Meanwhile, back in Rome, there were plenty who regarded Nero’s eastern adventure with disgust. The more exclusive the circles, the greater the sense of outrage tended to be. The contempt was, of course, entirely mutual. To watch Nero’s travelling companions descend the gangplanks onto Corinthian soil was to know that the Roman elite had been put decisively in the shade. Not since Tiberius’s retirement to Capri had access to Caesar been so humiliatingly barred to them. Heading down the Appian Way to take ship for Greece, Nero had been alerted to yet another plot against his life, its exposure confirming him in a suspicion of the Senate that would have done credit to Caligula. ‘I detest you, Caesar, for being of senatorial rank.’85 This joke, often repeated in his presence by a particular henchman of his, a hobbling one-time cobbler named Vatinius, never failed to bring a smile to Nero’s lips. True, not all senators were banned from his presence. Looking ahead to the projected campaigning in the Caucasus, Nero had made sure to bring with him on his travels the odd seasoned campaigner. Typical was a former consul by the name of Vespasian. A veteran of the conquest of Britain, his war record had just about served to compensate for his unfortunate habit of falling asleep during Nero’s recitals. Yet in truth, Vespasian was only of marginally better stock than Vatinius, and not all his commands and magistracies could obscure the fact that his grandfather had worked as a debt collector. For those in the Senate who could still trace their ancestry back to the heroic beginnings of Rome, it was a profound humiliation. What was there to choose between a former cobbler and a peasant who had risen to become a consul? That Vatinius was a malicious and disreputable parasite and Vespasian a decorated war hero made barely a difference. Both had the ear of Caesar. The world was turned upside down.
But there was worse. Soldiers and courtiers were not the only people in the retinue of Augustus’s heir. There were also to be found in it teeming hordes of musicians, voice coaches and personal trainers – for Nero, as a contender in the Olympic or Isthmian Games, could hardly be expected to function without vast numbers of back-room staff. In Greece, the home of drama and competitive sport, the notion that what happened in a theatre or on a race track might hold up a mirror to the broader world was a familiar one; but never before had anyone thought to blur the boundaries between them to quite such dizzying effect. Nero was not, as most visitors to the province were, a tourist. He had no interest in merely poking around the sights. The Greece that he had come to experience was not the land of art and antiquities, but of still living myth. A games staged in Olympia, or on the Isthmus, or in Argos, where Agamemnon had once reigned, or at Delphi, where Apollo had his most famous shrine, offered communion with the legendary heroes of the past in a way that no corresponding festival in Rome ever could.
It was this that gave to all those who competed in them their glamour; and it was why, despite his status as Caesar, Nero refused to take first place for granted. Without the edge of genuine competition, after all, his victories would be worthless. Hence, just like any other entrant in the games, he was prey to stage-fright, bitched about his rivals behind their backs and lived in dread of the judges. Ruler of the world or no, he could not afford a performance that would make him look a fraud – and everyone knew it. That the judges, at event after event, had little choice but to award him first prize did not diminish the genuine awe felt by many spectators at his feats. The greatest festivals in Greece had all been founded by gods or heroes of royal blood; and now, with the arrival of Caesar to headline at them, the ancient days of song and legend seemed renewed. Across the East, wherever theatres were to be found and sporting contests staged, the glamour of his achievements could hardly help but blaze. Senators in Rome might scoff, but Nero had his eyes fixed, not just on the capital, but on all the lands that he ruled.
In Greece, he could breathe more freely. Visitors to the great festivals there were attuned to his sensibility. Back in Rome, for instance, even Nero had hesitated to perform as an actor. Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores. It was this that explained their presence alongside adulterers and gladiators among the class of people defined by the law as infames. Disapproval of the theatre was a venerable Roman tradition. Moralists had always condemned it as a threat to ‘the qualities of manliness for which the Roman people are renowned’.86 Actors, it was sternly noted, were inclined to effeminacy. They rarely had due respect for the boundary that existed between male and female. Only strictness could serve to patrol it. An actor who had found it amusing to keep a married woman as a page, her hair cut short to look like a boy’s, had been whipped and banished from Rome on the personal instructions of Augustus himself. Those who played others in public threatened subversion at every level. Even the most basic fundamentals risked being undermined. Seneca, watching a play in which a slave played Agamemnon and imperiously threw his weight around, had been prompted to reflect on the illusory nature of rank itself. ‘Who is the “Lord of Argos”?’ he had mused. ‘Why, only a slave!’87
No such anxiety, though, was likely to trouble Caesar. That Nero, like so many of the heroes who featured in the repertoire, was descended from a god, and wielded kingly power, gave to his appearance on the stage a quite exceptional heft. Acting came naturally to him. Back in the first days of his rule, addressing the Senate, he had delivered a speech composed for him by Seneca and been roundly mocked for it behind his back: ‘for those with long memories noted that he was the first emperor to rely on borrowed eloquence’.88 Even then, though, Nero had penetrated to the heart of what it meant to be a Princeps. To rule as Caesar was to play a part. The performance was all. Now, arrived in Greece, Nero’s aim was to make this apparent to the entire world. Taking to the stage, sometimes his mask would be painted to look like the hero he was playing, sometimes to look like himself. No one could mistake the point that was being made. The events of Nero’s life, its many trials and tribulations, were as worthy a subject of drama as anything conjured up from myth. To watch him star as Orestes was to know that the murder of Clytaemnestra had been rivalled by a second, no less terrible act of matricide. When he played the part of a woman giving birth, who could not reflect on the tragedy that had seen him lose his heir? When he wore a mask fashioned after the features of Poppaea, who could not be reminded of the homicidal fits of madness sent by the gods upon many an ancient hero, and pity Nero likewise? It was a bravura act. Vision, audacity, conceit: his performance boasted them all. Only Nero could have attempted it; only Nero could have pulled it off to such stunning effect.
Resurrecting Poppaea on the stage was only a beginning, though. Beyond the theatre too, Nero aimed to bend reality to his will. His sense of bereavement remained unassuaged. In the wake of Poppaea’s death, he had briefly considered marrying Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius; but when she, not surprisingly, had shown herself reluctant to wed her sister’s killer, he had opted instead to have her put to death for treason. Tellingly, his choice of a new wife had been a woman very like Poppaea. Statilia Messalina, lately married to a consul executed in the wake of Piso’s conspiracy, was stylish, beautiful and clever. Nevertheless, not even the fascination she shared with Nero for training and strengthening her voice could compensate, in her new husband’s opinion, for her one abiding drawback: she was not Poppaea.89 This was why, just as Nero had once delighted in sleeping with a whore who looked like his mother, he had ordered a hunt to be made for a doppelgänger of the wife he had kicked to death. Sure enough, a woman with a close resemblance to Poppaea had been located, and delivered to his bed; but he had soon wearied of her. Then someone else had been tracked down: someone soft-skinned, amber-haired, irresistible. To Nero, brought this prize, it was as though his dead wife had been restored to him. So completely did he imagine himself to be gazing on her face again, caressing her cheeks and taking her in his arms, that Poppaea seemed to him redeemed from the grave. Nevertheless, there was a twist. For all the eeriness of the resemblance, it was not a woman who had been found for Nero – nor even a girl. The lookalike, so perfect as to convince a grieving husband, was not perfect in every detail. The double of Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s greatest love, was a boy.