The other side of the monarchy, 14-96 AD

Tiberius

When great men incline toward emotion, the world takes greater interest in them; but when emotion seizes politics, empires tremble. Augustus had wisely chosen Tiberius, but the choice came too late. While Tiberius was patiently saving the state and the country with his sober generalship, the emperor had almost come to love him. One of the emperor’s letters to Tiberius ended thus: “Farewell, thou most charming of men … most charming of men, and most skilful of commanders.” Then the blindness of kinship overcame Augustus, as it later overcame Marcus Aurelius, and he set Tiberius aside to advance his own handsome grandsons. He forced Tiberius to break a happy marriage so that he might become the deceived husband of Julia. Disgusted by this, he left Tiberius to grow old in Rhodes studying philosophy. When at last Tiberius reached the throne he was fifty-five years old—a disappointed and embittered man who found no pleasure in power.

To know Tiberius truly we must remember that he belonged to the Claudian line—that Claudian branch of the Julio-Claudian house which ended with Nero and began with this same Tiberius. From both father and mother he had inherited the proudest blood and the sourest memories, together with the strongest Italian will. He was tall, strong, and handsome; but the eruptions on his face intensified his natural modesty, his awkward manner, his melancholy shyness, and his love of solitude. The beautiful head of the statue of Tiberius that exists in the museum at Busten shows him as a young priest with a broad forehead, deep-set honest eyes, and a thoughtful appearance. In youth he was so serious that the wits called him “the old man.” He received all the education that Rome, Greece, environment, and responsibility could offer. He learned Latin and Greek literature and language thoroughly: he wrote elegies, studied astronomy, and “neglected the gods.” Although the people preferred his brother Drusus, he loved him. He was a good husband to Vipsania, and so generous to his friends that they could present him with gifts without anxiety and hope that he would reward them fourfold. He was the driest yet ablest commander of his time; because he cared for the smallest details of the soldiers’ welfare he was respected and loved by them, and in war he won more often by strategy than by bloodshed.

The very virtues that made him great destroyed him. He believed the stories told about “the ways of the ancients” and wished to see those stern qualities of old Rome revived in the new Babylon. He approved Augustus’s moral reforms and openly declared his intention of enforcing them. He disliked the racial stew boiling in the Roman pot; he gave the people bread but not money for the circus, and by his absence from the games offered by the rich he offended Rome. He was convinced that Rome could be saved from the decay and degradation that had seized her only by an aristocracy pure in conduct and refined in taste. But the aristocracy, like the people, could not endure his “stiff neck,” his grave countenance, his long silences, his calm speech, his evident consciousness of superiority, and above all his severe guardianship of the treasury. Tiberius had been born a Puritan by mistake in an age when everyone followed pleasure, and he was too honorable and too inflexible to learn the art that Seneca later displayed—of preaching one principle with sweet eloquence and practicing another with magnanimous consistency.

Four weeks after Augustus’s death Tiberius appeared in the Senate and asked that the Republic be restored. He told the Senate that he himself was not worthy to rule so vast a state, especially “in a city that had so many men of perfect ability … and that several departments of public business could be better managed by a coalition of the best and ablest citizens.” The Senate, which dared not believe his words, paid him so many compliments and flatteries that at last Tiberius accepted the powers “as a wretched and laborious slavery,” hoping that one day the Senate would allow him to be persuaded and to follow his own free and private life. Both sides played the comedy well. Tiberius wanted the empire, or he would have found some way to escape it. The Senate feared and hated Tiberius, but shrank from restoring the Republic on the old basis of assemblies that were nominally, not actually, sovereign. The Senate wanted less democracy, not more. And when Tiberius (14 AD) satisfied the Senate by transferring the right of electing magistrates from the “Centuriate Assembly” to itself, the Senate was pleased. The citizens grumbled for a while and mourned the cutting off of the payments they had received for voting. The only political power now left to the common people was the right to choose an emperor by murdering the previous one. After Tiberius, democracy passed from the assemblies to the army, and its vote was taken by the sword.

Apparently he sincerely disliked monarchy and regarded himself as the head of a board and the arm of the Senate. He refused all titles that savored of kingship, contented himself with the title “First Man of the Senate,” stopped all efforts to raise him to divinity or to offer sacrifice to his “genius,” and openly showed his dislike of flattery. When the Senate wished to name a month after him, as it had done for Caesar and Augustus, he rejected the compliment with dry humor: “What will you do if there are thirteen Caesars?” He refused a proposal to revise the list of senators. Nothing could exceed his deference to this ancient “council of kings.” He attended its sessions, referred “even the smallest matters” to it, sat and spoke like an ordinary member. He was often in the minority, and when decrees were passed wholly contrary to his express opinion he made no protest. Suetonius writes of Tiberius: “He was patient and tolerant of abuse, slander, and lampoons directed against himself and his family. He used to say that in a free country there should be freedom of speech and thought. …” Tacitus the historian, whose opinion of Tiberius was bitterly hostile, admits that:

His appointments were made with judgment. The consuls and praetors enjoyed the ancient honors of their offices. The subordinate officials exercised their functions without interference from the emperor. The laws (if we except those which dealt with treason) were administered in the regular courts. The revenues were collected by men of known integrity. … No new taxes were imposed on the provinces, and the old ones were collected without oppression or extortion. … Discipline was maintained among his slaves. … In all disputes between the emperor and private persons the courts were open and the law decided.

The honeymoon of Tiberius’s reign lasted nine years, and during it Rome, Italy, and the provinces enjoyed the best government in their history. Without additional taxes, and despite large grants to families and cities that had suffered disaster, the exact restoration of all public properties, the absence of profitable wars, and the refusal to accept bequests from persons who had wives, children, or near relatives, Tiberius—who had found 100,000,000 sesterces in the treasury when he succeeded Augustus—left 2,700,000,000 sesterces in it at his death. He tried to check extravagance, not by law but by setting an example for the people. He labored over every detail of internal and external affairs. To provincial governors eager to collect larger revenues he wrote that “a good shepherd shears his sheep; he does not skin them.” Although skilled in the art of war, when he became emperor he deprived himself of the honors of the battlefield and, after the third year of his long reign, kept the empire in peace and quiet.

It was precisely this peace-loving policy that hindered the progress of the government. His handsome and popular nephew Germanicus, who after his father’s death in Vesuvius had become his adopted son, had won several victories in Germany and wished to conquer the whole region. Tiberius opposed the plan, and thereby aroused the resentment of the imperialist public. Because Germanicus was the grandson of Mark Antony, those who still dreamed of restoring the Republic saw in him the embodiment of their cause. When Tiberius transferred Germanicus to the East, half the people of Rome called the young commander the victim of the emperor’s jealousy; and when Germanicus suddenly fell ill and died (19 AD), almost all Rome suspected that Tiberius had ordered him poisoned. Gnaeus Piso, whom Tiberius had appointed in Asia Minor, was accused of the crime, tried by the Senate, and, foreseeing condemnation, killed himself to save his property for his family. No certain information ever came to light to prove Tiberius’s innocence or guilt. We only know that he asked the Senate to try Piso fairly, and that Antonia, Germanicus’s mother, remained his most loyal friend to the end of her life.

The excited participation of the public in this famous trial, the unseemly stories that circulated about the emperor, and the agitation stirred up against Tiberius at this time by Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus, led Tiberius to make use of the “Julian law of treason against the state” or the law punishing treason or the law against treason—which Caesar had passed to define crimes against the government. Since the Roman state had no public prosecutor or attorney-general and (before Augustus) no police, every citizen was free, and was invited, to bring charges in the courts against anyone whom he believed had violated the law. If the accused was convicted, one-fourth of his property was given as a reward to the informer or delator, and the remainder was confiscated by the government. Augustus had used this dangerous method to enforce his marriage laws. Now that plots against Tiberius were multiplying, informers sprang up on every side to profit by exposing conspirators; and the emperor’s supporters in the Senate were ready to prosecute such charges with severity. The emperor tried to check these proceedings. He interpreted the law narrowly so that it applied only to those who spoke insultingly of the name or statues of Augustus. According to Tacitus, “persons who spoke against himself were to be left unpunished.” Tiberius assured the Senate that his mother Livia also wished the same mild treatment to be shown toward those who made insinuations or attacks upon her good name.

But Livia herself had now become a major problem for the government. Tiberius’s refusal to remarry left him defenseless against a strong-willed woman accustomed to exercising power over her son. Livia saw that the arrangements she had made had smoothed Tiberius’s path to the throne, and she made it clear to her son that he held the government only as her representative. In the early days of Tiberius’s reign, although he was nearing sixty, official letters were signed by both him and his mother. Dio Cassius says: “But when she was not satisfied with sharing the government equally with her son, she wished to make her superiority over him manifest. … and undertook to administer all affairs like an absolute ruler.”

Tiberius bore this situation patiently for a long time. But since Livia lived fifteen years after Augustus’s death, Tiberius at last built a separate palace for himself and left the palace that Augustus had built undisputed to his mother. It was rumored that Tiberius treated his mother cruelly and had starved his wife to death in exile. Meanwhile Agrippina pushed forward her son Nero to succeed Tiberius after his death or, if possible, immediately. Tiberius bore this too with patience and tolerance, and rebuked Agrippina only with a Greek quotation: “My child, do you think that because you are not an empress a wrong has been done you?” But nothing was harder for Tiberius to bear than the discovery that his only son, Drusus, whom he had by his first wife, was a profligate, cruel, ill-mannered, and debauched youth.

The self-control that Tiberius showed in enduring these afflictions shook his nerves. He withdrew more and more into himself, assumed a countenance so melancholy and a speech so sharp that, except for a few hopeful friends, all scattered from around him. There was only one man who appeared to remain unblemished in his devotion to Tiberius—and this was Lucius Aelius Sejanus. Sejanus, as commander of the emperor’s guard, claimed that the preservation of the ruler’s life was his duty. Soon no one could gain access to the emperor except through and under the surveillance of this enchanting minister. Tiberius gradually entrusted more and more of the government to him. Sejanus persuaded Tiberius that the emperor’s safety required the guard to be brought as close as possible. Augustus had stationed six of the nine cohorts of that guard outside the city. Now Tiberius allowed all nine cohorts to pitch their camp near the Viminal Gate, only a few kilometers from the Palatine and the Capitol. There the guard first protected and then mastered the emperors. Sejanus, thus supported by the guard, exercised his powers with ever-increasing arrogance and greed. First he recommended men for various offices, then he increased his own wealth by selling positions to the highest bidder, and finally the lust for sovereignty seized him. Had the Senate been composed of real Romans it would have removed him at once. But the Senate, with a few exceptions, had become a club of Epicureans and was too lax to exercise even the authority that Tiberius insisted the Senate must retain. Instead of deposing Sejanus, it filled the city of Rome with statues erected to his honor by decree of the Senate, and on his proposal it exiled the followers of Agrippina one after another. When Drusus, Tiberius’s son, died, the people of Rome whispered that Sejanus had poisoned him.

Tiberius, now a prey to despair and bitterness, a man of sixty-seven, melancholy and alone, left the turbulent capital and retired to the distant seclusion of Capri. But rumors followed him unchecked. The people said that Tiberius wished to hide his emaciated limbs and scrofulous face and to indulge in unnatural drink and vice. Tiberius drank a good deal, but he was not a drunkard. The stories of his vices were probably fabricated. Again Tacitus says that most of his companions on Capri “were Greeks distinguished only in literature.” Again he administered the affairs of the empire with care, except that he communicated his opinions and wishes to his officials and the Senate through Sejanus. Since the Senate was increasingly terrified of him or of Sejanus or of his troublesome guard, it accepted the emperor’s wishes as commands; and the imperial government, without any change in its organization and without Tiberius expressing any insincerity toward it, under the leadership of a man who wished to restore the Republic, became an absolute monarchy.

Gaius (Caligula)

The people of Rome escorted the death of the old emperor with the cry “Throw Tiberius into the Tiber,” and the Senate congratulated itself on ratifying the succession of Caesar Gaius, son of Germanicus. Gaius, who had been born to Agrippina during Germanicus’s campaigns in the north, had been brought up among the soldiers, had imitated their dress, and out of affection had been nicknamed Caligula or “Little Boot.” (The word is a diminutive of caliga, the half-boot usual in the army.) Caligula announced that he would follow the principles of Augustus in politics and would cooperate with the Senate in all matters with the greatest respect. He distributed the 90,000,000 sesterces that Tiberius and Livia had bequeathed to the citizens and added 300 sesterces of his own to each of the 200,000 recipients of state grain. He restored to the comitia the right of electing magistrates, promised light taxes and abundant games and entertainments, recalled those exiled by Tiberius, and piously brought the ashes of his mother to Rome. In every respect he seemed the opposite of his predecessor—extravagant, cheerful, and mild. In the first three months of his reign the people offered 160,000 victims to the gods in gratitude for having so charming and beneficent an emperor.

But the people had forgotten his family. His paternal grandmother was the daughter of Antony and his maternal grandmother the daughter of Augustus; in his blood the war between Antony and Octavian had broken out again and Antony had emerged victorious. Caligula prided himself on his skill in dueling, gladiatorial arts, and chariot racing. But he “suffered from epilepsy” and sometimes “could hardly walk or collect his thoughts.” At the sound of thunder he would hide under the bed and flee in terror from the flames of Etna. He could not sleep peacefully at night, and wandered through his vast palace longing for the dawn. He was tall and stout and hairy, but bald-headed; his sunken eyes and temples gave him a terrifying appearance, and this delighted him. “He practiced all kinds of terrifying faces before a mirror.” He had studied well, was an eloquent speaker, and had a naturally witty and jesting disposition that knew no bounds or laws. Because he was fond of shows he gave financial help to many performers and himself played and danced in private; and because he wished an audience, he would summon the leaders of the Senate as though for a vital conference and then show them the new steps of his dance.

A quiet life and responsible work would probably have steadied him, but the poison of power drove him mad. Reason, like government, needs constant care and balance; no mortal being can be both omnipotent and sane. When his grandmother Antonia offered him a little advice, Caligula put her in her place with the remark: “Remember that I have the right to do anything I please to anyone.” At a banquet he reminded his guests that he could have them all killed where they lay. When he embraced a wife or mistress he would say with perfect calm: “This beautiful head will fall at a nod from me.”

So the young emperor, who had shown such respect for the Senate, soon began to command it and demanded oriental submission from it. He allowed the senators to kiss his feet as a mark of respect, and the senators thanked him for the honor they had received. He praised Egypt and its customs, introduced many of them into Rome, and wished to be worshiped as a god like the Pharaohs. He made the worship of Isis one of the official cults of the Roman state. He had not forgotten that his great-grandfather had planned to unite the Mediterranean under an oriental monarchy. Caligula too thought of making Alexandria his capital, but the vigilance of its people prevented him from feeling secure. Suetonius says of him that “he habitually committed incest with all his sisters,” and this seemed to him one of the excellent customs of the Egyptians. When he fell ill he made his sister Drusilla heir to the Roman throne. When Drusilla married he forced her to divorce her husband and “treated her as his lawful wife.” For women he desired he sent divorce papers in the name of their husbands and invited them to his embrace. Scarcely a woman among the nobility could be found whom Caligula had not approached. Amid all these illicit love affairs and some cases of pederasty he found time to marry four times. On the wedding night of Livia Orestilla with Gaius Piso, Caligula appeared, carried off the bride to his house, married her, and divorced her twelve days later. When he heard that Lollia Paulina was very beautiful he sent for her, divorced her from her husband, married her, divorced her, and forbade her any further relations with any man. When he took his fourth wife Caesonia she was already pregnant by her husband. This woman was neither young nor beautiful, but Caligula loved her faithfully.

In royal revelry the affairs of state became secondary and could usually be left to men of feeble minds. Caligula reviewed the list of the equestrian order with special power and raised the best members to senatorial rank. His extravagance soon emptied the treasuries that Tiberius had left full. He did not bathe in water but washed himself in perfume. He spent 10,000,000 sesterces on a single banquet. He built great pleasure ships with several columns, dining halls, baths, gardens, and fruit trees, their sterns studded with jewels. He forced his engineers to bridge the distance between the shore and the resort of Baiae with a bridge resting on ships; as a result Rome suffered a famine because of the shortage of ships for importing grain. When the bridge was completed a great festival was held, illuminated in the modern manner. The people drank with full enjoyment, then suddenly the boats capsized and many were drowned. From the roof of the great palace of Livia, Caligula scattered gold and silver coins over the people below and watched with delight the deadly scramble. He was so fond of the green faction in chariot racing that he gave one charioteer a bonus of 2,000,000 sesterces. For his racehorse Incitatus he built a marble stable and an ivory manger, invited the horse to dinner, and planned to make it consul.

To raise money for the “Saturnalia” of his whole life he revived the custom of presenting gifts to the emperor. He sat on the balcony of his palace and accepted whatever anyone brought. He encouraged citizens to name him heir in their wills. He imposed taxes on everything: a sales tax on all foodstuffs, a tax on all legal actions and lawsuits, and a tax of twelve and a half percent on the wages of porters. Suetonius says with certainty: “He levied a tax upon the earnings of prostitutes” “equal to what each received for one service; and by law every woman who had ever been a prostitute remained subject to this tax even if she had married.” He ordered rich men to be accused of treason and, to replenish the treasury, condemned them to death. He himself sold gladiators and slaves at auction and forced aristocrats to attend the auction and make bids. In the case of a senator who was present at the auction and dozed off, every time the senator nodded Caligula interpreted it as agreement to raise the bid, so that when the senator awoke he found that thirteen gladiators had been added to his property and 9,000,000 sesterces subtracted from it. He forced senators and knights to fight one another in the gladiatorial arena.

After three years a conspiracy was formed to put an end to this shameful buffoonery. Caligula discovered it and took revenge with a reign of terror intensified by his mad pleasure in tormenting others. Executioners were ordered to kill their victims “with many light wounds” “so that they would feel they were dying.” If we may trust Dio Cassius, Caligula forced his saintly grandmother to commit suicide. Suetonius relates that when meat ran short for feeding the wild beasts kept for the gladiatorial combats, Caligula ordered all the bald-headed prisoners to be thrown to the beasts for the public good. He also says that he branded men of high rank, sent them to work in the mines, threw them to wild beasts, or shut them in cages and then sawed them in half.

These are stories for which we have no reason to reject them and which must be recorded as tradition. But we must remember that Suetonius loved gossip, Senator Tacitus hated the emperor, and Dio Cassius wrote his history two centuries after Caligula. What is more credible is that Caligula began the war between empire and philosophy by exiling Carrinas Secundus and condemning two other teachers to death. Seneca, who was then young, was marked for execution but was spared because he was ill and likely to die without torture. Claudius, Caligula’s uncle, because he was slow-witted and a harmless bookworm—or pretended to be—escaped death.

Caligula’s last amusement was to declare himself a god and the equal of Jupiter. The heads of famous statues of Jupiter and other gods were removed and replaced with heads modeled on the emperor. He enjoyed sitting in the temple of Castor and Pollux and being worshiped as a god by visitors. Sometimes he conversed with the statue of Jupiter, usually in a tone of reproach. He ordered a machine to be built so that he could answer Jupiter’s thunder and lightning bolt for bolt and flash for flash. He erected a temple for the worship of his own divine head, with a college of priests and a store of choice victims, and appointed his favorite horse to the priesthood of that temple.

He pretended that the moon goddess had come down to earth to sleep with him and asked Vitellius whether he could see her. The witty courtier replied: “No. Only you gods can see one another.” The people were not deceived. When a cobbler from the people of Gaul saw Caligula imitating Jupiter, and was asked his opinion of the emperor, he simply replied: “A great fraud.” Caligula heard it but did not punish the pleasant consolation.

This god died at the age of twenty-nine, an old man worn out by continuous excesses, probably suffering from venereal disease, with a small head—half the hair fallen out—on a fat body, a leaden complexion, hollow eyes, and a sinister look. His end came suddenly, from the same imperial guard whose support he had long bought with gifts. One of the tribunes of the guard, Cassius Chaerea, who was weary of the foul and disgusting words that Caligula daily gave him as the watchword, killed Caligula in one of the hidden corridors of the palace (41 AD). When the news leaked out the people of the city doubted it. They feared that this too was one of the tricks of the cunning emperor to discover who would rejoice at his death. To make the matter clear the assassins also killed Caligula’s last wife and dashed his daughter’s head against the wall and scattered her brains. Dio says that on that day Caligula learned that he was not a god.

Claudius

Caligula had left the empire in a dangerous condition: the treasury empty, the Senate torn apart, the people disgusted with the situation, Mauretania in revolt, and Judea ready for war over the insistence on placing a statue of the imperial cult in the Temple of Jerusalem. No one knew where a ruler could be found who could face these problems. The leaders of the guard came upon the apparently foolish Claudius hiding in a corner, proclaimed him commander-in-chief and emperor. The Senate, which feared the army, perhaps thinking that in the future it would deal with a bookish man rather than a ruthless madman, confirmed the guard’s choice; and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ascended the throne with hesitation.

He was the son of Antonia and Drusus, brother of Germanicus and Livilla, grandson of Octavia and Antony and also grandson of Livia and Tiberius Claudius Nero. Born in 10 BC in Lugdunum (Lyon), he was fifty years old when he reached the throne. He was tall and stout with white hair and a pleasant face, but infantile paralysis and other diseases had weakened his frame. His legs were dangerously thin and made his walk unsteady. His head nodded back and forth as he walked, he loved nourishing food and good wine, and he suffered from gout; he stammered a little. His laugh was too noisy for an emperor. A malicious rumor-monger says that when he became angry “his mouth foamed and water dripped from his nose.” Brought up by women and freedmen, he had developed a natural shyness and sensitivity that were not very useful for a ruler. And except in a few cases he had had no opportunity to govern. His relatives regarded him as a weak-minded invalid. His mother, who had inherited Octavia’s charm, called him “a monster of a man, not finished but only begun,” and whenever she wished to emphasize someone’s dullness she called him “more stupid than my Claudius.” Because everyone scolded him he lived in darkness and obscurity, far from danger, and immersed himself in gambling, books, and drink. He became a scholar of philology and antiquities. He learned the arts, religion, sciences, philosophy, and “ancient” law. He wrote histories of Etruria, Carthage, and Rome, treatises on dice and the alphabet, comedies in Greek, and a volume of personal autobiography. Scholars and scientists corresponded with him and dedicated their volumes to him. Pliny the Elder quotes him as an authority four times. When he became emperor he taught the people how to prevent the effects of snakebite, and he calmed the superstitious fears of the people with his prediction of an eclipse on his birthday and an explanation of its cause. He spoke Greek well and wrote several works in that language. He had a good mind; perhaps when he told the Senate that he had pretended to be a fool in order to save his head he was telling the truth.

His first act as emperor was to give 15,000 sesterces to each member of the imperial guard that had raised him to the throne. Caligula had also given such gifts, but not so openly on account of the empire. By this act Claudius acknowledged the sovereignty of the army, and at the same time he again abolished the right of the assembly to elect magistrates. With wiser generosity he ended the charges of “lèse-majesté” and freed those who had been imprisoned on that charge. He restored confiscated property, returned to Greece the statues that Caligula had stolen, and canceled the taxes that Caligula had imposed. But he put to death the murderers of Caligula, on the theory that pardoning the murder of an emperor was unhealthy. He ended the custom of prostration and simply declared that he should not be worshiped as a god. Like Augustus he restored temples and, with the zeal of an antiquarian, tried to revive the old religion. He personally attended to the affairs of state with insight and care. He even “inspected the work of the vendors of food and the landlords of buildings, and corrected whatever he thought was wrong.” But in truth, although he tried to equal the reforms of Augustus, his practical policy went beyond Augustus’s caution and reached the realm of Caesar’s bold and varied plans: reform of government and law, building and public works and services, the advancement of the provinces, the granting of freedom to the government of Gaul, and the conquest and Romanization of Britain—more than Augustus and on the scale of Caesar.

By showing will and character, in addition to learning and intelligence, he astonished everyone. Like Caesar and Augustus, he was convinced that local magistrates were too few and themselves untrained, and that the Senate was too proud and impatient to manage the complicated business of municipal and imperial administration. He paid deference to the Senate and left it many powers and more dignity. But the real burden of government rested on his own shoulders and on the board he appointed, and on the civil service that gradually, like that of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius, was formed from freedmen in the emperor’s household. He used “state” slaves for clerical work and minor duties. Four members of the board headed this administrative machine: a secretary of state (for communications), a treasurer (for accounts), another minister (for petitions), and a public prosecutor (for legal matters). The first three posts were entrusted to three capable freedmen named Narcissus, Pallas, and Callistus. Their rise to power and wealth was a sign of the great advancement of the freedman class, which continued for several centuries and reached a new height in the reign of Claudius. When the aristocracy protested against the rise of these upstarts, Claudius revived the office of consul. He arranged to be elected consul himself, revised (under consular powers) the list of those eligible for senatorial rank, removed the names of his chief opponents from the list, and added new members from among the knights and the provinces.

Once equipped with these instruments he drew up a far-sighted program of restoration and reform. He improved the regulations of the courts. He imposed penalties for delay in the administration of justice; he sat as judge several hours every week with patience, and forbade the torture of citizens. To prevent the floods that were increasingly endangering Rome because of the cutting of the Apennine forests, he ordered a side channel to be dug for the lower course of the Tiber. To speed up the importation of grain he ordered a new harbor to be built near Ostia, equipped it with warehouses and wide docks and two breakwaters to break the anger of the sea, and provided a channel connecting the harbor above the silted mouth of the Tiber with the river. He completed the Claudian aqueduct that had been begun under Caligula. He built another aqueduct called the Anio Novus. Both were great works and remarkable for their beauty and high arches. When he noticed that the lands of the Marsians were periodically flooded by the waters of Lake Fucinus, he arranged with government money a budget for 30,000 men working for eleven years to dig a tunnel five kilometers long from the lake to the river Liris, through the middle of the mountain; before releasing the water of the lake into the tunnel, he arranged before spectators who had gathered from all parts of Italy on the slopes of the hills around the lake a naval battle spectacle between two fleets; 19,000 condemned criminals were in those fleets. The combatants greeted the emperor with the historic phrase: “Hail, Caesar! We who are about to die salute you.”

The provinces flourished under his rule as in the days of Augustus. He punished the misconduct of officials severely, except in the case of Felix, the procurator of Judea—whose misgovernment Pallas, the brother of the man who brought Paul the Apostle to trial, concealed from Claudius. He concerned himself with every stage of provincial affairs. His edicts and rescripts, which have been found throughout the empire, bear the marks of his particular pedantry and garrulity, but also show the intelligence and will of a vigilant man devoted to the public good. Claudius tried to improve communications and transport, to protect travelers from robbers and highwaymen, and to reduce the cost of the state post for communities that used it. Like Caesar he wished to raise the provinces, on a level with Italy, to the status of Roman commonwealths. He carried out Caesar’s plan of granting full freedom and citizenship to Cisalpine Gaul. If he could have acted according to his own wish he would have granted full civil rights to all free men of the empire. A bronze tablet, which was dug up in Lyon in 1524, has preserved part of the confused speech in which Claudius persuaded the Senate to admit those Gauls who possessed the rights of Roman citizenship to membership in the Senate and to public offices. At the same time he did not allow the army to become corrupt, and he did not permit encroachments on the frontiers; his legions were always busy and ready, and great commanders such as Corbulo, Vespasian, and Paulinus were trained by his selection and encouragement. Again in accordance with the decision to complete Caesar’s plans, in 43 AD he attacked Britain and conquered it and, six months after his departure, returned to Rome. In the triumph celebrated for him, despite precedent, he pardoned the captive British king Caractacus. The people of Rome laughed at their strange emperor but loved him; and when during one of his absences from Rome a false rumor of his death was spread, such a wave of grief swept the city that the Senate was forced to issue an official assurance that Claudius was well and would soon return to Rome.

Claudius fell from that high position because he had created a government that was too closely supervised by himself, and also because his kindly spirit was too easily deceived by his three freedmen and the members of his own family. The administrative formalities had improved the condition of the offices and opened hundreds of new paths for corruption and bribery. Narcissus and Pallas were excellent and capable high officials who did not consider their salaries equal to their merit. To make up the deficit they sold offices, extorted bribes by threats, and fabricated charges against those whose estates they wished to confiscate. In the end they became the richest men of ancient times. Narcissus had 400,000,000 sesterces (60,000,000 dollars) and Pallas, who had only 300,000,000 sesterces, was considered poor. When Claudius complained of the deficit in the imperial treasury the Roman wits said that if he would take his freedmen into partnership the deficit would be made up and there would be a surplus. The old aristocratic families, now relatively poor, looked with horror at this concentration of wealth and power, and when they were forced to flatter men who had once been slaves in order to gain access to the emperor they burned with rage.

Claudius was busy writing letters to new officials and scholars, preparing edicts and speeches, and attending to the needs of his wife. Such a man should have lived like a monk in celibacy and surrounded himself with a wall to be safe from love. His wives exercised a destructive fascination over him in practice, and his domestic policy was not as successful as his foreign policy. Like Caligula he married four times. His first wife died on the wedding day, he divorced his second and third, and then at the age of forty-eight he married Valeria Messalina, who was sixteen. Messalina did not possess extraordinary beauty; she had a broad head, a ruddy face, and an ungainly bosom. But a woman does not need to be beautiful to commit adultery. When Claudius became emperor Messalina assumed the rights and manners of a queen. She accompanied Claudius in his triumph and had her birthday celebrated throughout the empire. She fell in love with a dancer named Mnester, and when Mnester refused her love Messalina asked her husband to order Mnester to be more obedient to his wife’s wishes. Claudius granted Messalina’s request, and Mnester, as befits an obedient man, surrendered with full enthusiasm. Messalina enjoyed the ease of the solution she had found and followed the same path with other men. Men who still refused to satisfy her desires were accused of imaginary crimes by officials under Messalina’s influence and lost their property and sometimes their lives.

Perhaps the emperor tolerated this unusual situation in order to secure his own pleasures. Suetonius says: “He was not moderate in his relations with women.” And then with surprising distinction he says that Claudius “was completely free from unnatural vice.” And Dio says that Messalina “gave several attractive servants to Claudius for his bed.” The empress, who needed money for her adventures, sold government offices, recommendations, and contracts. Juvenal tells the story that Messalina went to a brothel in disguise, accepted customers generally, and happily pocketed her fee. It is probable that Juvenal took this story from the lost memoirs of Messalina’s successor and enemy, Agrippina the Younger. Tacitus confirms the truth of the story and notes that “the writers of that time have fully testified, and also elderly and respectable men who were alive at the time and knew all the circumstances have borne witness.”

At the time when Claudius was devoting all his time to the duties of the office of censor—which included supervision and improvement of Roman moral principles—Messalina “was going to extremes in love affairs” and finally, while her husband was in Ostia, she formally married a handsome young man named Gaius Silius “with all the usual ceremonies.” Narcissus informed him of the affair through the emperor’s concubines and sent him a message that a plot had been formed to kill the emperor and place Silius on the throne. Claudius hurried back to Rome, summoned the imperial guard, ordered Silius and Messalina’s other lovers to be killed, and then with nervous weakness went to his palace. The empress hid in the gardens of Lucullus, which she had confiscated for her own amusement. Claudius sent a message that she should come and explain her actions. Narcissus, fearing that the emperor might pardon Messalina and become angry with him, sent several soldiers with orders to kill Messalina. The soldiers found Messalina alone with her mother, dispatched her with one blow, and threw her body into her mother’s arms (48 AD). Claudius told the imperial guard that if he ever married again they had the right to kill him; and he never again spoke Messalina’s name.

Less than a year had passed when Claudius was hesitating whether to marry Lollia Paulina or Agrippina the Younger. Lollia, the former wife of Caligula, had great wealth. It was said that she sometimes wore jewelry worth 40,000,000 sesterces. Perhaps Claudius preferred her money to herself. Agrippina was the daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. In her too flowed the irreconcilable blood of Octavian and Antony. She had inherited her mother’s beauty, ability, decisiveness, and boundless vindictiveness. She had been widowed twice. From her first husband, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, she had a son named Nero, whose elevation to the throne was the absolute ambition of Agrippina’s whole life; and from her second husband, Gaius Crispus, whom she was said to have poisoned, she inherited a fortune that helped her achieve her aims. The problem before her was to become Claudius’s wife, to diminish the claim of Britannicus, Claudius’s son, to force Claudius to adopt Nero, and thereby to make Nero heir to the empire. That she was Claudius’s niece did not hinder her but gave her the opportunity for eager intimacies that excited the old emperor in a way that had nothing to do with unclehood. Claudius suddenly appeared in the Senate and asked the Senate to order him to marry again for the sake of the needs of the state. The Senate granted the request, the imperial guard laughed, and Agrippina set foot on the imperial throne (48 AD).

At this time Agrippina was thirty-two and Claudius fifty-seven. Claudius’s strength was declining and Agrippina’s was at its peak. She used all her charm on her uncle until he adopted Nero and gave his thirteen-year-old daughter Octavia in marriage to the sixteen-year-old Nero (53 AD). With every passing year Agrippina’s political power increased until she finally sat on the imperial throne side by side with Claudius. She recalled the philosopher Seneca from the exile that Claudius had imposed and entrusted him with the education of her son (49 AD), and appointed her friend Burrus to the command of the imperial guard. She ruled with masculine power and established order in the emperor’s household. Had she not surrendered to her greed and vindictiveness, her elevation to the imperial throne might have been a blessing for Rome. She ordered the execution of Lollia Paulina because Claudius, in a moment of inattention that no woman forgives her husband, had remarked on the charm of Lollia’s figure. She had Marcus Silanus poisoned so that Claudius would not make him his successor. She conspired with Pallas to overthrow Narcissus, and this rich ruler, who however corrupt was sincerely devoted to the emperor, finally ended up in a dungeon. The emperor, weakened by ill health, many labors, and sexual preoccupations, let Pallas and Agrippina re-establish a reign of terror. Because the treasury had been emptied by public buildings, entertainments, and games and needed to be replenished with confiscated property, the accused were exiled or killed. During the thirteen-year reign of Claudius thirty-five senators and three hundred knights were condemned to death. Some of these executions may have been justified by actual conspiracy or crime, but we do not know. Nero later claimed that he had examined all the papers and documents of Claudius and found that not one of these policies had been carried out by the emperor’s order.

After five years of Claudius’s fifth marriage his eyes were opened to Agrippina’s actions. He decided to put an end to her power and, by naming Britannicus as his successor, to forestall her plan concerning Nero. But Agrippina had a resolute and obsessive will. When she shrewdly perceived the emperor’s intention she took the plunge. She gave Claudius a poisonous mushroom, and Claudius struggled for twelve hours until he died, without being able to utter a word (54 AD). When the Senate declared him a god, Nero, who was already on the throne, wittily said that the mushroom must be the food of the gods, since it was by eating a mushroom that Claudius had become a god.

Nero

Nero was related on his father’s side to the Domitian family. This family had been famous in Rome for five hundred years for its ability, courage, pride, bravery, and cruelty. Nero’s paternal grandfather was very fond of gladiatorial sports and shows, raced chariots, spent money lavishly on wild beasts and gladiatorial displays, and was rebuked several times by Augustus for his savage treatment of officials and slaves. He married Antonia, the daughter of Antony and Octavia. Their son Gnaeus Domitius added to the family’s fame by adultery, incest, violence, and treachery. In 28 AD he married Agrippina the Younger, who was then thirteen years old. Knowing the lineage of his wife and himself, he concluded that “it is impossible for a good man to be born from us.” Their only son they named Lucius and gave him the surname Nero, which in the Sabine language means strong and brave.

His chief tutors were the Stoic Chaeremon and the philosopher Seneca; the former taught him Greek and the latter literature and moral principles. Agrippina had forbidden Seneca to teach Nero philosophy, on the ground that the study of philosophy would make Nero unfit for government. The result was a credit to philosophy. Seneca, like many other teachers, complained that the fire of his instruction was quenched by the mother’s affection, for whenever Seneca rebuked the child he ran to his mother and she always comforted him. Seneca tried to teach Nero modesty, courtesy, simplicity, chastity, and self-control. He thought that if he could not teach him the principles and subjects of philosophy he could at least dedicate to him the eloquent philosophical treatises he was writing, in the hope that his pupil would one day read them. The young ruler was a good pupil, wrote tolerable poetry, and delivered speeches to the Senate in the approved style of his master. When Claudius died Agrippina had no great difficulty in securing the confirmation of her son as emperor, especially since her friend Burrus practically guaranteed the full support of the guard.

Nero rewarded the soldiers with a cash gift and gave 400 sesterces to every citizen. He read a funeral oration over his predecessor’s grave that Seneca had written; the same Seneca who shortly afterward published, under a pseudonym, a merciless satire on the expulsion of the late emperor from Olympus. Nero paid the customary honors to the Senate, modestly apologized for his youth, and declared that of all the powers that previous emperors had held he would retain only one—the command of the army—and the pupil of the philosopher could not have chosen better. This promise was probably sincere, for Nero kept it for five years, and this is the “Neronian quinquennium” that Trajan later called one of the best periods in imperial government. When the Senate proposed that gold and silver statues be erected in Nero’s honor the seventeen-year-old emperor rejected it. When two men were accused of preferring Britannicus to him he had the charge withdrawn and, in a speech delivered in the Senate, promised that during his reign he would observe the government of wisdom that Seneca was then praising in a treatise called De Clementia (On Mercy). When he was asked to sign the death warrant of a condemned criminal he sighed: “Would that I had never learned to write!” He canceled or reduced oppressive taxes. He established annual salaries for distinguished but poor senators. Because he admitted his own inexperience he left Agrippina free to manage his affairs. Agrippina received ambassadors and had her image placed beside her son’s on imperial coins. Seneca and Burrus were alarmed by this matriarchy and conspired to arouse Nero’s pride and tempt him to take the administration of his powers out of his mother’s hands. The mother, in a rage, declared that Britannicus was the true heir to the throne and threatened to overthrow him in the same way she had raised her son. Nero countered this threat by ordering Britannicus to be poisoned. Agrippina retired to her villas and there, as her final act of revenge, began to write her memoirs—all her enemies and her mother’s were besmirched and a store worthy of a museum of horror stories was left behind from which Tacitus and Suetonius drew the dark colors for the pictures they painted of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero.

Under the guidance of a wise prime minister and under the pressure of an administrative organization whose plan had already been drawn, the empire prospered and flourished both internally and externally. The frontiers were well guarded, the Black Sea was cleared of pirates, Corbulo again brought Armenia under Roman protection, and the Parthians signed a peace treaty with Rome that lasted fifty years. Corruption in the courts and municipalities was reduced, administrative officials were reformed, and the treasury was managed with economy and intelligence. Perhaps at Seneca’s suggestion Nero made the far-sighted proposal to abolish all indirect taxes—especially the customs duties collected at the frontiers and ports—and to establish free trade throughout the empire. This bill was rejected in the Senate through the influence of the tax contractors—and this was a defeat that showed that, despite Nero’s enormous power, the empire still accepted its legal limitations.

Seneca and Burrus, in order to turn Nero’s mind away from interference in government, let him indulge his passions without hindrance. Tacitus says: “When vice had an attraction for all distinguished men, it was not to be expected that the ruler would live with asceticism and self-denial.” Religious beliefs could not encourage Nero to observe moral principles either. A little acquaintance with philosophy had loosened his intelligence without bringing his judgment to maturity. Suetonius says: “He hated all religions and emptied the contents of his bladder on the image of the goddess he most respected, that is, Cybele.” His instincts drove him to excess in food, unnatural inclinations, and extravagant banquets whose flowers alone cost 4,000,000 sesterces. He said that only miserly and poor people count the money they spend. He admired and envied Gaius Petronius because that wealthy aristocrat taught him new ways of mixing vice with taste. Tacitus gives a lasting description of the ideal of that Epicurean individual who was Petronius:

He spent his days in sleep and his nights in revelry and debauchery. Idleness was at once his passion and his road to fame. What others achieved by effort and toil he accomplished by his fondness for pleasure and luxurious ease. Unlike those who claim to understand social pleasures and squander their wealth, he lived extravagantly but without waste. He was pleasure-loving but not extravagant, addicted to his own lusts but with refinement and wisdom, and a cultivated and charming libertine. He was eloquent and lively in speech, and had a kind of charming negligence that, because it sprang from his natural and innate freedom, was more effective. Despite all his natural refinement and effortless ease, when he was governor of Bithynia and also when he was consul he showed that strength of mind and gentleness of behavior can exist in one person. … When he had finished the business of the state he returned to his usual occupations, which were eager for vice or the pleasures that surround it. … Because Nero and his companions valued him … they left him to judge taste and refined manners. Only by his verdict was anything considered excellent or pleasing or rare.

Nero was not flexible enough to achieve this artistic Epicurean method. He went to brothels in disguise, at night with his like-minded friends he roamed the streets and visited taverns, looted shops, and insulted women. “They wrestled with boys in lust, tore the clothes of those they met, struck them, wounded them, and killed them.” A senator who defended himself vigorously against the emperor in disguise was shortly afterward forced to kill himself. Seneca tried to divert the royal lust from its existing course by linking Nero with a former slave of Seneca named Claudia Acte. But Acte was so loyal to Nero that she could not hold his affections. Shortly afterward Nero replaced her with a woman who was a complete master of all the ways of love. This woman was Poppaea Sabina. She came from noble families and had immense wealth. Tacitus says: “She had everything except an honorable mind.” She was one of those women who spend the whole day on their toilet and whose existence is when they are desired by someone. Her husband Salvius Otho boasted of her beauty to Nero; the emperor immediately appointed him governor of Lusitania (Portugal) and, to trap Poppaea, made things difficult for him. Poppaea refused to be his mistress but agreed to become his wife if Nero would divorce Octavia.

Octavia had silently endured Nero’s transgressions and violations and, in the midst of the stream of sexual debauchery in which she had inevitably lived since birth, had preserved her humility and chastity. This was a credit to Agrippina, who lost her life defending Octavia against Poppaea. Against the plan to divorce Octavia she resorted to every entreaty and pretext, even, according to Tacitus, going so far as to offer her feminine charms to her son. Poppaea advanced with the weapon of her own charm and beauty and won; youth did its work. She taunted Nero that he was afraid of his mother and convinced him that Agrippina was plotting his downfall. Finally, in a frenzy of infatuation, Nero consented to the murder of the woman who had borne him and given him half the world. He thought of poisoning his mother, but Agrippina, by regularly taking antidotes, was immune to every poison. He tried to drown her but, from the ship that Nero had arranged to wreck, Agrippina swam to shore and did not die. But Nero’s men pursued her to her villa. When they caught her she stripped and said: “Strike the sword into my womb” and did not die until she had received several blows. The emperor, who came to view the naked corpse, said: “I did not know I had so beautiful a mother.” It is said that Seneca had no hand in this deed. But the saddest part of the history of philosophy is the place where Seneca wrote the letter in which he explained to the Senate Nero’s account of Agrippina’s plotting against the emperor and her suicide after her capture. The Senate accepted the explanation with full courtesy. The senators went in a body to meet Nero on his return to Rome and thanked the gods for saving him from danger.

It is hard to believe that this matricide was a twenty-two-year-old youth who had a passionate interest in poetry, music, art, drama, and athletic contests. He admired the Greeks for the variety of competitions they arranged in physical and artistic prowess and tried to organize similar contests in Rome. In 59 AD he founded the “Juvenalia” and a year later inaugurated the famous Neronia in imitation of the four-year Olympic festival of sports and arts, which included chariot racing, beauty of form, and “music” together with oratory and poetry. He built a huge amphitheater, gymnasium, and public bath. He took part in athletic events with skill, became an enthusiastic charioteer, and finally decided to compete in chariot races. In his philhellenic mind this act was not only correct but in accordance with the best traditions of ancient Greece. Seneca considered it foolish and tried to confine the emperor’s exhibitions to a private stadium. Nero rejected his advice and invited the common people to watch his performance. The people came and applauded with joy and delight.

But what this reckless demigod really wanted was to be a great artist. Since he had every kind of power he wished to be capable of every task. It is to his credit that with laborious seriousness he devoted himself to engraving, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. To improve his singing he “would lie on his back with a lead plate on his chest, purge his system with enemas or vomiting, and eat no fruit or food that was bad for the voice.” On some days he ate only garlic and olive oil for this purpose. One night he summoned the most distinguished senators to his palace, showed them a new water organ, and lectured them on the principles of playing it and its construction. He was so enchanted by the sweet melodies that Terpnus drew from the lyre that he spent many nights until dawn practicing that instrument with Terpnus. He gathered poets and artists around him, competed with them in his palace, compared his paintings with theirs, listened to their poetry, and read his own verses to them. He was deceived by their praise, and when an astrologer predicted that he would lose his throne Nero replied joyfully that in that case he would earn his living by his art. He wished one day to play the water organ, flute, pipe, and bagpipe in public, then to appear as an actor and mime imitating Turnus in Virgil. In 59 AD he gave a semi-public concert as a lyre player in the gardens he had beside the Tiber. In these performances he sang songs that he apparently composed himself. A few fragments of his works remain that testify to his average talent. In addition to several elegies he wrote a long epic on Troy (in which Paris was the hero) and began a longer epic on Rome. To complete his versatility he appeared on the stage as an actor and imitated Oedipus, Hercules, Alcmaeon, and even the matricide Orestes.

The people were delighted that the emperor gave performances and entertained them and, as was customary, knelt on the stage so that the people would applaud him. They learned the songs that Nero sang and sang them in taverns and streets. The enthusiasm he had for music spread to all classes. His popularity, instead of declining, increased day by day.

The Senate was more alarmed by these performances than by the rumors of debauchery and sexual degradation in the royal palace. And Nero’s answer to this alarm was that the Greek custom of assigning artistic and athletic competitions to the citizen class was better than the Roman custom of leaving these competitions to slaves. Nero said: There is no doubt that competitions should not become a gradual execution of criminals. The young murderer ordered that during his reign no gladiatorial combat in the arena should continue to the death. To revive the Greek tradition and honor his own performances he persuaded or forced some senators to appear in public as actors, musicians, athletes, gladiators, and charioteers. Some patricians, such as Thrasea Paetus, showed their opposition to Nero’s method by not attending when Nero went to the Senate to deliver a speech; others, such as Helvidius Priscus, condemned Nero with severity in those aristocratic salons that were the last refuge of free speech; and the Stoic philosophers in Rome spoke more and more openly against that devilish Epicurean who sat on the throne. They formed conspiracies to overthrow him. His spies discovered the conspiracies, and like his predecessors he countered with the establishment of a reign of terror. The law of “lèse-majesté” was revived (62 AD) and those whose opposition or wealth made their death desirable on cultural or financial grounds were accused. Because Nero, like Caligula, had by then emptied the treasury with his extravagance, gifts, and games, he announced his intention of confiscating the entire estates of those citizens who in their wills had not sufficiently remembered the emperor. He plundered many temple endowments and melted down their gold, silver, and statues. When Seneca protested and secretly criticized his conduct—and worse, his poems—Nero banished him from the court (62 AD) and the old philosopher spent the last three years of his life in seclusion in his villas. Burrus had died a few months earlier.

Nero now gathered new assistants around him who were generally of a rougher breed. Tigellinus, the prefect of the city police, became his most important adviser; he smoothed the emperor’s path for every pleasure and debauchery. In 62 AD Nero divorced Octavia on the ground of barrenness and banished her, and twelve days later married Poppaea. The people protested silently against this act by overturning the statues of Poppaea that Nero had erected and placing wreaths on the statues of Octavia. Poppaea, enraged, convinced her lover that Octavia was plotting a new marriage and that a revolution was being prepared to overthrow Nero and place Octavia’s new husband on the throne in his place. If we may believe Tacitus, Nero invited Anicetus, who had been Agrippina’s murderer, to confess to adultery with Octavia and to appear as a participant in a plot to overthrow the emperor. Anicetus pretended as he had been ordered, was exiled to Sardinia, and spent the rest of his life in comfort and wealth. Octavia was exiled to Pandateria. A few days after her arrival there the emperor’s agents came to kill her. She was then only twenty-two years old and could not believe that a person of such innocence should die so soon. She fell on her knees before her murderers, saying that she was now only Nero’s sister and could do him no harm. But the agents cut off her head and took it to Poppaea to receive their reward. The Senate, hearing of Octavia’s death, thanked the gods that the emperor had once again been saved.

At this time Nero had become a god himself. After Agrippina’s death a consul who had just been elected but had not yet taken office proposed that a temple be erected to “Nero the deified.” When in 63 AD Poppaea bore Nero a daughter who died shortly afterward, the child too received divinity. When Tiridates I came to Rome to receive the crown of Armenia he knelt and worshiped the emperor in the name of Mithra. When Nero built his Golden House he had an enormous statue 36.5 meters high erected in the forecourt with a head modeled on his own, and a halo of sun rays around it that identified him with Phoebus Apollo (the sun god). But in reality he was now thirty-five years old, a debauched man with a protruding belly, a weak and thin frame, a fat face, broken skin, yellow and curly hair, and dead gray eyes.

As a god and artist he found much fault with the palaces he had inherited and wanted to build a palace according to his own plan. But the Palatine district was crowded and below it on one side lay the Circus Maximus and on the other the great Forum of Rome, with slums on the two other sides. He lamented that Rome, instead of being built like Alexandria or Antioch with scientific plans, had grown so haphazardly and without a grand design. He wished to rebuild Rome, to become its second founder, and to name it “Nero’s City” or “Neropolis.”

On 18 July 64 a fire broke out in the Circus Maximus, spread rapidly, lasted nine days, and destroyed two-thirds of the city. When the flames rose Nero was in Antium. He hurried to Rome and arrived in time to watch the burning of the palaces on the Palatine. The vaulted corridor that he had recently built to connect his palace with the gardens of Maecenas was one of the first buildings to collapse. The Forum, the Capitol, and the western district of the Tiber remained safe from the fire, and throughout the rest of the city houses, temples, priceless manuscripts, and countless works of art were destroyed. Thousands perished in the residential buildings that collapsed in the crowded streets. Hundreds of thousands of homeless and wandering people, terrified and dazed, spent the nights listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire and was scattering ashes to rekindle it. From the top of the tower of Maecenas, while reading his own poems on the sack of Troy and accompanying them on the lyre, he watched the fire. Nero with great energy took the lead in the effort to prevent or limit the fire and to provide relief. He ordered all government buildings and the emperor’s gardens to be opened to the afflicted poor. He set up a city of tents in the Campus Martius, requisitioned food from the surrounding areas, and arranged for the feeding of the people. He endured the mockery and slanderous accusations of the people without irritation. According to Tacitus (whose senatorial opposition must always be remembered) he sought a scapegoat and found it in a people who

were hated for their abominable practices and generally called Christians. This name derives from Christ, who was put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. The sect founded by him received a blow at that time which for a while checked the dangerous superstition, but it soon revived and spread not only in Judea … but even in the city of Rome—the sink into which everything vile and horrible from all parts of the world flows like a flood. Nero used his usual trick. He found a number of debtors and outcasts who were willing to confess their guilt; and on the testimony of such persons a number of Christians were condemned. And this was not on the clear evidence of having set fire to the city, but because of their stubborn hatred of the human race. They were killed with ruthless cruelty, and Nero added mockery and derision to their suffering. Some were covered with the skins of wild beasts and left to be devoured by dogs, some were nailed to crosses, and some were burned alive, and many were set on fire after being covered with inflammable materials so that they might serve as torches at night. … At last the brutality of these measures filled men’s hearts with pity. Humanity felt compassion for the Christians.

After the remains of the fire had been cleared, Nero with evident delight undertook the rebuilding of the city according to the dream he had seen for it. Contributions for this purpose were collected from every city in the empire by request or pressure, and those whose houses had been destroyed were able to build new homes with this money. The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their facades and first floors built of stone and to be sufficiently spaced from other buildings to provide a safety distance in case of future fires. The springs that flowed under the city were connected by aqueducts to a large reservoir to provide a water supply in case of future fires. Nero, from the imperial treasury, built porticos along the streets that shaded thousands of houses. Architects and old men had forgotten the spectacular scenes of the old city, but it was not long before everyone agreed that a Rome had emerged from the fire that was healthier, safer, and more beautiful.

If Nero had at this time reshaped his own life as well as his capital he would have been forgiven. But in 65 AD Poppaea, while several months pregnant, died, it is said, from a kick in the stomach. It was rumored that the kick was Nero’s answer to Poppaea’s protests over his late return from the races. He grieved greatly over Poppaea’s death because he had eagerly looked forward to an heir. He ordered her body to be embalmed with rare spices, arranged a magnificent funeral for her, and read a eulogy over her corpse. When he found a boy named Sporus who greatly resembled Poppaea he ordered him to be castrated and married him with full official ceremonies and “used him in every way as a wife.” A wit remarked that it would have been better if Nero’s father had had such a wife. In the same year he began to build his Golden House. The extravagant decorations, costs, and dimensions of that building—in an area that had previously housed several thousand poor people—renewed the disgust of the aristocracy and the suspicion of the plebeians.

Nero’s spies suddenly brought him news that a widespread conspiracy was being prepared to place Calpurnius Piso on the throne (65 AD). Nero’s agents arrested several secondary and unimportant members of the conspiracy and by torture and threats extracted confessions that cast suspicion on a number of people, including the poet Lucan and Seneca. Gradually the whole plot was revealed. Nero’s revenge was so savage that the Romans believed Nero had sworn to destroy the senatorial class. When Seneca was ordered to kill himself he debated for a while and then carried out the order. Lucan also opened his veins and died while reading his own poems. Tigellinus, who envied Petronius’s popularity with Nero, bribed one of that pleasure-loving man’s slaves to testify against his master, and persuaded Nero to order Petronius’s death. Petronius died with perfect calm; he opened and closed his veins while reading poetry to his friends and talking with them in his usual manner; then he walked a little, slept a little; and then opened his veins again and died peacefully. The condemnation of Thrasea Paetus, the leader of the Stoics in the Senate, was not because he had taken part in the conspiracy but because he had not shown sufficient enthusiasm for the emperor, had not enjoyed his singing, and had written an admiring biography of Cato. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely exiled. But two others who had praised him were killed. The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus and the great jurist Cassius Longinus were sent into exile. Two brothers of Seneca—one Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father, and the other Annaeus Novatus, who had freed Paul the Apostle in Corinth—were ordered to kill themselves.

After ridding himself of the internal uproar, in 66 AD Nero set out for Greece to take part in the Olympic Games and to give several concerts. He said: “The Greeks are the only people who have musical ears.” In the Olympic Games he drove a four-horse chariot, was thrown from the chariot, and was so badly injured that he nearly died; when he was put back in the chariot he continued the race for a while but abandoned it before the end of the course. But the judges knew well the difference between an emperor and an ordinary person taking part in a competition and awarded him the victory crown. When the crowd applauded him he was so delighted that he declared that henceforth not only Athens and Sparta but the whole of Greece should be free—that is, exempt from paying any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities, by holding the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year, provided for his comfort, and in return for this kindness he took part in all those competitions as a singer, lyre player, actor, and athlete. Nero observed the rules of the various competitions with care, was perfectly courteous to his opponents, and granted Roman citizenship to them as a consolation for his compulsory victory. During his travels in Greece he learned that Judea had revolted and that the whole West had raised the standard of rebellion. He sighed and continued his journey. Suetonius says: “When he sang in the theater no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent needs. For this reason some women gave birth in the theater, and several people pretended to be dead so that they could be carried out.” In Corinth he ordered the canal that Caesar had planned to be carried out; work was begun but was set aside during the disturbances of the following year. Nero, terrified by news of further revolts and conspiracies, returned to Italy (67 AD), entered Rome in an official triumph, and displayed the 1,808 prizes he had won in Greece as tokens of victory.

But the sad events did not lag behind his buffooneries: in March 68 the governor of Lyon, Julius Vindex, a Gaul, declared the independence of Gaul; when Nero offered a reward of 2,500,000 sesterces for Vindex’s head, Vindex retorted that “whoever brings me Nero’s head shall have mine as reward.” Nero, preparing to take the field against this man-eating opponent, first turned his attention to selecting wagons to carry his musical instruments and theatrical costumes. But in April news arrived that Galba, the Roman commander in Spain, had joined Vindex and was marching on Rome. The Senate, learning that the imperial guard was ready to abandon Nero in exchange for a suitable reward, declared Galba emperor. Nero put a little poison in a small box and, thus armed, fled from his Golden House to the Servilian gardens on the road to Ostia. He asked the officers of the guard who were present in the palace to accompany him. All refused, and one of them recited a line from Virgil to him: “Is dying so hard?” He could not believe that the absolute power he had exercised had so suddenly come to an end. He sent messengers to several friends for help, but none replied. He went to the Tiber to drown himself but lacked the courage. Phaon, one of his freedmen, offered to hide him in his villa on the Salarian Way. Nero immediately accepted the offer and in the darkness walked six kilometers from the middle of the city to the outskirts. He spent that night in a dirty cloak, sleepless and hungry, in Phaon’s barn, trembling at every slight sound. Phaon’s messenger brought the news that the Senate had declared Nero a public enemy, ordered his arrest, and decreed that Nero should be punished “in the ancient manner.” Nero asked what that manner was. They told him: “The condemned man is stripped naked, a wooden fork is passed through his neck, and he is then beaten to death.” In terror he wanted to stab himself with a dagger but made the mistake of first testing the point and found it unpleasantly sharp. He lamented: “What an artist the world is losing!”

As day was about to break he heard the sound of horses’ hooves. The Senate’s soldiers had found him. While reciting a line of poetry—“Listen! Now the sound of swift horses’ hooves comes to my ears”—he plunged a dagger into his throat, his hand trembled, and Epaphroditus, his freedman, helped him drive the dagger home. Nero had asked his companions not to let his body be mutilated, and Galba’s agents agreed to this request. His old nurses and Acte, his former mistress, buried him in the family tomb of the Domitii (68 AD). Many people rejoiced at the news of his death and ran through the city with caps of liberty on their heads. But many more mourned him; because he had been as cruel to the great as he had been generous and kind to the poor. These people listened eagerly to rumors that Nero had not really died and was fighting the Senate and coming to Rome; and when they accepted the news of his death they came to his grave for several months to scatter flowers on it.

The Three Emperors

Servius Sulpicius Galba reached Rome in June 68. He had a distinguished lineage, tracing his ancestry on his father’s side to Jupiter and on his mother’s to Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos, and the bull. In this year when he reached the height of his fame he was bald and, because of gout, his hands and feet were so twisted that he could neither put on shoes nor hold a book. He was addicted to the usual Roman vices of womanizing and pederasty, but these vices did not shorten his reign. What displeased the army and the people was his strict economy in the treasury and the impartial administration of justice. When he ordered that those who had received gifts or permanent allowances from Nero should return one-tenth of them to the treasury he made a thousand new enemies and his days were numbered.

Marcus Otho, a bankrupt senator, declared that he could pay his debts only if he became emperor. The members of the guard declared their support for him, rode into the Forum of Rome, and met Galba who was being carried in a litter. Galba without resistance bowed his head to the swords of the guard. They cut off his head, arms, and lips. One of them took the head to Otho, but because he could not carry the head with its thin and blood-soaked hair he thrust his thumb into the mouth of the head. The Senate hastily accepted Otho as emperor, while the Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing their commanders as emperor. These two commanders were Aulus Vitellius in Germany and Titus Flavius Vespasian in Judea. Vitellius marched on Italy with his powerful legions and crushed the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the imperial guard. After a reign of ninety-five days Otho killed himself, and Vitellius ascended the throne.

This was one of the weaknesses of the Roman government and military system—that indolent men like Galba could become commander of the army in Spain, or a pleasure-loving idler like Vitellius could become commander of the Roman forces in Germany. Vitellius was a glutton who regarded the empire as a banquet and turned every meal into a sumptuous feast. Between meals he attended to the business of government, and when these intervals grew shorter he left the government to his freedman Asiaticus, who in four months became one of the richest men in Rome. When Vitellius heard that Antonius, the commander of Vespasian’s forces, was leading an army toward Italy to overthrow him, he left the defense to his subordinates and devoted himself to gluttony. In October 69 Antonius’s troops defeated Vitellius’s defenders at Cremona in one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles of ancient times. Antonius’s troops entered Rome, and there the remnants of Vitellius’s forces bravely defended their emperor while he himself took refuge in the palace. Tacitus says the people “gathered in crowds to watch the battle as though it were a spectacle of slaughter staged for their amusement.” While the battle continued some people looted shops and houses and prostitutes plied their trade. Antonius’s soldiers were victorious, killed the enemy without mercy or pity, and plundered the city without any qualms; and the crowd, which had gathered like the breath of history to applaud the victors, helped the victorious troops drag the enemy from every corner. Vitellius, who had been dragged from his hiding place, was paraded half-naked through the city with a noose around his neck, dung was thrown on him, he was tortured at leisure, and finally in a moment when pity overcame savagery he was killed (December 69). His body was dragged through the streets with a hook and thrown into the Tiber.

Vespasian

What a relief it is to meet a sensible, capable, and honorable man! Vespasian, who was busy directing the war in Judea, came to Rome at the right moment to take the heavy burden that his soldiers had won for him, and the Senate hastily confirmed him in that office. When he reached Rome (October 70) he set about with inspiring energy to restore order and discipline in a society whose every aspect of life had been thrown into chaos. Realizing that he had to repeat the work of Augustus, he necessarily adapted his behavior and policy to that of the emperor. He made peace with the Senate and restored constitutional government. He freed or recalled from exile those who had been condemned under “lèse-majesté” in the time of Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, reorganized the army, limited the number and powers of the imperial guard, sent experienced commanders to the provinces to suppress revolts, and shortly afterward was able to close the temple of Janus as a sign and pledge of peace.

He was sixty years old, but the power of his strong frame was at its peak. He had broad shoulders and a powerful personality, a wide, bald, large head, harsh but masterful cheeks, and small, sharp eyes that penetrated every deception. No sign of genius appeared in him; he was simply a man of strong will and practical intelligence. He had been born in a village in the south of the Apennines near Reate, and his family and lineage were plebeian. His accession to the throne was a fourfold revolution: a man of the common people had reached the imperial throne, a provincial army had overcome the imperial guard and placed its candidate on the throne, the Flavian dynasty had succeeded the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the simple habits and qualities of the middle class of Italy had taken the place in the imperial court of the Epicurean extravagance and urban descendants of Augustus and Livia. Vespasian never forgot his humble origin and made no attempt to conceal it. When some genealogists who hoped for his favor tried to declare one of his ancestors a companion of Hercules, Vespasian silenced them with a laugh. He regularly visited his birthplace to enjoy the ways of rural life there and would not allow anything in that place to be changed. He condemned luxury and idleness, ate the food of peasants, fasted once a month, and was irreconcilable with war extravagance. When a Roman whom Vespasian had nominated for office came to see him smelling of perfume, Vespasian said: “It would have been better if you had smelled of garlic” and revoked the appointment. He arranged that everyone had easy access to him. He lived and spoke on equal terms with the people, enjoyed sharp jokes against himself, and gave everyone great freedom to criticize his behavior and character. When he learned of a conspiracy against himself he pardoned the conspirators and said how foolish they were not to know how heavy the burden of ruling was.

He lost his good humor in only one case. Helvidius Priscus, whom Nero had exiled, when he returned to the Senate at Vespasian’s order, insisted strongly that the Republic be restored and without any restraint hurled abuse at Vespasian. Vespasian asked him that if he wished to continue his abuse he should not attend the Senate; Helvidius refused. Vespasian exiled him and stained an otherwise excellent government with an order for his execution. Later he regretted this act and for the rest of his life, according to Suetonius, “showed great patience under the frank speech of friends … and the impudence of philosophers.” But the latter group were mostly Cynics rather than Stoics, and the anarchists were philosopher-like men who regarded all government as tyranny and attacked all emperors.

To inject fresh blood into a Senate that had been ruined by family restriction and civil war, Vespasian secured the office of censor for himself, and using his powers brought a thousand distinguished families from all over Italy and its western provinces to Rome, placed them among the leading patricians or knights, and, despite strong protests, filled the Senate with their ranks. The new aristocracy, following his example, reformed the morals of Roman society. This aristocracy had not yet been corrupted by sudden wealth, and had not yet distanced itself so far from work, effort, and agriculture that it considered the ordinary tasks of life and government beneath its dignity, and it had something of the order and decency of the emperor’s own life. From this class arose the rulers who after Domitian governed Rome with integrity for a century. The use of freedmen as imperial officials had defects that Vespasian was aware of, so he replaced many of them with members of the new class he had brought to Rome and handed them over to the growing merchant class of Rome. With the help of these men he accomplished a miracle of national revival in nine years.

The establishment of the first state system of education in the ancient world awaited this slow-witted soldier. He arranged that some capable teachers of Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric should receive salaries from government funds and after twenty years of service should receive a retirement pension. Perhaps the old skeptic had realized that teachers have a share in forming and creating public opinion and that a government that paid them money might be praised by them. Probably for similar reasons he revived many of the old temples, even in rural areas. He rebuilt the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva that had been burned by Vitellius’s supporters over the heads of his soldiers, erected a royal tomb for the goddess of peace, and began the construction of the most famous building in Rome, the Colosseum. The upper classes mourned that their property was being spent in taxes on buildings for the government and wages for the common people, and the workers were not particularly grateful. He stirred the people to a fierce struggle to clear the rubble left from the recent war, and he himself carried the first basket of rubble. When an inventor showed him plans for a hoisting machine that would greatly reduce the need for human labor in building work and carrying debris, Vespasian refused it and said: “I must feed my poor.” At this moment when invention might have been favored, Vespasian realized the problem of creating unemployment as a result of technical progress and voted against the industrial revolution.

The provinces flourished as never before. The wealth of the provinces—at least in monetary terms—had doubled since the time of Augustus, and they could bear the payment of additional tributes without damage. Vespasian sent the able Agricola to govern Britain, and entrusted the suppression of the Jewish revolt to Titus. Titus captured Jerusalem and returned to Rome with the honors usually given to one who kills the most. A spectacular triumph, with a long procession of captives and spoils, passed through the streets and a famous arch was erected in memory of the victory. Vespasian was proud of his son’s victory, but he was distressed that Titus had brought with him a beautiful Jewish princess named Berenice as his mistress and wished to marry her. Again the saying “The captive took her savage conqueror captive” found application. The emperor could not understand why a man should marry his mistress. He himself after his wife’s death lived with a freedwoman without bothering to marry her, and when that woman died Vespasian distributed his love among several concubines. It was certain to him that the designation of a successor must be carried out before his death to prevent chaos. The Senate agreed with him but asked Vespasian to name “the best of the best” (who would naturally be a senator) and adopt him; Vespasian replied that in his opinion Titus was better than anyone. The young conqueror, to facilitate the matter, sent Berenice away and sought consolation in mixing with women. Thus the emperor made Titus his partner on the throne and shared part of the government with him.

In 79 Vespasian traveled again to Reate. While he was in the south of the Apennines he overindulged in drinking the laxative waters of Lake Cotilia and suffered severe diarrhea. Although he was bedridden he received ambassadors and attended to the other duties of his office. Although he felt the hand of death upon him he preserved all his humorous nature to the full. He said: “Alas, I am about to become a god!” (In his weakness he struggled and with the help of his attendants stood up. He said: “An emperor should die standing.” And with these words he ended his sixty-nine-year life and his ten-year beneficent reign.

Titus

Vespasian’s elder son, who bore the same name (Titus Flavius Vespasian), was the happiest of the emperors. He died in the second year of his reign at the age of forty-two, while he was still “the darling of humanity.” Time did not give him the opportunity to be corrupted by power or to grow weary of the illusory nature of his desires. In his youth he made himself famous by taking part in ruthless wars and stained his name with a dissolute life. When he came to power, instead of letting absolute power intoxicate him, he reformed moral principles and made his government a model of wisdom and honor. His greatest fault was his boundless generosity. He did not count as part of his life any day in which he had not made someone happy by giving a gift. He spent a great deal of money on games and shows, and almost reduced the full treasury to the state his father had found at the beginning of his reign. He completed the Colosseum and built another public bath. During his short reign no one was condemned to death, but contrary to orders he had informers flogged and exiled. He swore that he would rather be killed than kill. When two noblemen were caught in a conspiracy to overthrow him he was content to warn them. He then sent a messenger to the mother of one of the two conspirators to calm her anxiety and inform her that her son was safe.

His misfortunes were disasters over which he had little influence. A three-day fire in 79 destroyed many major buildings, including the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva which burned again; in the same year the eruption of Vesuvius buried the city of Pompeii and thousands of Italians under its molten material; and a year later Rome was struck by a plague that was more deadly than all previous plagues. Titus did what he could to alleviate the suffering caused by these calamities, and “showed not only the interest of an emperor but the comprehensive paternal affection.” In 81, in the same country house where his father had recently died, he died of a fever. All the people of Rome mourned him except the brother who succeeded him.

Domitian

The unbiased portrait of Domitian is even harder to draw than that of Nero. The main sources we have about his reign are Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. Both of them advanced during his reign but belonged to the group of senators who were at war with Domitian—a war that almost led to the ruin of both sides. Against these hostile witnesses we have Statius and Martial, both poets who ate Domitian’s bread or sought it and who really raised his head to the heavens. Perhaps all four witnesses were truthful, because this last member of the Flavian dynasty, like many members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, was like Gabriel at the beginning of his career and became Lucifer (the devil) at the end. In this case Domitian’s spirit was always with him: in his youth he was modest, refined, cheerful, and tall; in his later years he had “a protruding belly, crooked legs, and a bald head”—although he had written a book on the preservation of hair. In adolescence he wrote poetry, in old age he was not even confident in his own prose and left the drafting of his speeches and orations to others. Had Titus not been his brother he might have been more fortunate; but only the noblest souls are capable of witnessing the victory of their friends without frowning. Domitian’s jealousy turned him into a sullen, self-consuming, and silent man who later turned to secret plotting against his brother. Things reached the point where Titus himself had to ask his father for pardon for his brother. When Vespasian died Domitian claimed that he too had shared in the imperial powers, but someone had tampered with his father’s will. Titus asked him to be his partner in the empire during his lifetime and his successor after his death; Domitian refused and continued to plot. Dio Cassius says: When Titus fell ill Domitian hastened his death by piling snow around him. The degree of truth in these stories cannot be known, just as the truth of the sexual stories that have come down to us about Domitian is unknown—they say that Domitian went swimming with prostitutes, had made Titus’s daughter his concubine, and “indulged in lust equally with women and boys.” All Latin historiography is the expression of the politics of the time of writing and consists of partisan blows struck for temporary purposes.

When we come to Domitian’s actual administration we see that in the first decade of his reign he was astonishingly chaste and capable. Just as Vespasian had taken Augustus as his model, Domitian apparently followed the policy and method of Tiberius. After he made the office of censor for life his own he prevented the publication of foul and obscene satires (although he winked at Martial’s descriptions). He put the Julian laws on adultery into effect; he tried to prevent the prostitution of children and to reduce pederasty; he forbade the performance of the ludi Florales because it was contrary to decency; he executed one of the Vestal Virgins who had been condemned for adultery; and he put an end to the castration of men, because this practice had made the rise in the price of eunuch slaves very common. He was disgusted by any kind of bloodshed, even the sacrifice of a bull that had a religious character. He was honorable, generous, and free from greed. He did not accept inheritances from those who had children, canceled all tax arrears that were more than five years old, and abolished delation. He was a strict but impartial judge. He made freedmen his secretaries but forced them not to deviate from the straight path.

His reign was one of the great building eras in Rome. Because the fires of 79 and 82 had caused much destruction and poverty, Domitian drew up a government building program to create work and distribute wealth. He too hoped to revive the old faith by beautifying or multiplying its shrines. He rebuilt the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva and spent 22,000,000 dollars on their doors and gilded roof. The people of Rome admired the result but mourned the extravagance. When Domitian built a huge palace called the Flavian House for himself and his administrative staff the citizens rightly complained of its great cost; but they raised no voice of protest against the expensive games with which he tried to mitigate the unpopularity that resulted from his imitation of Tiberius. He dedicated a temple to his father and brother, restored the baths and the Pantheon of Agrippa and the portico of Octavia and the temples of Isis and Serapis, added to the grandeur of the Colosseum, completed the baths of Titus, and began building baths that Trajan later finished.

At the same time he did his utmost to encourage art and literature. Flavian sculpture reached its peak in his reign; his coins are excellent. To encourage poetry he established the Capitoline Games in 86, which also included competitions in literature and music, and for these competitions he built a stadium and a music hall in the Campus Martius. He gave modest help to the moderate talent of Statius and the immoderate talent of Martial. He rebuilt the national libraries that had been destroyed by fire and sent several copyists to Alexandria to make copies of their manuscripts to replenish their contents—and this is another proof that only a small part of the treasures of the great library of Alexandria had been lost in the fire that Caesar started in that city.

He administered the empire well. He had Tiberius’s hard decisiveness in management, severely punished the embezzlement of public funds, and carefully supervised the work of all officials and the progress of affairs. Just as Tiberius had prevented the advance of Germanicus, Domitian also recalled Agricola from Britain—after that brave general had led his troops as far as Scotland and pushed the frontier to the same limit. Apparently Agricola had wanted to go further and Domitian had not agreed. This recall was considered the result of jealousy, and because the history of Domitian’s reign was written by Agricola’s son-in-law this recall cost Domitian very dearly. He was equally unfortunate in war. In 86 the people of Dacia crossed the Danube, attacked the province of Moesia which belonged to Rome, and defeated Domitian’s generals. The emperor himself took command, planned the war well, and was on the verge of entering Dacia when Antoninus Saturninus, the Roman governor of Upper Germany, persuaded two legions stationed at Mainz to proclaim him emperor. Domitian’s assistants suppressed this revolt. But this action disrupted his plan by giving the enemy time to prepare. Domitian crossed the Danube, engaged the people of Dacia, and apparently retreated. He made peace with the king of Dacia named Decebalus and agreed to send him an annual tribute. Then he returned to Rome to celebrate a double victory over Dacia. After that he devoted himself to building a strong road between the two rivers Rhine and Danube and another between the northern bend of the Danube and the Black Sea.

The revolt of Saturninus was the turning point of Domitian’s reign. It is there that one can draw the dividing line between the good Domitian and the bad Domitian. Before that Domitian had always been strict and serious, but now he inclined toward tyranny and oppression. He became convinced that the proper administration of the country was possible only with the existence of an absolute and despotic ruler. The Senate under his pressure quickly lost its powers, and his extraordinary power as censor had made that assembly at once obedient and vengeful. Selfishness, which takes root even in humble people, had no obstacle or restraint in Domitian’s position. He filled the Capitol with his own statues. He declared his father, brother, wife, sisters, and himself gods. He created a new college of priests called the Flaviales (worshipers of the Flavians) who watched over the worship of these new gods. He asked government officials to call him “Lord and our God” in correspondence and official documents. He sat on the throne and encouraged petitioners to embrace his knees, and in his adorned palace he introduced the customs and ceremonies of eastern courts. The empire, through the power of the army and the decline of the Senate, had become an un-constitutional monarchy.

Not only in the aristocracy but also among philosophers and among religious followers who were penetrating Rome from the East a revolt broke out against these new developments. Jews and Christians refused to worship Domitian as a god, the Cynics condemned all governments, and the Stoics, although they accepted the king, had a moral obligation to oppose tyrants and honor tyrant-killers. In 89 Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome and in 95 banished them from Italy. The previous decree also included astrologers whose predictions about the emperor’s death had created terror in his unbelieving but superstition-ready head. In 93 Domitian executed a number of Christians for the crime of not offering sacrifice to his statue; it is said that one of these Christians was his own nephew, Flavius Clemens.

In the last years of Domitian’s reign his fear of conspiracy almost reached madness. He covered the walls of the corridors under which he walked with polished stones so that he could see everything that passed behind him. He lamented that it was the misfortune of rulers that when someone is accused of conspiracy no one believes them unless the conspiracy succeeds. Like Tiberius, the older he grew the more he listened to informers. And because the number of informers increased day by day, no citizen whose head was worth anything was safe from spies even in his own house. After the revolt of Saturninus the issuance of indictments and condemnations rapidly increased. Aristocrats were exiled or killed, and suspects were tortured, even by “inserting half-burned instruments into their private parts.” The terror-stricken Senate—of which the historian Tacitus, who relates these events with the utmost bitterness, was a member—was the agent of trial and condemnation; and every time it issued an execution order it thanked the gods that the emperor had been saved.

Domitian committed a great blunder, and that was to terrify the members of his own household. In 96 he issued the order for the death of his own secretary Epaphroditus because twenty-seven years earlier he had helped Nero to commit suicide. The other freedmen of the court felt that their lives were in danger and decided to kill the emperor to save themselves, and Domitia, the emperor’s wife, also took part in that plot. On the night before his death he awoke in terror from sleep. When the appointed moment arrived the servant of Domitian struck the first blow. Four others joined in the attack, and Domitian, struggling madly, died in the fifteenth year of his reign at the age of forty-five (96 AD). When the news reached the senators they smashed and toppled all the images of him that were in the Senate hall and ordered all his statues and inscriptions containing his name to be destroyed throughout the Roman domain.

History has not been fair to this “age of tyrants,” because in this case it has spoken mostly in the eloquent and opinionated language of historians. Even in the worst of these rulers there was a sign of good—Tiberius was a faithful statesman, Caligula had a charming cheerfulness, Claudius possessed lasting wisdom, Nero had boundless beauty-loving, and Domitian had a dry talent. Behind the adulteries and murders an administrative organization had come into existence that throughout this period had produced excellent order in the government of the provinces. The emperors themselves were victims of their own great power. A kind of blood disease, intensified by the heat of unrestrained execution of intense desires, followed the Julio-Claudian dynasty like the children of Atreus; and a defect in this machine reduced the offspring of the Flavians in one generation from patient statesmanship to tyranny born of terror. Seven of these ten emperors died a hard death. Almost all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy and villainy and deception, and tried to rule a world from a house full of chaos. They satisfied their desires to excess because they knew how fleeting their absolute power was; their lives were the lives of men condemned to sudden and premature death filled with terror. They were brought down because they thought themselves above the law; they became less than human because their power had made them gods.

But this age or empire should not be absolved of its infamy and crimes. This age gave peace to the empire and terror to Rome; it damaged moral principles with the supreme example of tyranny and lust; it tore Italy apart with civil war that was far more severe than the war between Caesar and Pompey; it filled the islands with exiles and killed the best and bravest men. With lavish rewards given to greedy spies it induced them to give false testimony about the crimes of friends and relatives. In Rome it made individual tyranny the successor to the rule of law. It erected lofty buildings by piling up taxes and tribute, but it dragged the spirit down to baseness by terrifying creative or ready minds and making them silent or submissive. Above all, it raised the army to the height of power. The emperor’s power over the Senate was not in his supreme genius or in tradition or dignity, but rested on the points of the spears of the emperor’s guards. When the provincial armies saw how emperors were made and saw how valuable the gifts and spoils of the capital were, they pushed aside the guard and themselves took up the business of king-making. Again for a century the wisdom and prudence of great rulers, who were chosen by the rule of adoption and not by inheritance or violence or wealth, kept the soldiers in their place and kept the frontiers safe. But when folly again reached the throne through the love of a philosopher, the armies became rebellious, chaos tore the thin veil of order, and civil war joined hands with the barbarians who seized the opportunity to bring down the shaky foundation of the government that the genius of Augustus had built.