Then a letter arrived, borne by one of Phaon’s couriers.*7 Nero snatched it from the man’s hand. He read it, and as he did so, he turned paler still. The Senate had declared him a public enemy. No mercy was to be shown him. Senators, as though in honour of a time when there had been no Caesars to put them in the shade, had sentenced him to a death as antique as it was savage. He was to be stripped naked, yoked and led through the streets, and beaten to death with rods. Rather than suffer such a fate, Nero knew, he had no choice but to finish things off himself. He picked up a pair of daggers, tested their points, then put them down again. ‘The fatal hour,’ he cried out, ‘has still not come.’106
But it had. Even as he was instructing Sporus to mourn him as a wife properly should, by wailing and tearing at her hair and robes, he heard the sound of hoofbeats thundering towards the villa. Again, he reached for his dagger. This time, with the aid of a freedman, he summoned the courage to drive it into his throat. A centurion, rushing into the room, attempted to staunch the flow of blood with his cloak, but it was too late. ‘Such loyalty,’107 the dying man murmured; and then his eyes began to bulge horribly. Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was dead.
And with him the entire dynasty of which he had been the last surviving member. Its extinction came as no surprise to those versed in the art of reading omens. In the villa once owned by Livia, in the laurel grove, stood four withered trees. Each one had been planted by a Caesar; and each one, shortly before the Caesar’s death, had died. Then, shortly before Nero’s suicide, the tree that he too had planted had begun to wither – and with it, from the roots up, the entire laurel grove. The chickens too, bred of the hen dropped miraculously into Livia’s lap, had all expired. The meaning could hardly have been any clearer. The line of the Caesars was destined to end with Nero – and so it had proved. To be sure, emperors would follow in his wake, and all would be graced with the title of Caesar. None of them, however, would rule as descendants of Augustus. Galba, too old, too stern and too mean to delight a people still half in love with Nero, did not last long; and sure enough, in January 69, beside the spot in the Forum where Marcus Curtius had once vanished into the abyss, he was hacked to death. Otho followed three months later; eight months after him, Vitellius. Three emperors had perished in the space of a year. In the end, it was left to Vespasian, back from the Jewish war, to establish himself as master of the world. More than that, he succeeded in founding a new dynasty. When he died in his bed a decade later, he was succeeded by his eldest son, who in turn was followed by his younger brother. Like Augustus and Claudius, Vespasian even ended up a god.
Never again, though, would the Roman people be ruled by emperors touched by the sheer mystique and potency that membership of the August Family had bestowed upon the heirs of Augustus. Nero, taking to the stage, had been right to recognise within himself the quality of myth. All his family had possessed it. The blood in their veins had been touched by the supernatural. The dynast who had healed the wounds of civil war, and planted in the midst of a king-hating people an impregnable and enduring autocracy, was justly reckoned a god. The name of Augustus would remain a sacred one for as long as there were men who wore the title of Caesar. It served as an assurance to humanity that a man midway between the earthly and the divine might indeed reign as a universal prince of peace, and ascend triumphant to heaven. Augustus, victorious over his enemies as no man in history had been, had triumphed eventually over death itself. So too had his heirs. Even Caligula had haunted the house where he was murdered, and the gardens where his body was burned. When Nero killed himself, and brought the bloodline of Augustus to extinction, many simply refused to believe it. Decades on, across the Roman world, people were convinced that he would come again. ‘Everybody wishes he were still alive.’108
Even those who had suffered most terribly at his hands, and had every reason to execrate his memory, could not help but acknowledge the charisma of the House of Caesar. Some three decades after Nero’s suicide, a Christian named John recorded a vision of the end days revealed to him by an angel. Out of the sea he had seen a seven-headed beast rise; ‘and one of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound’.109 What was the wound, so many who read John’s vision would wonder with dread, if not the sword blow to the throat with which Nero had ended his own life?*8 The wound, so the angel had revealed to John, was destined to be healed; and the beast, which ‘was, and is not’,110 would rise from the bottomless pit. On its back would ride a woman; and the woman would be ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication’.111 Rarely before had the Rome ruled by the August Family been made to sound so glamorous.
‘What an artist perishes with me.’112 So Nero, with his customary lack of modesty, had declared as he steeled himself to commit suicide. He had not exaggerated. He had indeed been an artist – he and his predecessors too. Augustus and Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius: each, in his own way, had succeeded in fashioning out of his rule of the world a legend that would for ever afterwards mark the House of Caesar as something eerie and more than mortal. Painted in blood and gold, its record would never cease to haunt the Roman people as a thing of mingled wonder and horror. If not necessarily divine, then it had at any rate become immortal.
*
*1 Two ships were built on Caligula’s orders at Lake Nemi: the first seems to have been a floating palace, the second a floating temple. They were still afloat in Nero’s lifetime, but were then dispatched to the bed of the lake, where they remained for almost two thousand years. Recovered in 1929, they were destroyed in 1944 – though whether by American artillery fire, German arson or the cooking fires of Italian refugees has never been conclusively settled.
*2 There is an intriguing possibility that the bears which are described by the poet Calpurnius Siculus as savaging seals in Nero’s wooden amphitheatre might be polar bears. Tellingly, though, there is no mention of their fur being white, and so the balance of probability must sadly be against it.
*3 It is Suetonius (Nero: 18) who tells us this. Although he does not specify a date, it is evident from Nero’s determination to crush the insurrection in Britain that he would never have countenanced the province’s abandonment in the wake of Boudicca’s revolt.
*4 Suetonius. Claudius: 25.4. It is possible, indeed probable, that this is an allusion to arguments in Rome’s Jewish community about the claims to messianic status of Jesus. Chrestus, it is true, was a common name, particularly for slaves; but against that, there is no recorded instance of a Jew in Rome ever being called it. A number of scholars have suggested that Suetonius might have derived his information from a police report, and that ‘Chrestus’ is a mistransliteration of ‘Christus’ – Christ. The truth, though, is ultimately unknowable.
*5 According to St Jerome, the total number of Christians martyred by Nero was 979.
*6 All the ancient historians of antiquity whose work has survived take Nero’s guilt for granted, with the telling exception of Tacitus. ‘Whether the disaster was the result of accident or the criminality of the Princeps,’ he tells us, ‘is uncertain. There are historians who back both points of view.’ The same is true today – although with a substantial majority of historians inclined to exonerate Nero. The verdict I would deliver is one of ‘not proven’ – which is, under the circumstances, more than damning enough.
*7 An intriguing implication of this letter is that Phaon had tipped people off as to where he was going. The arrival of a death squad soon afterwards implies that agents of Galba would have been among them.