“The executioners strip their victim naked, thrust his head into a wooden fork, and then flog him to death with rods,” the learned Epaphroditus informed him.
Terrified by the prospect, Nero drew one of his daggers, tried its point on his finger, threw it down, then repeated the act with the second dagger. “The fatal hour has not yet come,” he declared. Turning to Sporus, he begged him to weep for him and to mourn him once he had gone. Then, he implored all of his companions to set him an example by being the first to suicide. All three demurred.
He bemoaned his own cowardice and then muttered, “This certainly is no credit to Nero, no credit at all.” He paced about, saying, “Come, pull yourself together!”
9
A large party of riders was now heard coming up the road to the villa’s front door. Peering out the door, one of Nero’s companions saw that they were Praetorian cavalry. Perhaps Phaon had informed the Praetorians where to find the object of their quest. Perhaps Phaon’s messenger had been followed. Perhaps the Praetorian veteran who had recognized Nero on the Nomentan Way had told someone about it once he reached the city. Perhaps the Praetorians were coming to search the villa of Nero’s freedman as a matter of course. Whatever the cause, the troops were just minutes away.
Nero grabbed up one of the daggers. “Help me, Epaphroditus,” he pleaded.
As Nero held the knife to his own throat with both hands, his secretary gripped his hands. Nero gave one last instruction: “Don’t let them take my head.” Then, on Nero’s signal, both he and Epaphroditus thrust the dagger into his throat.
10
A little later, a Praetorian centurion strode into the room. Finding Nero lying on the couch with blood gushing from his throat as the others stood around him, the officer rushed to his side. Kneeling beside the dying man, he used the end of his blood-red cloak in an attempt to staunch the bleeding.
“Too late!” Nero gasped, looking up at the centurion with bulging eyes. “Is this your duty?” he asked.
11
In other words, did the centurion’s duty require him to save his emperor’s life only to permit Nero to be later subjected to an agonizing death in “the ancient style”?
According to Suetonius, thirty-year-old Nero died in the centurion’s arms, this ninth day of June, AD 68. On the centurion’s orders, a Praetorian galloped back to the city from Phaon’s villa with those tidings. But Dio Chrysostom, a Bithynian philosopher based at Rome and writing around the same time as Suetonius, believed that the truth surrounding Nero’s demise never came out.
12
Plutarch later wrote that Icelus, a freedman in the employ of Galba, had been incarcerated at the Praetorian barracks by orders of the Senate until that very evening. He was still there, but a free man now, when the Praetorian messenger arrived from Phaon’s villa.
Icelus did not believe the soldier’s story. He immediately jumped on a horse and rode out to the villa to see for himself if Nero truly was there, and truly was dead. The house was cordoned off by Praetorians, but Icelus, announcing that he was the freedman of new emperor Galba, pushed his way inside. He found the centurion and Nero’s last three companions guarding the corpse. “I went myself to the body and saw him lying dead,” Icelus later reported to Galba.
13
When Icelus saw the body, the centurion was in a quandary. The officer’s instructions required him, if he found Nero dead, to take the head back to his superiors. But Epaphroditus, a man with considerable presence, had reportedly argued against defiling the body of the late emperor. Consequently, the centurion asked the freedman of the new emperor to adjudicate in the matter. Icelus advised him not to decapitate the last of the Caesars. The head of the dead man would not go on public display for all to see, but would be hurriedly incinerated with the rest of the body on a funeral pyre.
Icelus hastened back to the city. Staying just long enough to make travel preparations, he set off for Spain to inform Galba that Nero was dead and that the older man was now emperor of Rome. Icelus made the journey to Clunia, where Galba had retired, in seven days. This was record time, and it was not until the official Senate announcement of Nero’s death and Galba’s elevation to the throne arrived some days later that Galba would believe Icelus.
At Rome, one senator, Mauriscus, warned the House that “in a short time, they might wish for Nero again.”
14
How right he turned out to be. Ahead lay a year of turmoil. Within seven months, Galba would be assassinated at Rome by troops dissatisfied by his refusal to pay the bonuses that Nymphidius had promised them for deserting Nero. Galba’s short-lived successor would be Marcus Otho, Nero’s former best friend, who himself would be dead within another three months after his army was defeated. The leader of the conquering army was Aulus Vitellius, Galba’s appointee as commander of the legions on the lower Rhine. Vitellius subsequently succeeded Otho as emperor; this was the same Vitellius who, as chief judge at the Neronian Games in AD 65, had called Nero back to perform in the Theater of Pompey after he had suffered stage fright. Vitellius, who would even celebrate funeral rites for Nero once he became emperor, would be assassinated in December AD 69, to be replaced by Nero’s toadying general Vespasian, the first of the Flavian emperors.
As for Nero, his body was reportedly cremated, swiftly, privately, and intact, wearing the gold-embroidered robes that he had used in the January 1 ceremonials on the Capitol. His ever-faithful mistress Acte and his childhood nurses Ecloge and Alexandria carried his ashes and bones in a white porphyry casket to the tomb of his father’s Domitius family, on Rome’s Pincian Hill. For decades after, flowers were laid on his grave by admirers, every spring and summer. Statues of him mysteriously appeared on the Rostra, and edicts would be circulated about the city in his name by those who regretted his passing, as if he were still alive.
The legend of
Nero redivivus
, or Nero returned to life, persisted until the fifth century. This held that Nero had never died, or that he would be resurrected, would gather a vast army in the East, and would return to Rome to destroy his enemies. Dio Chrysostom, who lived between AD 40 and 120 and resided in Rome during the reign of the tyrannical Domitian, said this about Nero: “Even now everyone wishes he were still alive, and the great majority do believe that he still is.”
15
Had the body burned at Phaon’s villa actually been that of a Nero look-alike? Had Icelus and Epaphroditus conspired to spin a tale about Nero’s suicide to permit Nero to escape to a life of anonymity and allow Galba to take the throne? Three times over the two decades after Nero’s demise, lyre-playing individuals who looked like Nero would appear in the East and claim to be him. The most famous emerged in Parthia during the reign of Domitian. “Twenty years after [Nero’s death], when I was a young man,” Suetonius wrote, “a mysterious individual came forward claiming to be Nero. And so magical was the sound of his name to the Parthians’ ears that they supported him to the best of their ability, and only handed him over with great reluctance.”
16
Once in Roman hands, the pseudo Neros were all executed.
Helius the freedman, who had remained loyal to Nero to the end, was executed by Galba, along with two other of Nero’s loyal freedmen, including Patrobius. Even the sorceress Locusta was put to death. Nero’s general Petronius Turpilianus was among a number of others executed by Galba; his crimes were having been loyal to Nero for many years and commanding respect among the soldiery. Praetorian Prefect Nymphidius, who had engineered the troops’ defection from Nero at Rome, an act that had given Galba the throne, was likewise executed by Galba—for being too powerful. Just as Galba would make numerous questionable appointments, giving powerful, well-paid posts to exiles, former criminals and old men with shameful pasts, he unaccountably protected Tigellinus. But it was only a short reprieve; Tigellinus would be executed during Otho’s reign.
Otho also restored to office many of Nero’s freedmen. One of the latter, Epaphroditus, who allegedly helped Nero end his life, continued to serve the Palatium for decades. He was petitions secretary to Domitian, a post he held for many years until just months before that emperor’s assassination, when the secretary fell victim to Domitian’s paranoia and was executed.
Nero continued to fascinate Romans for generations to come. Pliny the Younger would write, early in the second century, of the death of a friend who “was bringing out a history of the various fates of the people put to death or banished by Nero.” This friend of Pliny, Gaius Fannius, had by the time he died already published three volumes of his Neronian history. “He was all the more anxious to complete the series when he saw how eagerly the first books were read by a large public,” said Pliny.
17
This fascination with Nero persists to this day, no doubt in part because of his unconventional character and the many famous figures and historic events that figured in his life story. The interest can also be attributed to the fact that as Suetonius wrote, “with Nero, the line of the Caesars became extinct.”
18
Nero had no heirs. While many future emperors would include “Caesar” in their name, Nero was the last of the Caesar dynasty, a situation that many Romans lamented.
And as Josephus was to complain, with no descendants to defend Nero’s reputation, it became open season for any author who cared to conjure up sensational stories about Nero and his reign and thereby profit from their inventions. Rather than execrating Nero, we might pity him. For most of his short life, he was controlled and manipulated by others: his mother Agrippina, Seneca and Burrus, Tigellinus, and Poppaea Sabina. He dreamed of being an artist and driving chariots. In the end, he realized his dreams, and they brought about his downfall, providing his enemies with the ammunition they needed to destroy his reputation and his support.
Was Nero the cruel and crazy ruler that his detractors claimed he was? Certainly, he was no saint. If his biographers are to be believed—and all can be considered hostile witnesses—blame him for his mother’s murder and also for that of his adoptive brother Britannicus. But extenuating circumstances—his mother’s insane ambition—might be argued in both cases. Meanwhile, the ambitious Poppaea was probably the person behind the execution of Nero’s wife Octavia.
There is no escaping that Nero authorized the executions of men convicted of plotting to kill him. But the governors of various American states today authorize the execution of convicted felons. Does that necessarily make them cruel? If you believe it does, then yes, Nero was also cruel. Did Nero burn followers of Isis following the Great Fire? Some historians believe such a thing never even occurred. If he did burn them, then this was certainly cruel, but no more so than crucifixion, the accepted method of execution for all noncitizens throughout Roman times, yet an execution method that could prolong the victim’s sufferings for days. These were cruel times.
Was he a tyrant? If Nero was such a tyrant, how was it that Nerva, who would be rated one of Rome’s most wise and just emperors, willingly and actively served Nero and led the hunt for those who plotted against him? Far from possessing a track record of tyranny and cruelty, Nero ordained that no man, gladiator or convicted criminal, should die in the arena. And as Suetonius pointed out, Nero was incredibly tolerant of those who lampooned him, while his patience with Thrasea’s years of insulting and royally haughty behavior is almost beyond belief. And when Nero said that he would have spared Torquatus Silanus had the senator not taken his own life, we can believe him. On one occasion, Nero declared that he would not stand in the way of clemency for one of his most bitter critics. In fact, Nero frequently gave the Senate the final say in the fate of his opponents, just as he returned various ancient powers to the House.
Far from being mad, Nero was in many ways a visionary. His plans for massive engineering works were lambasted by the likes of Tacitus and Suetonius as fantastical and impossible, yet the Corinth Canal would be realized and would follow Nero’s design. Nero’s strict building regulations and clever incentives for the restoration of Rome were innovative and the first of their kind in Rome’s history. Tacitus had to agree that through these regulations, Nero created a much more beautiful and utilitarian Rome, yet the historian had to add the ludicrous complaint that some people perceived the city’s new, wider streets as unhealthy.
Nero’s downfall and the besmirching of his name began with the Great Fire. The emperor’s critics and enemies were able to turn that calamity against him, by blaming the fire on him. In the same way, later Christian writers would, falsely, cast Nero as the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians, in the wake of the fire. He was, after all, an easy target: young, naive, insecure, bisexual, timid, artistic.
Nero was also accused of spending money like a drunkard, yet he reduced a variety of taxes, and the empire was never more prosperous than during his reign, up until the fire. The cost of rebuilding Rome and of constructing his extravagant Golden House did impose a heavy financial burden on the provinces. This certainly contributed to the decline in Nero’s popularity in Gaul and exacerbated Jewish unrest in Jerusalem caused by the greed and mismanagement of successive procurators of Judea. No doubt, this rebellion in the East and the struggle that Roman forces initially had in putting it down convinced Vindex that his Gallic revolt could succeed.