Let’s start with the gates.
They locked them. When Nero sang in Greece, the theater
gates were barred and chained for as long as the Emperor of Rome had breath in
his lungs, and he had a lot of breath. Suetonius, who wrote the lives of the
Caesars about fifty years after the fact, tells us so. If you were in that
theater when the singing started, you stayed until it stopped, and it stopped
when Nero decided it would.
You can guess what happened next. Suetonius says people did
the only things left to them. Some, bored past the point of reason, scrambled
over the walls. Others dropped to the stone floor and played dead, or played
faint, and got carried out like sacks of flour. Imagine it: a few thousand
people in their best clothes, trapped in the heat with an imperial voice going
on and on, and every one of them quietly working out the odds on a swan dive.
Because they were being watched. That is the part I want you
to hold on to.
Cassius Dio, writing in the early third century, says Nero
paid attention to everything. How you came in. How you went out. How you
nodded. How hard you cheered, and whether the cheering sounded like the real
thing. If you clapped with proper joy, you were praised. If you looked like a
man with somewhere else to be, you were shamed in public, and sometimes it got
worse than shame.
The scholar Shadi Bartsch noticed something about the way
Dio tells it. In Actors in the Audience (1994: 5), she points out that
Dio describes the crowd in the language of the stage. People enter.
People exit. People respond to the performance. All of it under
duress, all of it with a smile painted on. The audience had been turned inside
out. The ones who came to watch the show were the show, and the man on
stage was watching them.
Think about that for a minute. It is the kind of thing that
stays with you when the lights go out.
---
But it didn’t start that way. Nobody gets to the locked
gates in a single step.
Nero took the throne in 54 CE, after the death of Claudius,
who had adopted him. He was seventeen years old. Christoph Kugelmeier makes the
point in his 2019 essay on Nero’s historical image (p. 256), and it is worth
repeating, because we forget it. Seventeen. A kid. A kid with the whole world
handed to him on a cushion.
And what did the kid say, in that first speech?
Good things. Reasonable things. He promised to hand a
great many matters over to the Senate. He would not, he declared, sit as judge
in every case himself, deciding it all with his own mouth. He promised to avoid
verdicts that were unjust, or secret, or open to manipulation. And then came
the line that C.E. Manning paraphrases in his 1975 article on Nero and acting
(pp. 168–169): From my house, bribery and favoritism will be banished. I
will keep private affairs and state affairs separate.
Fine words. Clean words. You can almost hear the senators
exhaling.
They had earned the relief. Claudius had loved to hear cases
himself, and when a senator offended him, that senator sometimes ended up dead.
Under Claudius, the Emperor’s power had been something like Big Brother: in
every room, behind every door, a presence you could feel on the back of your
neck. Under Nero it went almost invisible.
And here’s the odd thing. Nero kept his promise. The Senate
decided many cases. But that wasn’t virtue. The boy simply couldn’t be bothered
with the daily grind of governing. He had other interests.
He wanted to be looked at.
---
In 59 CE, five years after that speech, Nero killed his
mother.
Agrippina. The woman who had maneuvered him onto the throne
in the first place. He had her murdered, and Rome knew it, and Rome did what
people do when they can’t say a thing out loud. It wrote it on the walls.
Graffiti spread across the city, cursing the deed. One scrawl set Nero beside
the great mother-killers of myth: Nero, Orestes, Alcmeon: the matricides.
(Bartsch, 1994: 38.)
Now, a man with a working conscience might have stopped
there. Might have looked at the wall, and then at his hands.
Nero wrote a poem.
Or somebody did. A verse began to circulate not long after
the murder, and it cast the Emperor as the morning sun, his face softly
glowing, his neck framed by streaming hair. Beautiful stuff, if you didn’t
know what it was covering. Sigrid Mratschek, in her 2013 essay on Nero as
imperial misfit (p. 50), suspects that Nero himself slipped the lines into
circulation. Think of it: the graffiti said murderer, so he answered
with sunrise.
That same year, he founded the Juvenalia, an arts festival
to celebrate the first shaving of his beard. And there, for the first time, he
sang in public, accompanying himself on the lyre. The sources say the earth
shook while he sang. And he kept right on singing. (Bartsch, 1994: 8–27.)
Hold the image of that a moment. A tremor under the floor,
the crowd gone pale, and the Emperor of Rome with his eyes half closed,
strumming.
The Juvenalia gave Rome something else, too: the Augustiani.
A professional claque, trained cheerers, planted in the seats to lead the
noise. Dio says the rest of the audience was forced to join in. Officials
especially. They had to shout whatever the claque shouted, however heavy their
hearts, and look delighted doing it. The words were something like this: Glorious
Caesar, Apollo, Augustus, the only one equal to the Pythian!
Say it in your head. Now imagine saying it with your voice,
in front of a thousand people, while grief or fear sat in your belly like a
stone. Imagine meaning it with your face.
---
In 65 CE, about a year after the great fire had gutted Rome,
Nero appeared at an arts festival. He walked down into the orchestra, the
half-circle of floor in front of the stage. His favorite roles were Orestes the
matricide and Hercules the madman, and he played both in masks modeled on his
own face. Read that again if you need to. Masks modeled on his own face.
When he finished, he kneeled to await the judges’ verdict.
He had a look of anxiety all arranged for the occasion. Manning notes it (1975:
164–165). Anxiety. In a man who had never lost a contest in his life, because
no one would have dared.
The audience applauded, of course. Tacitus describes the
sound, and I’ll give it to you as Manning quotes it: The people, long
accustomed to applauding even the mannerisms of professional actors, cheered in
measured rhythm. They sounded pleased. Indeed, since the disgrace of the nation
meant nothing to them, they may actually have been pleased.
Measured rhythm. That’s the chilling part. Not the
roar of a crowd. The beat of a machine.
And behind that rhythm, Tacitus reports, were the watchers.
Men stationed in every section of the stands, taking note. Who was here. What
did their faces look like. Were they glad, or were they sickened?
The audience sat rigid from midday into the night. Some fell
ill. They didn’t dare leave, because leaving was worse than boredom, and a few
of them probably understood exactly how much worse.
Take Vespasian. A senator then, though he would one day wear
the purple himself. He nodded off while Nero sang. One little slip of sleep,
one slackening of the face. For that, he was barred from the palace and packed
off to a remote little town, out of sight.
---
Now, I’d be cheating you if I told only the dark half of it.
Some accounts say the crowds were not always unwilling. In
59 CE, when Nero drove in a chariot race for the first time, Tacitus wrote: Such
is the crowd: they love spectacles and are delighted when the emperor shares
their tastes. (Manning, 1975: 169–171.) The people of Rome didn’t want him
to go.
That is an uncomfortable thing to sit with. It means the
show worked on some of them. Some genuinely loved it, and loved him.
On another occasion, before the fire, Nero announced he was
postponing his trip to Greece and Egypt, because some of his subjects couldn’t
bear to be without him. His supporters greeted this news with joy. Whether the
joy was real or the other kind, the kind you wear like a mask, is a question I’ll
leave with you.
The orator Fronto thought the whole performance a triumph.
He wrote that the loyalty of Rome’s citizens was held by two things: the
grain dole and the games.
Bread and circuses. The oldest trick there is, and you can
see why it keeps working.
---
In 66 CE, Nero finally went to Greece. It was the center of
music, drama, and the horse races, and he went to sing, to recite poetry, to
drive his chariot. Legend says he carried home 1,808 victory prizes.
(Mratschek, 2013: 54–58.)
Eighteen hundred and eight. Count them and think about who
would dare to beat him.
It changed nothing. Suetonius says the price of grain soared
in those years, and a full belly is the one thing applause can’t buy. Nero’s
popularity, which had been sliding, began to fall like a stone down a well.
The revolt started with the provincial commanders. The
Senate declared Nero hostis publicus, a public enemy, and began planning
his overthrow. Suetonius adds a small, telling detail: the plot was fairly well
organized, but there is no solid evidence that the common people took part. The
crowd that had cheered in measured rhythm did not rise to save him, nor, so far
as we can tell, to bury him.
When Nero finally understood how bad things were, that he’d
been deposed, that the whole beautiful machine had stopped, he ran. He left the
palace deliberately and went to a villa outside Rome. And there, with the help
of his secretary, he took his own life rather than wait for the Senate to
execute him.
That’s the way it ended. Not with the earth shaking, not
with a song. In a borrowed room, with a servant’s hand on the blade.
---
And the aftermath was worse. Rome did not exhale. In a
single year, 68 to 69 CE, the throne changed hands four times, and each
change was written in blood. The man who sang so badly, and was so dangerous,
was gone. What replaced him was chaos.
---
One last thing, and it’s a thing that ought to make you a
little uneasy.
Everything I’ve told you, we know from other people.
Suetonius. Tacitus. Dio. They wrote after Nero was dead, and they were not his
friends. The story of his end, down to the last breath, was handed to us by men
who had every reason to make it ugly, and Manning warns that any picture of
Nero, even the final moments, must be read with those biases in mind (1975:
165).
Katharine Eileen Piller goes further. In her 2016 essay on
the Neronian narrative (p. 188), she suggests that if you strip away the
portrait painted by later writers, you might find an ordinary emperor. A ruler
who loved the arts, who tried a few new ways of showing himself to the people,
and who was simply not ready for the tangled politics he had inherited at
seventeen.
Maybe. It’s possible.
Even his famous last words, Qualis artifex pereo, the
line usually rendered as What an artist dies in me, come to us only
through Suetonius. Whether Nero said them is doubtful.
Manning suspects it may be a legend that grew up around the
story of his death (1975: 164).
So here is the question the locked gates leave behind. Was
he a monster who made a nation applaud at knifepoint? Or a frightened boy in a
mask, whom history needed to be a monster?
The gates are open now. Nobody is stopping you from leaving.
But you’ll notice you’re still sitting there.
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