Two Rulers — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames
For a few months Rome has two rulers, and the second is sixteen. The Senate grants Agrippina two lictors, an escort with rods like a magistrate of the state, and the priesthood of her deified husband. Senators meet in the palace, and she listens to them from behind a curtain in a doorway, meant to hide her from sight but not from hearing.
Her name has outlasted her power. Agrippina was born on the Rhine, in the principal town of the Ubii. While Claudius was still alive, it was enough for her to ask her husband, and he sent a colony of veterans there and gave the town her name.
Behind the scenes, though, power lies with two men who do not care for this dual rule. Seneca, philosopher and teacher, teaches the emperor to speak. Burrus, a soldier with a crippled hand, holds the Praetorians. Tacitus remarks that rarely do two men share power in such harmony.
One day envoys from Armenia arrive in Rome. Nero sits on the tribunal, and Agrippina sets out to take a seat beside him, as if she were a second emperor. Everyone freezes. No one knows what to do with the emperor’s mother. Almost no one.
Nero comes down, greets his mother with respect, and walks her aside. It looks like tenderness. It is the first door closed to her. Not the last.
Then Acte appears. A freedwoman from Asia Minor, a former slave and the seventeen-year-old’s first real love. The court watches with relief: better that the emperor love a freedwoman than seduce senators’ wives. So Nero’s friends think, and the affair is screened by Serenus, a friend of Seneca, who pretends to be in love with Acte and signs the emperor’s gifts. Nero cannot stand his wife Octavia, Claudius’s daughter.
Agrippina flies into a rage. She shouts that a freedwoman is to be her rival and a slave her daughter-in-law. The harder she criticizes, the more stubborn the boy becomes. So she changes tactics: she offers him her own bedroom and her money. Too late. Nero sends her a gown studded with jewels from the imperial wardrobe, and she declares in public that her son shares with her only what he took from her.
The blow comes quickly. Nero dismisses Pallas, the treasurer and his mother’s ally. Agrippina loses control of herself. According to Tacitus she threatens to take Britannicus to the Guard’s camp: let the soldiers listen to the daughter of Germanicus, not to the cripple Burrus and the exile Seneca.
Britannicus is nearly fourteen. At the Saturnalia, the winter festival of merrymaking, the young play king of the feast. The lot falls to Nero, and he orders Britannicus to stand and sing. He expects the boy to make a fool of himself. Britannicus calmly sings about someone thrown out of his father’s house and robbed of the power due to him. The guests fall silent. Nero sees that it is a blow aimed at him, and his hatred grows.
February AD 55. A banquet in the palace. The children of the imperial houses sit at a separate, modest table. The poison for Britannicus is handled by Locusta, the same poisoner who had been used against Claudius. The boy takes a sip, loses his voice and his breath.
Nero lies back calmly and says it is nothing: Britannicus has had epilepsy since childhood and it will pass in a moment. Agrippina freezes. Tacitus writes that there was so much fear on her face that even her enemies believed she knew nothing. Octavia, the boy’s sister, shows nothing. She has learned. After a moment of silence the banquet goes on.
Britannicus is buried the same night, in a downpour, on the Campus Martius. Nero announces in the Senate that a modest funeral is the custom of the ancestors for those who die before their time. He distributes his brother’s property among his friends. An emperor of seventeen has just discovered that killing is simple. And a mother who knows too much cannot keep quiet.