Forebodings that the world had been delivered up to the rule of a mistress as imperious as she was determined were only strengthened the following year. Few doubted the intensity of Agrippina’s hopes for her son; and sure enough, it came as no great surprise when, in AD 50, thirteen-year-old Domitius was formally adopted by his stepfather as a Claudian. No longer Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the boy could now boast the altogether more impressive name of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. Portraits of young Nero, round-faced and still with a hint of baby fat, immediately began to proliferate. It was his mother, though, whose radiance was truly coming to fill the world. Honours that not even Livia had enjoyed were lavished on her by her husband. For the first time, an emperor permitted his wife to be graced with the awesome title of ‘Augusta’ while he was still alive; to be shown in sculptures wearing the crescent-shaped diadem of a goddess; to appear with him on his coins. These, prior to the downfall of Messalina, had been minted on their reverse side with images designed to proclaim Claudius’s many triumphs; but no longer. Now, where previously there had been soldiers, and triumphal arches, and self-aggrandising slogans, there gleamed only the heads of Agrippina and Nero. The sheer scale of the crisis required nothing less. The grievous wound inflicted on the August Family could not possibly be allowed to suppurate. Its future had to be presented, at all costs, as stable.
Naturally, those predisposed to see Claudius as a pliable dolt, the plaything of women and slaves, were only confirmed by this in their contempt for him. The Emperor himself, as he had done throughout his life, shrugged it all aside. At stake, so he believed, was not merely his own survival but the long-term security of the Roman people. Claudius had appreciated from an early age the terrible consequences of civil war. As a young man, embarking on a history of Augustus’s rise to power, he had been roundly scolded by Livia and his mother, and persuaded to abandon it. ‘No one,’ they had told him, ‘could ever give an accurate or frank account of what had really happened.’62 Decades on, the menace of what might happen were he to slip, to squander the legacy of Augustus, to betray the inheritance of a peace that had lasted now for decades, still haunted Claudius. Schooled as he was in the history of the Republic at its flintiest and most austere, he understood that the ideal of citizenship might sometimes demand sacrifice. With Messalina consigned to oblivion and Britannicus still only nine years old, he could not rely on his own son to take the helm of the world. Claudius was old, and in declining health: it was too dangerous to leave Nero untutored in the demands of ruling Rome. Certainly, that winter, there were reminders everywhere of how narrow was the thread by which Caesar’s fortunes might hang. Ominous-looking birds were seen flocking above the Capitol. Earthquakes shook the city. Meanwhile, in the warehouses along the Tiber, reserves of grain were running low. A hungry mob, cornering Claudius in the Forum, would have torn him to pieces had he not been rescued by a detachment of troops. It was a salutary lesson. The love of the people, the steel of the Praetorians: these were things that an emperor had to hug close to his chest.
As soon as he could, then, Claudius set about providing his prospective heir with both. The perfect opportunity was not long in coming. On Nero’s fifteenth birthday, one year ahead of schedule, he was permitted to celebrate his coming-of-age. First, he lavished donatives on both the Roman people and the Praetorians; then he led the Praetorians on parade. Shortly afterwards, for good measure, he made his maiden speech in the Senate. Meanwhile, as Nero was busy cutting a dash in his gleaming new toga, or presiding over the Circus arrayed in best triumphal regalia, Britannicus was left to mope around wearing the distinctive striped toga of a child. When he briefly sought to fight back against his stepbrother’s grandstanding by calling him ‘Domitius’, Agrippina went straight to Claudius and had the boy’s teachers replaced with nominees of her own. Britannicus’s principal tutor was put to death on a charge of plotting against Nero. The Augusta had form when it came to executing manoeuvres of this kind. She did not care to see anyone occupy a significant post unless he owed it to her. This was why, soon after her marriage to Claudius, she had persuaded him to appoint to the command of the Praetorians a man whose record of service to her family was as impeccable as his lack of pedigree was glaring. That Sextus Afranius Burrus was a distinguished officer, and even had a mutilated hand to prove it, did not alter the fact that he was irredeemably provincial – ‘and as such could hardly help but be aware who was responsible for his promotion’.63
Below the surface waters of Caesar’s household, where monsters of the deep fed on those weaker than themselves and yet were always hungry, Agrippina had shown herself as predacious as anyone. ‘It is not arms which constitute the surest safeguard of power, but the ability to bestow favours.’64 So Seneca, with the perspective provided by distance, had observed from his exile on Corsica. Agrippina, content to demonstrate the truth of his aperçu, had arranged, following her marriage to Claudius, for his recall to the capital. Her son needed a tutor – and who better than Rome’s foremost intellectual? Seneca, naturally, had leapt at the chance. The chance to educate a future ruler of the world, as Aristotle had taught Alexander the Great, was every philosopher’s dream. Not that Agrippina wanted her son taught anything as impractical as philosophy: rather, it was Seneca’s talent for giving a speech that she had hired. Sure enough, when Nero stepped onto the floor of the Senate House, it was evident that his tutor had done his work. As senators grown lined and craggy in the service of Rome listened to the sixteen-year-old give them the benefit of his views on foreign affairs, they could detect no sign of nerves. Unlike Claudius himself, he appeared to the manner born. Fluent, strapping and intimidatingly bumptious, Nero could hardly help but present a contrast to the aged Emperor. His very youth, an inevitable cause of perturbation in a Senate House still scarred by its memories of Caligula, seemed transformed almost into a source of strength.
Nero was not the only one entering into manhood. In AD 53, in a seeming confirmation of his status as favoured heir, he married Octavia, Claudius’s daughter by Messalina. There was, though, a second message broadcast by the marriage. Britannicus was only a year younger than his sister, and it served as a reminder to the Roman people that he too was on the verge of leaving childish things behind. Whether in the Senate, the Praetorian camp or the bars and street-markets of the city, he still had backers. In the household of Caesar too. Pallas, whose early support of Agrippina had seen him rewarded with public honours fit to put even those granted to Narcissus in the shade, was yet to establish total supremacy. Taking Britannicus by his hands, Narcissus would hug him and urge the boy to grow up fast. Claudius too, embracing his son, promised him, if he came of age, ‘an account of all that he had done’.65 By AD 54, when Britannicus turned fourteen, such a moment was plainly not far off. Nero had been arrayed in the toga of a man for the first time when he was only fifteen: why not the younger sibling too? Claudius began to talk openly of how much he was looking forward to the ceremony. Give it another year, and he would have double the number of candidates to succeed him – and then, of course, Nero’s future might no longer look so assured.