Burrus, a physically imposing man, had overcome the disability of a withered left hand to become a soldier of great renown before he took command of the Praetorians. He proved to be an honest and able prefect and a clever military strategist, serving in the capacity of what in modern terms would be considered a secretary of defense. Retaining his post when Nero came to the throne, Burrus had been, in combination with Nero’s chief of staff (the famed and flawed philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca), another of Agrippina’s favorites, a steadying influence on the boy emperor for the first five stable years of Nero’s reign.
In AD 62, Burrus had died from throat cancer, although the gossips would claim that Nero, tiring of the prefect’s strict influence, murdered Burrus by sending him a poison-laced medicine for his throat. Following Burrus’death, Nero, on the advice of Seneca, had reverted to the custom of two Praetorian prefects. To satisfy Seneca and the public, he first chose Faenius Rufus, yet another favorite of Agrippina. Nero had earlier appointed Rufus to the post of commissioner of the corn supply. The poet Juvenal said that Romans would be content just as long as they were provided with bread and circuses, and there was much truth in this. The man who controlled the capital’s supply of corn, most of which had to be shipped in from the wheat fields of Egypt and North Africa in vessels of the Mediterranean grain fleet, controlled the lives of the people of Rome. Some of the 150,000 tons of grain shipped into Rome each year was sold to bakers, but since the reign of Augustus, most was doled out free of charge to the poorer residents of Rome and sold to soldiers at a subsidized rate.
Some past holders of the post of commissioner of the corn supply had been lazy; others had been inept, and others still, corrupt. Rufus was an exception; he had gained “vulgar popularity,” according to Tacitus, through “his administration of the corn supplies without profit to himself.”
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Yet, just as Rufus was widely known as a virtuous man, he was equally well known as a passive, if not downright timid man. And this admirably suited both Nero and his second choice for prefect.
This was Tigellinus, who, like Rufus, was by AD 64 a middle-aged man. A senator of lowly birth, Tigellinus had been banished from Rome by Caligula in AD 39 for having an affair with Nero’s mother, Agrippina. Once Claudius came to the throne and Agrippina became his wife, Tigellinus was allowed to return to Rome. Early in Nero’s reign, he had been appointed prefect of the Cohortes Vigiles, or the Night Watch. He had soon wormed his way into Nero’s favor by encouraging and participating in the young emperor’s worst vices, particularly his night revels around the taverns, brothels, and back streets of Rome. Tigellinus, who was famous for personally keeping a veritable harem of concubines, had gone on to become Nero’s procurer; whatever Nero wanted, Tigellinus would organize.
It was Tigellinus’ “inveterate shamelessness and infamy,” according to Tacitus, that put him, and kept him, in Nero’s most intimate circle of friends.
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In return, Nero had heaped money, property, and favors on Tigellinus. On one occasion, when Tigellinus’ son-in-law was banned from the Senate by a vote of the House for an undisclosed crime, Tigellinus, with Nero’s support, had the ban overturned.
Tigellinus’ co-prefect Rufus, once appointed to head the Praetorians, “enjoyed the favor of the people and the soldiers.”
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Tigellinus, meanwhile, began office universally despised and devoid of respect at all levels of society. Rufus’ popularity meant that Nero dare not antagonize the men of the Praetorian Cohorts by removing him, so Tigellinus set to work to undermine his fellow prefect. After Seneca had retired from the post of chief secretary in AD 62, within months of the death of Burrus, Tigellinus launched his campaign. He began by discreetly reminding people that Rufus had been a favorite of the emperor’s mother. Officially, Agrippina’s name had been mud ever since her murder, on Nero’s orders in AD 59, with the Senate declaring Agrippina guilty of conspiring to kill her son. Still, association with the disgraced Agrippina alone was not enough to destroy Rufus’ reputation or his popularity. Tigellinus had more work to do to increase his power at his colleague’s expense.
Tigellinus progressed to hatching plots against leading men of Rome. According to Tacitus, Tigellinus thought that “wicked scheming” was all he needed to bring him power and that his schemes would be all the more successful if he “could secure the emperor’s complicity in guilt.”
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To do this, Tigellinus would, at dinner with the emperor or while out carousing with him, delve into the young man’s most secret fears. And fears he had aplenty. Having grown up in a Palatium rent by intrigues and sullied by murder, Nero was, not surprisingly, insecure.
Like many an emperor before and after him, Nero above all feared being overthrown. Seneca, while serving as his chief secretary, had counseled him not to live in fear, for he could never execute his successor; it did not matter how many men he executed, someone would take his place. But with Seneca out of the picture, no such wise counsel existed, and Tigellinus was able to play on his employer’s insecurities.
Crafty Tigellinus identified the two men whom Nero dreaded most. Rubellius Blandus Plautus had several marks against him. Plautus’ mother was, like Nero, a member of the Julian family, making Plautus distantly related to the emperor. And Plautus had married a granddaughter of the emperor Tiberius. So, Plautus could claim imperial credentials on both scores. And to add to his illustrious name, Plautus, young, charismatic and rich, was capable of charming the people and buying allegiance, should he set his sights on the throne.
Nero had originally been alerted to a potential threat from Plautus a year after he took the throne in AD 54. One of his mother’s female friends had accused Agrippina of planning to marry Plautus, her cousin, and then take the throne from Nero and give it to Plautus. When defending herself against the charge, Agrippina had said that no one would testify against her, even “if Plautus or any other were to become master of the State and sit in judgment on me.”
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The charge had come to nothing, and neither Agrippina nor Plautus suffered on account of it. But Nero would not forget that Plautus had the credentials to replace him.
In AD 60, Nero had celebrated his first Neronian Games, which he had created as a festival of contests of both mind and body, along the lines of games conducted in Greece for centuries past and which Augustus had emulated at Rome and Actium with his Actiaca, Greek games held every four years during his reign. Not long after the last poet had spoken his last line in the Neronian Games and the last naked boxer had been crowned victor with a laurel wreath, a comet was seen to blaze across the night sky. According to Tacitus, to superstitious Romans the appearance of a comet was a portend of revolution.
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It soon reached Nero’s attention that many people were suggesting that should the emperor be dethroned in such a revolution, then Plautus would make the ideal successor.
Plautus, who lived austerely and discreetly, encouraged none of this talk. Guided still by Seneca at that time, Nero had written Plautus a letter in which he had suggested that for the sake of “the tranquility of Rome,” Plautus “withdraw himself from mischievous gossip.” Plautus had inherited large estates in the province of Asia Minor, and Nero said that there Plautus “might enjoy his youth safely and quietly.”
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Taking the hint, and taking his wife and a few close friends with him, Plautus had departed for Asia and a quiet life.
The second man feared by Nero was Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix, brother of Messalina, who had been the late, unwise, and unlamented wife of the emperor Claudius. Though comparatively poor, Sulla was descended from the same Sulla who had ruled Rome as dictator during the youth of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Well known and well liked, Sulla had in AD 47 married into the imperial family, wedding Nero’s cousin Antonia, one of the daughters of the emperor Claudius. The couple had produced a son, who would have had a claim on Nero’s throne in adulthood, as the next most senior male of the Julian line. But the sickly boy had died at the age of two.
Several years after Nero came to the throne, one of the imperial freedmen, the elderly Graptus, had invented a story that Sulla had planned to murder Nero one night as the emperor returned from his revels at the Milvian Bridge, on the northern outskirts of the Campus Martius. The bridge was then a famous haunt of prostitutes, male and female, and Nero used to go there so that he could take his pleasures more freely outside the city. No proof was produced to support this accusation, but Sulla was ordered to depart Italy and confine himself within the walls of Massilia, modern-day Marseilles in the south of France. Sulla had been living at Massilia ever since.
In an AD 62 meeting with Nero, not long after Seneca’s retirement, Tigellinus had made his move against the two men. With Sulla in southern Gaul in self-imposed exile, and Plautus in Asia, Tigellinus had used their very absence from Rome against the men, claiming that their distance from Italy actually exacerbated the threat they posed to Nero.
“I have no eye, like Burrus, to two conflicting aims,” Tigellinus had said, implying that his Praetorian predecessor Burrus had divided his loyalty between Agrippina and Nero. His one thought, he said, was for Nero’s safety, “which is at least secured against treachery at Rome by my presence. As for distant uprisings, how can they be checked?”
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He claimed that Sulla could lead an uprising of the Gauls against Nero, using his family connection with Sulla “the great dictator.” At the same time, he said, he did not trust the nations of the East, which had fond remembrances of Drusus, Plautus’ grandfather by marriage and cousin and adoptive brother of Nero’s own grandfather, Germanicus Caesar. Drusus had won acclaim for his work as a statesman in the East. Plautus’ familial connection with Drusus might be enough, said his accuser, for the people of the East to rise up to support him against Nero.
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Sulla had given no indication that he had ambitions to replace Nero. In fact, he showed complete apathy toward politics in general and had never made a single noteworthy speech. This was no defense, according to Tigellinus. That air of apathy displayed by Sulla, said Tigellinus, was a fabrication, designed to deflect suspicion, “while he is seeking an opening for his reckless ambition.”
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Convincing Nero to authorize Sulla’s execution, Tigellinus had acted without delay. Six days after the co-prefect’s meeting with Nero, a Praetorian execution party landed at Massilia by ship. The executioners burst in on Sulla while he was reclining at the dinner table with friends. The Praetorian centurion in charge promptly dragged Sulla across the table by the hair and lopped off his head while Sulla’s companions watched in disbelief.
It was only necessary for a condemned man’s head to be returned to Rome as proof of his execution. The head was displayed in public, usually on the Gemonian Stairs, which ran down the southern slope of the Capitoline Mount between the Tabularium and the Tullianum to the Forum Romanum. Sometimes, these heads were displayed on the Rostra in the Forum. When Nero saw the grisly object before it was put on public display, he nervously commented that the victim’s hair was prematurely gray.
Plautus’ removal was not as easy to accomplish. His wealth made him well placed in Roman society, with many influential men owing their loyalty to him—because they were his clients or were literally in his debt. So, it was necessary to fabricate a story about his “crime.” Tigellinus had a rumor circulated that Plautus had attempted to bring Nero’s famous general Corbulo, who was now governor of Syria and controlled a number of legions, into a plot against the emperor. According to another fabricated story that ran around the streets and bathhouses of Rome, troops had been sent to execute Plautus but the people of Asia had taken up arms in his defense, and the soldiers sent to be his executioners had gone over to his side, necessitating the dispatch of a larger execution force.
These rumors also reached the ears of Plautus’ father-in-law, Lucius Antistius Vetus, in Rome. Vetus had shared the consulship with Nero several years back and had also served as governor of Asia—one of the most prestigious and sought-after of Rome’s proconsular appointments. When Vetus learned that Tigellinus had received Nero’s approval to execute Plautus and that a centurion was to lead a party of sixty Praetorians to Asia to carry out the act, the father-in-law sent one of the freedmen that Plautus had left behind at Rome hurrying to warn his master. With the benefit of good winds, the freedman’s ship had landed him in Asia ahead of the Praetorians, and he was able to pass on Vetus’ warning to Plautus.
Vetus’ message cautioned Plautus to react not by taking his own life, as many a Roman would have done in the same circumstances, suicide being legal and considered a noble resort by the Romans. Instead, Vetus had said, Plautus should rally supporters around himself and seek every resource to repel the Praetorian detachment. Then, said Vetus, in the delay caused by a message being sent back to Tigellinus by his centurion seeking reinforcements to complete the mission, Plautus could raise an army and go to war against Nero.