“I want the ruby to be larger than the others, as the sun is larger than the rest. And I want it set in finest gold. The bright kind, from Nubia.”
“Caesar, as you wish. I can have it for you in two months.”
“No, I want it in three days.” I wanted to present it to her the night of the theater opening, and of the full moon.
He was silent a moment, thinking. Should he admit it was impossible? Was he remembering one already made but not in that design, that perhaps he could offer instead? “I—I—” He took a deep breath. “Caesar, as you wish.”
“I will pay triple for your speed,” I assured him. “I value your professionalism.”
He looked a bit less troubled, as the bill would be a whopping one. That was a consolation.
• • •
I would recite my “Fall of Troy,” I decided. I did not feel quite ready, but this was fate. The festival called out for my participation, and I had the new work ready—if not quite polished. The theater was festooned with garlands for the occasion, and word had got back to Rome about it. So I was not surprised when I saw several senators and magistrates out in the audience. Curiosity had drawn them, and probably a hope that the emperor would do something that would lend itself to gossip.
I was pleased with the performances of the local poets and musicians, and when my time came to mount the stage, I welcomed everyone and thanked them for coming. I praised the local artists and announced that the theater was open to all, as my gift to the city of Antium. “I know there will be many more such festivals, enriching the culture of the town, and I am proud to be here.”
I then took up my cithara—I had hurriedly written the music to accompany the poetry—and began, no nervousness this time. The audience was small and local and friendly, except for the visitors from Rome. And they did not bother me. That was past. As I recited and sang, though, Antium vanished and Troy rose before me, blazing and doomed. That was all I saw, all I knew, until I finished the last notes and let them die away.
There was a great stillness, and I knew it was not for my artistry, for that was still raw, but rather for the tragedy of Troy. Even my rude art had captured enough of it to move people.
Then came the applause, but still subdued. It was not appropriate to cheer when Troy had been so gruesomely ruined.
I let the audience depart before Poppaea and I left. For a moment we were alone in the theater.
“It was magnificent,” she said.
“You are magnificent,” I replied. “Without you, I could not compose a word. There is no way for me to express it but—”
“How can a poet have no way of expressing himself?” she teased, putting her arms around me.
“Without words,” I said, pulling out the elaborate carved presentation box for the necklace that I had hidden inside my cithara bag. I handed it to her. “This speaks for me.”
Surprised, she carefully opened the hinged box. The necklace, in its glittering splendor, lay spread on dark cloth. She actually gasped.
“It mirrors the heavens,” I said, and I explained what all the stones meant. I took it out of its box and draped it around her neck, fastening it. Then I stood back and looked. Oh, it was lovely beyond even what I had imagined. Her hands flew to it and caressed the stones, smooth and rounded beneath her fingertips.
“I have no words, either,” she said, kissing me.
As we left the theater, the full moon shone down on us, catching its light on the pearl.
• • •
The next day I had set aside to relax and recover from my furious creative sprint and subsequent performance. The sun rose in a cloudless sky, and the day promised to be quiet and restorative. We sat out on the shaded terrace and for a while watched the horizon. It was soothing and still. And I relished the mindlessness. No thinking. No thinking. Just sit with closed eyes and drift, reliving the night before.
Attendants brought us food, placing the trays down on a stand—platters of cold ham and mullet, pine-tree honey, bread, eggs, olives, and cherries, with juice or Tarentinum wine to wash it down. Lazily I reached out and took a handful of cherries.
Poppaea was so enthralled with her necklace that she wore it that morning, hidden under a scarf. “For I can’t take it off just yet,” she admitted. She had insisted on wearing it to bed, where the cool gold and bumpy gems felt peculiar against my chest when we embraced, and kept it on through all the rest, like a charmed object from a myth. But in the myth the hero would have insisted on her removing it, only to doom himself with a curse or some such. I simply enjoyed the singular experience.
I was just passing her the platter of eggs and olives when a panting, dusty, sweaty messenger was hurried out to us, flanked by two of the villa guards. His face was set in a grimace, matched by the expression on the guards’ faces. I stood up.
“Caesar, Caesar!” he cried, falling to his knees and clasping his hands piteously. “I come from Rome, from Tigellinus.” His voice was a croak.
“Well, what is it?”
“Rome is on fire! Rome is on fire!” he shrieked. “It is burning out of control!”
I rose, still not taking it in. “On fire?”
“Yes, yes! It started in the Circus Maximus, in one of the shops at the far south end.”
“When?”
“Night before last—and the northerly wind fanned the flames so they swept fast down the length of the Circus and then started climbing the hills around it.”
Rome was a firetrap, and we had had many fires in our history. To guard against this, Augustus had created the Vigiles Urbani, a fire brigade of seven thousand men. Serenus had been head of it, and now Nymphidius Sabinus had replaced him.
“What of the firefighters? Are they out?”
“Yes, but helpless to stop it. The fire is spreading faster than they can contain it. The sparks jump over roofs and fields and flare up in new places. It was starting to climb the Palatine!”
I turned to Poppaea. I felt numb, not at all able to truly believe this. “I must go,” I said. “We’ll ride together,” I told the messenger. “A fresh horse for you.”
• • •
It was midday when we set out, but darkness had fallen before we approached Rome. All along the ride I felt myself becoming more and more agitated, hoping that the messenger had exaggerated, or that the fire was already contained, or that it had not destroyed much besides the shops in the Circus. Calm, calm, Nero, you must keep calm, think clearly. But inside another picture was emerging—of Rome destroyed, people dead or destitute, historical treasures lost forever, all when I was emperor, all happening while I was responsible for the safety of my people. Rome was ruined under Nero, the city incinerated, nothing left but ashes.
As we neared the top of a hill near Rome, before we could see the city itself, a lurid color stained the night sky, orange and red and yellow, ugly fingers reaching up into the heavens, pulsating. Then we crested the hill and I gazed down on the city aflame. Billows of smoke roiled upward, and spurts of color, clouds of sparks, and bursts of exploding stone and wood punctuated the darkness. The brisk wind blew ashes in my face, carrying the stench of burning cloth, garbage, and things unnamable.
It was true, all true.
“It’s worse!” the messenger cried. “It’s still spreading! It’s much bigger than when I left. Look, it’s engulfed the hills!”
Rome was being devoured. Suddenly I knew what the strange threatening portent in the Temple of Vesta, the hearth of Rome, meant. And I understood the meaning of the sibyl: Fire will be your undoing. Flames will consume your dreams and your dreams are yourself.
I stood at the turning point of my life. This was my battlefield, the battlefield I had wondered if I would ever face. My ancestor Antony had faced his twice: at the battle of Philippi, when he crushed the assassins of Caesar, and the battle of Actium, when he himself was crus
hed by Octavian.
Either Rome and I perished together, or we survived together.
But no matter the outcome, there was only one choice, to go forward, to wade into battle.
“Come,” I said, urging my horse forward. “Rome awaits.”
And we descended the hill, heading into the maelstrom.
AFTERWORD
This novel is my mission to rescue a gifted and remarkable young ruler, who was only sixteen when he became emperor, from what historian David Braund, in his essay “Apollo in Arms: Nero at the Frontier,” calls “the extensive fog of hostility, which clouds and surrounds almost all the historical record on Nero” and “makes historical analysis extraordinarily difficult.”
From being accused of fiddling while Rome burned to being the Antichrist to being Hollywood’s favorite over-the-top emperor, Nero has suffered badly at the hands of popular culture. This is ironic, as Nero himself embraced and cultivated popular culture and was probably the first public persona to thoroughly understand and manipulate image control on many levels. I was drawn to him as I sensed the vast gap between the perception of him and what he really was. It is possible, with the help of modern historical analysis, to blow the fog away and see a different person standing before you, not the madman who fiddled, the pyromaniac who burned Rome, the violent sex fiend and debauched tyrant, but a man of considerable talent, a visionary in many ways—in architecture and urban planning, engineering projects, diplomacy, and artistic freedom. He also was a man of integrity, ingenuity, and generosity.
How did his reputation become so tarnished that in popular memory he became a monster? Suetonius said that Nero longed for immortality and undying fame, but what he has today is not what he had in mind.
Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the authors of the three main surviving histories that cover his reign—Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius. There were many other histories, some favorable to Nero, but only these hostile three remain. Not only do the writers assign motivation to him for his actions, they invariably interpret every motive as malign, rather than just reporting the facts. They were not contemporaries of Nero, and two of the three histories are incomplete. The first two were written at a time when the Nerva-Antonine dynasty had recently come to power and it was in the new regime’s interests to tar the ones it had displaced, the first of which had been founded by the revered and deified Augustus, Nero being its last representative.
The first of these histories, Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome, was written around AD 115, about fifty years after Nero’s death. The account breaks off at AD 66, missing the last two years of Nero’s reign. Tacitus is a genuine and thorough historian (especially by ancient standards if not by modern ones), but he still colors his text with his proaristocratic biases, and he is a moralist. To him, the entire Julio-Claudian dynasty was corrupt, whereas the aristocrats of the old families of the Republic, and the senatorial class, were noble. He saw their continuing decline of power, with the rise of the emperors and their freedman administrators, to be a national tragedy. So Nero could do little right in his eyes and he lost no opportunity to make covert smears or outright attacks on his actions, while also supplying his own interpretation of Nero’s motives.
Suetonius’s history, The Twelve Caesars, written more or less at the same time as Tacitus’s (around AD 120), contains much information—some probably pure gossip—arranged by subject rather than chronologically. This has made it difficult to date the material or put it in context. Suetonius’s work was the basis for Robert Graves’s book I, Claudius and the subsequent miniseries, which titillated modern audiences to no end. How much is true? We can never know, but Suetonius must be taken cautiously and with a grain of salt. His magnificent tale of the last hours of Nero reads like a Shakespearean tragedy—but is it accurate? What is the source of his information?
The last one, Dio Cassius’s Roman History, came some one hundred and fifty years after Nero (around AD 230). We do not even have the complete text, just an extract produced by Byzantine monks in the Middle Ages, redacted for what seemed important to the summarizers. Dio was a fervent partisan of the Senate and judged Nero by how well he cooperated with it.
As imperfect as these sources are, we have to rely mainly on them for our knowledge of Nero. But with modern methods of analyzing material, we are able to shift the lighting and see between the cracks better. We are also helped by other evidence, coinage and archaeological, that adds another dimension. It remains, however, a challenge—how to find the real Nero?
The last step in his cultural evolution was joining an elite group of rulers who were thought not really to be dead but poised to return one day to rescue their respective countries: King Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Constantine the Great. After his death, no fewer than three Nero imposters appeared and gathered a substantial following. Suetonius says, tantalizingly, “There were people who used to lay spring flowers on his grave for a long time . . . pretending he was still alive and would soon return to confound his enemies.” (This in itself testifies to his popularity with the common people, regardless of Tacitus’s spin, for disliked rulers do not inspire imposters and no one wishes for their return.) In addition to that, by the end of the first century he had been assigned the role of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, which was written castigating Rome as the Whore of Babylon. The spelling of Nero’s name in Hebrew numericals adds up to the “666” of the Beast. From there came the identification as the Antichrist, who was also supposed to return to battle with Christ at the end of days.
Nero himself is a creature far different from the stereotype. The “fiddling while Rome burned” saying didn’t arise until the seventeenth century. He wasn’t violent—he even forbade killing in the amphitheater—wasn’t debauched, wasn’t a sex fiend (considering what was available to him, he was pretty restrained), and doesn’t fit the usual description of a tyrant. He took action only against those who directly threatened him, and only among a small circle of people, affecting very few, not the population as a whole, for his own safety and that of Rome. Would people today be surprised to learn that he was athletic, affable, and tolerant? That as a composer and musician he was quite good? That his projects were futuristic? That he had a bond with the common people, whom he preferred to the aristocrats, and that his successor, Galba, admitting the admiration was mutual, said, “Nero will always be missed by the riffraff”?
Actually he was a lot like his ancestor Marc Antony—generous, impulsive, dramatic, emotional, athletic, with a passion for the stage. Just as Antony did not fit into the proper Roman mold, neither did his great-grandson. Later the emperor Hadrian was to embrace many of the same things—Hellenism, extensive building projects, dabbling in the arts, wearing his hair long—and be admired. But Nero paid the full price of being ahead of his time.
It is also good to remember that Nero did not operate in a vacuum. He came from a murderous family, suffered a series of psychological shocks in his childhood that surely would have left their mark on him, and lived in an environment where murder was often the only means of survival. The track record of the preceding emperors was even more steeped in blood, but we don’t hear as much about that, because the murders were not so spectacularly theatrical, and because there was not a posthumous campaign to blacken their names to legitimize a new dynasty. In the case of Augustus, the opposite dynamic was at work: to expunge anything derogatory about how he came to ultimate power in founding that first dynasty.
The historian Edward Champlin, in Nero, sets out to answer the question “Why is Nero so fascinating?” He concludes, “Our image of Nero was reworked for eternity by hostile sources and by the popular imagination, but they did not create it. It remains so vivid because it was created by an artist.” By his last words, Qualis artifex pereo (What an artist dies in me), Nero chose his own epitaph as that of an artist. He was above all an artist who happened to be an emperor, and it is this Nero I wanted
to bring to you.
I have never written a novel in two parts before, and I hasten to assure my readers that the story will continue just where it left off in the next volume, although each book can stand alone. Nero’s life was so extraordinary it is impossible to get it all under one roof without stinting on important events, and since this work seeks to be fair to him, it seems only right that he should be given the space he needs to tell his story. I am eager to go on, because, as unbelievable as it may seem, what comes next is even more unprecedented and unforgettable.
• • •
In writing this I had to be mindful that I was writing a novel, not a history, and for a twenty-first-century audience. For that reason I have at times used modern terms—such as Naples instead of Neapolis and Portugal instead of Lusitania, as that name makes most people think of the ship sunk by the Germans in World War I. I also use the English versions of names if that is how we generally know them: the playwright Terence instead of Terentius, Marc Antony instead of Marcus Antonius. I use the modern terms “emperor” and “empress” although they were not used then. I use feet and miles as measurements because the Romans did, albeit theirs were not quite the same as ours, and it feels less jarring than meters and kilometers.
In chronology, I have made some adjustments for continuity—for example, I moved the date Otho was sent to Portugal and the date Nero built his baths and his gymnasium, closed a very slight gap between the death of Caligula and the birth of Britannicus, and changed the time of year the theater in Naples collapsed and the earthquake hit Pompeii. And I have combined the two historical Jewish delegations to Rome into one, for simplicity. In addition, I moved the dates of the deaths of the last Silanus descendants of Augustus back a bit and merged the years AD 56–57 and AD 60–61, but without omitting anything.
It is my custom never to knowingly go against a known fact, but in the case of ancient history much is fuzzy. I adhered to that standard here as much as I could. The chronology of Nero’s childhood is a bit vague, but we have the contours of it in external events around him. All the characters named are historical, except three men I invented to appear only once to do a minor action: the senators Nonius Silius, Vibius Procolus, and Quinctius Valerianus.