A Companion to the Neronian Age

Emma Buckley, Martin Dinter, Emma Buckley, Martin Dinter

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118316535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An authoritative overview and helpful resource for students and scholars of Roman history and Latin literature during the reign of Nero.

• The first book of its kind to treat this era, which has gained in popularity in recent years
• Makes much important research available in English for the first time
• Features a balance of new research with established critical lines
• Offers an unusual breadth and range of material, including substantial treatments of politics, administration, the imperial court, art, archaeology, literature and reception studies
• Includes a mix of established scholars and groundbreaking new voices
• Includes detailed maps and illustrations

Part I

Nero

Chapter 1

The Performing Prince

Elaine Fantham

The Training and Pastimes of Princes

Earlier this year I turned on the BBC television World Service to find an image of Prince Harry, the younger of the future crown princes of Great Britain, astride a polo pony in an exhibition game of polo at the Meadowbrook Club in Long Island. He was making a brief ceremonial visit to New York to lay a wreath at the site of Ground Zero and followed it up with some interviews and this unusual match.

Now polo is not a national game in Britain like cricket or football (soccer and/or rugger). It is mostly played under the auspices of private clubs and ordinary folk will only see it if it is screened because a member of the royal family is playing. The game is an archaic revival, originating in central Asia, brought to Britain from India in the nineteenth century and since modified. I would say that as an expensive game and a team game for the elite it is highly appropriate to a young prince, especially as it requires swift reflexes and skilled horsemanship. It invites comparison with the Lusus Troiae (“Troy Game”) re-introduced to Rome by Caesar, a ritual event in which elite Roman youth performed intricate choreographed manoeuvres on horseback (Suetonius, Divus Julius 39).

Suetonius pointedly says that Augustus put on the Troy Game because he thought it a becoming and ancient practice for the nature of elite families to make itself known (notescere): so the game was directed to the self-presentation of future nobles and princes to the people of Rome (Divus Augustus 43.2). Virgil features the first instance of this game, its etiology so to speak, as a tradition of the Julian gens in Aeneid 5.548–78.

The point I want to make is that monarchies—new or established—develop an appropriate training for their princes, and an appropriate way for the young men to be presented to their subjects. The princes William and Harry both followed their public school with military training, and have served in the army; Harry indeed went secretly to Afghanistan to share the experiences of his fighting force, and afterwards trained to be a helicopter pilot. No one would criticize this choice, and most citizens would be content even with the far more symbolic military service or titular positions as commanders of military units.

Within the dynasty developed by Augustus Caesar the military training of the emperor's successors followed the republican Roman tradition which sent the youth in his first years of military service (stipendium) to serve under his father's command, or if the father was unmilitary, under a friend's protection. Nicolaus of Damascus' Life of Augustus records that Julius Caesar took his great-nephew Octavian and Octavian's best friend Agrippa to fight Sextus Pompey in Spain and was expecting them to join him in the Parthian expedition of 44 BC. Octavian in turn promoted the military career of his stepsons. Even if Marcellus was not healthy enough for combat—as may have been the case—both Tiberius and Drusus fought and became officers, fighting for Rome over 15 years, in Gaul, in Germany, in the Raetian and Vindelician Alps of Tyrol. Drusus led a naval expedition eastwards in the North Sea as far as the mouth of the Elbe, and was fighting in Germany as consul and commander when a tragic fall from his horse killed him. In a sense there was no gap between this first princely model and the first training under Tiberius in 8 BC of Gaius Caesar, born in 20 BC as son of Agrippa and adopted as heir of Augustus. In 20 BC Tiberius had led a diplomatic expedition to show the flag and recover the Parthian standards; in AD 1 Gaius went out to Armenia on a similar military expedition, while his younger brother Lucius went to command Roman forces in Gallia Transalpina. Both princes died—one of wounds, one of disease—but their place was taken by Drusus' son Germanicus (born approx 15 BC) and Tiberius' son by Agrippa's daughter Vipsania, also called Drusus. Imperator Augustus had Tiberius adopt these two princes as successors. Germanicus was commander in chief of the two legionary camps on the upper and lower Rhine when Augustus died, whereas Drusus had been sent out from Rome to the mutinous legions in Pannonia. These two events form Tacitus' opening scenario once he has passed Augustus' funeral and obituaries.

So there were Roman princes rising through the army for 60 years from 45 BC onwards and they would also occupy superior commands until the sinister death of Germanicus in AD 19 and suspected poisoning of Drusus in 23. Other potential princes survived, Drusus II and Nero, the sons of Germanicus (Gaius was still below puberty): but not for long. They were accused of treason by Sejanus, imprisoned, and starved to death.

As a result, from AD 23 onwards there were no princes posing as successors and thus serving as models to the young Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would become Nero over 30 years later. The Roman principate passed from the disillusioned and geriatric Tiberius to his immature and soon demented grandson Caligula, then from Caligula to his aging uncle Claudius without any major warfare or serious imperial generals. Nero, meanwhile, had grown up the neglected child of a dead and nasty (detestabilis according to Suetonius, Nero 5) father and a disgraced and exiled mother, reared by his aunt Domitia Lepida, or by her employees (the legendary barber and dancing master.) Born in AD 37, he would have been 12 when his mother was restored to power as Claudius' last wife, and was adopted by the emperor as soon as he reached the toga of manhood in AD 51, an event which paved the way for Nero's succession after Claudius' opportune death in AD 54. When be became emperor at 16, Nero had had no military training; only the theoretical guidance of Seneca and Afranius Burrus, the honest Prefect of the Praetorian Guard. The young Nero is credited with two appropriate princely activities—participating in the Lusus Troiae (Tacitus, Annals 11.11), and advocating tax immunity for the Julian ancestral city of Ilium (Annals 12.58). But this seems to have been his last judicial speech: once beyond puberty and secure in power he would not compose his own speeches or even give them effectively. Instead, the role models of his dead grandfather and father would be ominously indicative. Nero's grandfather seems to have been landowner of huge grazing areas, and was already in his youth famous for his love of chariot-racing. While Suetonius suggests no scandal in this, his legendary cruelty was transmitted to Nero's father, who notoriously drove his galloping team over a child in the road (Nero 5).

Suetonius includes among Nero's disgraces and crimes his love of charioteering (Nero 20–21): an aspect of youthful character written into a narrative that starts from Nero's training in music, follows his apparently obsessive studies with the citharode Terpnus, and returns to Nero as singing performer after his words on charioteering (Nero 20–22). Suetonius begins with Nero's extreme enthusiasm, in his boyish talk as a fan of the chariot races—something predictable in any Roman—his constant attendance and pressure on the team owners to increase the number of race offerings and prizes. But soon the prince wanted more (a recurring pattern)…He wanted to race in person and have the public as his audience; he displayed himself to the common folk in the Circus Maximus, while using a freedman to wave the starting handkerchief. In describing Nero's trip to Greece in AD 66 (not treated in our surviving text of Tacitus which ends in 65), Suetonius offers details of Nero's chariot-racing in Greece and failed attempt to drive a 10-horse team at Olympia (not surprisingly he was thrown: cf. Nero 24.2). He also gives some attention to describing the spectacular imitation of Greek Olympic victors by Nero: as if he, too, had gained an eiselastic victory in a sacred game (i.e. one which entitled the victor to make a ceremonial entrance into the city), he breached the city walls of Naples, Antium, Alba, and Rome itself. And Champlin has rightly drawn our attention to Dio's account of the marvelous trompe l'œil of the golden sun charioteer depicted on the awning which fluttered over the audience, as if indeed Nero was the sun in his heaven (Dio 63.5.2): “When the audience looked up to the sun, they would see Nero himself instead—in fact the emperor's image very neatly preserved his people from the sun's burning rays and the stars around him indicated that his chariot was indeed a heavenly one.” (Champlin (2003a) 118). The various artifacts, including coins, statues, and the colossus of the Domus Aurea now wore radiate crowns identifying their emperor not so much with Apollo as with the sun god himself.

While Nero's love for charioteering is certainly part of the story in Suetonius' catalogue of disgraces and vices, however, it occupies a relatively small part of the narrative. Such brevity can be explained in several ways. First, chariot-racing did not really scandalize Romans as did acting or singing, and professional charioteers were not legally disqualified like actors (Rawson (1991) 475–86). In addition, we can add to the fashionable glamour of Nero's famous grandfather the tales of Caligula's pontoon bridge over the Bay of Naples, which he crossed first on horseback, then in a two-horse chariot. Instead I want to concentrate on what truly scandalized orthodox Romans: Nero's public ambitions as a singer. This is an art which many of us enjoy as audience, or in performance as amateurs. We can understand the techniques and how Roman vocal training differed from modern classical training. As a charioteer Nero was no doubt as stimulated by the risk and excitement of speed as by any desire for display. As a musician risk does not apply beyond the embarrassment of a failed performance, but despite Nero's reported nervousness his desire for self-display seems to have been insatiable.

Music and Musical Performance in Nero's Rome

First we should eliminate as an option for Nero as performer the immensely popular art of pantomime dance. Imperial pantomime increased constantly in prominence in Rome after its introduction by the celebrity dancers Pylades and Maecenas' lover Bathyllus in 22 BC. Fanatical partisanship over famous mimes was so strong that the association of senators and knights with pantomime dancers had to be regulated, but under Nero, who was an enthusiastic follower, the latter were recalled to the city from which they had previously been expelled by Tiberius (cf. Tacitus, Annals 4.14). Lucian (De Saltatione 63/24) has two anecdotes explicitly from Nero's time. In one the Cynic Demetrius condemned mime until a performance of the Ares and Aphrodite sequence from Odyssey 8 convinces him of the dancer's unlimited expressive powers: in the other Nero himself entertains a visiting dignitary from Pontus with a mime show. The dignitary begs the emperor to let him take back the dancer to Pontus so that he could communicate through his body language with barbarians who did not share any common tongue. But Hall, so expert in the singing of tragedy, is surely mistaken in seeing Nero as a performer, and not a spectator of pantomime (Hall (2002) 426; Champlin (2003a) 78–9 makes the same claim). Not only was Nero no dancer, but as a singer he had no use for pantomime, which was performed silently with closed masks that covered the mouth, expressing itself through gesture and body movement, and leaving the vocal and verbal aspect to the accompanying choral singers.

The problem is just how much credence we should give to the comments of both Suetonius and Dio that at the end of his life Nero was planning to turn to pantomime. Suetonius Nero 54 is the only time our sources use the word saltare (to dance) about Nero: we are told there of Nero's private hopes if he should survive the final rebellion, that he would appear as an organist (on two types of organ) and a bagpipe player (utricularius), and on the very last day become a histrio and dance Turnus. This is a significant choice, and I would not attempt to deny that Nero coveted the heroic role of Turnus the tragic failure. This role is not taken from tragedy or lyric, and so would be a natural candidate for dancing that could express complex and shifting emotional anguish. But this does not mean that Nero actually implemented his pipe-dream. Both Suetonius and Dio talk only of plans, and of Nero's jealousy of the mime actor Paris. “Nero ordered Paris to be slain because the emperor had wished to learn dancing from him but had not the capacity” (Nero 54 = Dio, Epitome 63.18.2). The Suetonian chapter is particularly scrappy and disjointed, but in either case we are not talking of any actual performances.

Roman entertainments both private and public involved instrumental music; Cicero's client Titus Annius Milo, tribune of the people in 57 BC, traveled with his own symphonia (chorus) and Seneca, in a letter describing gladiatorial shows, comments on the music involved, recalling both the old-fashioned choruses of men and women accompanied by pipes, and the overcrowded modern choral interludes (commissiones), with a file of singers filling all the streets while the aud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions To The Ancient World
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Neronian (Literary) “Renaissance”
• Part I: Nero
• Part II: The Empire
• Part III: Literature, Art, and Architecture
• Part IV: Reception
• Epilogue
• Index
• Supplemental Images