Now all that was about to change. While Agrippina lived, she had taken the heat off Seneca and Burrus. With her gone, they stood exposed. Now it was they, not she, who were the spoilers of Nero’s fun. With Nero having slipped his mother’s leash, however, they were about to realize that there was nothing they could do to control him. The Roman empire was about to discover what kind of man its emperor really was.
NERO’S NEW FRIENDS
AD 62, the eighth year of Nero’s rule. According to the historian Tacitus, ‘the forces of good were in decline’. Those forces were the voices of Seneca and Burrus. To date, their control over the emperor had been clever and highly successful. Burrus was a knight, born in Gaul, who had risen to become the head of the Praetorian Guard. Severe in character and disfigured in one hand, he acted as a moral barometer for Nero. Agrippina had once been Burrus’s sponsor, and out of loyalty to her he had vehemently opposed Nero in his murder plans, refusing to have any part in her death. Nonetheless, once the murder had been committed, he dutifully ensured that the Praetorian Guards stayed loyal to the emperor. This support was critical to the success of Nero’s regime. But it was his tutor who was perhaps an even more pivotal figure.
Seneca was a senator from an Italian family of Córdoba in Spain. He was also one of the greatest philosophers in Roman history. Urbane, charming and fatherly, he used his intelligence to guide and educate his adolescent charge. In so doing, he became one of the most influential voices in the Roman empire. The importance of Seneca to Nero can be seen in the variety of roles he played. He composed Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate and people. It was rapturously received. For the festival of Saturnalia in AD 54, he entertained the emperor by composing a satire lambasting the regime of the buffoon Claudius. Playing on the word ‘deification’, it was called The Pumpkinification of Claudius, and it had the court in stitches. As amicus (friend) of the emperor, Seneca also sat on the imperial council, which met in the palace with the leading senators. As a result, those senators heartily approved of Nero’s wise decisions.
Perhaps Seneca’s greatest role, however, was damage limitation; he knew how to clear up Nero’s mess. His greatest coup was to manage the senators’ reaction to the murder of Agrippina. His deft handling of the situation meant that they duly bought the official version of events: Agrippina had been plotting the murder of Nero, the plot had been detected, and Agrippina had paid the price. The emperor was now safe. His public relations exercise was so effective that, far from expressing horror at the matricide, Rome gave thanks to the gods. The state, after all, had been saved. Seneca, one might have supposed, was indispensable to the emperor. But there was one task he set himself that would ultimately prove his undoing. The key lesson he set for his young charge was how to be a good emperor. It would become his life’s greatest project and his life’s greatest failure.
We know what Seneca taught Nero because his great work of political philosophy, On Clemency, has survived. The lesson began with a simple statement of fact. The position Nero held, Seneca would have told the young emperor, was one of supreme power. He was the ‘arbiter of life and death for the nations’; in his power rested ‘what each person’s lot and state shall be’; by his lips Fortune proclaimed ‘what gifts she would bestow on each human being’.10 The key to being a good emperor, however, was not just to acknowledge that power, but to exercise it with restraint. If he could show clemency, he would become a good emperor, like Augustus; if not, he would be nothing more than a despised tyrant. In fact, Nero would do well to emulate Augustus in following this argument to its conclusion: above all, instructed Seneca, the emperor must disguise his absolute power.
Nero at first had been an obedient student. He had revived the traditional partnership with the senators: they and not the cronies of the imperial palace were, after all, the true pillars of justice, political wisdom and administrative experience. Together, Nero and the Senate ruled Rome as if they were equals. The idea that Seneca had sown in the young man was that of civilitas: the affability and accessibility of the emperor ‘that helps to conceal the fact of autocratic power’.11 Nero had at first played his role well, giving the impression that he was just another senator, another ordinary citizen. And yet, despite Nero’s promising start, by AD 62 he was forgetting his lines. By character he was just not cut out to be a politician. Maintaining the pretence, the theatrical illusion, that he cared what the senators really thought was fast becoming yet another burden. The truth was that, despite Seneca’s best efforts, Nero’s passions lay elsewhere.
One of these passions was for a good night out. It would amuse the young emperor and his dissolute playmates from the palace to put on a disguise, such as a freedman’s cap or a wig, and rampage around the streets of the city, drinking, carousing and getting into fights. ‘For he was in the habit of setting upon people returning home from dinner and would hurt anyone who fought back, throwing them into the drains.’12 Another of Nero’s passions from a young age was for horses. With great enthusiasm, he would follow the chariot races and their different teams. He supported the Greens over the Reds, the Whites or the Blues, much as fans follow football teams today. To attend the races and gratify his passion, he slipped out of the palace in secret, so it was said. However, his greatest love was reserved for the Greek arts: for music, poetry, singing and playing the lyre.
Nero was not only very knowledgeable about these subjects, but pursued his own practice and study of them with determination. As soon as he had become emperor, he hired as his tutor the most famous and skilled lyre-player of the day, a man called Terpnus. He even undertook the voice-strengthening exercises of professional singers: ‘. . .he would lie on his back, holding a lead tablet and cleanse his system with a syringe and with vomiting.’ Diet too was important for improving the quality of one’s singing. Apples were to be avoided as they were deemed harmful to the vocal cords, but dried figs were beneficial; and every month for a few days the emperor lived on just chives preserved in oil.13 Nero’s pursuit of these Greek interests worried Seneca and Burrus. It was not the pursuits themselves that were the problem; it was rather that Nero was dangerously close to achieving the standard of a professional performer. In the conservative circles of Roman high society of the day that just would not do.
At that time, when Rome had been the great cultural exchange centre, the exciting cosmopolis of the entire Mediterranean world for nearly two hundred years, and Greece had long been reduced to a Roman province, many Romans in the élite still laboured under an illusion. They were at heart, ran their self-serving myth, a people of tough, sturdy, self-reliant peasant-soldiers who, through grit, determination, fortitude and discipline, had forged their brilliant empire. Roman character and virtue, above all, were revealed in achievements on the battlefield and in public life. Yes, the Greek arts were good for education, perhaps even for relaxation too, but devotion to them would lead only to a breakdown in the moral fibre of Rome, turning a nation of soldiers into one of cowards, gymnasts and homosexuals. Toning up one’s oiled muscles for athletics, prancing around in a theatrical costume or singing poetic compositions to the accompaniment of a lyre had not prevented the fall of Greece. In fact, such pursuits probably caused it.14 The conservatives need only look around the streets of the city to make their point: professional actors were nothing but slaves and common prostitutes.