At midday the doors of the imperial palace were flung open. The emperor was dead, and now before the expectant Praetorian Guard stood not Claudius’s son Britannicus, but Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar. Although the sight of the boy took some of the soldiers by surprise, the arranged ceremonies of that day allowed no time for hesitation or doubt. The company of soldiers cheered Nero and speedily put him in a litter to be taken to their camp in the Servilian Gardens in the southeast part of Rome. Here Nero addressed the soldiers and, after promising them the usual gifts of money, the seventeen-year old boy was hailed emperor. With the passing of a decree in the Senate House on the same day, the senators followed suit. No one would ever know whom Claudius himself had intended to succeed him because his will was immediately suppressed.
Agrippina had achieved her greatest ambition. Her son was the most powerful man in the Roman world. At that moment, however, she could not have imagined that the tools she had used to secure power for him were now about to be turned on her. For not long after the young Nero’s rule began, a bitter power struggle developed between mother and son. Publicly Agrippina was given honour after honour. She was allowed a private bodyguard; she was made priestess of the cult of the deified Claudius; she was permitted an indirect hand in government by sitting secretly behind a sheet at council meetings held in the palace. Coins from the first years of Nero’s reign even bear heads of both the emperor and Agrippina. However, behind the polite courtly gloss of this mother–son relationship, the adolescent Nero began to lose patience with his influential, controlling kingmaker. His habitual obedience to her, he realized, was fast becoming a burden.
His mother was hard to please. She disapproved of Nero’s interest in horse racing, athletics, music and theatre. By the second year of his rule, they had clashed over his girlfriend, a former slave called Acte. Motivated perhaps by jealousy, possessiveness and fear of a rival to her son’s affections, Agrippina scolded him for having a love affair with such a vulgar, low-born woman. Nero responded, as a teenager would, by intensifying his relationship with Acte and coming close to making her his lawful wife.6 His next action, however, was tantamount to declaring all-out war. When Nero was still a boy Agrippina had scrupulously filled the imperial household with staff loyal to her. Now Nero attacked that power base by removing one of his mother’s key allies – Antonius Pallas – a freedman in charge of financial matters. Agrippina retaliated, fighting fire with fire. She knew how to win power in the palace. More than that, however, she knew how to hit the new emperor of Rome where it hurt.
One day Agrippina, in a display of anger, went around the palace, flinging her arms about and shouting out loud that she favoured not Nero, but his stepbrother Britannicus. The divine Claudius’s son was now grown up, she said, and was ‘the true and worthy heir of his father’s supreme position’.7 The cold blade of that remark opened a wound – namely, Nero’s insecurity over his claim to be emperor. The reaction Agrippina provoked in her son, however, may well have taken even her by surprise. At dinner one evening a drink was brought to Britannicus, who sat at a junior table with the children of other noblemen. Any poison in it would have been detected by the imperial tasters, so the drink was harmless, but it was deliberately made too hot, and the young boy refused it. Cold water, secretly spiked with poison, was added at the table. Thus cooled, the drink was handed back to Britannicus. Before the eyes of both Agrippina and his own sister the fourteen-year-old boy was soon convulsing uncontrollably. The person who had ordered the murder was widely believed to be Nero.
Reacting with a studied lack of worry, Nero casually claimed that Britannicus was simply having one of his epileptic fits; it was nothing out of the ordinary. The other diners saw through this excuse, but did nothing. There was nothing they could do. Containing their horror beneath glazed, outwardly normal expressions, they were paralysed: to have protested or denied it was a fit would have been to suggest murder. But equally, to have conspicuously agreed that it must have been an epileptic fit would also have been to suggest a crime because it would have been so patently a lie. While everyone hesitated, the teenage boy died. ‘Octavia, young though she was, had learnt to hide sorrow, affection, every feeling . . . After a short silence, the banquet continued.’8
The aptitude for the crimes required to hold on to imperial power had now passed from mother to son. Nonetheless, Agrippina, the determined and seasoned intriguer, did not give up the covert war against Nero for control of the palace. On the contrary, the death of Britannicus now prompted her to lend her support to Octavia; perhaps she could become a political figurehead around whom aristocrats with rival claims to be emperor would rally. A rumour circulated that Agrippina was also promoting the cause of the aristocrat Rubellius Plautus; he was in a position to claim descent from Augustus because his mother was Tiberius’s granddaughter, and Tiberius was the adopted son of Augustus. In response, Nero had Agrippina expelled from the palace and her bodyguard removed. However, it was not long before he devised a more permanent solution to the problem of his mother.
The final straw stemmed from Nero’s love life. He did not feel anything for his wife, Octavia. He wanted passionately to marry his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, the wife of his close friend Marcus Salvius Otho, and the woman who would become the great love of Nero’s life. Nero knew that his mother would never allow him to divorce Claudius’s daughter and marry his mistress. Poppaea knew it too. In private she ‘nagged and mocked him incessantly. He was under his guardian’s thumb, she said, master neither of the empire nor of himself.’9 Poppaea’s skill in needling Nero was reinforced ‘by tears and all the tricks of a lover’. Thus provoked, in the spring of AD 59 Nero summoned Anicetus and sent his mother the fatal invitation to join him for the festival of Minerva at Baiae.
With Agrippina dead, Nero felt released, free at last. The domineering influence in his life had been eliminated, and he could now rule and behave as he pleased. Indeed, there was much to celebrate. Despite the strife within the imperial palace, the first years of his rule had been far from disastrous. In fact, according to all the ancient sources, the empire thrived during Nero’s early years as emperor. Contemporary poets hailed them as a new golden age. Nero rivalled even Augustus for sheer popularity. The people loved him for the games he held, and the Senate for the respect he showed them. Abroad too there were successes to count: Rome was strengthening her eastern frontier in a successful campaign with Parthia. The empire was flourishing.
Given Nero’s youth and inexperience at governing during those first few years, how had this happened? Perhaps the empire, administered by senators and knights, ran itself? Perhaps it did not even need an active, industrious emperor, but simply a celebrity figurehead? Another answer to the question of who, if anyone, was really in charge of the empire can be traced to the two men who, according to Tacitus, had taken control of government in the first years of Nero’s rule. Their names were Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Sextus Afranius Burrus, and they had been the fledgling emperor’s two closest advisers. While the adolescent Nero was growing up, he had sought refuge with them. They protected him from his mother and indulged his interests. In exchange, he listened to their advice. However, these two men were much more than allies with good advice to offer. They were astute politicians on whom the emperor depended entirely for his popularity, for his new golden age.