A fitting symbol of Nero’s excesses was provided by the sculpture that was erected in the vestibule of his new palace: a bronze statue 36 metres (120 feet) high portraying the emperor, a crown of sunrays around his head. With such extravagances as this, it soon became clear to Nero, his advisers and the Senate that the rebuilding of Rome and, above all, the dream palace was going to cost a vast amount of money. What the senators did not reckon on, however, was that Nero would sanction outrageous means to obtain it:
Italy was ransacked for funds, and the provinces were ruined – unprivileged and privileged communities alike. Even the gods were included in the looting. Temples at Rome were robbed and emptied of the gold dedicated for the triumphs and vows, the ambitions and fears of generations of Romans.25
To pay for his new Rome Nero was not only riding roughshod over every ancient tradition. To inaugurate his new age he seemed prepared to bankrupt the empire. On his orders, a financial and political crisis was beginning to envelope the management of Rome and her provinces. Why was Nero doing it? The significance of the Golden House runs deeper than the financial crisis that the spiralling costs brought in their wake. At the same time it provides an insight into why opposition to Nero now accelerated.
The Golden House was an artistic endeavour to prove Nero’s primacy, his superiority over others, his right to be the most powerful person in the Roman state. He felt the need to do so because of the insecurity that Augustus’s hereditary monarchy promoted and that Agrippina had fostered. Now Nero believed he had found the way to settle this issue once and for all. When the palace was partly habitable, Nero was reported to have said, ‘Good! Now at last I can live like a human being’.26 Only the grandest palace the world had ever seen could mean normal living for Nero. Underlying this attitude was the reality and expression of Nero’s superiority to all others in the Roman state. Yes, parts of the palace grounds were open to the plebs, and yes, Nero certainly gave the impression of opening up his home to ordinary citizens. But even these concessions painted a picture not of a people’s palace, but of a monarch generously bequeathing gifts from his position of supremacy.27 The change in style of government from Augustus to Nero could not have been more clearly expressed. The first emperor had stressed the modesty of his villa. His house on the Palatine said, ‘I am just like any other senator.’ Nero’s said, ‘I am like no other; I am better.’ Why did he need to stress this?
When Augustus ended the civil war and established a new state around his position of emperor, the lion’s share of power was self-evidently in his hands: he had the loyalty of the army, and he had amassed an incredible personal fortune by conquering the wealth of Egypt. That power set him above all others in Rome as the first citizen, and gave him the licence to dominate the state. So long as Augustus behaved tactfully and disguised his supreme power within a form of constitutional government, others in the élite tolerated this situation. By contrast, Nero’s claim to the same position was not self-evident. He enjoyed no great respect among the armies, having had neither opportunity nor interest in winning it through military conquest. He had no outstanding sources of wealth. Heredity alone was responsible for his position. He was there by birth – just.
By AD 64 the murders of his mother Agrippina, the great-granddaughter of Augustus, and of his wife Octavia, the emperor Claudius’s daughter, had further weakened Nero’s claim to the throne. He feared that other descendants of the Julio-Claudians could make as good a case as he, and that they were now waiting in the wings, potential rivals for power. The final straw was Seneca. Increasingly estranged, Nero’s old tutor was no longer at hand to advise him on how to conceal his power, handle the Senate and govern affably with tact, openness and clemency. For all these reasons, in order to assuage the insecurity he felt over his right to be emperor, Nero turned to one solace above alclass="underline" pursuing a style of rule that asserted explicitly, and offensively, his primacy over his rivals.
Through the unrivalled glories of the Golden House, through its artistic virtues and ambitions, Nero stressed not just his excellence, but his superiority and eminence over everyone else. It was utterly unpalatable to senators and knights with ambition. By the following year a small core of them were plotting in earnest to get rid of him.
THE PLOT
What turned the grumblings and mutterings of a few disaffected aristocrats looking to improve their lot into a serious attempt on the life of the emperor was the participation of the joint head of the Praetorian Guard, Faenius Rufus. In AD 65 the able and efficient Rufus had suffered three years of insults and slanders from Tigellinus while watching him grow more powerful as the whispering voice in the infinitely suggestible emperor’s ear. Rufus brought with him other key members of Nero’s guard: colonels, company commanders and officers. Their support was critical.
The plotters were led by the senator Flavius Scaevinus, and their plan was simple: to replace Nero with one of their own, Gaius Calpurnius Piso. To their minds Piso was the ideal candidate. He came from an illustrious, aristocratic family of the republic; in more recent times it could trace associations with the Julio-Claudian dynasty as far back as Julius Caesar and Augustus. He was also popular with the plebs as a senator and lawyer who had often acted in their defence. Affable, suave and a sparkling guest at high-society parties, he was a politician who counted even Nero among his friends. But now he was preparing to betray that friendship, forced to this extreme plan, he said, by the need to rescue the freedom of the state from a tyrannical, avaricious emperor who was running Rome into the ground. Others, meanwhile, said he was motivated by pure self-interest.
The plotters hesitated until their plan was in danger of being exposed. A freedwoman named Epicharis had tried to win over Proculus, a captain of the fleet, mistaking his disaffection with Nero’s regime for a willingness to join the plot. In response, Proculus, though he had none of the conspirators’ names warned Nero, and Epicharis was kept in custody. The pressure to act was now on. The plotters gathered discreetly to decide how to kill Nero. One person suggested inviting the emperor to Piso’s luxury villa in Baiae, but Piso refused to defile the sacred guest–host relationship: it would, he said, look bad. Secretly, however, he feared that if Nero’s life were to be taken outside Rome, another rival aristocrat, Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, a descendant of Augustus, could take control of events and rob him of the fruits of the plot. Finally, the conspirators settled on taking action during games at the Circus Maximus, a place that Nero could be counted on visiting.
Before they dispersed, they acted out how they would attack the emperor. The strongest of the senators would approach Nero with a petition for financial assistance. He would then seize Nero and pin him to the ground while the disenchanted Praetorians would stab him to death. In this bloody act they would be led by the senator Scaevinus, who had taken to carrying a dagger in his toga as a totem of his intent. He had taken the weapon from a temple dedicated to the deified virtue ‘Safety’. The murder in the name of the state’s welfare, thought the assassins, would thus be lent extra credence. In reality the enactment was closer to a piece of macabre theatre – an unimaginative rerun of the assassination of that other tyrant, Julius Caesar.
The night before the crime was to take place, Scaevinus was in melancholy mood. He signed his will and settled his affairs, even freeing his slaves and giving them gifts. One slave, Milichus, was charged by his master with two final tasks: to sharpen the dagger and to prepare bandages for wounds. Milichus’s suspicions were immediately aroused, but then some guests arrived for dinner and the senator gave the impression of being as entertaining as usual. His cheerful conversation, however, could not disguise his distraction.