‘My wife is reading Seneca with Seneca. I don’t know who it is. Yes, I do. Get dressed. Go out that way.’ He pointed to the new egress he had had knocked out of the wall, a plain doorway covered with a tapestry of Odysseus multiply assaulting the screaming Sirens.
‘The other Empress, is it? Your mother?’ She dressed far more quickly than she had undressed.
‘Go on – come tomorrow. The same time. You have the ring to show the guard at the gate?’
She thrust out a winking finger and thrust and thrust, blew a kiss and left. Nero put on a fringed gown, went to the double door and unbarred it. Agrippina came, neck stretched forward like a hen, into the bedroom, sniffing. ‘Has that slave been here?’
‘She’s not a slave. Not now. What if she has?’
‘You’re slow to learn. The whole household knows. If you must conduct these unsavoury affairs, get out of the city.’
‘Like you and Pallas, you mean? You have to go very far out of the city to conduct that unsavoury affair.’
‘You will not,’ Agrippina said, ‘speak to your mother in that way.’
He picked up a flute and blew three derisive notes on it. ‘The Emperor will speak to anyone in any way he wishes. The Emperor will do what he wishes – within reason, and subject to the gloomy advice of Sextus Afranius Burrus and Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The sending away of Pallas was not such gloomy advice. The Emperor’s mother should conduct herself like a respectable matron.’ He blew three more notes, lower but still derisive. She said:
‘Put that thing down. Listen to me.’ He sat petulantly on the bed. She sat beside him. ‘This woman Acte is not so stupid as she looks. Nor is she as enamoured of you as you seem to think. She plays a slow game. She’ll drag you into situations and places where your title and status won’t help you. She’s in the pay,’ she suddenly decided to invent, ‘of Britannicus.’
‘I don’t believe that. I don’t. Oh, no. You’re making that up. Britannicus is not that kind of stepbrother. Britannicus accepts the situation.’
‘Britannicus has friends who don’t accept the situation. Britannicus was publicly named as his father’s successor. Rome has only the word of Pallas and myself that Claudius nominated you. I see something in your eye that bodes no good to Pallas, but be careful. I’m not above speaking out whenever the time comes. If you don’t ride the imperial horse like a real horseman you’ll be thrown.’
‘That sounds like something from one of Seneca’s plays,’ he said, examining the nails of his right hand and pushing cuticles back with the thumb of his left. ‘By the way, you know that place on the Rhine that the divine Claudius named for you? Well, I’ve decided to rename it. Not Colonia Agrippinensis but Colonia Actensis. Less of a mouthful, don’t you agree?’
He was biting a bit of scarfskin off his right little finger. She struck him on the face. He was surprised. He said: ‘You’d better not do that again, oh no.’ She struck him again. He struck back, though with an instinctive filial diffidence. ‘No boy,’ he said, ‘likes hitting his mother. Except, that is, in those bouts of loveplay one particular mother taught her son. I think you’re jealous of Acte. A younger body and she knows more. But you may be right about her being dangerous. I sometimes trust your judgement, the judgement of an older woman. You’re not jealous, I notice, of dear Octavia.’
‘I’m jealous of no one. I’m jealous only for your reputation. Get rid of that slave.’
‘I’m young,’ he pouted. ‘I’m entitled to live my life.’
‘Meaning, to use Seneca’s words, to indulge in flagrant promiscuity.’
‘Did he say that? About me?’ The pout grew ugly.
‘I don’t doubt he says it. Though not to me. Part of your claim to the purple, remember, rests on your marriage. Humiliate Octavia with this slave of yours and her brother will take action. Britannicus adores his sister.’
‘You mean,’ he said with wide eyes of innocence, ‘that they go to bed together? I don’t think I’d mind that really. It would show that there’s a bit of life in them. And it would be useful to have the charge of incest hanging over them. As, dear mother, it hangs over you.’
‘You can be a filthy little brat, can’t you?’ she said. ‘No capacity for love, for the natural expression of love. The extent of my love has been shown sufficiently by the danger I’ve put myself into to secure the title for you. And the thanks I get, the thanks?’
‘Yes,’ he said blandly, ‘you poisoned Claudius. You poisoned several people, good people. You made the faithful Narcissus commit suicide. With impunity, total impunity. Protected by the Emperor, dear mother. Still, it’s another thing you’ve taught me. The first and best imperial lesson. Get rid of those who flaw the artistic pattern of one’s life. Rub them out like bad drawings with breadcrumbs. Quickly. Thoroughly. I think I must get rid of Pallas. Exile isn’t enough. A son has a right to protect his mother’s reputation for virtue. Hasn’t he? Hasn’t he?’ And acting a panting beast in rut he thrust his left hand into his mother’s deepcut gown and fondled her right breast. ‘The greatest of all virtues, isn’t it? A boy’s love for his mother.’ She struck the hand away. She got up and looked down at him. She said:
‘I sometimes think I was wrong. I think that more and more.’
‘So stuttering limping old Claudius should have turned into a god at a ripe old age? And dear decent virtuous Britannicus should have put on the purple? Or have you some idea of his putting on the purple now? Poisoned mushrooms for your son. Get your stepson into bed and teach him all the lambent and ictal joys. You’d overwhelm him, mother. He’d be wax. I see I must go very very carefully.’
‘You’re a loathsome little boy, aren’t you?’ Agrippina said, gasping in her distaste.
‘You’re a beautiful woman, mother, though not quite so beautiful as my Acte. She has youth on her side. I plunge into honey with her, I writhe in a snow of petals.’
Her hand itched to strike him again, but she merely said: ‘The character of a slave and the manners of a snotnosed urchin. The Senate awaits you, Caesar. Try to behave like an emperor.’
‘Oh, I will, I can. I can act anything, dear mother. A considerable artist, you know. Leave me while I dress the part. I don’t think I want you to see me naked any more.’ But then, in a kind of unbidden poem, he saw himself lying naked before her, stabbed in his choicest parts, and the poem said something about if a mother could seduce her son she could kill him as well. Looking at him now, she seemed to disengage the seed of some fruit from her teeth and spit it in his direction. Then she left, and he performed a short savage dance in her dishonour.
A week or so later he saw her sitting with Britannicus in the audience ordered to attend his performance of the role of the soldier Pyrgopolnices in Plautus’s comedy Miles Gloriosus. The imperial dining room had been turned into a theatre for the occasion, with a platform of wooden slabs as a stage, and curtains swagging at the sides to cover entrances and exits. Gaius Petronius played the part of the parasite Artotrogus. He said, sycophantically:
‘Novisse mores me tuos meditate decet
Curamque adhibere, ut praeolat mihi quod tu velis.’
Nero-Pyrgopolnices asked: ‘Ecquid meministi?’ He was got up in armour of pulped papyrus and a little helmet. He was trying to make his voice fruitily pompous like that of Britannicus, a miles, yes, but not at all gloriosus. He saw Burrus and Seneca sitting at the back, looking and listening with little show of pleasure. Gaius Petronius-Artotrogus listed the killings of Pyrgopolnices:
‘Memini: centum in Cilicia
Et quinquaginta, centum in Scytholatronia,
Triginta Sardis, sexaginta Macedones
Sunt homines quos tu occidisti uno die.’
But how many altogether? ‘Quanta istaec hominum summast?’ And Artotrogus gave the total: ‘Septem milia.’ Some of the audience loyally laughed; Agrippina, Britannicus, Seneca and Burrus were stonyfaced. A very old man whispered to another:
‘If I pretend to die will you carry me out?
’
At the end of the play Nero said to Petronius: ‘I forgot some lines. Did you notice? I had to improvise.’
‘So that’s what it was. I thought old Plautus had inadvertently let the spirit of poetry in. You must forget more lines, Caesar.’
‘You’re too good, my dear. It’s not terribly good comedy, is it? Some of the laughs sounded a little, well, dutiful. I have a fancy for doing something tragic. A real Oedipus, with nothing hidden. Incest on stage, and real suicide and self-blinding. Britannicus in the lead and the Dowager Empress as Jocasta. I could be Creon.’
‘I appreciate your joke,’ Petronius said doubtfully, seeing little spirit of fun in Nero’s spotty pretty face. ‘As for the kind of realistic approach you suggest, you or I will have to write something with real deaths in it, so you could bring on condemned criminals and have them beheaded as part of the action. You have unlimited artistic scope, dearest Caesar.’
‘They wouldn’t have to be speaking parts. I mean, you can’t tell a man to learn lines to speak before he’s chopped.’
‘Oh, you underestimate your own ingenuity. Give him a free pardon and exalt him by letting him perform in one of Caesar’s own tragedies, and then the chop, as you so exquisitely term it, could come as a complete surprise.’
‘I must think about it, dear Gaius.’
When Nero, demilitarised and dressed in a green robe with artificial gladioli sewn on it, sat later chewing sweetmeats and wiping his sticky hands on the plentiful hair of a Greek slave, his praetorian prefect and his former tutor spoke serious words at him. Burrus said:
‘I must, forgive me, employ what authority I possess to beg you not to make such an exhibition of yourself in public.’
‘You think I act badly? Sing badly? Dance badly?’
‘Aesthetic judgements hardly apply, my boy,’ Seneca said. ‘It’s a matter of the dignity of your office—’
Nero said, acting the part of a dangerous tyrant: ‘My boy? You call me your boy?’
‘I beg Caesar’s pardon,’ Seneca said. ‘Force of habit. You’re not long out of the schoolroom. Forgive me. And forgive me for pointing out that actors, singers and dancers are a low breed, and Caesar should not associate with them, let alone practise their craft.’
‘You know nothing, you old fool,’ chewing Caesar said. ‘You’ve seen nothing of the real world.’
‘With respect, Caesar, I’ve seen a little too much of it. That’s what has turned me into a Stoic. With respect again, do I have to remind you that I’m considered a competent playwright myself and that I can have nothing against a private reading of one of my tragedies, say, to a limited audience? It’s these public performances that worry myself and your praetorian prefect. And your proposal to ride in chariot races – that, surely – well, apart from putting your inestimable life in danger—’
‘Caesar,’ Caesar said with well-enacted weight, ‘will think about depriving his people of wholesome and uplifting entertainment when he is ready to do so. At the moment, I merely require your advice on a matter of state.’
‘Caesar,’ Burrus said cautiously, ‘sincerely seeks our advice?’
‘Yes. But two questions first. First, did this reign begin in murder and terror and a return to the horrors of the imperiate of the undeified Caligula?’
Seneca said carefully: ‘There were too many people summarily removed, if I may say so, Caesar.’
‘You may say so,’ with right condescension. ‘I like your euphemism. You mean murdered. Second question. Who was responsible? Come on, don’t be afraid to answer. You know well enough. Very well, I’ll answer for you. My mother. The Dowager Empress Agrippina. Come on, what do you say, Burrus?’
‘You expect some advice from me, Caesar?’
‘Not exactly. I merely seek your approval, as the mentors of a boy who has just begun to shave, approval of a course of action. My revered mother must go into exile – Tusculum or Antium, she has estates in both places. Do you endorse my decision?’
‘The decision,’ Seneca said, ‘must be delicately worded. Retirement from Rome on grounds of ill health – something of the sort.’
‘Ill health, I like that,’ unfilial Caesar said. ‘She was healthy as a sow. But her ill health could, of course, be arranged. She knows that. She knows my feelings. Yesterday I took her guard of honour away.’
‘Something of an insult, if I may say so, Caesar.’
‘You may say so, Burrus. She knows the situation. There’s not one sword that can be drawn in her defence. Seneca, I remember something you made me read once. Let me see. Yes. “Nothing in human affairs is so—”’
‘“Transitory and precarious—”’
‘My pause was not a signal of bad memory, you old idiot. It was for dramatic effect. Let me conclude. “—as the reputation for power without the ability to support it.” There, am I not a good pupil? So, a fond farewell to the Dowager Empress Agrippina, the bloodthirsty old bitch—’
‘Your mother, Caesar,’ Seneca reproved.
‘I don’t have to be reminded she’s my mother. The former suckling is now weaned. That reverend womb has served its purpose. Out of the way with her, cross her lines out of the comedy, let her rot alone in Antium or Tusculum. I say, that’s not bad, that has a reasonable dramaturgical rhythm. All right, you’re dismissed.’
Few of the chroniclers of Nero’s reign have been accurate when relating the situation that obtained between the Emperor and his mother from the time when, reft of her German and Pannonian guards, she lived in a more or less solitary rage on one estate or another. Nobody knew what had happened to her lover Pallas, but she feared the worst. She was no nymphomaniac and summoned no slave or bought incubus or succubus to her bed. She merely brooded on her son’s infamy and sent the story about that he had tried to murder her by arranging for the roof of her bedchamber in the mansion at Antium to fall in on her. That the roof had fallen in was no lie and she kept the room for all to see in its wrecked condition, dust and plaster and bricks lying on the bed and the imprint of her body, which she had providentially removed to the privy a few moments before, on the dusty mattress. An old elm had in fact collapsed on to the roof, but there was no sign of artful sawing to incriminate either her son or any other of such of her enemies as she had still kindly allowed to survive. When Gaius Petronius heard of the incident he had no doubt that his imperial master and colleague in the arts had tried to arrange an ingenious quietus, and he deplored the failure of the attempt, saying: ‘Very frequently the best thought out of our dramatic devices come to nothing. That is not the fault of the scheme itself but rather of the interposition of the mischievous goddess Chance. But one tries again.’
‘Do you,’ Nero said wide-eyed, ‘honestly believe these stories that are going around – that I would wish to kill my own mother, bitch though she is?’
‘Oh, dear Caesar, some of us kill our mothers when we are born. I killed mine, you know, she died of having me. A comic situation in a way, a chance that women take in their lust for maternity.’
‘You say comic?’
‘Well, it can hardly be tragic, can it, if we hold by the Aristotelian rules? In a sense, you know, dearest Caesar, you rather disappoint me with this conventional posture of shock at the mention of matricide. Caesar is not as free as he ought to be. You’re always complaining, loudly and often very beautifully, of maternal persecution. Dramatic soliloquies unresolved in action. Still, Caesar knows best. Your mother may be the necessary irritant that produces the poetic pearl.’
‘Do you think I ought to kill my mother?’
‘Ought? Ought? What are you invoking now, dearest one? Moral duty, peace of mind, some law of artistic economy?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If we are thinking of life as a drama we cannot overcrowd our stage, can we? Enough of that for the moment, though this aphorism of dear dead Selvaticus is worth imprinting on the imperial brain – True freedom begins only when we have slain the gods of biology. I have a boy
for you.’
‘A boy? What do I want with a boy?’
‘What you want with a boy is what you want with the removal of a mother – release from the biological tyrants. To put it bluntly, liberation from the womb.’
‘But I like girls. And I adore dear Acte.’
‘Liberation, dearest Caesar. Come with me.’
They had been sitting together in one of the imperial gardens, among winking leaves, speaking loudly as though on the stage, surrounded by undeferential birdsong. Now they were carried in the wide litter that had once belonged to Messalina to a little house just north of the Theatre of Pompey. Here Gaius Petronius knocked thrice and was welcomed by an old Greek satyr who cordially embraced him. When the Emperor was introduced he went down on the marble and kissed the imperial feet until Nero grew embarrassed by the sight of a bald crown turned into a lateral pendulum. Then it was the best of the host’s Falernian with little snacks of toasted cheese on fried bread, and the boys were brought in. Exquisite, this one, a German lad, all the way from Colonia Agrippinensis. Take the little horror away. Or this, Greek of course, or this Syrian beauty. Finally the Emperor went to an airy cubicle, exquisitely clean and delicately scented, with a blond boy named Sporus. It was, really, a revelation.
If his mother was not permitted to come to Rome, nothing prevented her from using the internal courier service and berating her son for unnatural practices (of these, presumably, incest was not one):
… I am almost tempted to start believing in one of these crackpot religions of Asia which posit an eternal struggle between the forces of light and those of darkness and show plausible enough evidence that evil beings get into human brains and force them to perform filthy things. Do not think that Rome does not hear of the abominable perversions you and your friend Gaius Petronius the dirty poet are getting up to. If Rome hears I hear too, and, more pertinently, the faction that supports Britannicus hears very clearly and plots measures to cleanse the imperiate of monstrosities that were thought to be done for with the death of Gaius Caligula. Your stepfather the divine Claudius, one of the finest men who ever breathed, and not one ounce of perversity in him, must be turning in his grave or weeping on the shoulders of his fellow gods to think that the Roman Empire has been delivered into the hands of such a monster. Yes, I have begotten a monster and do not know in what way I have offended that such a shame and a misery should fall upon me in my exile and loneliness. If a mother’s curse carry any weight with you know that a mother’s curse is radiating from Tusculum. You have disgraced the Empire and yours, etc.