Dying Every Day Page 5

  But the story of human progress does not end there. In the next ode of Medea, the chorus resumes its ruminations on seafaring, this time in a gloomier register. By now it is clear that Medea will kill her children and destroy her husband, undoing Corinth’s political order. This horror is traced straight back to the primal sin of the voyage of Argo. An angry Neptune, god of the sea, has already destroyed most of the ship’s crewmen, as the chorus reveals, and will soon finish off those few who remain. The ocean will exact a terrible vengeance on those who have penetrated its secrets.

  It is not known when Seneca wrote Medea or any of his tragedies for that matter. But it’s a fair guess that Claudius’ invasion of Britain was much on his mind at the time. Romans celebrated the feat, and Claudius himself led a triumphal procession of conquered Britons through the capital’s streets. In Seneca’s view, however—a view that perhaps anticipates the thinking of modern environmentalists—the ceaseless advance of empire would turn the cosmos itself into an enemy. When everyone could go everywhere, when no boundaries remained intact, total collapse might not be far off.

  For Seneca to express such dour views, even from exile on Corsica, would no doubt have been risky. Tragic dramas, which tended to center around arrogant or deluded monarchs, were always risky under the principate; Tiberius had once ordered a playwright executed for a single line about the blind folly of kings. It is not clear that Seneca ever had his plays performed or even allowed them out of his house. There is no evidence they were known in his day, and Seneca himself says nothing about them elsewhere in his writings. Perhaps they were private documents, shared with a trusted few—a way to vent worries that a ruling princeps would not have welcomed.

  After 49, Medea would have been risky for another reason. It portrayed a powerful wife wreaking havoc on an imperial house. Agrippina, Seneca’s friend and patroness, could not have relished such a plot, in the wake of her marriage to Claudius. And she would have been even less pleased by Phaedra, Seneca’s other great portrayal of a destructive queen.

  Adapted (as was Medea) from a more famous play by Euripides, Phaedra tells of the second wife of Theseus, a mythic Athenian king. Phaedra conceives an irresistible passion for Theseus’ grown son, Hippolytus, and tries to seduce him, but he recoils. Rejected, Phaedra becomes a monster of vengeance. She kills herself but leaves behind a note accusing her stepson of rape, knowing it will prompt Theseus to destroy him. The play evokes that familiar folktale type, the wicked stepmother, made more monstrous here by incestuous lust.

  To Roman readers in A.D. 49, Phaedra would have raised uncomfortable associations. They saw Agrippina as a tempestuous, controlling, and highly sexual woman, not unlike Seneca’s heroine. She had already been accused of incest with both Caligula and her brother-in-law Lepidus; she was now incestuously married to her uncle Claudius. And she had become a stepmother. The chances that she would be a wicked one, given that she had a son of her own to protect, seemed high. Seneca’s Phaedra would have been perilous for its author indeed, if released against this backdrop.

  Was palace life imitating Seneca’s art, or were things the other way around? Could we determine the date that Medea or Phaedra were written, we would know the answer. For lack of any chronology, we can only muse on this tantalizing circumstance: Rome’s greatest tragic playwright had landed at the court of a queen plucked straight from tragedy. The curtain was going up on the drama of Agrippina’s reign.

  Concern over how Agrippina would treat Claudius’ children, Britannicus and Octavia, had already been raised before the wedding. Vitellius, chief flack and spin doctor of the Claudian regime, had addressed this concern in the Senate: “To her”—Agrippina—“Claudius can entrust his innermost counsels, and his young children,” he declared with studied confidence. But nothing in Agrippina’s background gave grounds for this assertion. She had been a bitter enemy of Messalina, Claudius’ prior wife, and could be expected to hate the children on their mother’s account, or they her. More troubling was her obvious devotion to Domitius, whose odds in a succession struggle were certainly, by this time, better than even.

  Claudius could not have been blind to the risks of his new marriage, but he did little to protect his children. He stood aside as Agrippina began to promote her son’s interests over those of Britannicus. Our sources depict Claudius as passive and manipulable, Agrippina as ruthless and clever, but it seems more likely that, in the matter of succession, the two were in cahoots: both recognized the need to merge the bloodlines of the imperial house. Their own marriage had been one step in this direction; the betrothal of Domitius to Octavia had been another. The logical third step was not long in coming: Claudius prepared to adopt Domitius, the great-great-grandson of Augustus, as his son.

  It was contrary to Roman law for a man with a living son to adopt another. Such an arrangement would clearly threaten the rights of his natural offspring. But Nature had already been superseded by Law when the Senate voted that Claudius could marry his niece. On February 25, A.D. 50, the senators passed a special act of adoption requested by the princeps himself. Claudius gained a new son and gave him a new name: Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, or as he soon became known, Nero.

  A rivalry for succession had begun, and it soon held all Rome in suspense. Not since the legendary days of Romulus and Remus had two boys who were brothers, in legal terms at least, been so much at odds. Every public appearance by the imperial family was scrutinized for clues as to which boy was the presumed heir. Coins struck at state mints, usually vehicles for glorifying the reigning emperor, became for the first time an indicator of who would replace him. Those struck at Rome increasingly featured Nero, while those in the provinces continued to favor Britannicus, or else they put the profiles of both boys together in an overlapping arrangement called jugate. One issue minted in the Greek city of Pergamon hedged its bets: it featured Nero’s portrait on one side and that of Britannicus on the other, as though the outcome of the rivalry rested on the toss of a coin.

  Nero had not only purity of blood but seniority in his corner. He would reach all the stages of political maturity more than three years before Britannicus: at fourteen, the donning of the toga virilis, the wool tunic signifying adulthood and responsibility; at twenty, the minimum age for officeholding; at twenty-five, the right to sit in the Senate. It was not clear how many of these milestones a youth had to pass to qualify for the principate. But Nero was almost sure to pass more of them, during Claudius’ lifetime, than his stepbrother.

  Nero’s partisans were evidently eager to increase his lead, for they rushed him to the first milestone a year ahead of schedule. At age thirteen, in early 51, Nero received his adult’s toga and was escorted into the Forum, the arena of public affairs. He was as yet too young to hold office, but the Senate reserved a consulship—the annual magistracy carrying the state’s highest authority—for him in the year he would turn twenty. Similar measures had been taken under Augustus in order to hurry young heirs toward the throne. Nero was quite clearly being groomed for rule.

  Pergamon coin issue showing Britannicus and Nero on flip sides.

  As a consul-to-be, Nero was entitled to exercise proconsular power—like a modern teenager driving with a learner’s permit—and to wear special clothing and insignia. His new stature was therefore highly visible in the streets of Rome. At a special round of games put on to mark his elevation, he was presented to the crowds wearing his new markers of high office, while Britannicus appeared beside him in the simple cloak of a boy. The contrast was a humiliation for Britannicus and a clear indication of the new order of things.

  He had the heart to lift the seed of alien blood above his own son, says a character in Octavia with disgust, looking back at Claudius’ elevation of Nero in 50 and 51. The sidelining of Britannicus shocked and puzzled many observers. Could a father be so unfeeling toward his own flesh and blood? Some thought the preferment of Nero was an accident of timing. Claudius, they guessed, would advance Britannicus in the same way t
hree years later and would make the two youths joint heirs—a strategy that previous emperors had used. Others thought Agrippina, with her rumored sexual wiles, had addled Claudius’ brain.

  In back rooms of the palace, factions jockeyed for influence, one supporting Britannicus’ right of succession, the other championing Nero. Claudius’ two most powerful Greek freedmen—ex-slaves on whom he increasingly relied as chiefs of staff—were divided. Narcissus had feared Agrippina from the start and had tried to persuade Claudius to remarry Aelia Paetina, his own ex-wife, instead. His rival Pallas, with a better eye for picking winners, had all along backed Agrippina as Claudius’ spouse and now backed Nero as his heir.

  Seneca had no choice but to take Nero’s side, despite the fact that in Consolation to Polybius, sent from Corsica, he had effused over the young Britannicus. “Let Claudius confirm his son, with lasting faith, as steersman of the Roman empire,” he had written. But that was before a second son had appeared on the scene, and before that boy’s mother had become his patroness. Now Rome needed clarity and decisiveness about the way forward.

  Seneca never commented, in any extant work, on the palace rivalry, but a line he quoted from Vergil seems to address it indirectly. In A.D. 54, when Nero was already on the throne but Britannicus’ claim was still supported by many, Seneca imagined one of the Fates saying:

  Death to the worse; let the better one rule in the empty throne room.

  The verse comes from Vergil’s Georgics, and gives instructions for managing a hive that has two “king” bees (Romans thought hive leaders were male, not female). Seneca quoted it in another context, but he must have been aware, given the tension surrounding the succession question, of its grim relevance.

  While the fortunes of Britannicus declined, those of his sister Octavia, perhaps a year or two older, were on the rise. By betrothing her to Nero, Claudius had raised her chances of becoming empress and, eventually, queen mother, but he first had to cease being her father. Since Nero was now, in law, Claudius’ son, Octavia had to become some other man’s daughter; even a regime founded on a union of uncle and niece could not sanction that of brother and sister. Octavia was adopted by a patrician family so that she might marry insitivus Nero, “grafted-on Nero,” the sneering title she gives her husband in the play Octavia.

  By the start of 53, the reengineering of the imperial family was complete. Claudius had a new wife and a new son; Nero had a new name and a new father; Octavia had a new father and a new fiancé. Britannicus alone remained unreconstructed. He had been the great loser in all these transactions, and he simmered with impotent anger. One day he let that resentment show, perhaps involuntarily, as he passed his “brother” in the palace halls. Though Nero had been adopted many months earlier, Britannicus saluted him as Domitius, the name he had held before joining the imperial family.

  A statue from Claudius’ era, thought to depict his daughter Octavia.

  Agrippina seized on this greeting as evidence of ill will, even of a conspiracy to overthrow the regime. She denounced Britannicus, now perhaps nine years old, to Claudius and demanded that he take action.

  Whatever his feelings may have been for his sidelined son, Claudius acceded to his wife’s wishes. Britannicus was stripped of the tutors who had helped raise him, his closest confidants and supporters; one of them, Sosibius, was put to death as an insurgent. A new staff of minders was called in, whose loyalty to the new order was firm and who could be counted on to isolate the boy.

  Britannicus had been fenced off from all he held dear, perhaps even from his father. He had landed exactly where his partisans feared he would land: in the grasp of a stepmother.

  Agrippina had gotten all that she sought. She had elevated Nero to presumptive heir and greatly diminished Britannicus. Her own stature had risen along with her son’s. Shortly after his transformation from Domitius to Nero, she had received a new name of her own, the honorific title Augusta. Only the most revered imperial women had borne this title before her, and only as widows or mothers of emperors. Agrippina was the first to claim it as wife, and the shift betokened a new definition of the role. An Augusta was now—or so Agrippina hoped—the female counterpart of a Caesar, entitled to sit beside him in the halls of state, to take part in his privy councils, to appear on the backs of his coins, or even to share the front face with him in jugate profile.

  But Agrippina’s self-assertions did not stop there. In her second year as empress, she boldly intruded into the most sacred preserve of male power: the military.

  A British resistance leader, Caratacus, son of Cynobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), had been brought to Rome in chains that year. Claudius arranged to receive his submission in a grand ceremony: Caratacus and his family were marched up to an imperial dais behind a procession of spoils, with the whole Praetorian Guard, clad in full armor, lining their route. Beside Claudius on that dais, surrounded by the standards that symbolized command of the legions, sat Agrippina, claiming her right as Germanicus’ daughter to occupy such a place. When Caratacus delivered his plea for clemency, he addressed both members of the royal couple, and when clemency was granted, it was granted by both. “This was a new thing, unknown to the ways of our ancestors—a woman sitting before the Roman standards,” comments Tacitus, no friend of powerful women.

  Agrippina, wife of Claudius after A.D. 49.

  Agrippina’s paternity gave her enormous credit with the army. So did her name—a feminine refashioning of that of her grandfather, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the general responsible for Augustus’ greatest victories. Alert to the value of these assets, Agrippina found an ingenious way to advertise them to the world.

  Agrippa had founded a town in Germany as a haven for the Ubii, a tribe he had brought under Roman dominion. His son, Germanicus, later made it his base of operations. Agrippina herself had been born there, during her father’s glorious campaigns. This place, as yet only a regional outpost called Ara Ubiorum, was the focal point of her family’s heroic legacy, and Agrippina knew it. She persuaded Claudius to upgrade it to a colonia, a high-ranking Roman town with full legal status, and to name it after her. Never before had a Roman foundation commemorated a woman. Its full name, Colonia Agrippinensis, “Agrippina’s colonia,” proved too cumbersome for many Roman tongues, and so over time a shortened version, Colonia, gave rise to the modern name, Cologne (or Köln).

  Agrippina had gained power unprecedented for her gender, greater even than Messalina’s, and she was even better than her predecessor at putting it to use. A familiar pattern emerged, in which enemies of the empress—in particular, attractive, marriageable women—suddenly found themselves labeled enemies of the state. Lollia Paulina was one of these—a fabulously rich widow whom Claudius had looked at as a possible bride, before deciding to marry Agrippina. Agrippina accused her of treason, on the grounds she had consulted astrologers in an attempt to win the marital contest. Lollia was stripped of her wealth and sent into exile, presumably to the Pontine Islands. When she was safely out of the public eye, a Praetorian was dispatched to kill her and, according to Dio, bring back her severed head.

  Not only female rivals but rivals for palace influence troubled Agrippina. Among them was the man who had long enjoyed Claudius’ confidence, the Greek freedman and palace staffer Narcissus. This sharp operator had himself brought down many enemies in the days of Messalina. He might have been a helpful henchman to Agrippina, but the two instead were at odds. Narcissus was leaning increasingly toward Britannicus in the rivalry over succession.

  Agrippina wanted Narcissus humbled. When a huge public works project that Narcissus headed came a cropper, her opportunity arrived.

  Under Narcissus’ oversight, a crew of 30,000 had worked for eleven years to dig a drain for the Fucine Lake, about fifty miles east of Rome. Claudius meant to shrink the lake and reclaim arable land from its shores. It was an enormous undertaking: a tunnel had been chiseled through the rock, much of it hard limestone, for a distance of three miles, so that the lake’
s waters would flow into the nearby river Liris. The rubble had to be hauled out laboriously by winches through shafts in what is today Monte Salviano. Vast amounts of cash had been spent on the project, and Narcissus had a huge stake in its success—a point that did not go unnoticed by Agrippina.

  Claudius staged an elaborate celebration for the tunnel’s opening. Crowds came from Rome and all the surrounding towns to watch the festivities, with the emperor presiding in full battle garb, and Agrippina beside him in a chlamys, a military cloak, adorned with threads of gold. As a prelude, Claudius assembled thousands of condemned prisoners and put them on warships for a battle to the death. The start of the ceremony was signaled by a trumpet blast from a mechanical statue that arose automatically from the center of the lake.

  But at the tunnel’s moment of truth, the flow issuing from its mouth was only a trickle. Narcissus’ engineers had erred. The crowds went back to Rome, and the crews went back to work. In due course, a second opening ceremony was arranged, again with elaborate entertainment, including a dignitaries’ banquet held at the tunnel’s mouth; this time the tunnel worked too well. A jet of water erupted from it with a roar, tearing away chunks of the dining platform and sending the banqueters fleeing in panic.

  Agrippina saw a chance to take Narcissus down, and she pounced. The freedman’s great wealth—he was reputed to be the richest man of his time—made charges of fiscal malfeasance all too credible. Of course, graft could explain only the first tunnel debacle, not the second; but an ingenious rumor was spread that Narcissus had contrived the banquet cataclysm as a way to divert attention from his juggled books.