The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources
336
The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources
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Overview
Nero's reign (AD 54–68) witnessed some of the most memorable events in Roman history, such as the rebellion of Boudica and the first persecution of the Christians—not to mention Nero's murder of his mother, his tyranny and extravagance, and his suicide, which plunged the empire into civil war. The Emperor Nero gathers into a single collection the major sources for Nero's life and rule, providing students of Nero and ancient Rome with the most authoritative and accessible reader there is.
The Emperor Nero features clear, contemporary translations of key literary sources along with translations and explanations of representative inscriptions and coins issued under Nero. The informative introduction situates the emperor's reign within the history of the Roman Empire, and the book's concise headnotes to chapters place the source material in historical and biographical context. Passages are accompanied by detailed notes and are organized around events, such as the Great Fire of Rome, or by topic, such as Nero's relationships with his wives. Complex events like the war with Parthia—split up among several chapters in Tacitus's Annals—are brought together in continuous narratives, making this the most comprehensible and user-friendly sourcebook on Nero available.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400881109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
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The Emperor Nero
A Guide to the Ancient Sources
By Anthony A. Barrett, Elaine Fantham, John C. Yardley
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8110-9
CHAPTER 1
THE MAKING OF THE EMPEROR
INTRODUCTION
It has often been observed that the primary weakness of the system established by Augustus was the absence of a clear formula for succession. It is certainly the case that after Julius Caesar every one of the Julio-Claudian emperors seemed at some early stage of his life to have been among the least likely candidates to become emperor. Augustus was an obscure student with a relatively modest family background when he learned that he had been adopted posthumously by Julius Caesar and made his subsequent bid for power. Tiberius enters the historical record as an infant when his parents were fleeing for their lives from Naples during the clashes between Antony and Octavian, and he almost betrayed their presence by crying. Even after his mother had married the future emperor, he spent a period of humiliating self-exile on the island of Rhodes, convinced that he was perpetually sidelined in the competition to succeed. Caligula might not even have escaped with his life had he been older. His two brothers were both put to death as a consequence of the bitter dynastic rivalries instigated largely by Sejanus. Caligula's successor, Claudius, who was neither a natural nor an adopted descendant of Augustus, had spent his youth hidden from public view and was so far from being a serious contender for the principate that he was considered an embarrassment to his family. By the end of Claudius's reign, Nero's father, a man noted for his mediocrity and laziness, was dead, and Nero's mother was in disgraced exile. Even after the succession of Claudius and the recall of Agrippina, Nero would spend his early youth in relative obscurity until the intrusion of his mother into the political scene in Rome.
Like Tiberius, Nero became emperor because of the single-minded and focused ambition of his mother (and, like Tiberius, he resented the idea that he owed his elevation to that agency). After her return from exile, Agrippina acquired a new husband, and presumably also acquired much of his considerable fortune upon his death. We cannot tell if she played any role in the downfall of Claudius's wife Messalina (whose behavior was so reckless that she in all likelihood brought about her own ruin, without any assistance from outside). But it is certainly the case that Agrippina saw the opportunity that the demise of Messalina offered, and exploited it relentlessly. She could provide Claudius with a much needed link to Augustus, since she was his granddaughter in a direct bloodline, and, with her son Nero, she enabled Claudius to take the wind out of the sails of any violent opposition to his reign by holding out the prospect of ultimately being succeeded by a direct Augustan descendant. Claudius was first and foremost a political animal, and if his political survival meant that his own natural son would be forced into a subordinate position, then that was a price he was willing to pay. Hence, after his marriage, which was technically illegal and required a special measure of the Senate because Agrippina was his brother's daughter, he agreed to adopt Nero. The adoption also necessitated a technical dispensation from the law, because Claudius already had a son. Claudius then agreed to his new son's marriage to his daughter Octavia, who was of course technically his sister and in yet another piece of legal legerdemain was adopted by another family to make the marriage legitimate. Claudius was prepared to overcome all of these formidable obstacles for his own self-preservation. Apparently, he did not stop to consider that these survival measures had the fatal flaw that while they made him more secure against external rivals, they generated a new rival in the form of the very individual meant to protect him, his adopted son Nero, and that once Claudius had, in the eyes of his wife, fulfilled his necessary role, she might be inclined, and the ancient sources generally agree that she was inclined, to play out her own role, that of a dynastic black widow spider.
Agrippina had in fact prepared the ground very skillfully. She removed the key supporters of Britannicus from his household staff, leaving him without close advisers and allies in any potential struggle for the succession that might ensue. Most importantly, she had, many years before the issue came to a head, ensured that her own man, Sextus Afranius Burrus, took command of the praetorian guard. Then, in an even more striking display of her capacity for carefully preparing the ground, over time she replaced the officers of the guard, the tribunes and centurions, with her own candidates, not by dismissing or demoting those not in her camp but more skillfully by bribing them with promotions to positions in the legions well away from Rome in the frontier regions. This meant that in December 54 the loyalty of the guard in Rome was a done deal. One can only speculate on how many of these same dislodged officers would still be serving, by then in senior positions, in AD 68, in legions that needed little urging to abandon Nero.
SOURCES
Suetonius provides information about Nero's general nature and appearance.
Suet. Ner. 51. Nero was of about average height, with a body that was blotchy and malodorous, hair that was almost blond, a face more agreeable than attractive, grey eyes that were rather weak, a thick neck, protruding stomach, spindly legs, and health that was robust. Indeed, despite his life of most decadent luxury, he was ill only three times during his fourteen-year reign, and even then not seriously enough to give up drinking or his other habits. In his personal grooming and dress, he was so outrageous as to have his hair always layered, and on his Achaean travels even let it grow long behind his head. He also frequently went out into the streets in dining attire, with a napkin tied around his neck and wearing no waistband or shoes.
52. When he was a boy, he engaged in practically all the liberal arts. His mother, however, turned him away from philosophy by warning him that it was not in a future emperor's interests, while his teacher Seneca, in order to prolong his student's admiration for him, steered him away from studying the orators of old.
Suetonius begins the Life of Nero with an account of the emperor's family background. Romans made much of the notion of inherited family traits and, by putting his focus on the shortcomings of Nero's ancestors, Suetonius seeks to suggest that his character failings were inherited. His narrative takes him down to the time of Nero's grandfather, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul in 16 BC, whose marriage to Antonia the Elder, daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, sister of Augustus, was a sure sign of the eminence that the family had acquired by the end of the Republic.
Suet. 5.1. By the elder Antonia, Domitius had as a son Nero's father, who was in every aspect of his life thoroughly detestable. Indeed, while a member of the staff of a young Gaius Caesar in the East, he murdered a freedman of his because the man had refused to drink as much as he was ordered to, and when he was dismissed from the staff, his life was no more disciplined. In a village on the Appian Way, he suddenly brought his team of horses to a gallop and deliberately trampled down a boy, and then in the middle of the Forum in Rome he gouged out the eye of a Roman eques for reprimanding him too freely. 2. Moreover, such was his lack of integrity that he not only swindled some bankers out of their payment for items bought for him but also in his praetorship cheated a number of charioteers out of their prize money. When he was the butt of his sister's joking over this, and managers of the racing factions lodged a complaint, he issued a decree that — in the future! — prize money must be paid immediately. A little before Tiberius's death, he was arraigned on charges of treason, adultery, and incest with his sister Lepida. He evaded them through the change of regime and died of dropsy at Pyrgi, having formally recognized Nero, his son by Germanicus's daughter Agrippina.
Nero's birth was noteworthy.
Plin. HN 7.8.45. It is unnatural for a child to be born feet first, and for that reason people have called such cases "Agrippas," the birth being "difficult." Such they say was the manner of Marcus Agrippa's birth, he being almost the only example of success among all those born in this way. And yet he, too, is reckoned to have expiated the omen of his inverted birth with his youth made wretched by lameness, with his life spent in warfare and so close to death's door, and with all his progeny bringing misfortune to the earth, especially the two Agrippinas, who bore respectively the emperors Gaius and Domitius Nero, a pair of firebrands to scorch the human race. 46. There was, in addition, his short life span: he was taken off in his fifty-first year, suffering the torments of his wife's adulterous affairs and enduring truly oppressive subservience to his father-in-law.
Nero, too, who was emperor a little while ago and who in his entire principate was the enemy of the human race, was also born feet first, so his mother Agrippina records. It is nature's way for a human to be born head first and taken out for burial feet first.
Nero's parents are divided by deep antipathy.
Dio 61.2.1. The following were omens of Nero's coming rule. When he was born, rays of light surrounded him just before dawn although they came from no observable sunlight. On the basis of this, and from the movement of the stars at that time and their position relative to each other, an astrologer made two prophecies about him: he would rule and he would kill his mother. 2. When she heard this, Agrippina was momentarily so deranged as to cry out the very words "Let him kill me, only let him rule," though she would later have bitter regrets about the prayer. Some people reach such a pitch of folly that, if they anticipate gaining something good that is mixed with something bad, they, in their desire for the better thing, give no thought to the bad, but when the time for that comes, they are distressed and would have preferred not to have accepted even the very best of things. 3. However, with regard to Nero's amorality and lechery, his father Domitius saw them coming, and not from prophecy but from his own character and that of Agrippina. "It is impossible," he said, "for any good man to be born from me and this woman." 4. Time went by, and a snakeskin was found around the neck of Nero while he was a child. This allowed the seers to say that he would acquire great strength from the old, since snakes are believed to throw off old age by discarding it.
Suet. Ner. 6.1. Nero was born at Antium nine months after Tiberius's death, on December 15, just as the sun was rising, so that he was touched by its rays almost before he was touched by the earth. With regard to his horoscope, there were many fearful predictions made by many people, added to which was the ominous remark of his father, Domitius, uttered amid the congratulations of his friends, that nothing could have been born from him and Agrippina that was not odious and a scourge on the state. 2. Another clear pointer to the man's unpromising future came on his purification day. When Gaius Caesar's sister asked him to give the baby any name he liked, he fixed his eyes on his uncle Claudius (who soon became emperor, and by whom Nero was adopted) and said he was giving the child his name. However, he did not do this in earnest but as a joke, and Agrippina rejected the name because at that time Claudius was one of the objects of ridicule in the court.
3. Nero was three when he lost his father. His legacy was one-third of the property, but he did not receive even that intact, as the entire estate was appropriated by his co-heir Gaius. And soon afterward, when his mother was also banished, leaving him almost without means and impoverished, he was brought up in the home of his aunt Lepida under two pedagogues, one a dancer and the other a barber. But when Claudius came to power, Nero not only recovered his father's property but also was even further enriched by a legacy from his stepfather, Passienus Crispus. 4. After his mother was recalled and restored to her position, he thrived thanks to her influence and power, so much so that word got out to the general public that men had been sent by Claudius's wife Messalina to strangle him during his siesta because she thought him a rival to Britannicus. A detail added to the story is that those same men were frightened off and took to their heels when a snake emerged from under his pillow. This story arose from the fact that the cast-off skin of a snake was discovered in his bed close to his pillow; nevertheless, following his mother's wishes, he wore the skin on his right arm for some considerable time, set in a golden bracelet. When he finally found the memory of his mother disagreeable, he threw it away and then, when his situation became dire, he looked for it again, without success.
In AD 47, Nero is successfully introduced to the Roman public.
Tac. Ann. 11.11.1. It was during this same consulship that the Secular Games were put on, in the eight hundredth year after Rome's founding and the sixty-fourth after their staging by Augustus....
2. When Claudius was seated at the games in the circus, boys from noble families put on the Game of Troy on horseback. Among them were Britannicus, son of the emperor, and Lucius Domitius, who would soon be taken by adoption into the ruling family, with the cognomen Nero. The support of the crowd, which was more enthusiastic for Domitius, was taken as an omen. It was also put about that snakes had looked after the boy like guardians during his infancy, a tall tale made up to match the wondrous stories of foreign nations. In fact, Nero, no man to downplay himself, used to recount that no more than one serpent was seen in his bedroom.
12.1. In reality, the support of the people arose from the memory of Germanicus, whose sole male descendant Nero was. And sympathy for his mother, Agrippina, was heightened by the savagery of Messalina. She had always hated Agrippina but at that time was particularly exasperated, being deterred from fabricating charges against her, and finding people to lay them, only by her new infatuation, which bordered on insanity. 2. For she had developed a passion for Gaius Silius, the best-looking of Rome's young men, and so much so that she chased Junia Silana, a woman of noble descent, from her marriage and then assumed possession of her now unattached lover.
After her marriage to Claudius, Agrippina completely dominates her husband and ensures the bethrothal, and later marriage, of Nero and Claudius's daughter, Octavia, and Nero's adoption as Claudius's son.
Dio 60.32.1. Once Agrippina was in the palace, she completely dominated Claudius. She was extremely clever at exploiting situations, and by a combination of instilling fear and granting favors, she won over all those who were on good terms with him. Eventually, she saw to it that his son Britannicus was brought up like any of the ordinary citizenry. (His other son, who had been engaged to Sejanus's daughter, was dead.)
She then made Domitius Claudius's son-in-law, and later engineered his adoption, too. She succeeded in achieving all this partly by using his freedmen to persuade him and partly by taking steps to have the Senate, the people, and the military shout out in unison what suited her on any particular occasion.
Tac. Ann. 12.25.1. In the consulship of Gaius Antistius and Marcus Suillius, the adoption of Domitius was swiftly pushed ahead, through Pallas's influence. Pallas felt bound to Agrippina as the arranger of her marriage, and later because of a sexual relationship, and he now kept urging Claudius to take thought for the good of the state and provide protection for Britannicus in his early years. He cited the parallel of the deified Augustus in whose family, though he had grandsons to rely on, stepsons had a prominent role, and the case of Tiberius, who had children of his own but also adopted Germanicus. Claudius, too, he said, should equip himself with a young man who would assume some of his responsibilities.
2. Convinced by this, Claudius set Domitius, who was three years older, ahead of his own son, making a speech in the Senate along the lines of what he had heard from the freedman. Experts observed that there had been before this no case of adoption among the patricians of the Claudian family and that they had survived without interruption from Attus Clausus on.
26.1. The emperor was thanked, and the flattery of Domitius was particularly well constructed; and a law was passed that provided for his adoption into the Claudian family with the name "Nero." 2. Agrippina, too, received elevation with the cognomen Augusta. When this was done, there was nobody so heartless as not to be touched by sadness for Britannicus's lot. The boy was gradually deprived even of the service of his slaves, and he treated with derision the poorly timed solicitude of his stepmother, aware of its hypocrisy, for they do say that he was not slow-witted by nature. That may be true, or perhaps sympathy for his danger allowed him to keep that reputation without it being put to the test.
Suet. Ner. 7.1. While still young, not yet in the later stages of boyhood, he took part in the Troy Game during the circus performances, with self-confidence and a successful result. During his eleventh year, he was adopted by Claudius and entrusted to Annaeus Seneca (who at the time was already a senator) for his education. They claim that the following night Senecadreamed that it was actually Gaius Caesar that he was teaching, and Nero soon gave some authority to the dream by his brutal nature, of which he gave evidence as soon as he could. Because his brother Britannicus had, after Nero's adoption, called him "Ahenobarbus," as he normally did, he tried to persuade the father that Britannicus was not really his child. Furthermore, when Lepida, his aunt, was indicted, he gave crushing testimony against her in her presence, to please his mother, who was trying to secure the defendant's conviction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Emperor Nero by Anthony A. Barrett, Elaine Fantham, John C. Yardley. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiIntroduction xi
List of Major Events during Nero’s Lifetime xxvii
I THE MAKING OF THE EMPEROR 1
II THE NEW EMPEROR 22
III ENEMIES WITHIN 41
IV PARTHIA 77
V BRITAIN AND GERMANY 118
VI THE GREAT FIRE 149
VII THE EMPEROR’S WIVES 171
VIII CONSPIRACIES 190
IX THE EMPEROR AS ARTIST AND SHOWMAN 231
X DEATH 265
Bibliography 287
Index 295
What People are Saying About This
"The most learned sourcebook I have ever seen."—Miriam T. Griffin, author of Nero: The End of a Dynasty"This extremely well-informed and judicious sourcebook collates the most important evidence on the life and reign of the emperor Nero. No one has organized this material in this way before and provided such a rich and accessible commentary on these difficult sources."—T. Corey Brennan, author of The Praetorship in the Roman Republic