Nero

The End of a Dynasty

Miriam Griffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134610433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Nero's personality and crimes have always intrigued historians and writers of fiction. However, his reign also illuminates the nature of the Julio-Claudian Principate. Nero's suicide brought to an end the dynasty Augustus had founded, and placed in jeopardy the political system he had devised.
Miriam T. Griffin's authoratitive survey of Nero's reign incorporates both a chronological account, as well as an analysis of the reasons for Nero's collapse under the pressure of his role as emperor.

ONE

Introduction

Commenting on the unanimity of opinion about the Emperor Nero that prevails among the ancient authorities, the historian Charles Merivale wrote, ‘With some allowance only for extravagance of colouring, we must accept in the main the verisimilitude of the picture they have left us of this arch-tyrant, the last and the most detestable of the Caesarean family.’¹ Though there were historians who wrote laudatory accounts while Nero was alive, their verdict was overturned after his death and their works have not survived.² It could hardly be otherwise. For Nero was the first Princeps to be declared a public enemy by the Senate. Moreover, his failure as Princeps led to a series of bloody civil wars that recalled the death agonies of the Republic, which had continued to haunt the Roman imagination.

Nero’s first historians wrote under the new dynasty of the Flavian Emperors, and they endorsed the official view that Nero had dishonoured Augustus and the rest of the Julio-Claudian line. It was they who first gave his tyranny the extravagant colouring familiar from our extant sources. Thus the Elder Pliny described Nero as ‘the destroyer of the human race’, ‘the poison of the world’.³ For the pagan tradition of Latin historiography, Nero was to become one of the canonical tyrants along with Caligula and Domitian, though his building projects still commanded admiration and the tradition of a decent start to his reign lingered on.⁴

The Jews, who rebelled against the cruelty of his procurators, and the Christians, who suffered undeserved punishment for the Great Fire of Rome, had their own reasons for hating Nero. Deliberately perverting the Greek hope that the philhellene Emperor would return, they portrayed him as an avenging spirit who would come back to punish the power that persecuted them. In the Jewish Sibylline Oracles, written not long after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, Nero is the exile of Rome, the great king and criminal, who has fled to the Parthians and will cross the Euphrates with tens of thousands to destroy Rome and the whole world.⁵ In comparable Christian outpourings, Nero is the Anti-Christ whose persecution of the Christians heralds the destruction of Rome. This view of Nero as Anti-Christ continued to be celebrated by the Church Fathers and by later Christian writers.⁶ The picture of him as the incarnation of evil triumphed as Christianity triumphed.

In European literature Nero has served as the stock example of unnatural cruelty, a matricide in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a fratricide in Racine’s Britannicus. The hero of the Marquis de Sade, he has fascinated decadent writers as the incredibilium cupitor longing to overcome human limits through extremes of luxury, cruelty and depravity.⁷ Here and there a kind word is heard. Napoleon is reported to have said that the people loved Nero because he oppressed the great but never burdened the small.⁸ But on the whole, in France, in Germany, and in England, the picture is the same. Certainly no serious historian has been tempted to whitewash the tyrant.

The last century, however, has seen a change of focus in the study of Nero’s reign. Merivale’s eloquent endorsement of the judgement of antiquity appeared in 1858 as a preface to an account of the vices of the Emperor and the humiliations of his subjects. Fourteen years later there was published in Germany what may be called the first modern book on Nero, The History of the Roman Empire under the Reign of Nero. In this work, dedicated to Theodor Mommsen and following his call for rigorous examination of the literary sources and serious attention to other types of evidence (notably coins and inscriptions), Hermann Schiller described the state of the Roman world at that period rather than the antics of the Emperor and his courtiers. This led him into a thorough analysis of the revolt in the provinces that brought Nero’s reign to its chaotic close.

The picture that Schiller drew is, in the main, the one that appears in Bernard Henderson’s The Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero: Nero’s conduct did deteriorate, but the only real opposition to him came from the governing class in Rome. His overthrow was the result of a ‘nationalist’ rising against Rome by the Gauls, which was not provoked by his crimes at home nor undertaken in the interests of the senators of Rome. Henderson’s work, which appeared in 1903, is still the most extensive account in English. That by Momigliano in The Cambridge Ancient History (volume x) which appeared in 1934, lays more stress on Nero’s loss of prestige with the armies but takes a similar view of the Gallic rising. This diagnosis of Nero’s fall has now been abandoned. Numismatists have demonstrated, and historians confirmed, that Vindex was acting not as a patriotic Gaul, but as a disillusioned Roman senator rousing the Gallic upper classes to revolt against an unworthy ruler whose rapacity they had already experienced. The most recent studies in English return to the view that prevails in the ancient writers, namely, that Nero’s vices alienated his upper-class subjects and caused his overthrow. Warmington in Nero: Reality and Legend (1969) places the emphasis on his frivolity and ineptitude, while Grant in Nero (1970) blames his paranoid cruelty.

Whatever we may now think of his conclusion that Nero’s crimes were not the cause of his overthrow, Schiller’s work was a valuable contribution. The significance of Nero’s reign to the historian of the Roman Empire, as opposed to the writer of literature or student of morality, does not lie wholly in Nero’s character. For the historian, the most important event of Nero’s reign was its collapse. The dynastic link with the founder of the Principate was severed and his system placed in jeopardy. In surviving and ceasing to be the heritage of one family, the Principate was ripe for clearer definition as an institution. On the other hand, what had often been feared had now been demonstrated: the novus status created and accepted as a protection against civil war could not guarantee that result by its mere existence. For Nero’s eventual successor, these were practical problems to be solved. For the later historian, there is an invitation here to exploit the benefits of hindsight and explore how the crisis occurred and how far the political system itself contributed to Nero’s failure.

There is also a practical advantage involved in accepting this invitation. By keeping in mind the need to explain why Nero fell, we may avoid the two principal pitfalls that face anyone writing about an emperor and his reign. The first is an exclusive concentration on biographical material which, in this case, can simply result in a rewriting of some of the best narrative in Suetonius and Tacitus, an exercise as otiose as it is impertinent. The second is a tendency to see one’s task as that of narrating all of the significant events within the chronological limits. Unfortunately, relations between Rome and Judaea or developments in Britain are not best understood by considering the period when a particular individual occupied the throne, for the problems endemic to any area of the Roman Empire mean that events there only become intelligible over a longer space of time. Similarly, the development of the imperial administrative or financial systems is not best illuminated when examined reign by reign. A better approach is to concentrate on Nero’s own decisions and initiatives and on those aspects of the Emperor’s behaviour that affected the stability of his position. In this way we may illuminate, not only Nero’s ability as Princeps, but the difficulties of the Principate itself.

Did the rôle that Nero initially played so well embody conflicts that he ultimately found impossible to resolve? Did the system offer particular temptations to a man of his temperament? Was the more successful Vespasian simply an empereur de bon sens or was he less exposed than Nero to certain features of the Principate and more aware, because of recent history, of the need to change others?

TWO

The Making of a Princeps

Augustus once expressed in an edict his wish to be called the ‘author of the best type of government’ and to retain to the end the expectation that the foundations he had laid for the state would hold firm.¹ But the Principate was not a form of government created at one stroke; rather it had evolved as Augustus corrected past mistakes and faced new problems. The first major step was completed in January of 27 BC when Octavian was given various honours, including the title Augustus, for making certain moves whose effect he described thus: ‘I transferred the state from my power into the control of the Senate and the Roman People. After this, I had no more power than my fellow consuls but I excelled all in authority (auctoritas)’, auctoritas being a capacity to get one’s own way, a political ascendancy secured by force of personality and excellence of achievement.

Even after the establishment of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship in 49 BC, the old Republican institutions continued to furnish the forms and procedures of government: the Senate still passed decrees, the assemblies passed laws and electpd magistrates. But the power of decision lay first with Caesar and then, after a short interval, with the Triumvirs, of whom only one remained in power after the Battle of Actium in September of 31 BC. When Octavian renounced his control in 27 BC and asked the Senate to resume responsibility for the army, the laws and the provinces, the Senate promptly offered him back the control of the provinces, which would have carried with it command of the armies. Octavian accepted only certain military provinces and for a limited period of ten years. In addition, he was elected consul every year.² For Augustus this remained the definition of his position that best accorded with his claim to be exercising certain traditional functions entrusted to him by the sovereign SPQR. That may be why the statement quoted above was left in its original prominent position, at the close of his account of his achievements, despite later changes in the definition of his power.

The consulship had long been the supreme magistracy of Rome. The power of the Triumvirs was described as equal to the consuls and Octavian held that office every year after Actium. Although such an arrangement showed a sensitivity to Roman tradition, it was awkward in other respects. It was difficult for the Princeps to make plausible his claim that the only difference between himself and his colleagues was auctoritas, especially as he had an escort of troops in Rome, traditionally the privilege of Roman generals abroad. Then again, the ambitions of the sons of great families to become consul were substantially impeded by the tenure of half the available positions by the Princeps. Finally, the tenure of an annual elective office was not a permanent transferrable position, depending as it did on the personal ascendancy of a particular individual. The events of the year 23 BC showed up these disadvantages with unmistakable clarity. Augustus became seriously ill and nearly died, he clashed with his consular colleague who, though connected by marriage with Augustus’ close associate Maecenas, then joined a conspiracy against the Princeps. As a result, Augustus resigned the consulship, to resume it only twice thereafter and then for only half the year on each occasion.³ Senate and People voted him new powers: the tribunicia potestas for life which enabled him to adopt the stance of a champion of the lower orders and, through the tribunician veto, to say ‘no’ with an appearance of clemency rather than autocracy; and imperium at consular level which could be exercised in Rome and his own provinces, did not need renewal, and could be used to issue orders to governors of the provinces not allocated to the Princeps. This imperium, which came eventually to be called imperium proconsulare, and the tribunician power, reinforced by certain privileges of precedence in the Senate, became the legal basis of the Principate. They were powers traditional in appearance, yet, in fact, anomalous. Augustus had ample time to give his interpretation of them in the 36 years he lived to wield them.

By the time the first Princeps died in AD 14, it had been established that the provinces to be governed by legates of the Princeps’ choice included all of the military provinces, though the proconsul of Africa retained control of one legion until the reign of Gaius. All triumphs belonged to the Princeps, though others could be granted triumphal insignia, and, after the reign of Tiberius, no general outside the imperial house could be hailed as Imperator.⁴ This must have meant that all booty now fell to the Emperor, whose private wealth was in fact essential to the running of the state. The military and financial resources of the Princeps were what made him, in all but name, a monarch. It is not surprising that a law recording powers granted to Vespasian cites Augustus as a de facto precedent for this extravagant conferment: ‘that he may have legal power to do what he deems to be in keeping with the advantage of the state and the dignity of affairs divine and human, public and private’.⁵

Augustus lived long enough to accustom men to the idea of dynastic succession without having to admit that he was a king. It had not been an easy idea to make acceptable to the governing class: in 23 BC he had read out his will to show that he had not included in it any request for a special position to be given to his young nephew Marcellus. Neither his nephew nor his grandsons survived him. But by the time Augustus died he had secured the succession, immediately fbr his stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero, and, eventually, for his own descendants, the children of his granddaughter Agrippina.⁶ In this way he founded the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Augustus’ wishes were fulfilled to the extent that Agrippina’s youngest son Gaius eventually became Princeps. When he was murdered along with his wife and daughter, less than four years later, there were members of the Senate who thought that the opportunity for abandoning Augustus’ system of government had come. But the Praetorian Guard had a vested interest in that system. They forced the Senate to recognise as Princeps Gaius’ surviving male relative, his uncle Claudius. Gaius’ sisters also survived his assassination. One of them was the younger Agrippina, gi-eat-granddaughter of Augustus and mother of the future Emperor Nero.

Nero’s Paternal Clan

Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, as Nero was called at birth, was also connected by blood with Augustus on the paternal side. Augustus’ sister Octavia had produced two daughters by her marriage to Antony, and Nero’s grandfather Lucius had been chosen as husband for the elder Antonia. His son Gnaeus – the name alternated with Lucius by family tradition – was selected by Augustus’ successor Tiberius as a husband for the younger Julia Agrippina, and the future Emperor was the only child of the marriage.

The family of Domitii Ahenobarbi belonged to the Republican nobility. They could boast a line of consuls that extended back over two hundred years, while family legend traced their fame to the very infancy of the Roman Republic. Castor and Pollux, it was said, had foretold ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Preface to Second Paperback Edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Making of a Princeps
• 1 Nero’s Principate
• 2 Post-Mortem on the Fall of Nero
• Appendix One Sources for the Neronian Material in Tacitus Annals, Suetonius Nero and Cassius Dio
• Appendix Two Nero's Later Coinage
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index of Persons, Human and Divine
• General Index
• Index of Inscriptions, Papyri and Coins