Strike the Womb — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames
The same night, Baiae. The emperor cannot sleep. The ship failed, his mother is alive and she surely knows. Nero imagines Agrippina arming slaves, riding to the Praetorians, standing in the Senate with the wound on her shoulder and telling of the son who wanted to drown her. He wakes Seneca and Burrus.
Tacitus describes the scene as a theater of silence. The two advisers say nothing for a long time. Perhaps they knew nothing before; perhaps they knew everything. At last Seneca looks at Burrus and asks whether the soldiers can be ordered to do it. Burrus answers: the Praetorians are devoted to the whole house of the Caesars and remember Germanicus. They will not raise a hand against his daughter. Let Anicetus finish what he began. Anicetus volunteers without hesitation. Nero breathes a sigh of relief and says a sentence that Tacitus recorded like a verdict on this entire court.
Then Agermus arrives with a message from his mother. Nero hears him out, and meanwhile throws a sword at his feet. A cry: assassin! Agermus is put in chains. The official version is ready: the mother sent a killer against her son, and when the plot was exposed, she took her own life. Only one thing is missing: the mother’s version.
A few words remain in history: “Strike the womb.” So Tacitus recorded. Cassius Dio gives a longer version: strike here, for this bore Nero. Were they really spoken? No witness left an account, and the court composed the official version. But the line passed into history as the shortest speech for the prosecution Rome ever heard.
Did Nero view his mother’s corpse and praise her beauty? So gossip claims. Tacitus notes that others deny it. What is certain is what he did next.
The propaganda begins. Nero sends the Senate a letter which, according to Tacitus, Seneca wrote: the mother sent an assassin, and when it failed, she ended her own life. The Senate thanks the gods for saving the emperor and declares the day of her birth unlucky. One senator, Thrasea Paetus, stands up and walks out. For now that is all Roman opposition can manage. Tacitus adds bitterly that nobody believed this fairy tale, and that it was not Nero who fell into ill repute but Seneca, who wrote such a confession.
Nero returns to Rome in triumph. Crowds cheer, senators come out to meet him. He is twenty-one, and for the first time no one stands between him and power. But Suetonius writes that for years afterward he saw his mother’s ghost, and the Furies with whips and torches, and even had magicians summon her shade and begged her forgiveness. When many years later he comes to Greece, he will not dare enter the sacred mysteries at Eleusis: heralds drive the impious away from there.
He has nine years left. Enough for the fire of Rome, a theater stage and an end he will direct himself. But two men are still left in Rome who can say no to him.