Dying Every Day Page 13

  Anicetus’ agents among the crew were trying to complete their mission. They had expected the ship to break apart and pitch Agrippina into the sea, but this had failed to happen. Confused and seemingly lacking a backup plan, they rushed about on the boat’s splintered deck. Some had the idea of capsizing the craft by putting all their weight on one side. But other crewmen who were not part of the plot, perhaps surmising what their comrades were up to, countered them by running to the opposite side. Shouts echoed across the bay’s still surface, barely heard, if at all, by those on shore.

  As the boat gradually tipped, Agrippina and Acerronia slid into the water. Acerronia, perhaps failing to see the design behind the calamity, called out that she was Agrippina and asked for rescue. Her cries drew a hail of blows from oars and other naval gear, as nearby assassins saw a chance to finish their job. Acerronia was clubbed to death in the water, while Agrippina, who had kept a prudent silence, took only a hit on the shoulder. Glimpsing the lanterns of some fishing smacks nearby, she swam off unnoticed. Indefatigable to the last, she had escaped Nero’s deathtrap.

  Safely returned to Bauli, Agrippina reflected on her position. Nero clearly meant to kill her but had gone to extreme lengths to keep the crime secret. Her high stature as daughter of Germanicus, and her son’s timidity, had prevented an open attack, and these might now be enough to save her. She sent a messenger to Nero to inform him of the night’s events, pretending it had all been a freak accident. If she could feign trust in her son, prevent him from striking a second blow, she could somehow rally support and strengthen her position. Already crowds of well-wishers, festival-goers who had heard about the collapse of the ship, were gathered outside her villa. She had a fighting chance, if she could only survive this night.

  Meanwhile at Baiae, Nero, accompanied by Anicetus, had fretted for hours awaiting word of the plot’s outcome. The news that it had failed sent him into a tailspin. He knew that his mother would now spot his intentions. Wounded but not killed, Agrippina would become more dangerous than ever. She might march on his villa that very night with a band of armed slaves, or make her way back to Rome to denounce him before the Senate. Nero was determined that his mother must die before the next day dawned, but he had no idea how to proceed. In despair, he sent for his two senior counselors to be roused from their chambers—Seneca and Burrus.

  None of Seneca’s meditations on morality, Virtue, Reason, and the good life could have prepared him for this. Before him, as he entered Nero’s room, stood a frightened and enraged youth of twenty-three, his student and protégé for the past ten years. For the past five, he had allied with the princeps against his dangerous mother. Now the path he had first opened for Nero, by supporting his dalliance with Acte, had led to a botched murder and a political debacle of the first magnitude. It was too late for Seneca to detach himself. The path had to be followed to its end.

  Every word Seneca wrote, every treatise he published, must be read against his presence in this room at this moment. He stood in silence for a long time, as though contemplating the choices before him. There were no good ones. When he finally spoke, it was to pass the buck to Burrus. Seneca asked whether Burrus could dispatch his Praetorians to take Agrippina’s life.

  Now it was Burrus’ turn to face the awful choices that came with collaboration. He too declined to do what the situation, and what full loyalty to Nero, demanded. The Praetorians, he said, had too strong an allegiance to Agrippina, and to the memory of her father. He suggested that Anicetus and the sailors at Misenum finish what they had started.

  Nero’s old guard had temporized at a critical pass and thus ceded power to the new. Anicetus eagerly took on the task that Seneca and Burrus had cast off, and Nero instantly affirmed how highly he rated this boon. “Only today did I get control of the empire,” he declared, “and it was a mere freedman who conferred such a great gift.” This barb was aimed at Seneca who, despite having worked for a decade to firm up Nero’s power, had now been found wanting. The sage’s influence over the princeps, long in decline, had taken another lurch downward.

  With opportune timing, the messenger sent earlier by Agrippina, Agerinus, now arrived with news of his mistress’s “accident.” Nero was grateful for a pretext, however slim, to move openly against his mother. As Agerinus delivered his message, Nero dropped a sword by the man’s feet and ordered him seized as an assassin. Then he dispatched Anicetus to Bauli.

  It was well past midnight when Anicetus’ hit squad arrived at Agrippina’s villa. In spite of the hour, the grounds and beach were thronged with Agrippina’s well-wishers. Anicetus ordered them to disperse, then broke down the door and began removing household slaves.

  Agrippina was in her bedroom with a lone servant, but even this last companion disappeared when armed men were heard in the house. The queen mother was alone when Anicetus and two other officers burst into her room. She had been hoping it was her messenger Agerinus arriving; his long delay meant she was still in grave danger.

  Agrippina’s only chance was to shame her attackers out of completing their mission, to remind them of the glory of her line. But she was exhausted, shaken from the night’s ordeal, and wounded. The best she could manage, according to Tacitus, was to protest that Anicetus must have made some terrible mistake. Surely Nero would never order her death.

  The captain accompanying Anicetus, a man named Herculeius, answered by hitting her on the head with a club. The other officer standing by, Obaritus, drew his sword. Agrippina was all out of stratagems. There was little left for her but to die.

  Agrippina had been betrayed by those she had put in power, by Nero above all, but also by Burrus, Anicetus, and not least, Seneca. The sage she had rescued from Corsica, who owed all he had to her, had declined to raise his voice against her murder. Politics had first made bedfellows of her and Seneca—in the literal sense, some claimed. But politics, and her son’s disordered mind, had arranged things such that only one of them could survive.

  The foremost woman of her age—sister of one emperor, wife of a second, mother of a third, the last of Germanicus’ children—was about to die, friendless, abandoned, alone. One last, bold gesture remained to her, a gesture reported by three ancient sources. The author of Octavia describes it best:

  Dying and wretched, she makes one last request of her assassin:

  to sink his lethal sword in her womb.

  “Here’s where to bury your sword, right here—

  The place from which such a monster came.…”

  After those words, she lets her sad soul

  seep out through savage wounds

  together with a final groan.

  CHAPTER 5

  Maritocide

  (A.D. 59–62)

  The deed that Nero had yearned to achieve brought him no relief. Back at his Baiae villa, informed of his mother’s death, he could only peer vacantly into the darkness, starting up suddenly from time to time as though in fear. The enormity of the vacuum he had created was now becoming apparent. The central force in recent politics, the woman who had held sway in the palace for more than ten years, the last of the nine children of her great father, was gone. Nero, an insecure, self-indulgent twenty-three-year-old, had made himself an orphan.

  Burrus tried to bolster the young man’s nerves by sending in Praetorians to greet him. The guard had been Agrippina’s most loyal partisans, and Nero had cause to fear them. Cued by Burrus, though, they made clear they would change sides, congratulating the young man on having escaped his mother’s “plot.” The pale pretext created by dropping a sword at a messenger’s feet was to be the official version of the night’s events. Nero, it was to be proclaimed, had been the intended victim, not the perpetrator, of violence.

  At Bauli, meanwhile, Anicetus oversaw Agrippina’s cremation, done by the simple expedient of burning her body on a dining couch. No state funeral or pyre was held, and it is unclear whether Nero even came from Baiae to view the corpse. No burial was performed or monument constructed; Agrippi
na’s followers heaped only a low dirt mound over her ashes. (The grand Campanian ruins known today as Agrippina’s Tomb are in fact the remains of a theater built much later.)

  The most important cleanup task in the wake of the messy matricide fell to Seneca. There were concerns that the senators back in Rome, to whom he remained principal liaison, might decry Nero’s deed in the Senate house or conspire with the Praetorians to remove the princeps from power. Seneca was charged with winning their acquiescence. Despite his decline at court, his verbal dexterity was still a vital asset to the regime, as was his high standing among the elite. Here, at least, was a job that toughs and parvenus like Anicetus could not do.

  Seneca now undertook the most difficult writing assignment of his life. In the letter Nero would send to the Senate, under his own name but without pretense of authorship, Seneca had to justify as an act of policy a crime that was neither justifiable nor primarily political. He had to brazen out a family murder before the same body of men who had been promised, some five years earlier, an end to family murders. He had to win pardon for the princeps whose great virtue, as he had proclaimed in De Clementia—even then at risk of his own reputation—was not to have shed a single drop of human blood.

  What clever turns of phrase, what sinuous rhetoric, could accomplish such a task? Only one sentence of the letter survives, in a chance quotation, but Tacitus preserves a record of its content and structure.

  The letter began with the main cover story, the discovery of a weapon on Agerinus’ person. Agrippina had plotted a coup and, it was asserted, had taken her own life when the plot was uncovered. The letter went on to discuss the larger threat that Rome had been under while Agrippina lived: a usurper, and worse, a woman, had sought supreme power. Agrippina had pressured the Praetorians and the Senate to swear allegiance to her, the letter alleged; then she had withheld gifts and handouts from the guard if they refused—a subtle reminder that Nero was at this moment arranging gifts and handouts for that very body. Agrippina had tried to enter the Senate house, the letter went on, and to represent the Roman state in dealings with foreign ambassadors. Ever since marrying Claudius ten years before, she had grasped at the throne.

  But even while claiming to have escaped a monster, Nero, as represented by Seneca, affected filial grief. To celebrate the death of a mother, even the nightmarish figure conjured up in the letter, would be unseemly. “I neither believe nor rejoice that I am still alive,” Seneca had Nero say, employing a parallel-with-contrast structure typical of his style.

  The letter’s sternest challenge was how to present the bizarre events leading up to Agrippina’s death. The collapse of the rigged boat—witnessed by many and, in light of the later killing, clearly intentional—was a subject perhaps better passed over in silence. But Seneca must have felt that even a transparent lie was better than no explanation at all. His letter portrayed the collapse as a shipwreck, an accident that showed the gods themselves intervening to save the state. Nero’s troops had only completed the design of Providence.

  This was going too far. For the second time in his political career, Seneca had overstepped the bounds of propriety with his ready support of the princeps. “It was not Nero—whose monstrosity precluded any complaint—but Seneca who was in a bad odor, because he had written a defense speech using this kind of rhetoric,” says Tacitus.

  One senator in particular, a stiff-necked Stoic named Thrasea Paetus, silently walked out of the chamber after the letter had been read. Thrasea, like Seneca an admirer of Cato and other heroes of conscience, disliked the servility of his colleagues. The fictions of Seneca’s letter, and the Senate’s willingness to countenance them, finally pushed him past his breaking point. By modern standards, his was a mild protest, a simple declaration of nonsupport. But in the Roman autocracy, even such small gestures carried huge significance and incurred huge risks.

  No senators followed Thrasea’s lead, though many no doubt wished to. Instead they declared their total acceptance of the account contained in the letter. They voted that annual games be held at the time of the Quinquatria to celebrate the salvation of the princeps. A gold statue of Minerva—the goddess to whom the spring festival was devoted—would be set up beside that of Nero in the Forum. There was to be no public reckoning for matricide.

  But as they fawned, the senators silently pondered the new course on which Nero’s regime was set. They were getting a clearer view of the emperor’s emerging character. His matricide presented a strange admixture of cravenness and cruelty. Nero had lacked the courage to proceed openly against his mother or even to acknowledge that he had killed her. Instead he had shown himself nervous and needy, trying to win hearts and minds in the Senate before daring to enter Rome. Indeed, long after the senators had voted to honor him, Nero lingered in Campania, fretting over what reception he would get in the capital.

  Such a man might be just as dangerous as Caligula, though for different reasons. He would want reassurance and flattery and even—though few in Rome had yet glimpsed his ambitions as a performer—the cheers of sycophantic crowds. His subjects would be required to show not just loyalty but something more, a sort of affection. He would hate anyone in a position to judge him, which meant the entire political class. The aristocracy might again be haunted by old specters—treason trials, banishments, executions, and forced suicides—arising this time not from the whims of a sadist but the demands of a petulant child.

  A waggish actor named Datus, star of the clownish performances called Atellan farces, highlighted the new dangers in a performance he gave shortly after Agrippina’s death. During a comic song that contained the line “Farewell father, farewell mother,” he mimed the motions first of drinking, then of swimming. Claudius had in fact died from a poisoned meal, not a drink, and Agrippina had escaped the waters to be killed in her bed, but the references were clear enough. Then when Datus came to another line, “Orcus guides your steps,” he pointed to the senators seated before him in the front rows of the audience. The god who had charge of souls of the dead, he implied, was awaiting them in the underworld.

  After spending nearly three months in Campania, Nero and his court returned to Rome in June. The long delay, and the work done by handlers in the interim, had primed the populace well. Romans turned out in droves to welcome Nero home, even setting up bleachers along his route; the senators put on festal attire. The people strove to show their princeps that they would turn a blind eye to murder.

  Beneath these displays, however, revulsion simmered. In anonymous pranks and graffiti, Nero was made to recall his crime. One wag hung a leather sack from a public statue of Nero, implying that the princeps belonged inside one—for Romans sometimes punished parent slayers by sewing them up in a sack, together with various wild animals, and casting the whole lot into the Tiber to drown. Meanwhile a different message appeared on a statue of Agrippina that had been draped in cloth, a temporary measure to conceal it until it could be pulled down. On the pretense that the cloth was a veil of modesty, someone affixed a sign that represented Agrippina speaking to Nero: “I have some shame; you haven’t.”

  Nero bore all this with a degree of patience that bewildered the ancient chroniclers. Perhaps relieved to have incurred some penalty, or (as Dio speculates) not wishing to give substance to rumors by prosecuting them, he ignored all jibes. Even when informers, eager for advancement, reported the names of the graffitists, Nero refused to take action. He preferred to distract and cajole his public, and set about to mark the death of Agrippina with magnificent spectacles and games.

  First came the Ludi Maximi, spread over many days and occupying multiple theaters. Bizarre new spectacles were staged for the crowds, including an elephant that walked down a sloping tightrope carrying a rider on its back. Ancient nobility, coerced into taking the stage, were seen dancing, acting, and even fighting as gladiators against wild beasts, roles that had long been considered out of bounds for aristocracy. Meanwhile commoners in the stands were showered with handouts and priz
es. Live birds, valued as pets, rained down on them by the thousand. Vouchers in the form of inscribed balls were tossed out by the emperor’s troops, redeemable later for horses, slaves, precious metals, even whole apartment buildings. Nero was going all out, and digging deep into his own purse, to win his people’s love.

  Another lavish event, the Juvenalia—a “youth festival,” marking the first time Nero shaved off his whiskers—followed soon after. Officially a private party held on imperial land, it was attended by large crowds of equites and plebeians, the classes whose favor Nero had chosen to court. As in the Ludi Maximi, aristocrats were made to perform in roles that defied social conventions. A noblewoman in her eighties, Aelia Catella, was shown dancing in a pantomime, the most risqué genre of popular theater. Other members of great houses were recruited for choral dances. When some came onstage in masks to hide their identities, Nero insisted the masks be removed. He meant to show all Rome that even the high and mighty were sharing his carnival fun.

  At the culmination of the Juvenalia came an event that Nero’s advisers had long dreaded, though they had no choice but to take part. For the princeps no longer wished merely to practice his singing in private. He had determined to go on the stage.

  Of many shocking firsts in the history of theater, perhaps none rivals the moment when a Roman emperor, the apex of the social pyramid, appeared in the long cloak and high boots of a Greek citharodist, saying “Please hear me graciously, masters.” It was no spontaneous whim but an entrance Nero had planned and prepared and for which he had written a musical ode, “Attis or the Bacchantes,” an ardent story of love-struck madness. He had also ensured that his reception would be favorable. Gallio, Seneca’s brother, an ex-consul, brought the emperor onstage and introduced him, while Seneca himself (according to Dio), together with Burrus, was stationed where he could be seen signaling approbation, waving his toga-clad arms high in the air.