The World

The next year, while Nero was at his villa at Antium (Anzio), fire broke out in Rome, spreading fast among the closely packed multi-storey wooden buildings. The inferno was one of history’s super-propellants – pandemics and disasters – that implacably test leaders and systems in what we might call the Nero Test. He did all the right things, offering his private gardens as refuge, reducing the grain price, erecting shelters, inviting refugees to live in his palaces, but in his self-absorbed need to dramatize his own importance at all times he put on a show about the fire in which he sang with his lyre. Its charm deteriorated even more as the Roman fire flared up again. Nero’s oblivious decision to take advantage of the space cleared by the fire to build a new palace, the Golden House, added to the impression that he had ignited it. In its vestibule, he erected a colossus of himself as a ninety-nine-foot naked god holding a rudder on a globe to express his world power.^* The truth matters less than the impression: Nero had failed the Nero Test.

Poppaea was raised to Augusta after the birth of their short-lived daughter and, chatelaine of the hundred-acre palace, was powerful enough to appoint her own inept protégé to govern Judaea.

Untrammelled by any sensible advisers, Nero sought scapegoats for the fire and other inauspicious events, focusing on a newly popular Jewish sect named Christians who followed Jesus, the prophet executed by the Romans during Tiberius’ reign. They were an object of special suspicion because they rejected the essential Roman rite of sacrificing to the gods – and the princeps. This behaviour was just acceptable among Jews, whose beliefs were ancient, but not among the new-fangled Christians, whose egalitarian beliefs seemed to challenge the entire order of society – a superstitio that championed the slaves, always a very touchy subject. Nero had Christians slaughtered in the arena, and one of Jesus’ surviving apostles, Peter, crucified upside down.^*

In the Golden House, Nero’s relationship with the pregnant Poppaea was deteriorating: during a row, Nero supposedly kicked her in the belly, killing her. Single again, he tried to marry Claudius’ last daughter by an earlier marriage, but when she refused she too was murdered. He set off for Greece to race chariots and perform as an actor, and there fell in love with a young eunuch and freed slave saucily named Sporus (Seed), who looked strangely like Poppaea. Nero encouraged him to transition into Poppaea – and married him.

Conspiracies intensified; rebellions multiplied. Seneca liked to say, ‘Poison is drunk from gold,’ but even the philosopher had amassed such riches that he started lending money at high interest rates – to the British chieftains among others. It may have been his aggressive debt collecting that accelerated a rebellion in Britannia, led by Queen Boadicea. A legion was destroyed before the rebels were crushed. Seneca, by now sixty, had already retired to his villa to write outrageous satires on emperors he had known when he was tenuously linked to a conspiracy. Nero ordered him to kill himself. ‘We’re always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them,’ Seneca reflected. Now there was an end: Seneca, taking poison and cutting his wrists, died in his bath, surrounded by friends.

In 66, Judaea exploded. The rebels, provoked by egregious Roman venality, eliminated a legion and founded a Jewish state based in the magnificent near-impregnable Temple city of Jerusalem, a development that threatened the eastern empire and sparked a rash of revolts. The Gallic and Hispanic legions rebelled; as they marched on Rome, senators and praetorians at last turned against Nero, who tried to flee to Ostia and then to Parthia – a hare-brained scheme. Returning to the palace in Rome he awoke the next morning to find himself abandoned and exclaimed, ‘Have I neither friend nor foe!’ On the run with a tiny retinue, including his beautiful Poppaean eunuch Sporus dressed as a girl, he tried and failed to kill himself, by drowning in the Tiber and by the sword, all the time declaiming theatrical lines loudly: ‘Is it so terrible a thing to die?’ Finally cornered, the arch-exhibitionist paced up and down crying, ‘What an artist the world is losing in me,’ before persuading his secretary to cut his throat. Just then an emissary of the Senate rushed in, but Nero, bleeding out, murmured, ‘Too late! That’s loyalty!’