The senators quickly came up with a plan: at a meeting of the emperor’s private council at the palace they gently suggested awarding him in advance the prize for first place in the category of song – and also in the category of political oratory to detract from the show-business nature of Nero’s chosen field of expertise. The emperor rejected their hypocrisy outright: he was to perform in public, he said, and he was to be received on equal terms with the other artists competing in the competition. There were to be no special favours.
While the emperor rehearsed assiduously, the games’ presiding officer chose a theme: the golden age. This was attributed to the fact that the Neronia was due to coincide with Nero’s search for treasure to which he had been alerted by an opportunistic Carthaginian called Caesellius Bassus. So successful was Bassus in convincing Nero of the existence of the treasure that the emperor continued to spend money on the games, as well as the palace and the rebuilding of his new Rome, in the expectation that it would materialize. It never did. Meanwhile, as the theme suggested, the games were going to be glorious and lavish. There would be elaborate sacrifices and extravagant, gaudy processions featuring images of the gods and the emperor. The Greek-style contests between athletes and guilds of performing arts would range from chariot racing and gymnastics to poetry, heraldry, lyre playing and acting in comic and tragic set pieces. There was even a titillating, transgressive element – the athletic games – which featured nude men, and from which Augustus had once banned women. Now they were to be honoured by the presence of not just Roman noble-women and plebs, but the vestal virgins too. These sacral aristocratic maidens devoted thirty years of their lives to the service of the goddess of the hearth. Their inclusion also had a Hellenic origin: the Greeks included priestesses at similar events, so Nero wanted them too. All his wishes were granted, but disgrace was waiting in the wings.
When Nero took to the stage for his chosen contest, the recital of tragic material, he was accompanied by members of the Praetorian Guard; the military backbone of Rome, the élite police force of the emperor was reduced to carrying Nero’s musical instrument. The emperor himself looked unsteady and grotesque in the authentic garb of an actor: he wore the appropriate mask – a haunting face with an elongated forehead, high platform shoes, an ornately embroidered and colourful tunic and, underneath it, padding for his chest and torso designed to emphasize his presence on the stage. Following his recital, he performed a section of his own composition about the fall of Troy. The Roman plebs were rapturous in their applause. Dazzled and delighted that the emperor of Rome was performing for their pleasure, they called him back for more.
In the wings an aristocratic friend called Aulus Vitellius encouraged the emperor to follow their wishes. His entreaty gave Nero the excuse to yield to their demands and return to the stage, this time to play the lyre and sing. Genuinely fearful of the judges’ verdict, and convinced that he was competing with the other performers on a level playing field, Nero took his performance seriously and followed the rules to the letter: he maintained the dignified poses required, he avoided using a cloth to wipe the sweat away, and showed no visible clearing of the throat and nose. At the close of his song, on bended knee and deferring to the crowd, Nero awaited the verdict. The judges put on their own very best performances as they made their assessments before awarding the first prize. The winner was Nero.
Again the urban masses of Rome stamped, applauded and cheered. It is recorded, however, that in disgust many knights voted with their feet and walked out. In their urgency to leave, some were crushed. Indeed, beneath the jubilation were sinister signs of tyranny. The more conservative citizens from Italy and the provinces were also horrified by what they saw. Nonetheless, they clapped with the rest. They had no choice: they were chivvied along by Nero’s professional cheerleaders, planted in the audience by the emperor. These young and ambitious men were called the Augustiani, and they were a special, 5000-strong division of knights appointed by Nero and formed from aspiring artists. As the emperor’s official fan club, they cuffed, cajoled and harassed the bored and the horrified among the audience. They also acted like secret police, for they spied on the crowd and noted down the names of those who did not attend or those who did not look as though they were enjoying themselves.30
Lack of support for the emperor’s performance was tantamount to treason. But that was just one aspect of the games that the senatorial élite found hard to stomach. For not only was Nero strong-arming them into applauding him; through the Neronia, the emperor was also wooing the people in a way that completely cut out the Senate from the political process. The magnificent games made a mockery of any equality between the first citizen and the Senate. This was a naked example of Nero setting himself above the institutions of the state: he was seeking to win the people over by appealing to their emotions, inspiring awe and exaltation of himself as an individual. No one else, muttered the senators in envy, could possibly put on games that would match these. None of them could ever win favour with the people in the way that Nero did.
Over the next year yet more extravagant and offensive spectacles were staged, and on each occasion the same image of Nero was presented – that of a tyrant retreating into a world of fantasy, unable to distinguish what was real from what was illusion. The state funeral of Poppaea was one such moment. Soon after the games, Nero had kicked his wife and their unborn child to death because he was in a rage when he returned from an evening out at the chariot races. Poppaea had said that she wanted to die before she passed her prime, so she had her way.31 The public funeral, full of procession and ceremony to reflect Nero’s grief, again flouted all tradition and sense of Roman decorum: Poppaea was not cremated in the Roman style, but embalmed and stuffed with spices in the manner of eastern potentates. Nero took the platform, eulogized his love’s virtues and announced the deification of a woman whom many aristocrats considered to be of questionable birth and ancestry. Nero saved the final affront for last. He ordered her body to be laid to rest in the mausoleum of the divine Augustus.
Unsurprisingly, one senator found this a desecration too offensive to endure. Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus was a principled rebel senator who had dared to challenge Nero’s decisions in government. He had walked out during the vote on the fictitious charges brought against Nero’s mother and now once again he broke cover. He made his disgust public knowledge by not attending Poppaea’s funeral. From that day on Nero would look for any excuse, no matter how corrupt, to remove this dignified aristocrat permanently. His chance was not long in coming.
At the start of the year AD 66 Tigellinus’s son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, brought a charge against Thrasea. The senator was accused of not honouring the emperor’s welfare: he had not attended the ceremony of swearing the oath that augured the new year. Secretly, Capito was motivated by an old grudge he bore Thrasea; the senator had helped a deputation from the Roman province of Cilicia to successfully bring charges against him for extortion while he was governor. The trial against Thrasea began in May. It was clear from the hundreds of soldiers anxiously guarding the approaches to the Senate House, law courts and nearby temples that there was much more at stake than Thrasea’s innocence. In reality, battle lines were being drawn up between two warring factions: on one side the emperor, his cronies and various servile senators; on the other side the backbone of the Senate trying to assert its authority once again. The covert war was breaching the veneer of harmonious imperial government between emperor and Senate. As usual, however, there was only one winner. After a series of vicious denunciations, Thrasea was found guilty and chose his own death: suicide. The fight against corruption and tyranny, and the battle for senatorial dignity, prestige and responsibility in government were being lost quite publicly.