Nero - Death of an Asshole
Was Nero bad?
Yes. He was. Thanks for reading.
Oh. You’re still here?
Yes, of course Nero was bad. I tend to shy away from saying ‘mad’ because it’s often used as a catch-all for negative or troubled behavior and calling someone who is dealing with mental health issues ‘crazy’ does them no help at all. Nero certainly had some sort of mental health issues, as his erratic, destructive and increasingly paranoid behavior will testify, but killing your mother isn’t the behavior of any well-adjusted young man.
I’m not going to say ‘evil', either, because that term comes preloaded with all sorts of other baggage, especially from the religious types who seem to believe that they invented morality at roughly the same time Nero was setting fire to Christians to light the forum at night. Which is demonstrable nonsense.
So, let’s just go with ‘bad’. He was a very bad man. His behavior was bad then and it is bad now.
It would seem, on the face of it, quite uncontroversial that the Emperor Nero would feature highly on a list of history's worst assholes. He certainly ticks a lot of the boxes of rampant assholery. Tyranny, despotism, megalomania, demagoguery, killing your mother; it's all on the list and Nero is guilty on all counts.
But who was Nero? A product of his own mania? A teetering, deranged man-baby desperate for praise to cover his own failings? A man who forced people to like him and when they didn't, had them executed, exiled or tortured?
Well, yes.
Or was he a young man, woefully unequipped for the office into which he was cajoled by his mother, a victim not just of his own paranoia, but of the unspoken failings of the political machinery of a Roman state that dared not question its own decisions?
Yes, and yes.
Nero was born, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus on December 15th 37AD at Antium, the only child of the former consul Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the Younger, the sister of the Emperor Caligula, who was also a bit of an asshole.
As the great-grandson of Julia the Elder, the only biological child of the Emperor Augustus, he was also of good blood and a prime candidate for the throne once Agrippina had cleared his path with a combination of Machiavellian guile and some poisoned mushrooms.
There is of course no better Roman Emperor to qualify as an asshole than Nero. Everyone knows the name, and everyone has an idea of just what a nightmare he was. He was the Mad Emperor, a swollen, sweaty, vain, neurotic terror. But he was also young, fiercely loved by those closest to him, artistic but not particularly talented, and idealistically ambitious.
The common view is that when he died, Rome let out a huge collective sigh of relief, settled down to some semblance of normality and got on with the job of building aqueducts and shuffling about in togas. You know, normal Roman stuff.
In reality, Nero's death was a catalyst for unheard of chaos. It was unplanned, unwanted, unwelcome and caused uproar. It threw succession out of the window, any long-term plans of the empire into jeopardy, spanners into the works of every part of the Roman political machine and threatened the very fabric of Rome itself.
Anger, betrayal, dismay, grief, panic, disbelief are not words one would usually associate with the death of someone that history has led us to believe was the scourge of the Senate and the people of Rome. This is not sentiment saved for the death of a childless, feckless, lazy lout.
Everyone wanted him gone, right?
No.
His death didn't make things better. It made them much, much worse.
There's been so much written about Nero and so much more left to right that it would seem wasteful to fill up your time with what we already know about him. We know about his time as Emperor and his character, less so about the complex power plays of the political system he operated in, and the subsequent effect on his image, and that of Rome itself.
So instead, in determining the true extent of Nero's status as one of history's greatest assholes, we're going to look a little bit more closely at the other thing that he did that was really important. Die.
Any history of Nero is automatically dominated by his personality, and whilst he may not have been the person his reputation has always made him out to be, it's worth evaluating how the political system of the principate in which he operated threw up difficulties that the young, vain and insecure man struggled and eventually spectacularly failed to deal with.
Was the fall of the Julio-Claudian line the accidental outcome of mismanaged destiny, or blind panic by a young emperor, exacerbated by bumbling bureaucracy and bogeyman fears, or was Nero's hold on power much stronger than he himself believed? If so, what caused him to let that power slip? His own failings, paranoia, or simply one falling domino too many in a cascade that he couldn't arrest?
The last year of his reign, 68 AD, saw defections and revolt that caused him to flee Rome in fear of his life. An overreaction that ironically sealed his fate. He met the challenges of 68 with an odd mixture of ennui, fateful acceptance and blind panic, when a steadier and wiser hand and a cooler temper might have saved him. Tacitus tells us that he was forced from office by ‘messages and rumors’ rather than force of arms. Whispers and spooks did for Nero.
Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdenensis (North-east France, basically), started trouble around the end of 67 by sending out series of letters to other provincial governors, testing the waters of rebellion to see who would be interested. Most of them forwarded the letters straight to Rome, but Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania Taraconensis in Spain, simply ignored them.
The subsequent absence of Galba's forwarded copies sent Nero into a suspicious rage. Had Galba kept the letters? Was he planning on responding? One could simply read it the way Galba had intended, namely that he thought it trivial, or one could read their absence with suspicion.
Nero responded in the rational calm manner for which he was famous by issuing a death warrant for Galba that the governor himself intercepted before it could be enforced.
Vindex himself had little ambition to become emperor, but he owed allegiance to the memory of Agrippina, Nero’s mother, and had been part of the conspiracy in 59 that led to Nero having her assassinated. His association, died with her, but he still harbored a desire to see someone else on the throne other than her son. If it wasn't going to be him, he could kick up enough dust and see if anyone else would be interested.
Vindex finally showed his hand in the middle of March 68, and in all likelihood, this was forced on him early as the revolt was planned for January of the following year, when the legions would swear their oaths. That would have given Vindex more time to secure the men he needed.
When news of the Vindex revolt reached Nero in Naples on March 23rd which was, with great portent, the anniversary of the death of his mother, Nero did, well, nothing.
He didn't even respond to calls from the Senate for a week, and why would he? Vindex didn't have the breeding, the backing, or even the men, and there was no reason for Nero to doubt the loyalty of the legions in France. On top of that, the job of dealing with impertinent Gallic upstarts had long been franchised out to the governor of Upper Germany, and Nero had only just appointed Lucius Verginius Rufus to that post a year earlier, so Rufus' loyalty wasn't in question.
The rebellion had no backing, Vindex had no family, he had no men, and it was someone else's job to sort that shit out. Nero lolled around playing the liar, eating, farting, fucking and remaining calm.
Vindex did what only a man with not much going for him could do and kicked up a racket. Making a lot of noise and boasting more idle threats than his means would allow him to carry out, he eventually provoked Nero into action, and the emperor wrote to the Senate demanding a public display of loyalty, which he got, and then returned to Rome ostentatiously to hold a meeting with them.
Even then, Vindex's shenanigans came low on the agenda, below the mooted construction of musical water organs, which sound like they would have been fucking fantastic, and which Nero thought would be an absolute blast. He seemed unfazed, but aware that he needed to start positioning himself carefully.
A few days later came more alarming news. Galba was not only not dead, but he was also fucking pissed.
Realizing that, against his will, he had his allegiances switched, Galba accepted a second letter of invitation from Vindex and, on April 3rd, declared himself ‘Legate of the Senate and People of Rome’.
Galba had one scant legion to his name, but he had a wide and loyal population base from which to recruit and also found support in the governor of Lusitania, Marcus Otho.
Nero spectacularly abandoned his calm response and, perhaps wanting to look like he was some sort of ancient fucking Rambo, responded with menace. He deposed a Consul and took direct power himself, insulting any sympathetic ears he had in the Senate by taking away one of their ruling numbers. And the senate duly declared Galba an enemy of the people, as if Galba hadn't just done that himself, and then confiscated his property.
Nero summoned troops from around the Empire. Men came from Britian, Germany and Illyricum, and he raised a whole new legion, the 1st Adiutrix, the ‘Faithful’, from the navy fleet at Misenum and sent all of them to act as a firewall in Northern Italy under the command of Petronius Turpilianus, former governor of Britain.
Nero, of course, stayed right where he was. He was many things, but he was no general and he knew it.
Events between mid-April and Nero's death on June 9th are sketchy at best.
At some point after hearing the news about Galba, Nero heard that Clodius Macer, legate of the only legion in Africa, has declared himself ‘Champion of Liberty’, whatever the hell that meant, and begun to recruit auxiliaries. Macer's treachery threatens Africa's vital grain supply to Rome and for the first time among the people and the tradesmen, there is disquiet.
Nero’s tipping point moment came, paradoxically, through victory.
Rufus finally moved against Vindex in May, and the legions of Upper Germany, bolstered by those from Lower Germany, took on Vindex at Vesontio and defeated him. Vindex did what was expected of him and to avoid any further bloodshed, shed his own blood and took his own life.
Drunk on victory and just drunk, Rufus's men, who seemed to either lack leadership or had leaders who didn't care, looted the town and tried to make Rufus emperor. Rufus wisely refused the offer, maintaining that they had no right to declare anyone emperor, and it must be the Senate and the People of Rome who made that choice.
When Nero heard that the German legions had tried to make Rufus Emperor, and even though they hadn’t, he just panicked more. All Nero seemed to have achieved in winning was raise another pretender to the throne, albeit one who had openly refused it. He wanted fewer potential rivals, not more of them.
He sent more reinforcements of loyal generals to the north, including Rubrius Gallus, but this time, crucially, failed to intervene personally when showing his face even if he stayed the fuck out of way out of any fighting, would surely have helped cement his position. Once more though, he was too timid to act.
The 14th Gemina Legion, bolstered by surly Batavian auxiliaries, were restricted by them from acting against Vindex’s own Batavians, and later were to claim that they had wrested control of Italy from Nero when the writing was on the wall.
Additionally, Turpilianus acted indecisively, and although he was later executed under Galba as a Nero loyalist, Cassius Dio writes that he acted on behalf of Galba. The reality may be that he, as well as Rufus, were both stalling for time, hoping that any questions surrounding Nero's future would be answered in the Senate before any major bloodshed took place. At some point the Illyrians in Italy also hailed Rufus as emperor, although it's possible that this happened after Nero's death.
The news about Rufus, even though he had refused, and rumors of other defections, finally convinced Nero that he was fucked, and that everyone had deserted him. He was convinced that he had lost the support of the entire army, which he hadn't, and he could think only of escape.
Firstly, he thought to flee to Alexandria, where he would be assured of a welcome, and perhaps even some kind of exiled power as a kind of unelected president. Ruler in name only whilst others, including the Senate of course, ruled directly from Rome.
He begged the Praetorians to follow him, who refused, but it wasn't until Nero had fled Rome that their prefect, Gaius Nymphidius Sabinus, declared the guard for Galba.
With Nero gone, the Praetorians declared, and the loyalty of the army unclear, the Senate was left with no option but to reverse their declaration on Galba and instead make Nero the enemy of the people. Galba was duly declared emperor.
With a handful of loyal freemen at his side, Nero fled to the villa of one of them, Phaon, and there, with the help of another, Epaphroditus, opened his veins as the sound of approaching horsemen clattered up the cobbled road to arrest him.
As he bled to death, he ordered that his tomb be decorated with marble, extracted a promise that his remains not be mutilated, and uttered his famous lament “Qualis artifex pereo” - What an artist dies with me.
Nero's initial inaction when faced with the crisis is easy with hindsight to criticize, but it's not without some justification. There may have been hesitation from Rufus and Turpilianus , but in the end neither of them let Nero down, and the seven legions of the German command proved loyal in the end, despite their somewhat over-excited attempts to claim too much from their victories.
Rufus did the right thing by refusing them and bringing their loyalty back into line, The problem was that Nero was so neurotic and untrusting that even this failed to pacify the nagging voice in his head that everyone was out to get him. Rufus really didn't want to be emperor, but to Nero, his refusal looked more like a stalling tactic, and his actual stalling tactics looked like outright betrayal.
Had Nero himself gone to the troops in Germany and Northern Italy both before and after the defeat of Vindex, his own paranoia might have been soothed, and the very public display of loyalty from the troops he would have received would have done wonders for his position.
Not that he needed much reinforcement. He was in a good position; he just didn't know it. Of the forces he might have shown his face to, he had recruited the 1st Italica less than two years earlier, and the Adiutrix for this very campaign, and the 14th Gemina from Britain were famed for their loyalty to him, even after his death.
Nothing suggests that any of them favored Galba and none of their commanders were openly or privately willing to seduce their troops away from Nero, particularly when his position seemed so secure.
He had won.
In Rome too, Nero might have acted more astutely to exercise further control. The Senate had diligently done its job in shit-mouthing Galba, and only changed their mind when the Praetorians changed theirs. Men carrying sharp things make very persuasive arguments.
The Guard itself, as Tacitus says, “long accustomed to swear allegiance to the Caesars”, had been brought to desert Nero more by deceit and incitement than by its own inclination. Nero's very public, and very silly, idea of sailing off to Egypt to live there and take up a political post was enough for Sabinus, the prefect, to persuade his men that the emperor was fucked and a promise of a huge bribe from Galba did the rest.
Nero was in the middle of packing for Egypt when he heard the Praetorians had declared for Galba. He was barely even out of Rome and his throne still warm when his own legion abandoned him.
Even then, had he acted with determination and confident focus, he could have rescued the situation. Sabinus was prefect but not the most popular one. He had sold out some of his own officers in a conspiracy a few years earlier and while the Praetorians swore allegiance to Nero directly, they also counted fully on the loyalty of their own. Had Nero simply had Sabinus strangled and thrown in the Tiber, and promised to match or even outdo Galba's bribe, the Praetorians would have no reason to switch allegiance. The Guard owed more allegiance to Nero than to Sabinus, but once Nero was out the door and running, there was only one allegiance left.
Dio Chrysostom writes that Nero's hideout was betrayed by his husband, Sporus, who Nero had married, castrated and dressed as his dead wife, Poppaea, who he pined for despite probably murdering her by kicking her to death while pregnant. This wasn't the first man Nero had married, but Sporus expressly played the role of wife, and Dio obviously sees this as him being mistreated by the emperor, hence the betrayal. Either way, Sporos was with him at the end, which only came when Nero's determination to persuade himself that all was lost, overtook any ability he had to think with focus or rationality.
The people loved him to the end and went on loving him after his death. A cult of the ‘Living Nero’ threw up numerous people claiming to be the reincarnated emperor well into the next century. The emperors Otho and Vitellius, who followed Galba, but were both gone within a year, thought it worth their while to milk the nostalgia for Nero to bolster their own claims.
A year after Nero's death, Otho took Nero’s name, restored his statues and continued the work on Nero’s decadent Domus Aurea, the Golden House. Otho played heavily on his own effete and youthful manner, basically impersonating Nero. He reinstalled Nero's freemen to their offices, including his widow Sporos. Vitellius erected altars to Nero and had his god-awful songs performed in public.
Tacitus tells us that the higher echelons of the plebs, with connections to noble families, and freedmen related to some of Nero's more public victims were given great joy by his death. These are the people Suetonius describe as donning liberty caps and running around in the street, dancing in joy.
But the common plebs, the Sordida, missed his profligate largesse and his games and decorated his tomb with flowers and erected statues of him in the forum, and posted up copies of his edicts as if this could somehow magically summon him back from the dead.
Even Nero himself, suddenly as he lay dying, had the idea that if he could reach the forum and speak to the people, all would be forgiven and his popularity would carry the day, and he was probably right.
It's hard not to reach the conclusion that if Nero had somehow managed to shrug off the stench of inevitable failure that clung to him at the end, he could have maintained loyalty and easily dismissed the revolts of Galba and Macer who, after all, were not acting in unison and had comparatively little in the way of resources. Nero's determination to read bad omens into every tealeaf and sluggish, neurotic acceptance of defeat, clouded any better decisions he might have made, but not all the events can be explained simply by his panic and inability to react.
Support for the rebels was weak, but still enough to cause some alarm. Vindex claimed to have 100,000 men which was bullshit designed to impress Galba, and anyway 20,000 of them were lost to Rufus at Vesontio. But Galba was able to raise a legion and auxiliaries, as well as form his own senate and equestrian bodyguard from the social elite and Macer could do the same in Africa.
What were the reasons for their disaffection? Whilst the narrative of Gallic independence finds some traction in the supposed attempts to form an empire of the Gauls a few years later, the lack of evidence for any unifying tribal identity among the Gauls, and the fact that the leaders of the Gallic revolt of 70 are notably not the same people who were supporting Vindex, discredits that idea.
Moreover, the numismatic evidence shows that Vindex was attempting to return to Augustan political and moral values. He wanted liberation from tyranny, not from Rome.
What seems to have motivated Galba, Vindex and Macer was Nero's rash regime. Cassius Dio tells us of higher taxes in Gaul. Plutarch notes that Galba complains about the treatment handed out to those in his province by Nero's lackeys. Pliny tells us of the “six fantastically wealthy landowners in Africa”, although he doesn't name them, who were executed and had their lands taken.
Add into that the suffering in Judea at the hands of Gessius Florus, confiscations in Egypt and harsh taxation in Greece, and a picture emerges of Nero not only harming those close to himself but those around the empire too. The disquiet spread far from Rome. The difference between the previous major uprisings against Nero's reign, in Britain with Boudicca in 61 and Judea in 66, is that this time it took place with the connivance of, and at the initiative of, Roman commanders and officials.
This wasn't a populist, pitchfork waving mob, but the very machinery of the Roman state at open rebellion against its leader. Even against the fabric of Rome itself. These are verdicts on Nero's rule handed down by the people charged with enforcing it.
Tacitus, as always, puts his own words into the mouths of historical figures, this time Galba.
“It was not Vindex with his unarmed province, nor I with one legion that freed the people from Nero's yoke, but his own monstrousness and extravagance.”
Nero's downfall can then be explained largely by these underlying causes, but it’s also worth considering the very nature of the Principate itself. The ancient sources all firmly put the blame of Nero, his viciousness ultimately proving his undoing. But is that sufficient?
The early years of the Augustan Empire were hailed as the Golden Age of Rome, described with soaring verbosity decades later by the old curmudgeon Tacitus, and still lovingly eulogized three hundred years later by writers who had long ago forgotten what was golden about it. The very notion of the Golden Age was enough to stir the narrative of patriotic passion.
Nero bathed in the popularity and love his conduct brought him yet struggled eventually to keep all the plates spinning. The sheer demands of the role and the complex interactions and unresolved contradiction of politics put too much strain on the callow shoulders of the fragile young Nero and exposed his lack of political nous. What we see in Nero's collapse is a clash between the weakness of his character, and the restraints of the position he was asked to hold.
The problem with the ancient sources is that they don't explicitly analyze the performance of the principate in terms of the machinery of state. We get plenty about what an asshole Nero was, and we get a meta-narrative about how popular he was, but we never get any commentary about how good he was at executing the role he'd been elevated to.
Did Nero fail not only because he was an asshole and he didn't know how to do his job properly, but also because the very system itself was unworkable? Could another system have been found that better suited his skills and allowed him to flourish in the role?
The idea that their own system of government could have contributed to the political disaster of the reign and death of Nero was just about the last thing that would have ever crossed their minds. Blaming the system, and by inference themselves, was unthinkable, so it was obvious to lay the blame squarely at the feet of a man who had no hope of ever being able to do the job properly.
The sources ignored the weaknesses of the Augustan model of succession, and however blind those sources are to those failings, they played a part. Problems like Imperial Freedmen, like modern day lobbyists, the Senate, flawed ideology and scattergun hereditary succession have been used to explain Nero's inability to maintain his popular style without stamping on too many toes along the way. But a broken system is a broken system, no matter who you put in charge, and whoever it is, there is only so long that can keep all the balls in the air at once.
The main problem with the system of succession was that, legally, there wasn’t one.
The emperor is not a monarch and as such the recognition of successive heirs, dominant as it was in practice, had zero legal standing. In theory the choice of successor lay in the hands of the Senate, but the uncertainty runs even deeper because not only was there no legal obligation to recognize the successor, but there was also no legal obligation to even have a successor. Even worse, there was no legal obligation to have an emperor at all.
Each incumbent of the throne is sworn for life and his office dies with him. The period between the death of the previous office holder and the swearing in of the new, however brief it may be, saw the Senate fully in charge of all Rome's affairs and they could just as easily have sworn in nobody at all.
Fans of the movie Gladiator might be slightly surprised to find out that not only did the pretend version of Marcus Aurelius shown in the film have no need to name anyone as heir, let alone Russell Crowe, should he wish power to return to the Senate after his death, but he could have done it himself at any point in the previous 17 years of his reign by simply getting up and walking away. Not that this is the only problem with Gladiator, of course. I feel a whole article about that movie coming on in the near future….
The Augustan view of the emperor, a man exercising various magisterial functions according to a mandate given him by the Senate and the people, not only justified Tiberius throwing open to senatorial debate the manner and duration of an emperor's power, but it also sanctioned the attempt of the Consuls and the Senate, after the murder of Caligula, to dispense with the whole fucking sordid mess and revert to a republic. The terrifying prospect of a civil war that such a move would have provoked spurred the Praetorians into action. Together with the freedmen who had everything to lose under Republic, they yanked Claudius out from beneath whatever curtain he was under, shitting himself because he was Caligula's nearest relative, and plonked him on the throne with a bold shout of, look at this asshole! A Germanicus!
That was enough to snuff out the candle of republican ideals in 41 AD and effectively keep it snuffed out. In a newly formed tradition then, the emperor must be dragged from under whatever piece of upholstery he was hiding, so he may be invested with the traditional powers. If you wanted a new emperor, check under the couch. Perhaps one was hiding under there, biding their time?
When Galba, making his pitch, declared himself only ‘legate’, he was paying lip service to the notion of being emperor, whilst not openly seeking the office. The Senate demonstrated that their approval was required by first telling Galba to go fuck himself, and then revoking the already held claim of Nero, descendant of Augustus and adopted son of Claudius, and then telling Galba to unfuck himself. Nero had the claim, and Galba wanted the claim, but it was nothing without the Senate's approval. At least in theory.
The German legions who had dealt with Vindex and tempted Rufus, refused to swear allegiance to Galba directly and instead left it to the Senate to decide, who of course decided on Galba. But the oath was meaningless. A new emperor had to be put up for approval and there was no recognized system for candidacy or for election. There were no rules for eligibility, only a set of procedures for transferring power.
The weaknesses and dangers inherent in the system are clear to see. If any ruler approved by the Senate and the People was legitimate, however he came to be put forward, then no emperor needed to be tolerated for long. No wonder then that someone already prone to paranoia saw danger lurking in every corner of the Senate. They could, at least in theory, cut him off at any time. Nero was constantly at strife with the Senate because being usurped was permissible on constitutional grounds. Nero had no legal right to be emperor.
Nero's autocratic power was tempered constantly by revolt or the threat of revolt. He walked a knife edge between the adoration of the people and the threat posed by the Senate, and for one so neurotic and mentally fragile, it was an impossible cross to bear.
Whilst both the Republican and Augustan models strived to achieve a perfect setup, where the incumbent was only a placeholder, exercising his powers at the will of the Senate, and the people, in reality it was obvious that the best way of providing stability for that incumbent was to designate his own successor and then secure enough power for that successor so as to leave him in a position to carry on the legacy.
The emperor not only had to arm wrestle the Senate constantly for his own power but engineer a position in which his succession became inevitable. Put your successor in a strong enough position and he acts like a firewall between the throne and the senate. It would be pointless for them to get rid of the incumbent, if incumbent 2.0 is waiting in the wings to not only continue the legacy, but also wreak a little revenge if it needed wreaking.
This was quickly regarded as the normal route to power. However, alternatives soon arose for nomination as with Claudius hiding under the bed, or Vespasian with his legions, or Nerva with his squawking palace minions.
In choosing a successor the incumbent would start with blood ties rather than merit or favor, and this originally had the advantage of stifling ambition and blunting envy.
As the younger Pliny put it, “men tolerate with greater equanimity the evil progeny fortune is given an emperor, than the bad choice he himself has made.” Or, to put it another way, “It’s not his fault his son is an asshole”.
30 years earlier, Galba, the first to hold the post without any regnal family claim whatsoever, and childless to boot, decided to adopt a man of suitable descent. In doing so, he claims to be breaking the family monopoly that has stood since Augustus and choosing the man he feels best suited for the job. In practice, the man he chose, Piso, had long been a favorite of Galba and had been designated a son in his will. Adoption had long been the way of continuing the line when nature failed, and Galba and Pliny are just making a virtue of necessity.
For Pliny, recent memories of Nero and Domitian who had both gained the throne by dynastic descent, and turned out to be complete maniacs, made the idea of selection on merit seem a much better idea, thank you very much.
Apart from the mumbled complaints mentioned, there's little evidence for criticism of hereditary succession. Even an old Stoic like Seneca, who would naturally have urged selection on merit, was prepared to justify the practice on the grounds that in keeping the tradition going, it was showing gratitude to the forebears, and in particular to Augustus who had set the whole ball rolling in the first place.
The role of emperor itself encouraged fear of usurpers on one side and ambition on the other, largely because there were no clear criteria for suitability. Anyone could theoretically maneuver himself into position, and the man in that position was always the prime candidate. Since there were no clear guidelines on who could gain the succession, descendants of all manner of noble families, who had been equal at birth with people who were later promoted up the chain of succession, people with the status of the Julii and the Claudii, old Republican stalwarts, might now also fancy their own chances of having a go at being emperor
Augustus rebuked one traitor with the line, and I paraphrase, that if all that is stopping you from power is me, then what of all the other great and worthy men of the realm? All that would be stopping them is you.
Augustus had, however, carefully laid down the plans for succession and, after a bit of a wrangle, he had his way. He gained his own power via adoption by Julius Caesar, and he did the same, first by adopting Gaius and Lucius who were both to die relatively young and then Tiberius who he also made heir. Even this had ambiguity as Gaius and Lucius were his blood grandsons and he favored them over Tiberius and Drusus, his adopted sons. He then tried to make sure the succession from Tiberius was sorted as well, by naming the war hero Germanicus as an heir, but he went and died on campaign, or was poisoned, wriggling the whole line of succession around again like an escaped fire hose.
By the time Claudius is shoved reluctantly forward as the last surviving male relative of the emperor, he was not in the direct line of descent from Augustus, either by birth or by adoption. He even lacked either the name Julius or Caesar. which he rectified by immediately calling himself Tiberius Claudius Caesar.
Claudius' sons inherited blood via Augustus' sister Octavia, but faced stiff competition from potential rivals who were older and even more direct descendants of Augustus, such as Rubellius Plautus, the great grandson of Tiberius and, of course, the son of his fourth wife, Nero.
Are you keeping up? It's all very complicated I know, but there were fucking loads of them. Let’s just put it like that.
Nero's adoption by Claudius gave him not only the correct bloodline, but familial descent from the reigning emperor, and the young Nero outshone, in terms of qualification, Claudius’ surviving son, Britannicus, and all the other names floating around.
The difficulties thrown up by a lack of a law concerning succession are made even more complicated by the marriage policy of the Imperial line. Yeah, even more complicated.
For them to have embarked on the practice of dynastic marriages with foreign houses, something later medieval rulers used with enthusiasm to secure alliances, would have been very un-Roman. One didn't want to sully the line with the sweaty, beardy blood of some horrible barbarian beer drinker, and anyway, foreign rulers are vassals to the Roman state, not equals in it. Foreigners were terrible candidates for marriage. Octavian's gleeful slander of his rival Anthony's relationship with the distinctly un-Roman Cleopatra is a great example. Octavian paints him as trying to thin the purity of Roman blood with his unhealthy alliance with this weird Eastern bitch. Even though Julius Caesar had no problem with it at all.
The only alternative, as marrying beneath oneself was literally impossible, even for an emperor, was to intermarry among the thin veneer of Roman society’s ruling classes. The result is a bewildering array of senators, generals and equestrians with some claim of kinship to the ruling family and as we've just seen, even a meagre familial tie would be enough to get you into the queue to have a go at usurping the Asshole in Chief.
Like a chain reaction these marriages generated more marriages at the elite level. Who else was there for the children of these marriages to marry but other children of these marriages? And as such it produced more and more and more eligible suitors to the throne. The more the Julio Claudians fucked, the more pretenders to power they generated.
With no rules to succession other than, it seemed, being vaguely related to somebody who was, or had been, at some point ruler, the more babies they produced didn't weaken that infant’s claim but strengthened it. Simply existing made you eligible to become emperor.
In modern royal families, each child born is one step further away from ever becoming king or queen. The fourth child of a King has virtually no claim to their Father’s throne. But in Rome, each child born is a potential threat. And the surviving blood descendants of emperors grew up and fucked and had more babies. Claudius had multiple marriages, each one dragging in more and more potential claimants like some great dynastic black hole.
Like any king, the emperor could only be removed from office by force. There was no time limit on his rule, no retirement plan, and even if he wanted to step back, having the specter of a former Emperor kicking around the palace would have been far too much for the successor to bear and they would have soon found themselves accidentally being strangled to death in the bath.
But unlike a monarch, and no matter how long the throne remained in the family, men of comparable power and pedigree could feel, with some justification, that they also had a legitimate claim to office. Whilst the Emperor remained in possession of his faculties, he could clearly see that it would be impossible to destroy or disgrace everyone who had a claim. He'd have to murder half of Rome's ruling elite. Those who had testicles, anyway. All that would do is strengthen the resolve of those who survived to strike for power.
By Nero's time, the number of people in that queue would have reached into the thousands. And all the while it grew and grew and edged menacingly closer until Nero could secure his own succession and reinforce his power accordingly.
As a result, court was teeming with rival factions centered around various claimants, many of whom could, and did, command armies. Freedmen whispered in whatever ear they thought more gullible at the time, and imperial women always a dominant force behind the scenes, plotted on behalf of their own offspring. Praetorian prefects were appointed, unappointed and murdered. Equestrians and senators lost their lives through involvement in real or imaginary plots. Some of these plots were not even against the emperor himself, but against other plotters who were in your particular way.
The pressure of this insecurity made great demands on the fortitude and character of the emperor. The issue of succession accounts for much of the aristocratic carnage in which the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius ended. Claudius alone, often such a figure of meek compliance in the historical narrative, was responsible for the deaths of over 200 equestrians and 35 senators, all of them related in some way to the imperial line.
Lack of hereditary principles, an absence of framework for succession, and intermarriage meant that Nero was faced with the bewildering and terrifying number of potential rivals. By the time of Nero's reign, being of good Republican family stock wasn't enough. There were enough people around with kinship to the distant Republican families of old to have qualified half of the Empire for office. Rome was teeming with candidates.
Nero's own marriages had continued the wild multiplication of suitable candidates. He had Rufrius Crispinus, his wife Poppaea's child by her first marriage, drowned because the little boy liked to play it being general, and that was a terrifying potential threat. The system encouraged fears to which Nero was already prone, but his obsession with comets, portents of a change of ruler, and his own tendency to paranoia, which he shared with his mother, became more frenzied when he realized he was facing a bigger problem than any of his predecessors had ever known.
He was surrounded by descendants of republican families as illustrious as his own, and not only that, but the number of men who claimed direct descent from previous emperors had spiraled as the years went on. The snowball of looming candidates grew by the month.
When Nero died, the Julio-Claudian line was nearly a hundred years old, and no other was to last as long. By the time Vespasian had established the Flavians, the remnants of Republican dynasty had been almost entirely removed, either by Nero, by civil war or by retributions.
The policy of intermarriage within the ruling classes still remained and went on causing trouble, but it would take a long time to bring the number of potential rivals back to the level it reached under Nero. When Titus succeeded Vespasian in 79, he was the first natural son of an emperor to do so. His reign was brief, but again succession was smooth, this time to his brother Domitian, an absolute bastard who shared Nero's talents for cruelty and paranoia, tendencies that drove him to become the antithesis of his father and brother. He led an ugly and brutal reign of terror with rivals to be slaughtered at every turn, and nobody to be trusted. Domitian shared Nero's horrible character, but he also shared the failings of the machinery of state. Once again, the system had put the wrong man on the throne. A failure of a leader running a broken system.
In the end, the paranoia of revolt inflamed by the broken system, the lack of a successor to bolster his position and just being a massive fucking asshole accounted for Nero. He never achieved a respected and consistent image as emperor, as he craved, and died knowing that his failure was total.
He could have sacrificed some of his popularity at the end, and saved power, but perhaps he saw that future as betraying everything he personally believed in. Nero was many things, a maniac, a tyrant and certainly a major asshole, but he was also a hopeless romantic and once he saw that slipping away from him, that was the final straw. He could face losing his status as emperor, he couldn't face losing his status as an artist.