Shortly after the punishment of the Christians, Lucan fell out with Nero and was forbidden to publish more poems. Nevertheless, verses attributed to him were widely circulated, in which he accused Nero of starting the Great Fire. When he was arrested for conspiring with Piso, Lucan was pressed to name accomplices and shamed himself by implicating his mother, then took his own life. While he bled to death he recited the words of a dying soldier from his poem about the civil war:
My eyes are opened wide by death’s mark.
You who go on living do so in the dark.
The gods keep you blind so that you may endure,
But I see the truth: death is the cure.
Seneca, whom many suspected of wanting to replace his protege as emperor, spoke bitter words when Nero’s Praetorians came for him. “Is this how all my efforts to educate him end? All my teaching, for this? He killed his brother and his mother, and now he kills his tutor!”
Seneca’s wife decided to die with him. They cut their wrists and lay side by side. But death was slow to come. Seneca took poison – hemlock, in emulation of Socrates – but that did not work either. Finally he was placed in a hot bath to quicken his bleeding and was suffocated by the steam.
When Nero was told that Paulina still lived, he declared that she had done nothing to harm him and ordered that her wrists should be bandaged. Paulina survived. Following the dictates of her husband’s will, she cremated Seneca without funeral rites.
Tigellinus’s investigation of the conspiracy became so far-flung that Titus began to fear suspicion might fall even on him. But no one was more loyal to Nero than Titus. The emperor never doubted him.
As each conspirator was convicted, Nero confiscated the guilty man’s assets. By Roman law, traitors always forfeited their property to the state. Still, the confiscations caused a great deal of grumbling. People said that Nero convicted wealthy men simply to lay his hands on their estates. It was true that Nero needed all the money he could get. The lavish construction of the Golden House and the massive rebuilding of monuments and temples all over Roma had sent the emperor deeply into debt. People complained when he proposed that the resurrected city should be called Neropolis, but had he not purchased the right to rename it?
Money – that was the problem, thought Titus. If Nero still had money, he might yet be in control of the city, the Senate, and the empire. But all Nero’s money was gone. The treasury was empty. When Titus realized the severity of the situation, he had offered to donate his own property to the public coffers, a token of his gratitude for all the blessings Nero had showered on him. Nero only laughed. Even Titus’s considerable wealth was a pittance compared to Nero’s debts, a drop of water in the ocean.
Trouble in the provinces had also taken a toll. The bloody uprising of Boudica in Britannia, earlier in Nero’s reign, had been summarily dealt with, but the revolt that had been going on in Judaea for the last two years was more vexatious. Nero had appointed Vespasian to put down the Jewish rebellion. Resistance along the coast and in the northern part of Judaea had been quelled, but the city of Jerusalem, a hornet’s nest of fanatics, had so far resisted the Roman siege. It was in Jerusalem that the cult of the Christians had originated, Titus recalled. Why was that part of the world such a breeding ground for dangerous ideas and so resistant to Roman rule?
There had also been a revolt led by Vindex, the governor of Gaul, ostensibly against Nero’s exorbitant taxes. The revolt had been suppressed, but not before Vindex’s slanders about Nero’s personal life incited a great deal of prurient speculation across the empire.
Titus sighed. As crushing as events in the public sphere had been – the Pisonian conspiracy, the rise of Tigellinus and the loss of Seneca, the decimation of Nero’s inner circle, the vast expenditures required by the rebuilding of the burned city, the troubles in Britannia and Judaea and Gaul – perhaps the most pivotal event of all was the death of Poppaea Sabina. Was that when the trouble really began?
Poor Nero! With his own eyes, Titus had seen the emperor’s remorse after the death of Poppaea. Nero had been drinking heavily that night. The imperial couple were heard shouting at each other. Nero flew into a rage. No one witnessed what happened, but the physician who examined Poppaea later told Titus that only a kick in the belly could have caused the bleeding that killed both her and her unborn child.
Nero was inconsolable. Instead of cremating Poppaea in the Roman way, he had her body filled with fragrant spices and embalmed. Some said that this was in deference to her peculiar religious beliefs, but Titus thought it was because Nero could not bear to see her beauty consumed by flames.
It was purely by chance one day that Titus noticed a boy who might have been Poppaea’s double. The boy’s name was Sporus and he was a servant in the imperial household. When Titus drew Nero’s attention to the uncanny resemblance, Nero was instantly infatuated. But his attraction was not merely sexual or even romantic; Nero seemed to think that Sporus was linked in some mystical way to Poppaea, that his dead wife had returned to him in the form of a boy. This strange notion became such an obsession that Nero induced Sporus to undergo castration. Nero declared that by an act of divine will he had transformed the boy into a girl. He called his creation Sabina, which was Poppaea’s cognomen.
In a ceremony that exactly duplicated his wedding with Poppaea, Nero took Sporus, now Sabina, as his wife. Such a thing could never have happened when Agrippina or Seneca held sway. Titus took the auspices and Tigellinus performed the ritual, and from that day forward Nero dressed Sporus in Poppaea’s gowns and treated the eunuch in every way as his wife. Seeing the two of them quarrel at a banquet and then make up and dote on each other, Titus was sometimes startled by the illusion that Poppaea was still among them.
It seemed to Titus that Nero’s transcendence of male and female was yet another manifestation of the emperor’s divine nature. Nero’s appetites were not to be proscribed by the presumed limitations of the mortal body. The god-emperor could re-make a boy into a girl, and could even, after a fashion, resurrect the dead.
But not everyone possessed Titus’s delicate insight. Inevitably, cruder minds made the unconventional relationship the butt of jokes. “If only his father had taken such a wife,” went one, “there would never have been a Nero!”
Titus gazed for a long moment at the desecrated statue of Nero beside the little fountain. He climbed onto the pedestal, intending to remove the ridiculous wig and the parricide’s sack, then heard a group of men coming towards him. They sounded drunk and were singing another verse from the ditty he had heard from the tavern:
Performed in Greece
And took a crown.
Winning clown: Nero!
Fit for gods is
The Golden House.
Or fit for a louse: Nero!
The men carried clubs of some sort; Titus could tell because he heard them banging the clubs against the walls of the buildings they passed.
Titus jumped from the pedestal and hurried on.
It was no use now, raking over the past, trying to understand how Nero had landed in such a mess. Titus tried to remember the good times. The Golden House was surely the greatest architectural wonder of the age, even if parts of it were still unfinished. Nero had dared to build a house truly fit for a god to live in, a place so beautiful that every vantage point offered a delight to the eye and each of its hundreds of rooms invited visitors to indulge in boundless luxury. What parties Nero had held there, presenting the best and most beautiful performers from every corner of the world, offering the most sumptuous banquets, and making available the most refined and esoteric of sensual pleasures. “Pain is for mortals,” Nero had said. “Pleasure is divine.” To be a guest in the Golden House was to be a demigod, if only for a night.