That the familiar sights of central Rome should have been lost to countryside bore witness to what senators found most disorienting about Nero: his ability to dissolve the boundaries of everything that they had always taken for granted. To many it seemed an unnerving power, for it hinted at something more than human. Nero himself, it was true, hardly seemed sprung from a dimension of the supernatural. Bull-necked and podgy, he had never quite lost his baby fat. The image of Caesar, though, was not bound by flesh and blood. Nero, who had transformed a yacht into a death-trap, and the Campus into a brothel, knew how to play tricks with people’s expectations. In the workshop of Zenodorus, the world’s most famous sculptor, a head almost four metres high was being fashioned out of bronze.66 Designed to top an immense statue that, when completed, would stand guard over the entrance to the Golden House, it portrayed that golden charioteer of the heavens, the Sun. There was, though, in the contours of the god’s face, more than a suggestion of a second charioteer. The Colossus, as the bronze would come to be known, ‘was designed to resemble the Princeps’.67 When completed, the statue was to be crowned by the rays of the sun and portrayed as the guardian of the world. Visible from across the city, it would hint at a status for Nero verging on the divine.
Yet if his face, seen from a certain angle, seemed ablaze with the eeriness of someone more than human, then so also, seen from another, did it seem shadowed by the savagery of a beast. Of the many strange sex games with which Nero was reported to have indulged himself, none was more unsettling than one which had combined a simulation of criminals being torn to pieces with the nauseating practice of oral sex. Men and women – or boys and girls, according to some reports – had supposedly been bound to stakes; Nero, dressed in the skins of a wild animal, had then been released from a cage and pretended to gnaw at their private parts.68 Scandalous on every level, as his floor-shows were invariably devised to be, the performance had made sinister play with the origins of the Roman people – whose city, as everyone knew, had been founded by a wolf-suckled king. Now, with much of Rome in ruins, it was as though Nero intended to found it anew. It was even claimed that he wished to rename it after himself: ‘Neropolis’69 True or not, such rumours had wide currency. Of a man whose face, seen from a certain angle, might seem that of a god, and from another that of a werewolf, almost anything could be believed. And so it was, in the months that followed the catastrophe of the fire, that a claim was first heard in elite circles so stupefying, so utterly monstrous, that to countenance it was to cast Nero as a criminal without parallel in the history of his city: that he, the heir of Augustus and First Citizen of his people, was the very man who had burned Rome down.
The surest evidence for this appalling charge was, of course, the use to which he had put the calamity; but it was noted as well that the fire, when it began again the second time, had originated on an estate owned by Tigellinus. Flamboyant and murderous, Nero certainly had form when it came to crimes on a mythical scale. What was a spot of arson, after all, to a self-confessed matricide? Just as the guilt he had shown at his mother’s murder was as theatrical as it was self-indulgent, so in a similar manner, it was claimed, he had been inspired by the spectacle of Rome burning to play on his lyre and sing of the fall of Troy. Quite where Nero was supposed to have given this performance was much disputed. Some said in his palace, others on its roof, others yet on the tower in Maecenas’s gardens. The precise details, to those convinced of his culpability, were unimportant. Rumour, as ever in Rome, had a habit of fuelling itself. That the moon had been full in the sky on the night of the conflagration, rendering it most unsuited to a project of arson; that Nero had thrown himself into the task of fighting the blaze with energy and commitment; that the costs of repairing the damage were crippling: none of these considerations served to extinguish the talk of his guilt.*6 Instead, just as the fire itself had done, it spread furiously, and it spread fast – and soon enough, come the New Year, it was starting to lick at the foundations of Nero’s regime.
‘Murderer of mother and wife, a driver of chariots, a performer on the public stage, an arsonist.’70 The list of charges was long. Few in the upper echelons of Roman society doubted that Nero, if permitted to live, would add to it. To kill a Caesar was, of course, a fearsome thing; but by early 65, enough were convinced of its necessity to start plotting Nero’s liquidation. Large numbers of senators and equestrians were recruited to the conspiracy; so too, no less crucially, assorted Praetorians. Most senior of all the officers to join it was Faenius Rufus, who, on the death of Burrus, had been appointed prefect alongside Tigellinus, and whose reputation for honesty was as impressive as his colleague’s was shameful. The presence of such a man in the ranks of the plotters helped to boost numbers, steady the waverers, and give to the conspiracy a broader base than any since that against Julius Caesar, more than a century before. Not that the conspirators had any intention of restoring the Republic. Thrasea Paetus, the man who more than any other had come to serve as the conscience of the Senate, and who sedulously marked the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius, was not invited to join the plot. Instead, the intention was to replace Nero with a new Caesar. Almost half a century after the disgrace and suicide of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, it was a scion of the same illustrious family whom the conspirators had fixed upon to serve as their figurehead. Gaius Calpurnius Piso combined a distinguished career of public service with an easy and ready charm: men could imagine him as emperor and not shudder at the prospect. True, he lacked even the vaguest link to the August Family; but that could be overcome. Octavia had not been the only daughter born to Claudius. There was a second, still alive, and in her thirties: Antonia. It was agreed among the conspirators that Piso should divorce his wife and marry her. The link that this would establish to Augustus, although tenuous, would be sufficient – it was hoped – to satisfy the Roman people. Piso’s own talent for popularity could then be relied upon to do the rest. Even Seneca, torn between residual loyalty to Nero and horror at what his pupil had become, was prepared to countenance the prospect of a new Caesar. Some among the conspirators went so far as to hope that he might end up emperor himself. Although the ailing philosopher, now in semi-retirement, refused to receive Piso in person, he did not betray the pretender when sounded out. Instead, he temporised. ‘Let him know,’ he told Piso’s emissary with pointed ambivalence, ‘that my own security is bound up with his well-being.’71
Visions of a universal cataclysm continued to haunt the old man. In his nightmares, he could imagine the sky turning to black, and the whole world lost to darkness. There was, though, in the contemplation of utter calamity, a kind of liberation. When the worst came to the worst, submission could no longer be an option. ‘No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.’72 Time was when the leading men of the Senate would have demonstrated the truth of this maxim on the line of battle, serving the greatness of their city amid viscera and swarms of thirsty flies, or else perishing in the attempt; but those days were gone. Now, the field of courage open to Rome’s most eminent citizens was shrunken and diminished. Not, though, the qualities required to take up position on it. ‘No matter how it manifests itself, the measure and value of virtus never change.’73 The courage required to strike at Nero in the Circus, in the full view of the Roman people, as the conspirators planned to do, was a fearsome thing. When it had been suggested to Piso that he invite his victim to Baiae, to the luxurious villa that he owned there, and commit the deed in private, he had refused in tones of contempt. It had to be public, or not done at all. Unless Nero’s blood were spilled in the capital, it would never serve to wash clean his crimes. So it was that Flavius Scaevinus, the senator who had laid claim to the honour of striking the first blow, did not trust to his own dagger, but removed one from a temple. The murder was to be nothing squalid. Rather, it was to be a sacrifice.