money upon the restoration of the meeting-place of the Senate, the Curia,2 upon building a new Rostra,3 or orators’ platform, at the Forum's Capitoline end, and upon the erection of the Basilica Julia4 to the south of the Via Sacra.5
This magnificent Basilica was entirely faced with marble. Its central hall, marked out with squares for games, was surrounded by a gallery supported by thirty-six columns. Here the lawyers held their courts, and the Centumviri tried important suits in civil law. These drew crowds of spectators who showed a passionate interest in the legal processes and rhetorical flights of oratory with which they were conducted. The acoustics were notoriously bad: when the four ‘chambers’ into which the Centumviri were divided were all trying separate cases at the same time the confusion was appalling, and the noise made all the more tremendous by the supporters whom some advocates paid to accompany them to the Basilica in order to cheer at appropriate intervals. It sometimes happened that the speech of an advocate with a particularly strong voice would resound through the building so loudly that no other speakers could be heard; on one occasion, a powerful and moving plea delivered in the thunderous tones of Galerius Trachalus was vigorously applauded not only by the crowds of people in his own chamber but in all the others as well.
North of the Basilica Julia, built as an integral part of the Forum of Caesar, was the Temple of Venus the Mother, Venus Genetrix,6 from whom Caesar's family claimed to be descended. Outside the temple stood an equestrian statue of Caesar himself, the horse, by Lysippus, taken from a monument of Alexander the Great; and inside was a statue by Arcesilaus of Venus with her breasts adorned with pearls. Beside it was a gilt-bronze statue of Cleopatra.
The Egyptian queen had come to Rome with her son, Caesarion, ostensibly to ratify a treaty of alliance, but in reality to be with her lover, who installed her in great luxury in a house on the east bank of the Tiber beneath the Aventine hill. Her ‘insolence’ while she was staying there enraged Cicero who confessed to his friend, Atticus, that he detested her; and Cicero was far from being alone in his intense dislike of her and in his distrust of the man upon whose protection she relied. Those who attributed to her influence Caesar's plans to establish public libraries on the Egyptian model in Rome, and his appointment of an Egyptian astronomer to supervise the revision of the dislocated Roman calendar, could not complain that her influence was malign; but other innovations, such as religious rituals practised in Alexandria where rulers were worshipped as gods, seemed to many of Caesar's critics clear evidence of his desire to become a godlike ruler himself.
Caesar's achievements could not be denied. For instance, by resettling the workless destitute of Rome, as well as former legionaries, in foreign colonies he did much to alleviate the problems of poverty and unemployment in the city; and by increasing the number of Senators and widening the areas in Italy from which they could be chosen, he made the Senate a far more representative body than it had formerly been. Yet he contrived at the same time alarmingly to increase his own personal power. He had a law passed enabling him personally to choose candidates for high office; he adopted the title Imperator, signifying his supreme command of the armed forces of Rome; he then had himself appointed Dictator in Perpetuity, the letters signifying his elevation to this new office being stamped around his profile on the coinage of Rome, which for the first time bore the image of a living citizen. His striking features were also to be seen in numerous portrait busts, fine examples of an art form in which the Romans now excelled; and these were displayed throughout the city and its surrounding provinces. It was whispered that he would soon revive the kingship; and the rumours were intensified when two staunchly Republican Tribunes of the People, who had removed a diadem from the head of the Dictator's statue and had arrested the ringleaders of a crowd which hailed Caesar as king, were deposed by the servile Senate.
In the hope of putting an end to these reports of his unbridled ambition, Caesar arranged with Mark Antony to make a public display in the Forum of his loyalty to the Republic. The occasion, so Plutarch related, was the festival of the Lupercalia held in February in honour of the fertility god Faunus: ‘At this time many of the magistrates and young men of noble families run through the city naked; and in their jesting and merry-making strike those whom they meet with thongs. And many women of high rank purposely stand in their way, holding out their hands to be struck like schoolchildren, believing that they will be granted an easy delivery if pregnant or become fertile if barren.’ Caesar, sitting on a golden throne above the Rostra and wearing a triumphal robe, watched this ceremony; and Antony, who was the Dictator's fellow-Consul and one of the priests of the Lupercalia, took part in the sacred running. When he came to the Forum the crowd made way for him. He was carrying a diadem with a wreath of laurel round it, which he held out to Caesar, who twice ostentatiously pushed it away.
Caesar's action was cheered by the crowds in the Forum. But the stories about his ambitions persisted; and, when it became known that he was to embark upon an expedition against the Parthians and had appointed his own political supporters with plenipotentiary powers to represent him while he was away, the opposition against him crystallized. At the centre of the plot to dispose of him were Gaius Cassius Longinus, a proud and hot-tempered soldier who was bitterly disappointed in not being given a command in the Parthian expedition; an impoverished follower of Cassius, Publius Casca; and Cassius's brother-in-law, Marcus Brutus, a former devoted protégé of Caesar and, so some people claimed, his illegitimate son. A fervent Republican, he was inordinately proud of his supposed descent from that Brutus who had deposed the last of the Etruscan kings of Rome.
Caesar, while recognizing well enough that he was far from universally admired or liked, seemed to discount all warnings that he might be in danger. Indeed, he disdainfully remained seated when one day a delegation of Senators came to present him with various laudatory decrees, and he went so far as to disband his personal bodyguard.
On 15 March 44 B.C., shortly before he was due to leave for his campaign against the Parthians, he attended a meeting of the Senate in the Curia Pompeia, an assembly hall attached to the Theatre of Pompey.7 As Caesar approached the hall a man pushed a note of warning into his hand, but he did not trouble to read it. He entered the building alone and defenceless, Mark Antony, who had accompanied him thus far, being detained at the door in conversation by one of the conspirators. Other conspirators crowded round him as he walked towards his chair, pretending to support a petition made to him by one Tullius Cimber on behalf of an exiled brother. Suddenly Tullius took hold of Caesar's toga with both hands and pulled it from his back as a signal for the attack. The first blow was struck by Casca who missed his aim and merely scratched Caesar just below the throat. Caesar jumped away, dragging his toga free and, grabbing Casca's knife with one hand, used the other to stab him in the arm with the point of his metal pen.
So it began. And, as the other conspirators crowded around Caesar, baring their daggers, those who were not in the conspiracy were so horror-struck that they stood transfixed while the victim, driven this way and that, was stabbed time and again until the white of his tunic was reddened with blood.
Some say that Caesar fought back against all the rest [wrote Plutarch], darting about to avoid the blows and crying out for help, but when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he covered his head with his toga and sank down to the ground. Either by chance or because he was pushed there by his murderers, he fell down against the pedestal on which the statue of Pompey stood, and the pedestal was drenched with his blood, so that one might have thought that Pompey himself was presiding over this act of vengeance against his enemy, who lay there at his feet struggling convulsively under so many blows.
Brutus stepped forward as though he wished to make a speech. But the Senators, unwilling to wait for him, rushed out of the building and fled to their homes, their excitement and terror infecting the Roman people, some of whom bolted their doors while others ran from their homes and shops to see where the assassination had taken place.
As Antony went into hiding, Brutus and his collaborators, ‘still hot and eager from the murder’, marched to the Capitol, holding up their daggers in front of them, calling out that liberty had been restored and inviting distinguished people whom they met to join their procession. The next day Brutus made a speech which was listened to in complete silence, indicating, so Plutarch thought, that the people both pitied Caesar and respected Brutus. And, as though in recognition of this popular feeling, the Senate voted that there should be no alteration made in any of the measures passed by Caesar while in power, yet at the same time Brutus and his friends were given honours and high rewards. ‘Everyone thought, therefore, that matters were not only settled but settled in the best possible way.’
Matters, however, were far from settled. ‘The state of things is perfectly shocking,’ one of Caesar's associates reported. ‘There is no way out of the mess. For if a man with Caesar's genius failed, who can hope to succeed?’ The Dictator was dead; but the Republic was not restored: power remained in the hands of those who could command the support of the legionaries and it could be seized by any man who, assured of this support, could force the Senate to accept an autarchy.
Mark Antony, still Consul, saw himself as that man. When Caesar's body was brought back to the Forum from Pompey's Theatre, he made a moving funeral oration which Shakespeare's imagination has rendered unforgettable. Antony's words, the sight of Caesar's lacerated body and the rumoured contents of the dead man's will which was said to have bequeathed a legacy to each Roman citizen, combined to arouse the people to frenzy. They tore down railings, they smashed benches and tables to make a pyre upon which Caesar's body was burned; they then rampaged through the city with blazing brands, setting fire to the houses of
5. Augustus, Julius Caesar's adopted son and heir, the first of the Roman emperors, who claimed to have transformed Rome from a city of brick into one of marble.
his assassins. Brutus and Cassius escaped from Rome, and Antony later allowed them to assume commands in the East.
Antony's general policy was, indeed, one of appeasement. He issued orders in Caesar's name, having taken possession of his papers, and he erected a statue in the Forum dedicated to Caesar, ‘Glorious Father of the Country'; but he stamped out a rapidly developing cult of Caesar's divinity and abolished for ever the title of Dictator. In his endeavours to take over control of the state, Antony was, however, at a serious disadvantage, for Caesar had nominated as his personal heir his great-nephew and adopted son, a brilliant, astute, calculating soldier, not yet nineteen years old, who now took the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. For a time Antony ruled in conjunction with the young Octavian and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, an aristocratic former deputy of Caesar who had proposed him for the dictatorship. These three men defeated a Republican army at the battle of Philippi after which both Brutus and Cassius killed themselves. Cicero was put to death; and despite Antony's earlier objections, Caesar was declared a god, and Octavian was thus elevated to the status of a god's son.
Octavian made much of this relationship; and when he and Antony, having disposed of Lepidus, divided the Roman empire between them, coins in the western part of the empire, whose capital was at Rome, described Octavian, its ruler, as ‘Son of the Divine Julius’. At the same time, in the eastern empire Antony, now Cleopatra's lover, endorsed her claim that Caesarion was Caesar's son and rightful heir. The inevitable and final clash between the two rival parties came at Actium outside the Gulf of Ambracia. Here in 31 B.C. Octavian's fleet, commanded by his friend, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, overwhelmed the ships of Antony and Cleopatra who fled to Egypt where, the next year, they both killed themselves at Alexandria.
Vastly enriched by Cleopatra's treasure, Octavian returned to Rome where by gradual and cautious degrees, shrewdly and carefully placating Republican sentiments and skilfully taking advantage of the Roman people's desire for peace after civil strife, he established himself as the leading man of the state. Short of stature, often ill and more often believing himself to be ill, he did not possess the personal magnetism of Julius Caesar. Nor did he possess Caesar's great gifts as a general; but he chose his deputies with well-judged discrimination, kept strict discipline within the legions and retained the loyalty of his friends, as well as the support of some of the greatest poets and writers who flourished in his time. Ovid, immoral and self-indulgent, offended him and was exiled to Romania; while Livy's reservations about Julius Caesar and his admiration for Caesar's enemies led Octavian to refer to him as a ‘Pompeian’. But Virgil expressed his approval of Octavian and so did Horace who became his friend, though he had fought against him under Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.
Octavian could be ruthless, not only with his opponents but also with those members of his family who offended his taste for a simple and well-regulated life: he banished his daughter, and then his granddaughter, when they fell into company of which he disapproved. Yet he was never a tyrant, and his adoption of
6. Figures in the frieze of the Altar of Augustan Peace, which was consecrated on 4 July 13 B.C.
the grave and exalted name Augustus, signifying a man who enjoyed the divine gift of carrying out his enterprises under favourable auspices, and later the title of Pater Patriae was accepted by the Romans who recognized his firm sense of duty and who welcomed his reforms and the lasting peace which accompanied them. This peace was commemorated in Rome by that beautiful monument of white marble, the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, which was consecrated in 13 B.C. in a ceremony attended, as the frieze depicts, by great officers of state accompanied by lictors with their rods, by priests and by Flamens in their strange spiked skull caps, by members of the imperial family and by Augustus himself.8
The Pater Patriae kept the people of Rome content with liberal supplies of food and lavish entertainments. He established an effective police force, a fire-brigade and a strong, permanent bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard. He also inaugurated a building programme which was more ambitious by far than Julius Caesar's and by which, so he proudly declared, he transformed a city of brick into one of marble. With the help of a team of architects, mostly no doubt Greek, he constructed a new Forum to the north and at right angles to his adoptive father's, flanking it with immense colonnades and two large side apses between a temple filled with treasures and dedicated to Mars the Avenger,9 in commemoration of his victory at Philippi where retribution for Caesar's murder was exacted. Another splendid new temple was raised in honour of his deified father,10 and, nearby, a new Rostra. Augustus also ordered the reconstruction of the Basilica Julia which had been burned down, as well as of the ancient shrine of the Lares and Penates, household gods of the Roman state, and of the ancient Basilica Aemilia which had been used for generations as a meeting-place and as a centre for money changers, remains of whose copper coins fused into the stone by the heat of fire during a Gothic invasion of the declining Empire can still be seen in the green stains in the Basilica's pavement.11 At the same time, various members of Augustus's family and friends were responsible for the restoration of the Temple of Saturn,12 the treasury of the Roman state, the Temples of Concord13 and of Castor and Pollux,14 and the official house of the Pontifex Maximus.15
On the Capitol, Augustus himself restored, at what he proudly described as ‘great expense’, the fine temple of Jupiter; and, in fulfilment of a vow he had made after having escaped being struck by lightning in Spain, he built a new temple to Jupiter Tonans.16 On the Palatine hill he erected a huge new temple to Apollo with fine porticoes and libraries at the side,17 and he converted the Lupercal, the cave in which Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the wolf, into an ornamental grotto.18 On the Quirinal he reconstructed the temple of Quirinus where Romulus was worshipped as Mars;19 on the Aventine he restored the ancient Temples of Diana20 and of Juno Regina.21 Below them he built a huge circular Etruscan mausoleum with a steeply pitched conical roof of earth planted with cypress trees.22 And, downstream from this, opposite the island in the Tiber reached by the Ponte Fabricio, he completed the Theatre of Marcellus which, named after his nephew, was later to be transformed into one of Rome's grand Renaissance palaces.23
After the death of Augustus in A.D. 14, his strong-willed widow, Livia, continued to live on the outskirts of Rome in a fine villa at Prima Porta. The exquisitely decorated plaster of one of the rooms, painted with birds and flowers in a trompel'œil manner that makes the representation of a little bird-cage astonishingly real, has been preserved in the Museo delle Terme.24 Livia also had a smaller house on the Palatine, perhaps the one now known as the Casa di Livia;25 and this, too, had walls beautifully painted with fruits and flowers and with mythological scenes set amidst temples and porticoes. It was here on the Palatine that Livia's wary and grimly sarcastic son, Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, built himself the palace
7. Livia, the strong-willed wife of the Emperor Augustus, whose house on the Palatine was probably that now known as the Casa di Livia.
8. A coin of the reign of the Emperor Nero (A.D. 54–68). He had ‘fair hair’, Suetonius said, ‘a handsome though not attractive face, blue myopic eyes and a thick neck’.
known as the Domus Tiberiana, the first of those grand imperial buildings which were soon to spread all over the hill.26 But grand as it must have been, this palace, whose floors disappeared in the sixteenth century beneath the Orti Farnesiani,27 was almost modest compared with the fantastic Golden House of the Emperor Nero.
Nero was the great-grandson of Tiberius's wife, Julia, Augustus's daughter, who had formerly been married to Agrippa, commander of the Roman forces at Actium. By Agrippa, Julia had had five children, the youngest of whom had given birth to Caligula, Tiberius's successor. Caligula had spent much of his youth on the island of Capri, where Tiberius had spent the last ten years of his life in secluded retirement, and when he came to the imperial throne was still only twenty-four years old. Arrogant, profligate and mentally deranged, Caligula had no taste for the business of government and ruled through his secretaries, in the same way as Tiberius had governed through such deputies as Sejanus, whose overweening ambition had led to his execution in the ancient water cistern later converted into the dark dungeons of the Mamertine prison.28 But Caligula was not emperor for long. At the beginning of 41 he and his wife and daughter were all murdered by officers of the Praetorian Guard. Increasingly influential in imperial affairs, they had secured his succession less than four years previously and now arranged for the throne to pass to his well-meaning, though eccentric and probably spastic uncle, Claudius.
Claudius was married to Messalina, a lascivious and malevolent woman whom he was persuaded to have killed after she had taken part in a form of public wedding ceremony with her lover. He then married his niece Agrippina, a great-granddaughter of Augustus who was widely suspected of being responsible for poisoning him with a dish of deadly mushrooms. Nero was Agrippina's son by a previous and very rich husband.
He was sixteen when he became emperor, and he gave good grounds for hope that he would be a generous and discerning ruler. He was described as handsome with an imposing manner, though completely under the dominance of his formidable mother whom he both loved and feared. Yet it was not long before he displayed those characteristics of monstrous cruelty, abandoned profligacy and insane vanity described in the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius. ‘His body was blotchy and repulsive,’ Suetonius said. ‘He had blue myopic eyes and a thick neck. He had a paunch and his legs were excessively thin. He enjoyed good health. In spite of the immoderate luxury of his habits, he was ill on only three occasions in the fourteen years of his reign, and even then he never gave up drinking or changed his indulgent way of life… or the manner of his entertainments.’
The most notorious and profligate of these entertainments [according to Tacitus] were those given in Rome by Tigellinus [his unpleasant Sicilian principal minister and joint commander of the Praetorian Guard]. A banquet was set out upon a barge on a lake in the palace grounds. This barge was towed about by vessels picked out with gold and ivory and rowed by debauched youths who were chosen in accordance with their proficiency in libidinous practices. Birds and beasts had been collected from distant countries, and sea monsters from the ocean. On the banks of the lake were brothels filled with ladies of high rank. By these were prostitutes, stark naked, indulging in indecent gestures and language. As night approached the groves and summer-houses rang with songs and were ablaze with lights. Nero disgraced himself with every kind of abomination, natural and unnatural, leaving no further depth of debauchery to which he could sink.
Having arranged for the death of his mother who, after escaping murder by drowning, was battered to death by a gang of sailors, Nero then ordered the execution of his 19-year-old wife who died in a hot bath, bound with cords and with all her veins cut. Afterwards he married his mistress who died after a vicious kick from him when she was pregnant. Yet, depraved and monstrously cruel as he was, Nero did have artistic gifts and worked hard to develop them. He wrote poetry; he spent long hours practising on the harp; he endeavoured to improve his singing voice by lying with lead weights on his chest in painful attempts to strengthen his diaphragm; he studied Greek literature and sought to introduce Greek games and Greek contests in the arts, going so far as to perform himself in
9. An imaginative reconstruction of Nero's Golden House, which was opened to the public by his successors. The Colosseum was built on the site of the lake.
public, to the horror of the upper classes, not only as musician, poet and actor but even as charioteer. Nero also had pretensions and talents – as an amateur architect, and seems to have taken the deepest interest in the construction in 61 of the gymnasium and baths known as the Thermae Neroniae.29
The Emperor's opportunities as a builder were spectacularly increased when, during the moonlit night of 18 July 64, a fire broke out in some shops near the Palatine and, fanned by the wind, soon spread uncontrollably throughout the city.
Furiously the destroying flames swept on [wrote Tacitus], first over the level ground, then up the heights, then again plunging into the hollows, with a rapidity which outstripped all efforts to cope with them, the ancient city lending itself to their progress by its narrow, tortuous streets and its misshapen blocks of buildings. The shrieks of panic-stricken women; the weakness of the aged, and the helplessness of the young; the efforts of some to help themselves, of others to help their neighbours; the hurrying of those who dragged their sick along, the lingering of those who waited for them – all added to the scene of utter confusion.
Nero was at Antium when the fire began. He hurried back to Rome to help direct the fire-fighting and to supervise the provision of shelter for the homeless. But any credit he might have been given for this was dispelled by a well-founded rumour that when the flames were at their height he had mounted a stage in his palace and had likened modern calamities to ancient disasters by singing a tale of the sack of Troy.
The fire, which had burned fiercely for six days, left most of Rome in smouldering ruins. Of the fourteen regions into which the city was then divided, only four remained intact. Three had been burned to the ground, and little had escaped in the other seven. The Emperor's palace, the Domus Transitoria, had been utterly destroyed. Nero set to work with a will, ordering the reconstruction of the city on more regular lines than had been possible in the haphazard, piecemeal building of the past, widening the streets, creating open spaces and providing tall apartment blocks for the workers who had lost their homes. Most of the Emperor's energies, however, went into the planning with his architects, Severus and Celer, of what became known as the Golden House, that magnificent palace whose porticoes, pavilions, baths, temples, fountains and gardens sprawled in lavish profusion across a 200-acre park extending from the Palatine hill across the valley to the Esquiline and taking in parts of the Caelian hill as well. In the valley was a large artificial lake surrounded by fanciful grottoes, columns and gazebos; and towering over the colonnaded approach to the golden façade of the palace itself was a colossal gilded bronze statue, 120 feet high, of Nero himself, the hero of the enterprise.
Inside the palace were white, painted rooms from which flowers fell upon the guests through fretted ivory ceilings; walls were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious stones; concealed jets in the cornices sprayed fine showers of rose water and scent; the roof of a great dining-hall ‘revolved slowly day and night in time with the sky’; streams of water flowed down a staircase over a glistening mosaic floor; water from the sea and sulphur-water from Tivoli poured into the palace's baths; on every side were works of art from Greece including, perhaps, the Laocoön.30
Little now remains of this Domus Aurea, which Nero's successors converted to public use before it was swept by a raging fire in A.D. 104. But in the fifteenth century some of its rooms, with delicately painted stucco reliefs by the artist known as Fabullus, were discovered buried in the earth beneath the Baths of Trajan; and these rooms, to which artists were lowered by ropes so that they could inspect the work of their great and ancient predecessor, were the inspiration of both Raphael and Giovanni da Udine for their decorations of the open galleries of the Vatican.31
When the palace was finished Nero declared, ‘Good! Now at last I can begin to live like a human being!’ But, in fact, he had only a short time left to enjoy the fantastic setting he had created for himself. Hated by the people of Rome, he was also detested by the Senate whose independence was lost and whose members, in constant danger of being tried for treason, were denied high office by the Emperor's preference for Greeks and orientals. A group of Senators and others conspired to replace him. The plot was discovered, however; the conspirators were hunted
10. The Emperor Vespasian, in whose reign (A.D. 69–79) the Colosseum was begun.
down and executed; and Nero became more tyrannical and megalomaniacal than ever. Identifying himself with several gods, including Apollo, god of the sun and of the arts, he claimed to be above the natural laws that governed mortal man. When news of fresh revolts reached him, he merely laughed, ordered another banquet, and composed more songs, proclaiming that he had only to appear and to sing to bring the world to his feet.
Then one night in 68 the Emperor awoke from a troubled dream and found the palace strangely quiet. His guests had fled and even his guards had gone. He ran through the empty rooms and, returning to his bedroom, discovered that a golden box of poisons which he kept there had been removed. He shouted for the gladiator, Spiculus, who could, if the occasion demanded, kill him with a single, painless blow of his sword. But Spiculus had fled with the others. At length Nero came upon an attendant who offered him refuge in his house beyond the city walls.
He mounted a horse just as he was, ‘barefooted and with an old faded cloak thrown over the tunic,’ Suetonius recorded. ‘His head was covered with a handkerchief across his face… All of a sudden there was an earth tremor, and lightning flashed right in his face. Terrified, he heard soldiers in a nearby camp cursing him, and he heard a passer-by say, “These men must be after Nero.”’ His horse took fright and shied at the stench of a corpse which had been left on the road, and the jolt pulled the handkerchief from his head. A veteran of the Praetorian Guard, recognizing him, saluted out of habit.
Outside the house he waited while a tunnel was dug so that he could enter it unobserved. He scooped up some water from a pond, murmuring, ‘This is Nero's iced water now.’ He crawled on all fours through the tunnel into the nearest room where he lay down on a thin mattress covered by his old cloak. He was offered a piece of coarse brown bread but, although he was hungry, he refused to eat. Abandoning all hope, he ordered that a trench be dug just large enough to take his fat body, and that wood and water should be fetched so that the last rites could be properly observed. He burst into tears as the materials were gathered, crying out again and again, ‘What a great artist dies in me!’
A message was brought to the house: the Emperor had been declared a public enemy by the Senate and, as soon as he was discovered, was to be executed as criminals had been in the days of his ancestors. He asked what kind of death that was, and was told he would be stripped naked, tied to a stake and flogged to death. He picked up a dagger and tried its edge, but he lacked the courage to use it. Asking for someone to set him an example of suicide, he reproached himself for his lack of resolution. ‘It is a disgrace for me to go on living like this,’ he said in Greek. ‘It is unworthy of a man like Nero.’ But it was not until he heard the clatter of horses' hooves outside that he summoned the courage to strike the blow. Whispering a line from Homer in a trembling voice – ‘and in my ears there rings the beat of swift-footed horses’ – he seized the dagger and, with help, pushed it into his throat.
After the death of Nero, the last of the emperors from the family of Augustus, the Empire, which for all the many failings of the imperial court had been governed well in his reign, was torn by civil war. Emperor followed briefly upon emperor. First Galba, the rich governor of Nearer Spain, was hailed by his soldiers and marched on Rome, but he was soon murdered. Then Otho, his successor, was driven to commit suicide. And Vitellius, who followed Otho, was lynched in a Roman street. Quietly waiting his opportunity, however, was a 60-year-old man whom Nero, having once disgraced for falling asleep during one of the imperial song recitals, had appointed to crush a revolt in the province of Judaea. This was the wary, hard-working, autocratic yet amiable Vespasian, whose simple tastes befitted the son of an honest Sabine tax-collector. Proclaimed Emperor in Egypt, where he had served after leaving Judaea, Vespasian declined to leave for Rome until he had consulted the oracles. But these being favourable, he entered the city, and under his rule, which lasted for ten years from 69, Rome slowly recovered from the damage which the months of civil disturbances and the wild extravagance of Nero and Vitellius had inflicted upon it. His financial measures were unconventional but effective; his solid, approachable character, his unaffected love for the simple, country life to which he had grown accustomed as a child in a village in the Sabine hills, and his rugged, bluff good humour endeared him to the Roman citizens. Maintaining a regular daily routine, Vespasian rose early, received friends and deputations as he dressed, attended conscientiously to affairs of state, drove out for a ride in his carriage, went to bed with one of his mistresses, had a bath, then enjoyed an ample though never exotic dinner, often making a crude joke as he ate. His jokes were celebrated, and one in particular was cited as characteristic. It concerned a tax which he had levied on the ammoniac urine that the Roman fullers collected from the city's public urinals to use in the dyeing of cloth. Vespasian's son regarded this tax as unseemly and voiced his objections to his father. Vespasian held a coin under his son's nose, urging him to notice that gold had no smell.
With the money that he raised, Vespasian was able to restore the buildings which had been damaged or burned in the reigns of his predecessors and to construct so many new ones that he felt himself justified in inscribing on his coinage the legend, Roma Resurgens. Appearing on building-sites with a basket of masonry on his shoulder, he gave personal encouragement to the redevelopment of the Capitol and the Forum; he lavishly restored a sanctuary dedicated to Claudius;32 he erected in a new Forum33 the now vanished Temple of Peace to house treasures looted from Jerusalem;34 and he began, on the site of Nero's drained lake, that most famous of Rome's ancient monuments, the Colosseum.