Certainly, she had good cause to keep the goddess of Nemi in mind. Already, on her marriage to Claudius, she had sought to expiate the offence of incest by sponsoring propitiatory rites with her husband in the sacred grove. Then, a few months later, Claudius had made a formal dedication to Diana: a request to the goddess that she keep both him and Agrippina safe, and Nero and Britannicus too. It had not been enough. The goddess had abandoned Claudius. Lamps still blazed in the shrine that he had commissioned at Nemi; but now he was dead, and it was widely rumoured that his wife had been responsible. True or not, Agrippina knew better than to rely for her own security on lighting candles to Diana. The lesson of the sanctuary at Nemi had not been lost on her. The goddess favoured those who made their own luck. So it was, with Claudius barely dead, that Agrippina had dispatched orders to her agents in Asia, instructing them to poison the province’s governor – who, like her son, happened to be a great-great-grandson of Augustus. Such, at any rate, was the assumption in Rome, when the news arrived there of the wretched man’s death. It was a perfectly reasonable one to make. The fate of Narcissus, arrested as he hurried back from Campania, had left no one in any doubt that Agrippina was clearing the decks. The suicide in custody of Claudius’s favourite freedman had set the seal on her control of the Palatine. With Pallas now even more securely in charge of its finances than he had been before, Burrus in command of the Praetorians, and Seneca on hand to orchestrate dealings in the Senate, she could boast placemen everywhere. When senators voted her the Priesthood of the Deified Claudius, and double the number of lictors granted to Livia in her widowhood, it set the seal on an astonishing comeback. ‘She dared to strive after the rule of the sacred world.’1 Never before had the Roman people been able to say that of one of their women.
Yet the summit attained by Agrippina was a precarious one. Her very feat of scaling it could hardly help but inspire in most men bitter mistrust. Senators, summoned to meet on the Palatine, deeply resented what all of them knew was her brooding presence behind a curtain, listening in on their every word. Seneca too, despite everything that he owed her, was profoundly unsettled by her pretensions. Daughter of Germanicus that she was, Agrippina saw no reason why she should not stamp her authority as firmly upon the frontiers as upon domestic affairs. She certainly had form when it came to setting her mark on military matters. Back when the chained Caratacus was led before Claudius, there had been Agrippina as well, sitting directly beside her husband, enthroned beneath the eagles – ‘an unprecedented thing’.2 Her abiding interest in Germany, where her father had performed such heroic deeds and she herself had lived as a child, had seen the capital of the Rhine renamed after her, so that the Altar of the Ubians had become Colonia Agrippinensis – the future Cologne. Now, though, in the first months of her son’s reign, attention was focused not on the northern frontier, but on Armenia, where the Parthians were busy attempting to replace a Roman-backed king with a puppet of their own – a crisis which Agrippina was resolved to take the lead in handling. When an Armenian embassy arrived in Rome, she took for granted that she should be seated beside her son to receive them. Seneca, an inveterate civilian, but whose scholarly temperament and lifelong respiratory problems had only heightened his respect for the martial traditions of the Roman people, was appalled. Determined that at least some bounds of propriety be respected, he instructed Nero to rise from his seat, step down to meet his mother and take her to one side. Scandal was duly averted.
‘It was I who made you emperor.’3 So Agrippina was forever reminding her son. Nero, barely sixteen, and schooled as only a Roman child could be in the habit of deference to his parent, had little choice but to listen. Various innovations proclaimed as much to the Roman people. On Nero’s coins, his profile and Agrippina’s, of matching size, were shown facing one another, as though in celebration of their partnership; on his inscriptions, he made sure to include the line of descent from his mother as well as his father. Nevertheless, there had to be limits. He was ruler of the world, after all. He could not afford to appear henpecked by his mother. Instead, shrewd enough to recognise just what a consigliere he had in Seneca, Nero was content, even now that he was Caesar, to remain the student of his old tutor. Advised to meet the crisis in Armenia with iron-fisted determination, he boosted troop numbers along the eastern front and dispatched a veteran of the German frontier to take command of the situation – with the result that, soon enough, the Parthians were scrabbling to sue for terms. Meanwhile, back in Rome, Nero continued to pose with great aplomb as the model of a beneficent ruler. Graciously, he refused an offer from the Senate to erect statues of him fashioned out of gold and silver. He declared an end to the treason trials that had so stained the reputation of Claudius – and kept his word, what was more. On one occasion, brought a death warrant to sign, he sighed, then lamented with great theatricality that he had ever learned to write. ‘No chance did he miss, in short, to parade his generosity, his mercy and his graciousness.’4
It was the nature of the factions lurking beneath the surface of Caesar’s household always to seek out fresh battlefields. Now, in the struggle to market the young emperor, Agrippina and Seneca had found the perfect focus for their growing rivalry. Two potent but contradictory versions of Nero’s image were being sold to the world: as the dutiful son of the Augusta, the daughter of Germanicus, without whom he would have been nothing; and as the father of his people, wise beyond his years, ‘always forbearing in the care of his children’.5 Nero himself, like a doll, found himself forever being draped in robes that others had chosen for him. Yet it was not easy to kick against this indignity. Agrippina had allies everywhere, and the burnishing that her incomparable ancestry gave to Nero’s legitimacy was beyond price. Seneca, meanwhile, learned like no one else in the traditions prized by the Roman establishment, was invaluable for his ability to shape them to his master’s needs. Neither could be jettisoned; and Nero, alert to the weakness of his own position, knew better – as yet – than to try.
Nevertheless, the more wearisome he found his mother and tutor, the more he yearned to flex his muscles. Opportunities were hardly lacking. When, chafing against the marriage to Claudius’s daughter forced on him by Agrippina, he began to look around for a woman better suited to his tastes than the earnest and high-minded Octavia, he soon found one in the shape of a former slave named Acte. Agrippina was predictably appalled. ‘A housemaid as my daughter-in-law?’6 It was not to be borne. Rather than back down, though, Nero turned for assistance to his tutor – who promptly arranged for one of his associates to serve Acte and her lover as a go-between. Yet Seneca, even as he was assiduously promoting his youthful pupil as the model of responsibility, faced challenges of his own. Nero, bored of spending his time living up to his tutor’s stern ideals, wanted to let off steam. He was strongly encouraged in this ambition by a young rake named Marcus Salvius Otho, whose flamboyant extravagance and taste for tossing unfortunates up and down in military cloaks made him very much a man after Nero’s own heart. Otho, unlike Seneca, was not forever nagging him about his duty; Otho, unlike Seneca, was familiar with the seamiest, the most vice-ridden quarters of Rome. Whole new dimensions of experience and opportunity, barely hinted at in books of philosophy, were waiting to be discovered in the streets of the city: a thrilling prospect for any young man who, like Nero, ‘had a love of the incredible’.7 Increasingly, it was not Seneca who ‘shared with him all his plans and secrets’,8 still less Agrippina, but companions like Otho.