NERO THE EMPEROR
Roughly then this is the situation at the centre of government.
Sumptuously housed on the Palatine Hill--the origin of our word
"palace"--is His Highness Claudius Nero, Head of the State,
Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, Empowered to act as Tribune of the
People, and Head of the State Religion: in modern times commonly
called "the Emperor." Every day and night his palace is surrounded by
a regiment of the Imperial Guards, and attached to his person is a
special corps for bodyguard, and orderlies. In practice, whatever be
the theory, he possesses the control of legislation and appointments;
upon him practically depends all recognised distinction of social
rank. Down below, to the side of the Forum, is the Senate-House, in
which there gathers, twice each month, and oftener if summoned, the
great deliberative body which, in spite of all disturbances, civil
wars, and limitations or broadenings of its power, is the continuation
of the assembly of grave Roman fathers who first met some eight
hundred years before. These men, who are of birth and wealth and
commonly of sound public training, are the nominal upholders and
directors of the commonwealth, still left to perform many functions
and to administer the more peaceful provinces in their own
way--especially if they relieve the emperor of trouble--but in
practice controlled by His Highness whenever and however it suits his
purpose. They and the emperor form a partnership in authority, but the
Senate is very distinctly the junior partner. They lend him advice or
sanction when he seeks it, and they sometimes act as a break on his
impetuosity. It is not well to alienate them, for they are proud; they
are jointly, sometimes individually, powerful; and their moral weight
with army and public is not to be despised.
Thus stands the central government, while socially there follows the
order of the Knights, depending for their rank upon the emperor, and
in many cases serving in his employ. Below these the populace, of
whose rights and liberties the emperor is an official champion to whom
theoretically any Roman citizen can appeal against a sentence of death
or against cruel wrong. It is hard to conceive of a stronger position
for one man to hold.
When we survey this vast aggregation of various provinces, with their
differences of race, language, religion, and habits; when we remember
that it was on the whole strictly, energetically, and legally
administered; it is hard--even allowing for a wise Senate and capable
ministers--to realise a man competent for the position.
Yet Augustus had been conspicuously successful, and Tiberius not less
so; Claudius, despite a certain weakness, cannot by any means be
called a failure; after Nero, Vespasian and Titus were capable enough;
while Trajan deserves nothing but admiration. On the other hand
Caligula, it is true, had had more than a touch of the madman in his
composition, and had believed himself to be omnipotent and on a level
with Jupiter. Nero had begun well, but had been led by vanity, vice,
and extravagance to an astounding pitch of folly and oppression.
Nevertheless it must be remarked, and it should be firmly emphasised,
that what is called the tyranny of Caligula and Nero is mainly--and in
Caligula's case almost solely--a tyranny affecting the Romans
themselves, affecting the lives and property of the Roman senators and
other prominent persons, and affecting the lives and honour of their
wives and daughters. The outcry against these two emperors comes from
the Romans, not from the subject peoples. At least in Caligula's case
the provinces were as peaceful and prosperous as at other times. It is
true that the madman once meant to insist on the Jews putting up his
own statue in the temple at Jerusalem, but this was because his vanity
was aggrieved by their unwillingness. Under Nero the case is much the
same. His tyranny for the most part took the shape of cruelty, insult,
and plunder in Rome itself. It was only when he was becoming
hopelessly in debt that he began to plunder the provinces as well as
Italy by demanding contributions of money, and in particular to seize
upon Greek works of art without paying for them. It is a mistake to
think of Nero as habitually and without scruple trampling under his
blood-stained foot the rights and privileges of the provinces, or
grinding from them the last penny, or harrying, slaying, and violating
throughout the empire.
There is nothing to show that, during the greater part of his reign,
the provinces at large felt any material difference between the rule
of Nero and the rule of Claudius, or that they rejoiced particularly
in his fall. In many quarters he was a favourite. In the latter half
of his reign he made himself a brute beast, and often a fool, in the
eyes of respectable Romans. But it was, as still more with Caligula,
rather in his immediate environment that his tyranny was felt to be
intolerable; that is to say, among the men and women who had the
misfortune to come in his way with sufficient attraction of purse or
beauty to awaken his cupidity. And these were the Romans themselves,
senators and knights, not the populace, and in but a small degree, if
at all, the provincials in Spain or Greece or Palestine.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--BUST OF SENECA. Archeologische Zeitung.]
Perhaps this is the time to look for a little while at this Nero,
whose name has deservedly passed into a byword for heartless
bestiality. In the year 64 he is 27 years of age, and has been seated
on the throne for ten years. Four years more are to elapse before he
perishes with the cry, "What an artist the world is losing!" In his
early years his vicious propensities, inherited from an abominable
father, had been kept in check partly by his preceptor, the
philosopher Seneca, and by Burrus, the commander of the Imperial
Guards, partly by his domineering and furious-tempered mother,
Agrippina, who seems to have so closely resembled the mother of Lord
Byron. But at this date he had got rid of both his tutors. Burrus was
dead, probably by poison, and Seneca was in forced retirement. The
emperor had also caused his own mother to be murdered. Poisoning,
strangling, drowning, or a command--explicit or implied--to depart
this life, were his ways of shaking off any incubus upon a free
indulgence of his will. His follies and vices had revealed themselves
from the first, and had gone to outrageous lengths, but now he is
entirely unhampered in exhibiting them.
[Illustration: Photo--Mansell & Co. FIG. 14--BUST OF AGRIPPINA, MOTHER
OF NERO.]
Educated slightly in philosophy, but better in music and letters, he
could speak, like others of his day, Greek as well as his native
Latin. His aim was to be an "artist," but if the want of balance which
too often goes with what is called the "artistic temperament" ever
manifested itself in its worst form, it was in Nero. Apart from his
passion for music and verse, he developed an early mania for
horse-racing, and when he was caught talking in school--where such
conversation was forbidden--about a charioteer who had fallen out of
his chariot and been dragged along the ground, he explained that he
was discussing the passage in Homer where Achilles drags the body of
Hector round the walls of Troy. In after life he carried both forms of
mania to amazing lengths. The highest form of music was then
represented by singing to the harp. Nero's ambition was no less than
to compete with the champion minstrels of the world. As he remarked,
"music is not music unless it is heard," and he decided to make public
appearances upon the stage like any professional. Whenever he did so,
a number of energetic youths, salaried for the purpose, were
distributed among the audience as _claqueurs_--the words actually used
for them being perhaps translatable as "boomers" or "rattlers." He
acted parts in plays--a proceeding which would correspond to an
appearance in opera--and made a peregrination through Greece and back
by way of Naples as an exponent of the art of singing to the harp.
While upon this tour, whenever he was performing in the theatre, the
doors were shut, and no one might leave the building for any reason
whatever. "Many," says the memoir-writer, "got so tired of listening
and praising that they jumped down from the wall, or pretended to be
dead, so as to get carried out." Naturally he always won the prize,
and, on his side, it should be remarked that he honestly believed he
had earned it. He practised assiduously, took hard physical training,
regulated his diet for the cultivation of his voice, which was not
naturally of the best, and probably became not at all a bad amateur.
His monstrous self-conceit did the rest. Besides singing to the harp,
he was prepared to perform upon the flute and the bagpipes, and to
give a dance afterwards. All this, of course, was undignified and
ridiculous, but it was scarcely tyranny. Doubtless there was
sufficient suffering among the audience, but that cruelty was hardly
deliberate. In the Roman noble, whose ideal of behaviour included
dignity and gravity, these public appearances perhaps often aroused
more indignation and scorn than did his sensual vices. The same
contempt was often evoked by other proceedings of a similar nature.
His insatiable fondness for horse-racing, or rather chariot-racing,
induced him to appear also as a charioteer. First he practised in his
extensive private park or gardens, which were situated across the
Tiber on the ground now approximately occupied by St. Peter's and the
Vatican. When he appeared at the Olympic games driving a team of ten
horses, he was thrown out of the car, and had to be lifted into it
again. Though he was eventually compelled to abandon the race, he was,
of course, crowned victor all the same. He dabbled also in painting
and modelling.
We must not dwell too long upon his eccentricities. One might describe
how in his earlier years he often put on mufti and roamed the streets
at night with a few choice Mohawks, broke into shops, and insulted
respectable citizens, throwing them into the drains if they resisted;
how, being unrecognized, he once received a sound thrashing from a
person of the senatorial order, and was thereafter attended on such
occasions by police following at a distance. One might describe his
dicing at £3 or £4 a pip, or his banquets, at one of which he paid as
much as £30,000 for roses from Alexandria. After the great
conflagration which swept over a large part of Rome in this very year
64 he began to build his enormous Golden House, in which stood a
colossal effigy of himself 120 feet high, and in which the circuit of
the colonnade made three Roman miles. Whether he deliberately set fire
to the city in order to make room for this stupendous palace is open
to doubt. It was naturally believed at the time, and, in order to
divert suspicion from himself, he turned it upon those persons for
whom the Roman populace had at that moment the greatest contempt,
because, as the historian puts it, of their pestilent superstition and
of a profound suspicion that they harboured a "hatred of the human
race." These were the new sect of the Christians, and with burning
Christians did Nero proceed to light up his gardens on one famous
night, as a means of placating the populace whom he had offended, but
who for the most part loved him for his misplaced generosity in the
matter of "bread and sports." The tolerant attitude of the Romans
towards foreign religions will be discussed in its own place; but the
cruelty of a Nero in the year 64 can hardly be put down as properly a
religious persecution in any way typical of the Roman government.
The sensual vices of Nero are indescribable, and that word must
suffice. His extravagances, whether in lavish presents or in personal
expenditure, soon rendered him bankrupt. He had no means of paying the
soldiers or meeting his own appetites. Then began, or increased, his
attacks on wealthy persons, his executions and banishments of senators
and other wealthy men, and his flimsy pretexts for all manner of
confiscation. The Senate he hated and the Senate hated him.
Nevertheless, so far as the empire itself was concerned, no systematic
or widespread oppression can have been perceptible. His officers and
the officers of the Senate were apparently all the time governing and
administering the law and the taxation throughout the empire in as
sound and steady a way as if an Augustus sat upon the throne.
If we wish to picture Nero to ourselves, here is his description: "He
was of a fairly good height; his skin was blotched, and his odour
unpleasant; his hair was inclined to be yellow; his face was more
handsome than attractive; his eyes were grayish-blue and
short-sighted; his neck was fat; he was protuberant below the waist;
his legs were very slender; his health was good."
Such was the man to whom St. Paul elected to have his case referred,
when at Caesarea he exercised his privilege as a Roman citizen and
appealed to the titular protector of the commons. "Thou hast appealed
unto Caesar, and unto Caesar shalt thou go." There is indeed no great
probability that the apostle was ever brought directly before this
precious emperor. We may perhaps draw from bur inner consciousness
elaborate and interesting pictures of the two men confronting each
other, but we must not forget that they will be pure imagination. The
appeal of a citizen did not imply such right to an interview, for the
Caesar in such minor cases commonly delegated his powers to other
judicial authorities at Rome. Paul's object was gained if his case was
safely removed from the local influences of Judaea and the weaker
policy of its governor, the "agent of Caesar," to the capital with its
broader-minded men and its superiority to small bribes and local
interference.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--BUST OF NERO.]