Nero would not take no for an answer and again demanded Seneca’s presence. This time, Seneca claimed ill health, saying that he was suffering from a nervous disposition and was totally incapable of traveling, or of even leaving his bedchamber. After this second request, Nero left Seneca alone. In his quest for more funds, the emperor soon dispatched a commission composed of two men, one of them a freedman, to rove through the provinces of Achaia and Asia collecting votive gold from temples there and seizing gold and silver statues of gods for melting down to coin. In at least one town in Asia, locals attempted to resist the commissioners when the region’s senior-most Roman official failed to support the imperial duo’s mission.
Even as the new year began and Nero was poring over the plans for his growing new Golden House with designers Severus and Celer, several of the emperor’s subjects became embroiled in a secret plot, which, if successful, would ensure that Nero did not long enjoy his extravagant new residence. In fact, it would emerge that more than one conspiracy was in the making and that before long, these various designs for Nero’s demise would meld into a single plot to kill him.
“I could not easily narrate who first planned it,” Tacitus wrote several decades later, “or whose prompting inspired a scheme into which so many entered.”
6
But among the first to convert disquiet into a conspiracy to do away with the emperor were two officers of the Praetorian Guard, Subrius Flavus, a tribune commanding a Praetorian Cohort, and Sulpicius Asper, one of Flavus’ centurions. At the same time, and quite separately, Lucan the poet, nephew of Seneca and close friend of his father’s client Martial, began to conspire with Plautius Lateranus, whom Nero had selected to become a suffect consul from the beginning of July.
Lucan brought “an intensely keen resentment” to the plot, said Tacitus, because “Nero tried to disparage the fame of his poems.”
7
As for Lateranus, the emperor had restored him to his senatorial rank, early in Nero’s reign, after Claudius’ Senate had condemned Lateranus for adultery with Claudius’ infamous wife Messalina. Lateranus had originally been sentenced to death and only escaped with a loss of rank on the intercession of his uncle. Clearly, by approving his upcoming consular appointment, Nero considered Lateranus a man worthy of the highest honors. Tacitus admitted that Nero had done Lateranus no personal wrong, and the only motive that he could ascribe to Lateranus’ desire to be rid of this emperor who favored him was “love of the State.”
Two senators soon joined Lucan and Lateranus in the plot. Neither had previously showed any great interest in politics, and according to Tacitus, they were the last men that anyone would have given the credit of plotting a revolution. Both had personal reasons for wanting Nero dead. The “effeminate” Afranius Quintianus was well known and popularly disliked for his homosexuality; Nero had lampooned him for it in one of his published poems, and, said Tacitus, Quintianus was determined to have his revenge.
Quintianus’ colleague in crime, Flavius Scaevinus, was best known as a spendthrift and heavy drinker whose life was widely viewed as one of “sleepy languor.”
8
Scaevinus was, in fact, deeply in debt. It seems that his income had been heavily reliant on rents from city apartment blocks that had been destroyed in the Great Fire. With his income stream drastically reduced, yet with a continued dedication to his usual hedonistic lifestyle, Scaevinus, said Tacitus, was being pressed for payment by his creditors, and he did not have the funds to satisfy their demands.
Six months had passed since the fire. Despite the rumors and the gossip impugning Nero, just as no one had been identified as the source of the rumors, not a single soul had been indicted for conspiring against Nero since the death of Torquatus Silanus the previous spring. In these early days of AD 65, the four civilian conspirators, unaware that two Praetorian officers were having similar thoughts, carefully sounded out their friends and acquaintances, reviling “the emperor’s crimes” and reminding their listeners of the portents the previous December of “the approaching end of empire.” These conspirators agreed that more than just assassinate Nero, they must also select “someone to rescue the State in its distress.”
9
A replacement emperor was needed. But who?
Decades of murders and executions going back to the poisoning of Nero’s grandfather Germanicus in AD 19 had meant that there was no male member of the Caesar family’s Julian line now living, apart from Nero. So, Nero’s replacement, this “someone” who would save Rome, would have to be the first man to rule the Romans since Julius Caesar a hundred years earlier not to have the blood of the Caesars running through his veins. This thought was sufficiently daunting for the plotters to decide that it would be necessary to give Nero’s successor legitimacy in the eyes of the Roman people.
To do this, they decided, they would marry their chosen candidate for the throne to the only other surviving member of the Julian family, the emperor Claudius’ daughter Antonia. Through thirty-eight-year-old Antonia, widow of Sulla—the same Sulla executed in AD 62—a male heir with the blood of the Caesars would arise. It is conceivable that were Antonia not alive, this plot would never have been born. As for Antonia herself, she knew nothing of what was being plotted in her name.
The man on whom the mantle of potential emperor discreetly settled was Gaius Piso. This friend of Seneca, who, like Seneca, had escaped the accusations of an agent of Tigellinus in the Senate two years before, was a descendant of the eminent Calpurnian family, with a family tree dotted with consuls, generals, and governors. The only blot on the family record had been the AD 20 conviction of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso for the murder of Germanicus Caesar. Gaius, the Piso chosen for Nero’s throne, was tall, handsome, and an eloquent speaker and had earned “a splendid reputation with the people from his virtue.” Or, his “semblance of virtue,” Tacitus was quick to add.
10
Piso, an accomplished legal advocate, had frequently employed his eloquence in the courts defending fellow Roman citizens. He was generous to his friends and showed courtesy and goodwill even to total strangers. On the other hand, in the opinion of Tacitus, Piso was not of solid character; “moderation in pleasure” was unknown to him.
11
Among those who were attracted to vice, Piso had a reputation of being of like mind, lowering his morals whenever it suited him, most conspicuously by stealing the beautiful wife of a fellow senator and by occasionally appearing on stage as an actor in Greek tragedies. He was also accused of showing off his wealth and sometimes eating and drinking to excess. In short, a Nero. But a Nero who did not lower himself to sing in public contests, or to race a chariot, or to “marry” a freedman. Above all, a Nero the conspirators could control.
Piso was actually on good terms with the emperor and had been for some years. So much so that when Nero’s mother had taken up residence at the imperial seaside villa at Antium, Piso had offered the emperor the use of his own sumptuous villa at Baiae, on the Bay of Naples, as his coastal resort. Nero had not only taken up Piso’s offer and used the Baiae villa for escapes from the city, but had made it his base for his second venture into murder, that of his mother.
Nero had an apprenticeship in murder in December AD 55, with the killing of his cousin and adoptive brother Britannicus, son of Claudius. Blame for that murder could be partly laid at his mother’s feet. Agrippina had reacted spitefully after Nero had dismissed her favorite, Pallas, the Palatium secretary for finance under Claudius and initially also under Nero. Agrippina had threatened to take Britannicus to the Praetorians and declare him emperor in Nero’s stead. That outburst had sealed young Britannicus’ fate. Nero had procured poison from Locusta, a convicted “sorceress” then languishing in prison. Nero made Locusta the promise that she would receive her freedom if the poison worked.
Because slaves were employed as food tasters for the members of the imperial family to detect poison, Nero had conceived a novel way to rid himself of his cousin. In winter, Romans drank hot wine. At dinner one night, Nero had made sure that the wine served to Britannicus was much too hot, necessitating the addition of cold water to cool it. The wine was tested by Britannicus’ food taster, but the cold water added to the wine was not. Shortly after drinking the now poison-laced wine, Britannicus was paralyzed and gasping for breath. As Britannicus was carried from the dining room by attendants, Nero had assured the other members of the family at the dinner that the epilepsy from which Britannicus had suffered as a child—a complaint he shared with another member of the Julian line, Julius Caesar—had no doubt returned. Britannicus, Nero’s rival for the throne, had been dead before daylight. And the murderer had kept his word to Locusta the poison maker: “Nero rewarded Locusta for her services with a free pardon and extensive country estates,” said Suetonius.
12
Little more than three years later, Nero’s mother was driving him to distraction, even attempting to draw him into her own bed to regain the control that she had exercised over him prior to his ascending the throne. Having succeeded in camouflaging one murder, Nero found the courage to plan another. Agrippina’s servants were much too loyal to her, so that had ruled out employing one of them to administer poison to their mistress. Nero had been forced to be more creative than that. At the games in the circus one day, he had an inspiration. In front of him, a ship that formed part of a spectacle literally fell apart, on cue. On asking how this was done, the emperor was told that the ship had been constructed in such a way that it came apart when a single pin was pulled. This had set the boy emperor’s mind to work.
From the naval city of Misenum on the Bay of Naples, Nero had summoned Anicetus, admiral of Rome’s largest battle fleet, the Tyrrhenian Fleet. Anicetus, a freedman and a native of Pontus, had been Nero’s tutor immediately prior to Seneca’s taking on that role, so the pair knew each other well. After the emperor and the admiral had discussed the practicalities of building a ship that would float but which would fall apart on the pulling of a pin, Anicetus, aware of Nero’s plan to murder his mother, undertook to have such a ship built by the following March and to provide a captain and a crew from his fleet who would perform the murderous deed with Agrippina aboard.
Relations between Nero and his mother had become so strained that the emperor had even withdrawn Agrippina’s Praetorian and German Cohorts bodyguard. As March AD 59 approached, Nero had written a conciliatory letter to his mother, inviting her to join him on the Bay of Naples for the forthcoming Festival of Minerva. Agrippina owned an estate at Bauli on the Bay of Naples, where she could stay; Nero, meanwhile, would stay at the villa of his friend Gaius Piso. Agrippina, while wary, had accepted the invitation. A trireme from the Tyrrhenian Fleet had collected her from the imperial villa at Antium and brought her along the coast, landing her at the door to the Piso villa on March 19.
Nero had greeted his mother with kisses and embraces, then escorted her around the bay to her estate. There, drawn up on the sand, was a brand new little ship; it glittered with gold and jewels, and the single cabin in the stern was draped with silk. This, said Nero to his mother, was his special gift to her, to mark a renewal of their warm relations. Nero then invited her to join him for dinner at Piso’s villa that night and departed. During the afternoon, Agrippina received a tip-off that there was a plot to kill her, a plot involving a ship. At that moment, the little ship gifted to her by her son was being prepared to convey her around the bay to Piso’s villa. As a precaution, Agrippina traveled to dinner overland, carried in a litter.
The grand dinner at Piso’s villa had been enjoyed by all present, who had included Seneca and then Praetorian commander Burrus. Agrippina, plied with much wine by her son, began to believe that Nero was genuine in his desire to reconcile with her. Around midnight, following the dinner, Nero had conducted his mother down to the jetty, where the brand new little ship, commanded by an officer from the Tyrrhenian Fleet, Volusius Proculus, sat waiting. Her fears allayed by wine and feigned affection, Agrippina had kissed Nero goodnight and boarded the vessel, accompanied by several retainers. Under a starry sky, with its oars rising and falling, the ship slid away across the flat waters of the bay.
When the ship was halfway to the Bauli villa, Proculus the captain had given a hushed order. A pin was pulled, and the stern of the ship, where Agrippina was reclining on a couch, had collapsed. But the ship failed to sink. When several crew members complicit in the plot with Proculus attempted to capsize the vessel, nonswimming crewmen had resisted them. The craft had eventually gone down, but Agrippina had swum toward the shore and been plucked from the water by fishermen. Once back at her Bauli estate, Agrippina had sent one of her freedmen to the Piso villa to inform the emperor that her ship had sunk, but that she was safe and well.
This news had sent Nero into a panic, and he had turned to Seneca and Burrus for help. Burrus had said that the admiral of the fleet, Anicetus, had promised to end Agrippina’s life, so it was up to him to complete the deed. Anicetus was called in, and he agreed to do what had to be done. Leading a detachment of marines from the trireme that had brought Agrippina from Antium, Anicetus had marched around the bay to the Bauli villa. After the troops forced their way into the house, Anicetus and his officers had drawn their swords and bloodily ended the life of the emperor’s mother as she lay on a couch. At Piso’s villa, Nero had, with Seneca’s aid, subsequently composed a letter to the Senate, claiming that Agrippina had been executed for plotting against him. Gaius Piso had been one of the many senators who had subsequently congratulated Nero in the House for terminating this maternal “threat” to his rule.