Dying Every Day Page 9

  The provocation demanded a riposte—but who would deliver it? Some Romans fretted that a youth just turning seventeen, governed by his mother and his teachers, was not up to the task of waging war in the East. Others reasoned that Seneca and Burrus were experienced men who would help the young emperor get through. Everyone waited to see who would be put in command, a real soldier or a mediocrity who could be counted on not to outshine Nero.

  Agrippina, daughter of the greatest soldier of the century, expected to help manage the crisis. This was a red line for the male leaders of the regime. An Amazon could not lead Rome into war, even if she was the last living child of Germanicus. A court audience for the Armenian ambassadors was chosen as the place to make a stand.

  Seneca and Burrus sat beside Nero on the high platform that denoted imperial power. Agrippina entered the room and made clear she intended to join them on that platform. The idea struck horror into the minds of the onlookers, but the three men had devised a countermeasure. At Seneca’s cue, Nero stepped down off the dais and met his mother at ground level, pretending to greet her but blocking her progress. The episode appeared to outsiders to be merely a tender exchange between mother and son, not a determined test of wills. The proceedings were then adjourned or moved to a new location. An open clash might have ensued had Nero reascended the dais, and foreign eyes might have glimpsed the rift in the regime.

  Nero, prompted by Seneca, had stood up to his mother with a small but strong gesture. He soon followed it with equally confident moves to counter the eastern threat. Troop strength was boosted, and plans were laid to bridge the Euphrates and invade Parthia. Nero gave Domitius Corbulo, an iron-hard disciplinarian who had beaten the Germans under Claudius, command of the invasion forces. That move was hailed as a sign that Nero, advised by Seneca and Burrus, did indeed have the strength to face a barbarian foe.

  The Parthians quickly backed down. Their surrogate in Armenia relinquished power and turned over hostages to Corbulo as guarantees of nonaggression. A grateful Rome showered honors on Nero, erecting a statue in the temple of Mars as large as that of the war god himself.

  Agrippina accepted her second check but nursed her wounded pride. She was far from ready to cede the role of chief regent to Seneca, still less to Burrus. She was determined to show who had more influence over her son, she or they. As it happened, her next opportunity was not long in coming, and her efforts to exploit it would forever destroy what concord remained in the palace.

  Like most Romans, Seneca mistrusted ambitious women, especially mothers who sought power through their sons. In a letter to his own mother, Helvia, from his exile on Corsica, Seneca had praised her for keeping out of politics even with two sons in the Senate: “You did not make use of our influence as though it were family property.… The only things that touched you from our elections to office were the pleasure they gave you and the costs they imposed.” Helvia’s passivity posed a stark contrast, Seneca wrote, to “those mothers who wield the potentia of their sons, with the impotentia of women.” His wordplay contrasts political governance—normally the province of men—with female inability to “govern” desire and emotion.

  Seneca never mentions Agrippina in any of his surviving writings. Indeed his moral treatises deal only infrequently with women in general. De Ira characterizes anger as a “womanly and childish vice,” but its cases in point come from the realm of adult males. Even in Apocolocyntosis, his scathing satire on the abuses of Claudius, Seneca mentions Messalina—the moving force behind numerous executions, and his own exile—only as a victim, not as a perpetrator, of crimes.

  By contrast, Seneca’s tragedies are dominated by women. Two of his best plays, Phaedra and Medea, revolve around powerful women and their passions, love in the first case, anger in the second. Phaedra conceives a desperate passion for her stepson, Hippolytus, then destroys him after he spurns her. Medea, barbarian wife of the Greek hero Jason, murders her children to get revenge on her adulterous husband. It is tempting to think that Seneca wrote the first in the era of Messalina, the second in that of Agrippina, women whose prevailing passions sort well with the heroines he portrayed. But there are no clues, either within the plays themselves or in other sources, that allow us to establish their dates.

  Few today would think to read De Ira together with Medea, though the two works might well have been composed concurrently. Indeed, among dozens of modern editions of Seneca, a huge array of anthologies that organize his works for modern readers, only a single volume dares to package tragedies and prose works together. For why would any reader—still less, any writer—choose to inhabit two nearly opposite moral universes at the same time? Medea shows anger run amok, mushrooming into gigantic and hideous forms. “Ira, I follow wherever you lead,” Medea says as she stabs her sons to death, one after the other. But in De Ira, Seneca argues that anger can and must be subdued so that the rational mind can prevail. Our exemplar is Seneca himself, sitting with his wife as evening falls, calmly chastising himself for raising his voice that day.

  Interpreters have struggled, and will struggle forever, to understand how one mind could have produced both bodies of work. It is as though Emerson had taken time off from writing his essays to compose the opera Faust. Some have described Seneca’s tragedies as inversions of his prose works—instruction by negative example—but that is too pat an explanation. The author of the plays expresses thoughts that the author of the treatises seems unable even to entertain. The last couplet of Medea, spoken by Jason as he watches his murderous wife escaping in a dragon-drawn flying chariot, resounds with nihilistic horror:

  Make your way up, through the high expanses of heaven;

  Proclaim, wherever you go, that there are no gods.

  The tragedies feature many such moments. One would guess that their author was well acquainted with despair, even madness. But the prose treatises are optimistic and pious. They proclaim everywhere that there are gods, or God—as proved by the divine power of Reason within every soul.

  In which body of work do we hear the real Seneca? Or are they two equally authentic expressions of what has been called his “compartmentalized mind”? Did he write his tragedies as a covert cri de coeur, a release of moral revulsion he could not otherwise express? That certainly seems the case, as will be seen, with his most ambitious, most harrowing drama, Thyestes—perhaps the last play he completed and the only one that can be securely dated to his years under Nero.

  In Medea and Phaedra, Seneca plumbed the depths of what he saw as a typically female affliction, impotentia—an inability to master lust, restrain envy, or tamp down the need for control and power. It was a condition he, and other Roman males, feared in all contexts but particularly when it entered the political realm. The passions of unbridled women could destroy that realm and rush the world headlong toward apocalypse.

  It was these fears of female impotentia that Rome, and Seneca, confronted as they watched Agrippina suddenly come unglued in early 55. What prompted the tempest was not an issue of statecraft but an affair of the heart.

  · · ·

  Nero had married Octavia a year or two before his accession, but the union was a cold one. The young emperor did not much care for the high-minded princess his mother had chosen for him. Octavia was central to Agrippina’s plan to knit together the Julian and Claudian lines and secure the future of the dynasty. The birth of a son would have sealed that future and cemented Nero’s position, but Octavia had not yet conceived. Perhaps she was not able, but it is likely that her disdainful husband did not give her many chances.

  Nero’s interest in sex was as strong as any adolescent boy’s, but like many smothered sons of the elite, he craved the exotic and outré. He had not been in the palace long when an Asian freedwoman named Acte, a member of the foreign-born staff assembled by Claudius, caught his eye and came into his bed. She was everything Octavia was not—above all, she was not his mother’s choice.

  Emperors felt entitled to any woman they desired, regardless of
either party’s marital status. Nero’s passion for Acte was not in itself worrisome. Indeed, it brought relief to many, who had seen Caligula debauch himself with the wives of senators and consuls, humiliating the elite with rape and degradation. The affair with Acte harmed no one—but it sent Agrippina into a rage. She regarded it as a betrayal by her son and a challenge to her authority. “A handmaid for a daughter-in-law!” she exclaimed to her partisans, and demanded of Nero that he end the liaison. “I made you emperor,” she reminded him, implying that she might undo what she had done.

  Nero had had enough. His mother’s carping and bullying had annoyed him before, so much that he had threatened to abdicate and run off to Rhodes, far from her influence. Now he was ready to risk a true breach, and he turned to his best natural ally, Seneca.

  Seneca had aided Nero early on in the affair with Acte, directing his close friend Annaeus Serenus, newly appointed as head of Rome’s vigiles (a combined police and fire-fighting corps), to help conceal it. Serenus pretended to be Acte’s lover, passing along Nero’s gifts to the girl as though they came from him. It was a sneaky and passive form of support—given no doubt in hope the affair would soon run its course—but it showed plainly where Seneca’s sympathies lay. If mother and son were going to war, he would side with the son.

  The choice could not have been an easy one. Agrippina was his patroness, the woman who had brought him back from exile and given him the power he now enjoyed. He would lose that power, and perhaps his life, if he fell on the wrong side of the rift. Agrippina might even go over the edge if she was pushed too far, a dangerous outcome that Seneca could not have hoped for. Even if Nero must triumph in the end, Seneca had nothing to gain—and indeed had much to lose—from the total estrangement of his two masters.

  The contretemps took a seemingly benign turn. Unable to bully her son, Agrippina suddenly turned cloying. Outpandering Seneca and Serenus, she offered Nero her own palace rooms for his trysts with Acte, and the use of her wealth to subsidize his pleasures. It was a transparent attempt at manipulation, and Nero’s friends urged him not to take the bait. The emperor nonetheless had pangs of regret. Knowing well his mother’s taste for feminine finery, he picked out some clothes and gems from the palace treasury and sent them to her as a peace offering. Agrippina only bridled when she got them, claiming that the crown jewels she had given her son were being returned to her in niggardly dribs and drabs. The attempt at reconciliation ended up widening the breach.

  Nero decided to neutralize one of Agrippina’s chief supporters, the freedman Pallas. Officially minister of the exchequer, but party to all backroom schemes, Pallas had amassed enormous influence and more wealth than anyone in Rome—except his deceased former rival, Narcissus. For seven years, he had used his sway on behalf of Agrippina, but now Nero wanted his mother disarmed. He cut a deal with Pallas, allowing the freedman to take his loot with him, no questions asked, if he would leave without making trouble. Pallas exited grandly, accompanied by crowds of attendants and bearers—a rare political gambler who had beaten the house and, for the moment at least, got out with his winnings intact.

  The loss of her principal ally turned Agrippina apoplectic. A few weeks earlier, she had touted her role in securing the throne for Nero; now she spoke openly of her power to take it away. Britannicus was about to reach manhood, she pointed out to her son, and could easily reclaim his patrimony. In an inversion of her former line, she portrayed Nero as an interloper and a usurper of Britannicus’ rights. It was by the grace of the gods, she said, that Britannicus still lived. She would take him to the Praetorians’ camp and present him for acclamation; the soldiers would take her part against her rivals at court.

  “It’ll be a daughter of Germanicus on one side, and on the other Burrus the cripple and Seneca the exile—one with his maimed hand, the other with his schoolmaster’s tongue, yet they seek rule over the whole human race!” she cried, gesturing wildly and invoking the shades of her victims, the two Silanus brothers and the now-deified Claudius.

  A young man’s dalliance with a servant was spiraling into a crisis. Agrippina was lashing out viciously at her son, with her uncanny instinct for what would threaten him politically and terrorize him psychologically. There was no doubt of her standing with the Praetorian Guard, the keystone to control of the throne. The guard had always been fiercely loyal to the house of Germanicus, whose memory they deeply revered. With the guard behind her, Agrippina could, if it came to that, destroy Seneca, Burrus, and Nero together, as easily as she had created all three ex nihilo.

  The triumvirate forged at the end of Claudius’ regime—the strange triangle of Agrippina, Nero, and Seneca—had collapsed. It was now a game of two against one, with Agrippina desperate not to end up on the losing side. She had shown her willingness to use any weapon, to escalate to the highest pitch of emotion, in order to hold Nero’s allegiance. For Seneca, adherent of Reason, advocate of moderation and the suppression of anger, it was not clear whether, or how, to fight back.

  Britannicus was approaching his fourteenth birthday. With it would come an adult toga, a ceremonial entry into the Forum, and implicitly, eligibility for rule. The seniority advantage that Nero had enjoyed would soon be at an end, forever.

  Though sidelined from power, Britannicus had made plain that his hopes were not extinguished. In December 54, when Nero had been two months on the throne, the imperial family had one night relaxed with a role-playing game, and Nero had been made king-for-a-night. The new princeps imperiously commanded his adoptive brother to stand and sing before all. Britannicus, unbowed by the bullying, sang a tragic lament about the loss of patrimony and rule. It was the same sort of pluck the boy had shown years earlier, if he indeed had ignored Nero’s adoption and deliberately called him Domitius.

  Had Claudius wanted his natural son to inherit the throne on coming of age? Some believed his will had made such provisions, but Agrippina and Nero had suppressed it. In any case, what mattered to Nero now was not his adoptive father’s intentions but those of his mother. Even if the will had not named Britannicus heir, Agrippina could claim that it had—and who would gainsay a grieving widow, daughter of Germanicus, and priestess of her deified husband’s cult?

  Agrippina had shown, in the Acte crisis, that she would use Britannicus at any opportunity to gain leverage. She had the supreme weapon that could be held over a princeps, a viable replacement. Only when this weapon was defused could Nero hope to control his mother—though she would still have in her arsenal the support of the Praetorians, the heroic legacy of Germanicus, and a remarkable ability to lavish or deny maternal love.

  The date of Britannicus’ upcoming birthday grew more threatening as it drew closer. Nero decided he must make that date a deadline in the literal sense—the date by which Britannicus would be dead.

  It was as much his mother as his adoptive brother that Nero was striking at. He was not strong enough to order violence against Agrippina, though soon the wish to do so would consume him. For now, he could murder her by proxy.

  Nero used his mother’s own hired poisoner to accomplish the deed, the Gaul Locusta, “the Crayfish.” Unlike his mother when she killed Claudius, though, Nero did not care about acting in stealth. Locusta at first concocted a slow-acting poison that only made Britannicus vomit; Nero became so agitated that he struck her. The woman explained that she had only been trying to help keep the crime concealed. “So I’m afraid of the Julian law, am I?” Nero asked, mocking the idea he could be tried under standing statutes.

  Locusta obliged by providing a stronger dose, testing it on a goat and a pig to make certain. Speed and openness were desirable now. Nero wanted Agrippina to see that he had the courage to act.

  Did Seneca help Nero carry out his first assassination? Was he at least informed of the plot? None of our sources imply either proposition, but the logic of the court demands that they be considered. Seneca had been Nero’s ally against Agrippina from the start, as well as his chief adviser and guide. It is
hard to know whether Nero could, or would, have pulled off the crime without him.

  By custom, the imperial family dined together, but with younger members sitting upright (as only children did in Rome) at their own table. Britannicus took his meals here, alongside his close friend Titus, son of the general Vespasian—both of whom would one day become emperors themselves. Nero and his wife Octavia sat apart, reclining on dining couches in adult fashion. Hierarchies of place, posture, and diet thus separated Octavia from her younger brother. The paths of the two orphans had diverged widely since insitivus Nero, “grafted-on Nero,” had arrived in their midst.

  Tasters routinely sampled all drinks and dishes to guard the family against poisons. But every system has its loopholes, and Nero exploited one of them. Since it was winter, wine was drunk warm, mixed beforehand with hot water. Britannicus’ cup was duly tasted and passed to him. But the drink had been made too hot for the young man’s liking. He pushed it away, and an obliging servant added melted snow to temper it. The drink, now containing the poison, was not tested a second time. Britannicus sipped it and fell stone dead.

  There followed a stunned silence in the dining hall, during which all present felt, as one historian has put it, “the need of seeing into the minds of others while concealing one’s own.” Some made a hasty exit from the room. Agrippina and Octavia, who were among those taken by surprise, stood transfixed, striving (according to Tacitus) to keep their faces expressionless. All eyes turned toward Nero. The emperor reminded those present that Britannicus had suffered epileptic attacks since childhood; the boy would no doubt soon recover his health. No one contradicted him, and the meal grimly resumed.

  Rome had seen dynastic murders before, but never such a brazen one at a large gathering. The openness of the deed sent a clear message, intended for Agrippina above all. She would not be allowed to bully or blackmail her son. Nero would stand on his own, or rather with Seneca and Burrus, not his mother, to aid him.