The Artist — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames
For the senators, this is the end of patience. In AD 65 a conspiracy forms: senators, equestrians, officers of the Guard, even a few women. They want to kill Nero in the circus on the festival of Ceres and put on the throne Gaius Piso, a handsome aristocrat with a good reputation. Tacitus judges him sourly: he had looks, eloquence and generosity, but no character. The plan is betrayed by the freedman Milichus. His master, one of the conspirators, sharpens a dagger and writes his will, and the servant sees it.
The investigation is brief. The conspirators give each other away, one after another. Tacitus records that the freedwoman Epicharis, despite the worst interrogations, named no one. Free men, equestrians and senators, could not summon what a woman freed from slavery did.
Among the condemned is Seneca. Nero has no proof, but has long wanted to be rid of him. A tribune brings the sentence. Seneca asks for tablets to write his will, and when they refuse, he turns to his friends: since he cannot reward them, he leaves them the one wealth left to him, the pattern of his life.
He takes his own life calmly, surrounded by friends. Tacitus’s account became, over the centuries, a model of Stoic dignity. Whether everything happened as Tacitus writes we do not know: it is a scene with a literary finish. We do know that Rome lost the man who for eight years had been its conscience.
In AD 66 Nero does what he has always dreamed of. He goes to Greece, the cradle of the arts, and enters the most famous contests: he sings, plays the kithara, drives a chariot. Suetonius describes something more interesting: fear. Nero fears the judges like a schoolboy. He addresses them with respect, slanders his rivals behind their backs, and bribes the best of them. During a performance he does not dare clear his throat, and he wipes his sweat with his forearm.
When you win everything, you must clear out the competition along the way. Nero has the statues of former victors pulled down and thrown into latrines so that no one will remember them. When the freedman Helius, who governs Rome in his absence, reminds him of affairs of state, he answers: better to advise me and wish that I return worthy of Nero.
The most interesting thing is what happens in the audience. Today you will be the judge.
From Greece Nero returns like a victor of the games, with the wreaths of every contest and with tablets recording where he won and against whom. The streets are sprinkled with perfume, and ribbons and sweets rain down on his head. Rome applauds. And in distant provinces someone is already counting how much longer this will last.