(III) 36: NERO CONSIDERS, BUT THEN RECONSIDERS, GOING ON TOUR TO EGYPT
36.1 Nec multo post omissa in praesens Achaia (causae in incerto fuere) urbem revisit, provincias Orientis, maxime Aegyptum, secretis imaginationibus agitans. dehinc edicto testificatus non longam sui absentiam et cuncta in re publica perinde immota ac prospera fore, super ea profectione adiit Capitolium.
nec multo post omissa in praesens Achaia: nec = et non, with the non negating the ablative of the measure of difference multo: ‘not by much.’ multo modifies the adverb post (‘later’, ‘afterwards’). omissa … Achaia is an ablative absolute, and in praesens another adverbial phrase of time (‘for the moment’). The sentence harks back to 34.1 where Tacitus mentioned that Nero came to Beneventum on his way to Greece, at which point the narrative took a detour with the character portrayal of Vatinius and the Silanus affair. Nero returned to the idea of touring Greece in AD 66, but the part of the Annals that would have covered the tour is unfortunately lost. Tacitus here employs very vague temporal markers (what does non multo post mean, precisely?), arguably to obfuscate that he is playing fast and loose with facts and chronology – certainly to pretend to bracket off the (displaced) rubbing out of Silanus as if merely incidental to the chief narrative thread, storming the world of song. (Before ‘revisiting’ Beneventum.)
causae in incerto fuere: fuere = fuerunt. If the assumption is correct that Tacitus made up Nero’s desire to tour Greece in AD 64 and then abandoning the plan, it hardly surprises that his reasons for not going remain obscure. At the same time, the phrase adds an air of intrigue to Nero’s alleged change of heart. Did he hear about a conspiracy? Was the affair of Torquatus more serious? Was he more alarmed by events in Neapolis than he made out? The silence of this parenthesis adds drama, certainly. And by contrast it underlines that the reasons for getting rid of Silanus were unmistakeable, however nonchalantly Nero assured us otherwise.
urbem: Usually, as here, Rome.
provincias Orientis, maxime Aegyptum, secretis imaginationibus agitans: Tacitus here gives a standard idiom a lurid twist: agitare aliquid/de aliqua re in the sense of ‘to drive at a thing in the mind, to consider, meditate upon’ often takes an ablative of place (with or without in), such as in corde, in mente, or animo. Here we get the highly suggestive secretis imaginationibus (‘in his private delusions’, ‘in his secret fancies’). The rare, ponderous, noun imaginatio, to be sure, fits the object of Nero’s obsession – in Rome’s cultural imagination the Eastern part of the Mediterranean was associated with fables and fantasies as well as an elaborate culture of performance, from drama to music. But we may wonder how Tacitus could have had evidence of the day-dreams of the emperor. As with the abandoned trip to Greece, the historiographer here adopts a stance of impossible omniscience. The trip to the Near East, though, acquired a different degree of reality: as the following sentences make clear, Nero ‘staged’, in the most public fashion, his decision both to go – and not to go.
dehinc: Like nec multo post, this word (‘then’) keeps the action racing forward, presenting us with a picture of an extremely impulsive emperor leaping from one thing to another: first Greece, then not, then considering the East, then the plan is off.
edicto testificatus: Nero announces his plans to depart for the Near East in a public edict, combining the announcement of his absence from the capital with reassurances that he would not stay long and take measures to ensure the continued well-being of the capital. In other words, he counterbalances an action that could be interpreted negatively on the part of the people (departure from Rome, to honour another city with his presence) with declaring his abiding affection and concern for the urban populace even in his absence. All of this formed part of the elaborate system of symbolic communication between the emperor and the groups that sustained his reign. At the same time, Tacitus conveys something of Nero’s egomaniac fantasizing: the imperial genius is frustrated in having to keep his talent close at home when he wants it to light up his world-empire.
non longam sui absentiam [sc. fore]: An indirect statement dependent on testificatus. This is Nero’s first reassurance to the anxious (as Nero believes) people: he will not be gone long. The sui (his own) is not grammatically necessary, but is there to underscore Nero’s realization that the people would be concerned to hear that he was going away. For a senatorial historiographer such as Tacitus, the proximity and affection between the people and the emperor would be grating. Horace, in an Ode addressed to Augustus while he was absent on campaign in Gaul, presents both the people and the senate as yearning for his return to the capital (4.5.1–8: Divis orte bonis, optime Romulae | custos gentis, abes iam nimium diu: | maturum reditum pollicitus patrum | sancto concilio, redi. || lucem redde tuae, dux bone, patriae. | instar veris enim vultus ubi tuus | affulsit populo, gratior it dies | et soles melius nitent: ‘Descended from the good divinities, excellent guardian of the Romulan race, you have been absent for too long: come back in haste as you promised the sacred council of senators. Bring back light to your country, good leader. When like springtime your face has shown upon the people, the day goes by more pleasantly and the rays of the sun shine more brightly.’) Horace’s harmonious menage à trois of princeps, senate, and people contrasts sharply with the dysfunctional relationships between these three constituencies of Roman imperial rule under Nero – as well as underscording the indispensability of the emperor’s presence in Rome.
cuncta in re publica perinde immota ac prospera fore: Tacitus endows Nero’s formulations with unintended irony: the great fire of Rome is only a paragraph away.
super ea profectione adiit Capitolium: The Capitoline Hill was the religious and ceremonial heart of the city and the empire. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus, with the associated cults of Juno and Minerva, was the focus of Rome’s official religion. There is something perverse about Nero’s visit to the Capitol: in the ‘old days’, generals on the way to wars would have gone to pray to Jupiter, and it was also on the route of the triumphal procession for victorious generals; but now Nero goes there to pray for the help of the mighty Jupiter Optimus Maximus for his theatrical trip to the East.
super ea profectione: The preposition super here as a causal sense: ‘on account of.’
36.2 illic veneratus deos, cum Vestae quoque templum inisset, repente cunctos per artus tremens, seu numine exterrente, seu facinorum recordatione numquam timore vacuus, deseruit inceptum, cunctas sibi curas amore patriae leviores dictitans.
veneratus …, cum … inisset, tremens … seu numine exterrente … seu … numquam … vacuus … deseruit inceptum: The main verb of the sentence comes at last after the long build up of participles and subordinate clauses. The syntax conveys a sense of Nero’s mounting anxiety until the breaking point, represented by the two-word clause deseruit inceptum.
veneratus deos: There were temples to many deities on the Capitoline, not just Jupiter.
Vestae … templum: The temple of Vesta was in the Roman Forum just below the Capitoline Hill. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth and the Roman family: Nero is creating the image of a father leaving his family on his travels.
repente cunctos per artus tremens: Nero’s fear manifests itself in physical symptoms. The sudden onset of Nero’s panic is made clear by repente, and the extent of it by cunctos and the vivid verb tremens.
seu … seu…: This technique of ‘alternative motivation’ is common in Tacitus.132 When he provides two reasons for an event or phenomenon, the second one given is generally the one he wishes to stress. (It tends to be the more discreditable one as well.) This is the case here. The ploy also allows him to suggest things without affirming them, to force us to make up our minds as to which is more plausible, while also pushing one option as more likely. Tacitus’ spin stands out particularly clearly if juxtaposed to the account of the incident in Suetonius’ biography (Nero 19.1): Peregrinationes duas omnino suscepit, Alexandrinam et Achaicam; sed Alexandrina ipso profectionis die destitit turbatus religione simul ac periculo. Nam cum circumitis templis in aede Vestae resedisset, consurgenti ei primum lacinia obhaesit, dein tanta oborta caligo est, ut dispicere non posset (‘He planned but two foreign tours, to Alexandria and Achaia; and he gave up the former on the very day when he was to have started, disturbed by a threatening portent. For as he was making the round of the temples and had sat down in the shrine of Vesta, first the fringe of his garment was caught when he attempted to get up, and then such darkness overspread his eyes that he could see nothing’).133 Suetonius reports an actual incident (Nero’s garment getting caught) that could be interpreted as a sign from the gods; Tacitus construes divine agency differently – he raises the possibility that they addled his brain with fear directly, i.e. without an empirical sign that others could witness (cf. numine exterrente; the formulation does not exclude the portent that Suetonius reports, but it suppresses vital information), before suggesting that the reason might be the mental disturbance caused by Nero’s prior crimes that come back to haunt him (again something that cannot be verified empirically). Put differently, Tacitus removes the incident from the sphere of empirical observation, explanation, and communication and locates it entirely in the psychology of Nero.
seu numine exterrente: Tacitus uses a (short) ablative absolute for the first option, suggesting that Nero’s fear may be due to a terrifying experience at the hands of the divine power of the temple. The implied accusative object of exterrente is eum/Neronem. The strengthened verb exterrente makes clear just how much the numen managed to frighten the emperor (if it did).
seu facinorum recordatione numquam timore vacuus: The second option is stressed by its length and its more complex syntax. The advanced position of facinorum draws attention to them as the likely cause of Nero’s sudden trembling. The litotes of numquam timore vacuus stresses the power of the frightful memories lodged in his brain. It is an arresting image: Nero, as he looks upon the images of the gods, breaking down in terror as he remembers the crimes he has committed.
facinorum: Tacitus will be thinking especially of Nero’s murder of his half-brother Britannicus in AD 55, whose drink he poisoned; of his mother Agrippina in AD 59, stabbed by his soldiers at his behest; and of the many senators whom he forced to die. (The murder of Silanus is still fresh in the mind of Tacitus’ readers and, so Tacitus suggests, also stayed fresh in the mind of the emperor.) Tacitus emphasises Nero’s fear elsewhere in the Annals. See, for instance, 14.10.1 (in the wake of the matricide): Sed a Caesare perfecto demum scelere magnitudo eius intellecta est. reliquo noctis modo per silentium defixus, saepius pavore exsurgens et mentis inops lucem opperiebatur tamquam exitium adlaturam (‘But only with the completion of the crime was its magnitude realized by the Caesar. For the rest of the night, sometimes dumb and motionless, but not rarely starting in terror to his feet with a sort of delirium, he waited for the daylight which he believed would bring his end.’).
[Extra information:
For Nero suffering from bouts of religious anxiety, see also Suetonius, Nero 46.1: Terrebatur ad hoc evidentibus portentis somniorum et auspiciorum et omnium, cum veteribus tum novis. Numquam antea somniare solitus occisa demum matre vidit per quietem navem sibi regenti extortum gubernaculum trahique se ab Octavia uxore in artissimas tenebras et modo pinnatarum formicarum multitudine oppleri, modo a simulacris gentium ad Pompei theatrum dedicatarum circumiri arcerique progressu; asturconem, quo maxime laetabatur, posteriore corporis parte in simiae speciem transfiguratum ac tantum capite integro hinnitus edere canoros (‘In addition he was frightened by manifest portents from dreams, auspices and omens, both old and new. Although he had never before been in the habit of dreaming, after he had killed his mother it seemed to him that he was steering a ship in his sleep and that the helm was wrenched from his hands; that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into thickest darkness, and that he was covered with a swarm of winged ants, and now was surrounded by the statues of the nations which had been dedicated in Pompey’s theatre and stopped in his tracks. A Spanish steed of which he was very fond was changed into the form of an ape in the hinder parts of its body, and its head, which alone remained unaltered, gave forth tuneful neighs’).]
cunctas sibi curas amore patriae leviores dictitans: amore is an ablative of comparison after the comparative leviores. Nero stressed repeatedly (note the frequentative verb dictito) that love for this country outweighed any of his other concerns. But the way that Tacitus puts the point still makes Nero appear selfish: sibi is a dative of interest, whereas cura, in the parlance of politics, refers to the diligent management of state affairs, public duties, and civic responsibilities. The use of this term here in the basic sense of ‘thought’ or ‘concerns’ is thus disconcerting (not to say perverse), especially in contrast to the effusive and emotional term amor. It points up Nero as an incompetent regent of the empire, who oscillates between selfish interests and empty gestures of affection for his people.
36.3 vidisse maestos civium vultus, audire secretas querimonias, quod tantum itineris aditurus esset, cuius ne modicos quidem egressus tolerarent, sueti adversum fortuita aspectu principis refoveri. ergo ut in privatis necessitudinibus proxima pignora praevalerent, ita in re publica populum Romanum vim plurimam habere parendumque retinenti.
This and the next two sentences are in indirect speech, reporting what Nero said.
vidisse maestos civium vultus, audire secretas querimonias: The two asyndetic phrases are well balanced: two verbs of perceiving at the beginning (vidisse, audire; see end of note for the shift from perfect to present), followed by two accusative objects, consisting of an attribute (maestos, secretas) and a noun (vultus, querimonias), with the genitive civium best understood as modifying both. Despite the placement of civium in the first phrase, the second is slightly, climactically longer in terms of syllables: 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 vs. 3 + 3 + 5. Alliteration (vidisse – vultus) adds further stylistic colour to the first phrase and homoioteleuton (-tas, -as) to the second. Such rhetorical balance is very un-Tacitean, but remember that here we are hearing Nero’s words – Tacitus imbues the speech with the sort of oratorical patterning that, for him, suggests hypocrisy. The change of tense of the infinitives is significant: the perfect vidisse tells us that the people’s faces struck him in the past, but the present audire implies that the complaints of the people are still ringing in his ears, even though they are private. That Nero is partial to what people say ‘off-record’ as it were could be open to a sinister interpretation: he has spies everywhere.
tantum itineris aditurus esset: itineris is a partitive genitive dependent on tantum. Any absence of the emperor from Rome was a potential source of disquiet for the urban populace, and Nero’s trip to Alexandria would have taken several months.
cuius ne modicos quidem egressus tolerarent: cuius, the genitive singular of the relative pronoun, refers to Nero and depends on egressus (accusative plural). The (implied) subject is the citizens. Nero, putting words into the mouths of his subjects, claims they cannot bear any absence of his: if they cannot even (ne … quidem) endure his short (modicos) absences from the city, how are they to cope with a long one? Tacitus mischievously has Nero out himself here as someone with a tendency towards immoderate actions – recall 15.23 where he portrayed the emperor as immodicus in both joy and grief.
sueti adversum fortuita aspectu principis refoveri: suetus is the perfect participle of suesco (‘accustomed’), here construed with the infinitive (refoveri). fortuita is an adjective used as a noun: it is a neuter accusative plural (‘the contingencies of life’) governed by the preposition adversum. Nero imagines the people consoled in the face of adversity by his presence. The vivid verb refoveri (literally, ‘to be warmed up again’ = ‘to be revived’) gives a sense of Nero’s warming glow for his people, and this is caused not even by his actions but merely by being seen (aspectu). (It is tempting to take refoveri as a proleptic reference to the fire – Nero sure knows how to make the city glow…)
ergo ut in privatis necessitudinibus proxima pignora praevalerent, ita in re publica populum Romanum vim plurimam habere parendumque retinenti: The indirect speech continues: after the ut-clause we first have populum Romanum as the subject accusative and habere as the infinitive verb, to which Tacitus attaches a further clause, but with a change in construction: the -que links habere and the impersonal gerundive parendum [sc. esse]. parere takes a dative object, here an (elided) ei, referring back to populum Romanum, and governing the present participle retinenti. (One has to supply the accusative object for retinere – i.e. Nero.) In all, then, Nero is saying that ‘the people, which are holding [him] back, must be obeyed.’ Nero here makes a show of modesty, conceding that even the emperor must acquiesce to the wishes of the Roman people. Arguably, Tacitus here hints at the alternative scenario that we capture in Suetonius, namely that Nero was literally ‘held back’ (if momentarily) by a divine power in the temple of Vesta when his garment was caught (see Nero 19.1, cited above). Note the pronounced p-alliteration throughout by which Tacitus links – ominously for anyone harbouring republican sentiments – the private sphere (cf. privatis, proxima, pignora, praevalerent) with the public sphere (cf. publica, populum, plurimam, parendum), implying an assimilation of the two: under bad rulers such as Nero, who did not live up to the ideal of the civilis princeps, the res publica became for all intents and purposes coextensive with the household of the emperor.
privatis necessitudinibus: ‘family obligations.’
proxima pignora: pignora, the subject of the ut-clause, here has the meaning of ‘kin’ – in the context of family obligations the closest kin has the greatest influence.
36.4 haec atque talia plebi volentia fuere, voluptatum cupidine et, quae praecipua cura est, rei frumentariae angustias, si abesset, metuenti. senatus et primores in incerto erant procul an coram atrocior haberetur: dehinc, quae natura magnis timoribus, deterius credebant quod evenerat.
haec atque talia plebi volentia fuere: volentia is the present participle in the nominative neuter plural of volo (‘matters desirable’ – plebi: to the people) and predicative complement to haec atque talia. It alliterates with voluptatum, suggesting that the people are slaves to desire.
voluptatum cupidine et, quae praecipua cura est, rei frumentariae angustias, si abesset, metuenti: Tacitus goes on to explain why the things Nero said pleased the people, linking, with et, an ablative of cause (voluptatum cupidine) and a participle with causal force (metuenti: it is in the dative since it modifies plebi). angustias is the accusative object of metuenti and the antecedent of the relative pronoun quae. Authors steeped in aristocratic ideology like Tacitus routinely mis-represent the people as motivated by base instincts and desires – a condition that Juvenal captures for ancient Rome in the pithy phrase panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’). See Satire 10.78–81:134
nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, 80
panem et circenses.
[The people that once used to bestow military commands, high office, legions, everything, now limits itself. It has an obsessive desire for two things only – bread and circuses.]
Tacitus, too, puts the emphasis on entertainment and food supply. The latter concern is expressed in much longer and more complex syntax, compared to the two words (voluptatum cupidine) dedicated to entertainment. The variatio lends more weight to the latter, not least because of the emphatic final position of metuenti, which renders it apparent that fear of corn shortage was greater than desire for games. We should note that these real reasons for the people’s anxiety about Nero’s absence bear no relation to Nero’s speech: there’s nothing here about Nero the father-figure or the consolation he gives in adversity; according to Tacitus, the people just care about being entertained and their bellies.
voluptatum cupidine: Tacitus here voices his (elitist) despair at the (perceived) pleasure-loving populace and the ease with which they are won over. The two words (desire for pleasures) are very negative words in Roman morality: cupido represents a strong lust or desire; and the plural of voluptas is a loaded word for moralising Roman historians – rather than the more neutral meaning of the singular (‘pleasure’, ‘delight’), the plural often has the idea of sensual gratification or indulgence.
praecipua cura: Rome’s huge population was dependent on corn from overseas, especially Egypt and Sicily. The populace were concerned that they be entertained, but even more so (praecipua = greatest, especial) that they be fed. Ensuring sufficient supply of free or highly subsidized grain to the urban populace was a major responsibility of the ruling élite, the designated officer, and, ultimately, the princeps. Neglect or failure could lead to riots.135
si abesset: The people feared that if he was absent, then there might be shortages in corn supply.
senatus et primores in incerto erant, procul an coram atrocior haberetur: After the plebs’ reaction, Tacitus now tells us how the upper echelons responded to Nero’s decision to remain in Rome. Their reaction is much more ambivalent, and their priorities rather different from the people’s concern with the corn supply and games. They do not wonder whether he would be better near or far, but where he would be more dreadful (atrocior), implying of course that wherever he is, far or near (procul an coram), he is a horrendous prospect. The adjective atrocior is a very strong one, implying cruelty and savagery.
procul an coram atrocior haberetur: an introduces an indirect question, specifying two alternatives (procul or coram); haberetur = to be regarded as. The subject is Nero; atrocior is a predicative complement.
dehinc, quae natura [sc. est] magnis timoribus, deterius credebant quod evenerat: Being undecided as to whether Nero’s absence or presence would result in the greater atrocities, they believed that worse which then actually happened (quod evenerat). Tacitus considers this psychological reaction a law of nature (cf. quae natura magnis timoribus). Do you agree?
(IV) 37: TO SHOW HIS LOVE FOR ROME, NERO CELEBRATES A HUGE PUBLIC ORGY THAT SEGUES INTO A MOCK-WEDDING WITH HIS FREEDMAN PYTHAGORAS
37.1 Ipse quo fidem adquireret nihil usquam perinde laetum sibi, publicis locis struere convivia totaque urbe quasi domo uti. et celeberrimae luxu famaque epulae fuere quas a Tigellino paratas ut exemplum referam, ne saepius eadem prodigentia narranda sit.
Tacitus suggests that even Nero knows deep down that the people don’t believe he chose to stay in Rome for patriotic reasons, and feels the need to win the people’s belief in his claims (fidem adquireret). The claim is made implausible, not just by his need to prove it but by the exaggerated nature of it. Nero’s use of public places for his own private purposes is ominous and foreshadows the fact that eventually, after the Great Fire, Nero will build himself an enormous mansion in the centre of the city, the so-called Domus Aurea (‘Golden House’). The emphatic position of publicis, and the arresting hyperbole of tota urbe (the whole city) being used like a private home (quasi domo) underline Nero’s abuse of Rome’s communal areas. The domus is the essence of private life, so domo is set in stark contrast to publicis locis to further stress the emperor’s usurpation of Rome for his own personal uses. Tacitus’ narrative then takes a subtle turn, gliding from a banquet staged with a specific rationale to a more general description of how Nero and his entourage carried on. He picks out the most notorious banquet (organized by Tigellinus, a freedman and Nero’s Praetorian Prefect) as an illustrative example of the public debauchery rampant in Nero’s Rome. Throughout the passage, Tacitus uses rare or unusual words or phrases to enhance the sense of exotic extravagance: see prodigentia (37.1), superpositum (37.2), tractu (37.2), abusque (37.2), crepidinibus (37.3), lupanaria (37.3), obsceni (37.3), and tenebrae incedebant (37.3). Cassius Dio, too, has a detailed description of the event (62.15):
To such lengths did Nero’s licence go that he actually drove chariots in public. And on one occasion after exhibiting a wild-beast hunt he immediately piped water into the theatre and produced a sea-fight; then he let the water out again and arranged a gladiatorial combat. Last of all, he flooded the place once more and gave a costly public banquet. 2 Tigellinus had been appointed director of the banquet and everything had been provided on a lavish scale. The arrangements made were as follows. In the centre of the lake there had first been lowered the great wooden casks used for holding wine, and on top of these, planks had been fastened, 3 while round about this platform taverns and booths had been erected. Thus Nero and Tigellinus and their fellow-banqueters occupied the centre, where they held their feast on purple rugs and soft cushions, while all the rest made merry in the taverns. 4 They would also enter the brothels and without let or hindrance have intercourse with any of the women who were seated there, among whom were the most beautiful and distinguished in the city, both slaves and free, courtesans and virgins and married women; and these were not merely of the common people but also of the very noblest families, both girls and grown women. 5 Every man had the privilege of enjoying whichever one he wished, as the women were not allowed to refuse anyone. Consequently, indiscriminate rabble as the throng was, they not only drank greedily but also wantoned riotously; and now a slave would debauch his mistress in the presence of his master, and now a gladiator would debauch a girl of noble family before the eyes of her father. 6 The pushing and fighting and general uproar that took place, both on the part of those who were actually going in and on the part of those who were standing around outside, were disgraceful. Many men met their death in these encounters, and many women, too, some of the latter being suffocated and some being seized and carried off.
What makes Tacitus’ handling of this incident special, however, is the way in which he links the orgy Nero celebrates at Rome to his abandoned plan to tour Egypt and the East. As Tony Woodman has shown in his seminal article ‘Nero’s Alien Capital: Tacitus as Paradoxographer (Annals 15. 36–7)’, Tacitus suggests throughout this paragraph that Nero has managed to turn Rome into Alexandria, a cesspool of vice and sexual license.136 By suggestively juxtaposing his report of Nero’s desire to go East and the account of an ‘eastern’ orgy celebrated by the emperor in Rome, Tacitus subliminally turns Nero into a foreign pervert, who subverts Roman standards of civilization. Put differently, ‘he others the emperor’, drawing on the prejudices about oriental cultures (and in particular Egypt) that circulated in Rome. The centre that ought to hold the empire together thus emerges as alien and rotten at its core. (The practice of suggestive juxtaposition continues in the following paragraph, where Tacitus begins his account of the great fire of Rome; in other words, he goes from moral to physical chaos, from the metaphorical to the literal ruin of the capital under Nero. The sequence strongly suggests a ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’, i.e. that the fire not only followed after Nero’s debauchery but somehow resulted from it.)
quo fidem adquireret: A purpose clause: quo = ut eo.
nihil usquam perinde laetum sibi: An indirect statement, with the verb (esse) elided. nihil is the subject accusative, laetum the predicative complement. sibi is in the dative of personal interest or reference. The adverb perinde (‘equally’, ‘to the same degree’) modifies laetum. Hence: Nero wanted to prove that ‘nothing (nihil) was ever (usquam) to the same degree welcome (perinde laetum) to him (sibi) [sc. as Rome].’
publicis locis struere convivia totaque urbe quasi domo uti: struere and uti (linked by the -que after tota) are historic infinitives (i.e. infinitives used as main verbs). They serve to quicken the pace of the narrative as Nero’s immorality spirals to new depths. The verb struere is especially interesting: whilst it is used here to mean ‘to set up’ banquets, it can often be used of ‘contriving’ or ‘plotting’ a crime. The word thus contains a hint of the sinister undercurrent to Nero’s actions: they are paving the way for future outrages. The arrangement is chiastic: verb (struere) + accusative object (convivia) :: ablative object (tota urbe) + verb (uti).
celeberrimae luxu famaque epulae fuere: The superlative celeberrimae, qualified by the negative nouns luxu and fama (both ablatives of respect; celeberrimae … fama is an ‘almost tautological expression’137), paints a lurid picture of the immorality of the banquet. More generally, banquets in Tacitus are often used as the setting of profound immorality. In Annals 14, Nero’s incest with his mother, Britannicus’ murder, and part of the plot to kill his mother all occurred against the backdrop of a banquet. The decadence and corruption of Nero’s court, of which Tacitus never ceases to remind us, make this an appropriate setting for the crimes of the regime and for demonstrations of his extravagance. Tacitus varies his vocabulary (convivia, epulae) and, with luxu (instead of the more common luxuria), chooses recherché diction to draw further attention to them and stress the number of degenerate feasts occurring.138
quas a Tigellino paratas [sc. esse] ut exemplum referam, ne saepius eadem prodigentia narranda sit. Tacitus here runs two sentences into one. Taken apart the Latin would be: celeberrimae epulae … fuere, quae a Tigellino [sunt] paratae; quas/eas ut exemplum referam… Put differently, the quas does double duty as both accusative object of referam and as subject accusative of the indirect statement dependent on referam. In English, this is impossible to reproduce and it is best to translate with two sentences: ‘the most celebrated feasts were those that were arranged by Tigellinus; these I shall describe as an example…’ Woodman notes on quas … ut exemplum referam: ‘This statement, with its combination of the noun exemplum and a first-person verb, is unique in the Annals and signals that the following description is digressive. The start of the digression is marked by Igitur (37. 2), which picks up ut exemplum referam, and its closure is marked by denique (37. 4).’139
Tigellino: Ofonius Tigellinus was prefect of the Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s bodyguard, an extremely influential position under the Caesars. Here he is presented as the architect of an appalling display of imperial decadence.
ne saepius eadem prodigentia narranda sit: One banquet will serve Tacitus as representative of the rest. This approach will save him from having to detail all the other orgies that took place under Nero: eadem intimates that Tigellinus’ banquet is nothing exceptional – though in reality, Tacitus has surely chosen an event of particular excess and debauchery. The feigned weariness in the ne-clause underscores Tacitus’ contempt (and his skill in focused, economical exposition), though he also clearly revels in relating this sort of outrage and knows what his readers want, too.
prodigentia: The word seems to be a Tacitean neologism – it occurs nowhere else in Latin literature. Its meaning here is something akin to ‘excessive extravagance or prodigality’, but its etymological affinity with prodigium (‘ominous, unnatural occurrence’, ‘portent’) also hints at monstrosity.
37.2 igitur in stagno Agrippae fabricatus est ratem, cui superpositum convivium navium aliarum tractu moveretur. naves auro et ebore distinctae; remigesque exoleti per aetates et scientiam libidinum componebantur. volucres et feras diversis et terris at animalia maris Oceano abusque petiverat.
in stagno Agrippae: The general Agrippa was one of Augustus’ closest companions and the architect of his victory at Actium. He also left his mark on the urban topography. Arguably the most famous building he sponsored was the Pantheon. The ‘Lake of Agrippa’ at issue here was a huge artificial reservoir, built on the Campus Martius in Rome, which supplied the ‘Baths of Agrippa’ with water and also served as an open-air swimming pool. The invocation of Agrippa – one of Nero’s most famous ancestors – is significant: ‘Tacitus no doubt relished pointing the contrast between the engineering of Agrippa, Nero’s own great-grand-father, and that of Tigellinus, Nero’s henchman: the one was intended for use and regular enjoyment, the other exclusively for irregular pleasures.’140
cui superpositum convivium navium aliarum tractu moveretur: The antecedent of cui is ratem. The subject of the relative clause is convivium. Tacitus says, literally, that the banquet was moving over the lake, pulled along by other ships (navium aliorum tractu).
navium … naves: A rare repetition for Tacitus, the master of variation. Here the polyptoton helps to generate a picture of the number of boats and to emphasise the diverse uses to which they were put.
naves auro et ebore distinctae: Tacitus continues to describe the physical wonder of the spectacle: the boats were ornately decorated with the most precious materials.
remigesque exoleti per aetates et scientiam libidinum componebantur: Tacitus proceeds to paint his picture: we now see the rowers, usually hardy, strong men but here characterised by the highly derogatory exoleti, the perfect passive participle of exolesco: the rowers, apparently, were male (pathic) prostitutes. They are arranged according to age (per aetates) – and their sexual expertise (scientiam libidinum). The suddenness of this revelation is a big surprise after the purely choreographic description so far! So, with extra shock-value for its unexpectedness, the moral degeneracy of the party comes full into view.
volucres et feras diversis e terris et animalia maris Oceano abusque petiverat: The subject is Tigellinus. The accusative objects volucres et feras and animalia maris are well balanced phrases that, with variation, cover animals of the air (volucres), land (feras), and sea (animalia maris). They come from far-flung and exotic habitats. Just like the phrases for the animals, those Tacitus uses for their location – diversis e terris and Oceano abusque – feature parallelism with variation: in each case, the preposition (e, abusque) that governs the ablative comes second (a phenomenon called ‘anastrophe’); many words in this sentence are highly literary or poetic, and abusque (from ab + usque) especially. As Woodman points out, Oceanoque abusque ‘is a most unusual phrase. The distance from which the creatures have been brought is underlined by the uncommon preposition abusque, which itself is further emphasized by being placed after its noun. And when Tacitus elsewhere refers to Oceanus in his own person (as opposed to in reported speech), he means a specific sea such as the English Channel or the North Sea; only here does he use Oceanus without qualification, evidently referring to the sea or great river which, according to ancient legend, encircled the world but about which even Herodotus expressed some scepticism on several occasions.’141 For the idea that all the animals are called to the cosmopolis by the blessed world-ruler’s magnetism, cf. Calpurnius Siculus 7, on Nero’s showpiece. The shepherd Corydon reports that ‘he saw every kind of beast’ (57: vidi genus omne ferarum) during games in the amphitheatre sponsored by the emperor.
37.3 crepidinibus stagni lupanaria adstabant inlustribus feminis completa et contra scorta visebantur nudis corporibus. iam gestus motusque obsceni; et postquam tenebrae incedebant, quantum iuxta nemoris et circumiecta tecta consonare cantu et luminibus clarescere.
crepidinibus stagni: crepido, stressed further by its position, is a rare word (a more prosaic synonym would be ripa) and reinforces the sense of exoticism and flamboyance of the previous sentence. One could take it as a locative or, more likely, as dative with adstabant.
lupanaria adstabant inlustribus feminis completa: lupanar, -aris n. is, as Lewis & Short coyly put it in their entry, ‘a house of ill-repute’ – or, to use the vernacular, a brothel. The disgraceful incongruity of noble women (inlustribus feminis) manning brothels sums up the total disintegration of Roman morals. The piety, chastity and virtue of the noble Roman family woman (matrona) or maiden (virgo) was an essential part of idealised Roman morality, and for noble women to be acting (in both senses…) as prostitutes is utterly appalling. Note how they appear in the midst of low, seedy vocabulary: lupanaria and, in the next sentence, scorta (‘whores’). Also, Tacitus does not simply say that there were noble women in the brothel: they were filled (completa) with them.
et contra scorta visebantur nudis corporibus: contra is here used as an adverb, not a preposition; scorta is the subject of the sentence.142 nudis corporibus, delayed emphatically to the end, paints a vivid and rude picture and completes the inversions of proper female conduct that Nero’s orgy apparently celebrated: ‘Facing each other on the banks of Agrippa’s lake were upper-class women and low-class prostitutes (37. 3). Normally the former would be parading themselves, behaviour to which inlustribus perhaps partly alludes; but scorta visebantur suggests that the feminae are indoors, as the reference to their housing implies (‘lupanaria adstabant … completa’). Conversely, the nakedness of the scorta would normally mean that they were out of sight; yet it is they who are on display (visebantur). These paradoxes and reversals lead to another. Since the scorta are naked (nudis corporibus), the suggestion is that the feminae are clothed; and, since the feminae are also inlustres, there is a contrast between their presumed haute couture and their incongruous surroundings (lupanaria).’143 Put differently, in the topsy-turvey world Nero created what ought to be out is in, what out to be in is out; what should be in sight isn’t, and what is oughtn’t.
[Extra information:
With Tacitus’ account, compare Suetonius, Nero 27.2–3, who sketches a general picture of debauchery: Epulas a medio die ad mediam noctem protrahebat, refotus saepius calidis piscinis ac tempore aestivo nivatis; cenitabatque nonnumquam et in publico, naumachia praeclusa vel Martio campo vel Circo Maximo, inter scortorum totius urbis et ambubaiarum ministeria. quotiens Ostiam Tiberi deflueret aut Baianum sinum praeternavigaret, dispositae per litora et ripas deversoriae tabernae parabantur insignes ganea et matronarum institorio copas imitantium atque hinc inde hortantium ut appelleret. indicebat et familiaribus cenas, quorum uni mitellita quadragies sestertium constitit, alteri pluris aliquanto rosaria. (‘He prolonged his revels from midday to midnight, often livening himself by a warm plunge, or, if it were summer, into water cooled with snow. Sometimes too he closed the inlets and banqueted in public in the great tank in the Campus Martius, or in the Circus Maximus, waited on by harlots and dancing girls from all over the city. Whenever he drifted down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, booths were set up at intervals along the banks and shores, fitted out for debauchery, while bartering matrons played the part of inn-keepers and from every hand solicited him to come ashore. He also levied dinners on his friends, one of whom spent four million sesterces for a banquet at which turbans were the theme, and another a considerably larger sum for a rose dinner’).]
iam gestus motusque obsceni [sc. erant]: With the adverb iam (‘already now’, i.e. during the hours of daylight – the iam sets up the following postquam tenebrae incedebant) Tacitus moves from setting the scene to the action. A very short, punchy sentence, made more so by the ellipsis of the verb, draws our attention to what went on. The fact that the gestures and movements are the subjects of the sentence (one could have imagined Tacitus using verbs: ‘they moved and gestured…’) gives them extra impact and generates the proto-pornographic impression of impersonalized bodies in motion, an impression reinforced by the emphatic, final position of obsceni.
quantum iuxta nemoris et circumiecta tecta consonare cantu et luminibus clarescere: The subjects of the sentence are quantum and circumiecta tecta; nemoris is a partitive genitive dependent on quantum; iuxta is here used adverbially (‘in close proximity’); the verbs are the historic infinitives consonare and clarescere. Stylistic features abound, conveying a sense of the sound level of the raucous party throughout Nero’s movie-set pleasure park: note the song-like rhyme in circumiecta tecta, the c-alliteration circumiecta – consonare – cantu – clarescere, and the chiasmus (a) consonare (b) cantu (b) luminibus (a) clarescere. Tacitus reflects the sound and light of the party, its over-extravagance and ornateness, in his verbal design.
37.4 ipse per licita atque inlicita foedatus nihil flagitii reliquerat quo corruptior ageret, nisi paucos post dies uni ex illo contaminatorum grege (nomen Pythagorae fuit) in modum sollemnium coniugiorum denupsisset. inditum imperatori flammeum, missi auspices, dos et genialis torus et faces nuptiales, cuncta denique spectata quae etiam in femina nox operit.
With ipse, Tacitus introduces a shift in focus. So far, he has adopted a panoramic survey approach towards recording what happened at the party; now he zooms in on the emperor. After conveying a general sense of the proceedings, we get a detailed, close-up look at what Nero himself got up to. Apparently, the emperor indulged his depraved appetites without inhibition at the party, a factoid that Tacitus uses as a foil for something even more obscene, an account of his mock-marriage to Pythagoras. Nero’s erotic license also attracted the attention of other writers. Suetonius, for instance, devotes two full chapters of his biography to the sexual transgressions of the emperor (28–29), including the tid-bit that Nero, when his aptly named freedman Doryphorus (Greek for the ‘Spear-bearer’ – Suetonius’ equivalent to Tacitus’ Pythagoras), ‘finished him off’ on his ‘wedding night’ went so far as ‘to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered.’ Tacitus’ reticence contrasts (favourably?) with the sensationalist gusto of the biographer who lovingly dwells on each unsavoury detail. Whereas Nero (and his biographers) glory in letting it all hang out, Tacitus abides by the principle, enshrined in his own name [Tacitus ~ tacitus = the perfect passive participle of taceo, ‘I make no utterance, am silent, say nothing’], that some stuff is best shrouded in the veils of narrative obscurity. Put differently, Suetonius strips, Tacitus teases.144
per licita atque inlicita: Neronian vice covers the entire spectrum of possibilities, but Tacitus uses an oxymoron to articulate the comprehensive nature of his debauchery. In principle, it is difficult to defile oneself per licita, but Nero somehow manages the impossible. Conversely, Tacitus intimates that in Nero’s perverse indulgence in public disgrace, even otherwise sanctioned forms of erotic activity become filthy and hideous.
foedatus: A very strong and ugly verb, suggesting how utterly Nero disgraced himself and sullied any sense of public morals.
nihil flagitii reliquerat: flagitii is a partitive genitive dependent on nihil. The pronounced hyperbole again makes clear Nero’s degeneracy, suggesting that Nero saw this party as an opportunity to debase himself and made sure he left nothing out.
quo corruptior ageret: The antecedent of quo is nihil; quo is an ablative of means or instrument; corruptior is an adjective used instead of an adverb: ‘through which he could have acted with greater depravity.’
paucos post dies: We move on from the party to its aftermath. As in 37.2 Tacitus uses anastrophe, with the preposition post-poned. The link involves the personnel – Pythagoras was among the perverted crowd that participated in the banquet of Tigellinus (uni ex illo contaminatorum grege). It is important to note, however, that the marriage was not part of the banquet. Put differently, Tacitus has his cake and eats it too: at the beginning of the chapter, he announced that he would pick out a particular egregious instance of Nero’s debauchery exempli gratia – so as not to be compelled to cover the same stuff over and again (the implication being, of course, that Nero was a serial offender). At the same time, he indulges in the creative license to link up temporally distinct (but thematically related) episodes – in defiance of the annalistic principle. This condensation of material ensures that within this paragraph Tacitus reaches unprecedented heights on the imperial scandalometer.
uni … in modum sollemnium coniugiorum denupsisset: Tacitus keeps his narrative dynamic and enthralling as we move from a general description, to a view of Nero specifically in that general setting, and now finally to a specific event. From a Roman point of view, Nero’s same-sex marriage forms a shocking climax to the depravities committed during Tigellinus’ banquet. Delivering on the heralded ‘licit-and-illicit’ headline, the emperor of Rome participates in a mockery of the sacred rite of marriage, and the perversion of this ancient ceremony is emphasised by the technical term for ‘real’ marriage, coniugiorum, and the adjective sollemnium. But the real shocker comes at the end: the verb denubo is specifically used of a woman marrying a man – so Nero is the bride here. It is therefore a savage comment on Nero’s inversion of everything natural and normal (with acid overtones of his being the passive sexual partner). (In the cultural imaginary of ancient Rome, the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ was of far greater importance than the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual.)
ex illo contaminatorum grege: This refers to the perverts, who like the rowers and whores, fill the party. The illo adds a note of scorn and also presents them as infamous in Nero’s reign. The word grex usually denotes animals, and thus dehumanises the men and emphasises their degeneracy. Finally, the powerfully pejorative adjective contaminatorum stresses the moral pollution of these men. The memorable and scything phrase sums up the company Nero kept: it is a paraded on-the-nail quotation from Horace’s famous ‘Cleopatra Ode’ (Ode 1.37.6–10):145
… dum Capitolio
regina dementis ruinas
funus et imperio parabat
contaminato cum grege turpium,
morbo virorum.
[… while the queen | was plotting mindless ruin for the | Capitoline and an end to Empire, | among her pervert company of disease- | polluted ‘males.’]
As Tony Woodman explains, this allusion to Horace clinches Tacitus’ subliminal transformation of Rome into Alexandria: ‘Horace was referring to the eunuchs who were conventionally associated with Egypt in the ancient world; and in his ode their leader, being a woman (regina), is an appropriate analogue to Nero, who in his wedding to Pythagoras adopts the female role. Yet Cleopatra was not only a woman but queen of, precisely, Alexandria.’146 The allusion, then, achieves an identification of malicious ingenuity: Nero is Cleopatra, the king of Rome has turned into the queen of Egypt.147 There is a further, sinister dimension to the Horatian intertext. His poem is, after all, a victory ode that celebrates a Roman triumph over an alien queen who tried to reduce Rome to ruins. Yet especially with the account of the fire coming up, Tacitus strongly implies that Nero succeeded where Cleopatra failed – Rome, in Horace’s words, has become ‘polluted’, an empire has indeed come to ‘an end.’ We are, in other words, faced with another inversion, this time at the literary level: whereas Horace, writing under Augustus, composed a victory ode of joy, relief, and celebration that, in exorcising a threat from the East, looks forward to a bright future, Tacitus’ narrative, which here chronicles the crimes of the last scion of the dynasty, who undoes or even reverses Augustus’ victory of West over East, offers an obituary on Julio-Claudian Rome, which collapses in onto itself: in a monstrous spectacle of imperial history returning to its beginnings, Nero is Augustus, Antony, and Cleopatra all in one.
nomen Pythagorae fuit: The name is Greek, conjuring ideas of effeminacy, homosexuality and loose morality. He is almost certainly also a eunuch – and a dreadful bringdown of a parodic return to life for the metempsychosis (and triangle and vegetarianism) guru.
flammeum … auspices … dos … genialis torus … faces nuptiales: All the ritual elements of genuine marriage are there in this disgraceful sham of a wedding, and Tacitus, by using the technical language of weddings, wants us to dwell on how totally Nero perverted the sacred ceremony:148
- The flammeum was the orange veil worn by the bride at her wedding (again, note that Nero assumes the female role).
- An auspex was a priest who foretold the future by observing the flight of birds. Auspices were sent to take their reading as part of the Roman wedding ceremony to gage the future prospects of the couple.
- The bride’s dowry (dos) was officially transferred as part of the service.
- The bride and groom’s marriage bed (torus genialis), on which the marriage would be consummated and which was a symbol of their union, was on prominent display during the ceremony.
- The wedding procession was accompanied by torch-bearers carrying the wedding torches (faces nuptiales), further symbols of wedlock.
inditum imperatori flammeum: Tacitus deliberately refers to Nero not by his name but by his most military title, imperator (‘emperor’, ‘commander’). The appalling incongruity of this title inserted strategically in-between inditum … flammeum (the word-order enacts the covering of the emperor in the bridal veil), brings dramatically and graphically to life Nero’s distortion of both his office and the ceremony of wedlock. And his passive role in this play for today. Nero allegedly takes on a much more active role in the following chapter, which contains Tacitus’ account of the fire of Rome – and Tacitus makes the connection via a verbal link: ‘Nero’s flammeum provides both a verbal and visual harbinger for the flammae that will sweep through the city of Rome in the next chapter (15.38.2).’149
dos et genialis torus et faces nuptiales: The asyndeton of the previous two phrases, both containing verbs, turns into polysyndeton here, combined with the absence of any verb at all: this speeds up the list of sacred objects of marriage, which now pile up as Tacitus fires out the items Nero profaned. The perfect symmetry of the chiasmus (a) genialis (b) torus (b) faces (a) nuptiales, which features two adjectives meaning ‘of marriage’ in prominent position, brings details of the ceremonial part of the wedding to a mocking end – before Tacitus proceeds to recount its consummation.
cuncta denique spectata quae etiam in femina nox operit: Tacitus refers to the act of consummation. The culmination of a genuine wedding service came at night, when the bride was undressed by fellow women who had only ever had one man (univirae), before the groom was brought in and the marriage consummated in private, while friends and family sang wedding hymns outside. But Nero ‘consummates’ his ‘marriage’ by having intercourse with his ‘groom’ Pythagoras in full view of everyone. The cuncta (everything) suggests pretty graphically that there was no modesty here.
etiam in femina nox operit: In other words even (etiam) in heterosexual weddings decency requires the cover of night for the act of consummation. In contrast, Nero turns his wedding night experience into a public spectacle. And into the bargain, the way Tacitus makes it sound, right before their very eyes s/he pulled off a wizard feat of anatomical impossibility!
Tacitus’ account of the fire of Rome can be divided as follows:
38: The outbreak of the fire and its devastation of the city
39: Nero’s return to Rome and his counter-measures
40: Control of the initial conflagration and a new outbreak
41: Assessment of the damages
The fire is the last big event in Tacitus’ account of AD 64 (Annals 15.33–47). The remainder of Book 15 (Chapters 48–74) covers the conspiracy of Piso in AD 65, which developed in part as a reaction to the rumour that Nero himself was responsible for setting the city on fire. Here is what Subrius Flavius, one of the conspiractors, allegedly said to Nero just before his execution (Annals 15.67):
‘oderam te’, inquit. ‘nec quisquam tibi fidelior militum fuit, dum amari meruisti: odisse coepi, postquam parricida matris et uxoris, auriga et histrio et incendiarius extitisti.’
[He said: ‘I hated you. No one of the soldiers was more loyal to you while you deserved to be loved. I began to hate you after you became the murder of your mother and your wife, a charioteer and actor, and an arsonist.’]
To come to terms with Tacitus’ account of the fire, it will be useful to begin by establishing some background, which we will do under the following four headings: (a) Emperors and fires in the Annals; (b) Other accounts of the Neronian fire; (c) Tacitus’ creative engagement with the urbs-capta motif; (d) Nero’s assimilation of the fire of Rome to the fall of Troy.
(a) Emperors and fires in the Annals
Tacitus mentions other significant fires elsewhere in his Annals; they had been a staple item in the city of Rome’s annual records from the year dot: but now Tacitus makes sure each time to comment on the fact that the event shaped the relation between the emperor and his subjects. These passages provide telling foils and benchmarks for the way Nero dealt with the challenge. Here is Annals 4.64 on events from AD 27 that occurred right after that collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidena (see above on 15.34.2):
Nondum ea clades exoleverat cum ignis violentia urbem ultra solitum adfecit, deusto monte Caelio; feralemque annum ferebant et ominibus adversis susceptum principi consilium absentiae, qui mos vulgo, fortuita ad culpam trahentes, ni Caesar obviam isset tribuendo pecunias ex modo detrimenti. actaeque ei grates apud senatum ab inlustribus famaque apud populum, quia sine ambitione aut proximorum precibus ignotos etiam et ultro accitos munificentia iuverat.
[The disaster had not yet faded from memory, when a fierce outbreak of fire affected the city to an unusual degree by burning down the Caelian Hill. ‘It was a fatal year, and the decision of the princeps to absent himself had been adopted despite evil omens’ – so men began to remark, converting, as is the habit of the crowd, the fortuitous into the culpable, when the Caesar checked the critics by a distribution of money in proportion to loss sustained. Thanks were returned to him; in the senate, by the noble; among the people, by a rise in his popularity: for without respect of persons, and without the intercession of relatives, he had aided with his liberality even unknown sufferers whom he had himself encouraged to apply.]
Tacitus here records a telling dynamic that also informs – mutatis mutandis – the Neronian fire. The people of Rome, he reports, are wont to ascribe responsibility for disasters to their leader, whom they charge with disregarding crucial pieces of supernatural intelligence that – so the assumption – could have averted the catastrophes if properly heeded. Tacitus, adopting the stance of enlightened and skeptical historiographer, mocks the people for positing causalities where there are none. Yet at the same time, both he (and the emperor) realize that these popular delusions about causal relationships between political and religious leadership on the one hand and general well-being or, conversely, suffering on the other are very real in their consequences. If the groundswell of negative opinion intensified, it could destabilize the political order, lead to riots, and cause a regime change (or at least a swap on top).150 Tiberius achieves a mood-swing through some swift and decisive action: a well-orchestrated, public show of concern, combined with material generosity towards all and sundry. These measures are so effective that his popularity ratings rise again. Catastrophes, then, put leaders under pressure, not least in the court of public opinion: they can either be deemed to have risen to the challenge or to have failed to meet it. Tiberius proved adept in his crisis-management. He pulled off a similar stunt towards the end of his reign. Here is Annals 6.45.1–2 (AD 36, the year before his death):
Idem annus gravi igne urbem adfecit, deusta parte circi quae Aventino contigua, ipsoque Aventino; quod damnum Caesar ad gloriam vertit exsolutis domuum et insularum pretiis. miliens sestertium in munificentia ea conlocatum, tanto acceptius in vulgum, quanto modicus privatis aedificationibus…
[The same year saw the capital visited by a serious fire, the part of the Circus adjoining the Aventine being burnt down along with the Aventine itself: a disaster which the Caesar converted to his own glory by paying the full value of the mansions and tenement-blocks destroyed. One hundred million sesterces were invested in this act of munificence, the more acceptably to the multitude as he showed restraint in building on his own behalf…]
For future reference, more specifically Tacitus’ account of the new palace that rose from the ashes of Nero’s burnt-down Rome, what is important here is the distinction between personal and public investment on the part of the emperor. Tiberius gains the respect of his subjects for using his private purse for the public’s benefit, while putting severe checks on his architectural self-aggrandizement. This approach reflects commitment to a norm that dates back to the republic. As Cicero says at pro Murena 76: odit populus Romanus privatam luxuriam, publicam magnificentiam diligit (‘the Roman people loathe private luxury but they love public grandeur’).
(b) Other accounts of the Neronian fire
Just like Tiberius in AD 27, Nero was not actually in Rome when the fire broke out. He returned to the capital to fund and oversee the relief efforts, though perhaps not as quickly as he could or should have done, at least according to popular opinion. Yet somehow, the urban rumour arose (and stuck) that Nero actually ordered the conflagration. Tacitus, as we shall see, is rather guarded on the question as to whether Nero was the culprit. Most of our other surviving sources, however, blame Nero outright. Here is Suetonius (Nero 38):
Sed nec populo aut moenibus patriae pepercit. Dicente quodam in sermone communi: ‘ἐµοῦ θανόντος γαῖα µειχθήτω πυρί’, ‘Immo’, inquit, ‘ἐµοῦ ζῶντος,’ planeque ita fecit. nam quasi offensus deformitate veterum aedificiorum et angustiis flexurisque vicorum, incendit urbem tam palam, ut plerique consulares cubicularios eius cum stuppa taedaque in praediis suis deprehensos non attigerint, et quaedam horrea circum domum Auream, quorum spatium maxime desiderabat, ut bellicis machinis labefacta atque inflammata sint, quod saxeo muro constructa erant. Per sex dies septemque noctes ea clade saevitum est ad monumentorum bustorumque deversoria plebe compulsa. Tunc praeter immensum numerum insularum domus priscorum ducum arserunt hostilibus adhuc spoliis adornatae deorumque aedes ab regibus ac deinde Punicis et Gallicis bellis votae dedicataeque, et quidquid visendum atque memorabile ex antiquitate duraverat. Hoc incendium e turre Maecenatiana prospectans laetusque ‘flammae’, ut aiebat, ‘pulchritudine’ Halosin Ilii in illo suo scaenico habitu decantavit. Ac ne non hinc quoque quantum posset praedae et manubiarum invaderet, pollicitus cadaverum et ruderum gratuitam egestionem nemini ad reliquias rerum suarum adire permisit; conlationibusque non receptis modo verum et efflagitatis provincias privatorumque census prope exhausit.
[But he showed no greater mercy to the people or the walls of his capital. When someone in a general conversation said: ‘When I am dead, be earth consumed by fire’, he rejoined ‘No, rather while I live’, and his action was wholly in accord. For under cover of displeasure at the ugliness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city so openly that several ex-consuls did not venture to lay hands on his servants although they caught them on their estates with tow and firebrands, while some granaries near the Golden House, whose room he particularly desired, were demolished by engines of war and then set on fire, because their walls were of stone. For six days and seven nights destruction raged, while the people were driven for shelter to monuments and tombs. At that time, besides an immense number of dwellings, the houses of leaders of old were burned, still adorned with trophies of victory, and the temples of the gods vowed and dedicated by the kings and later in the Punic and Gallic wars, and whatever else interesting and noteworthy had survived from antiquity. Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and exulting, as he said, in ‘the beauty of the flames’, he sang the whole of the ‘Sack of Ilium’, in his regular stage costume. Furthermore, to gain from this calamity too all the spoil and booty possible, while promising the removal of the debris and dead bodies free of cost he allowed no one to approach the ruins of his own property; and from the contributions which he not only received, but even demanded, he nearly bankrupted the provinces and exhausted the resources of individuals.]
Unlike Suetonius, who specifies a pragmatic reason for setting the city on fire, Cassius Dio identifies sheer wanton destruction as Nero’s principal motivation (62.16–18):
16 1 After this Nero set his heart on accomplishing what had doubtless always been his desire, namely to make an end of the whole city and realm during his lifetime. 2 At all events, he, like others before him, used to call Priam wonderfully fortunate in that he had seen his country and his throne destroyed together. Accordingly he secretly sent out men who pretended to be drunk or engaged in other kinds of mischief, and caused them at first to set fire to one or two or even several buildings in different parts of the city, so that people were at their wits’ end, not being able to find any beginning of the trouble nor to put an end to it, though they constantly were aware of many strange sights and sounds. 3 For there was nothing to be seen but many fires, as in a camp, and nothing to be heard from the talk of the people except such exclamations as ‘This or that is afire’, ‘Where?’ ‘How did it happen?’ ‘Who kindled it?’ ‘Help?’ Extraordinary excitement laid hold on all the citizens in all parts of the city, and they ran about, some in one direction and some in another, as if distracted. 4 Here men while assisting their neighbours would learn that their own premises were afire; there others, before word reached them that their own houses had caught fire, would be told that they were destroyed. Those who were inside their houses would run out into the narrow streets thinking that they could save them from the outside, while people in the streets would rush into the dwellings in the hope of accomplishing something inside. 5 There was shouting and wailing without end, of children, women, men, and the aged all together, so that no one could see anything or understand what was said by reason of the smoke and the shouting; and for this reason some might be seen standing speechless, as if they were dumb. 6 Meanwhile many who were carrying out their goods and many, too, who were stealing the property of others, kept running into one another and falling over their burdens. It was not possible to go forward nor yet to stand still, but people pushed and were pushed in turn, upset others and were themselves upset. 7 Many were suffocated, many were trampled underfoot; in a word, no evil that can possibly happen to people in such a crisis failed to befall them. They could not even escape anywhere easily; and if anybody did save himself from the immediate danger, he would fall into another and perish.
17 1 Now this did not all take place on a single day, but it lasted for several days and nights alike. Many houses were destroyed for want of anyone to help save them, and many others were set on fire by the very men who came to lend assistance; for the soldiers, including the night watch, having an eye to plunder, instead of putting out fires, kindled new ones. 2 While such scenes were occurring at various points, a wind caught up the flames and carried them indiscriminately against all the buildings that were left. Consequently no one concerned himself any longer about goods or houses, but all the survivors, standing where they thought they were safe, gazed upon what appeared to be a number of scattered islands on fire or many cities all burning at the same time. 3 There was no longer any grieving over personal losses, but they lamented the public calamity, recalling how once before most of the city had been thus laid waste by the Gauls. 18 1 While the whole population was in this state of mind and many, crazed by the disaster, were leaping into the very flames, Nero ascended to the roof of the palace, from which there was the best general view of the greater part of the conflagration, and assuming the lyre-player’s garb, he sang the Capture of Troy, as he styled the song himself, though to the eyes of the spectators it was the Capture of Rome.
And Pliny the Elder, too, is convinced of Nero’s guilt (Natural History 17.5, in a discussion of hugely expensive nettle trees):
duraveruntque, quoniam et de longissimo aevo arborum diximus, ad Neronis principis incendia cultu virides iuvenesque, ni princeps ille adcelerasset etiam arborum mortem.
[… and they lasted – since we have already also spoken of the limits of longevity in trees – down to the Emperor Nero’s conflagration, thanks to careful tendance still verdant and vigorous, had not the emperor mentioned hastened the death even of trees.]
The author of the Octavia (a so-called fabula praetexta or ‘historical drama’ that features Nero’s unfortunate first wife as protagonist) also blames Nero, but connects the fire with his outrageous treatment of Octavia, which happened two years earlier in AD 62 (831–33, Nero speaking):
mox tecta flammis concidant urbis meis,
ignes ruinae noxium populum premant
turpisque egestas, saeva cum luctu fames.
[Next the city’s buildings must fall to flames set by me. Fire, ruined homes, sordid poverty, cruel starvation along with grief must crush this criminal populace.]
In the light of a tradition in which Nero is the culprit plain and simple, Tacitus’ strategy is rather more subtle. He refrains from fingering Nero outright, relying instead on insinuation and a bag of further rhetorical tricks to associate the emperor with rendering his people, already adrift in a moral morass, ‘Romeless’ through the physical destruction of the capital. The most conspicuous ploy concerns his manipulation of the so-called urbs-capta topos, to which our last two sections are dedicated.
(c) Tacitus’ creative engagement with the urbs-capta motif
The urbs-capta topos refers to the rhetorical representation of a city captured and destroyed by enemy forces.151 The Rhetorica ad Herennium, an anonymous handbook on rhetoric from the first century BC, uses the topos as one of his examples to illustrate ‘vivid description’ (4.39.51):152
Nam neminem vestrum fugit, Quirites, urbe capta quae miseriae consequi soleant: arma qui contra tulerunt statim crudelissime trucidantur; ceteri qui possunt per aetatem et vires laborem ferre rapiuntur in servitutem, qui non possunt vita privantur; uno denique atque eodem tempore domus hostili flagrat incendio, et quos natura aut voluntas necessitudine et benivolentia coniunxit distrahuntur; liberi partim e gremiis diripiuntur parentum, partim in sinu iugulantur, partim ante pedes constuprantur. Nemo, iudices, est qui possit satis rem consequi verbis nec efferre oratione magnitudinem calamitatis.
[For none of you, fellow citizens, fails to see what miseries usually follow upon the capture of a city. Those who have borne arms against the victors are instantly slain with extreme cruelty. Of the rest, those who by reason of youth and strength can endure hard labour are carried off into slavery, and those who cannot are deprived of life. In short, at one and the same time a house blazes up by the enemy’s torch, and they whom nature of free choice has joined in the bonds of kinship or of sympathy are dragged apart. Of the children, some are torn from their parents’ arms, others murdered on their parents’ bosom, still other violated at their parents’ feet. No one, men of the jury, can, by words, do justice to the deed, nor reproduce in language the magnitude of the disaster.]
And here is Quintilian’s take, Institutio Oratoria 8.3.67–69:153
Sic et urbium captarum crescit miseratio. Sine dubio enim qui dicit expugnatam esse civitatem complectitur omnia quaecumque talis fortuna recipit, sed in adfectus minus penetrat brevis hic velut nuntius. At si aperias haec, quae verbo uno inclusa erant, apparebunt effusae per domus ac templa flammae et ruentium tectorum fragor et ex diversis clamoribus unus quidam sonus, aliorum fuga incerta, alii extremo complexu suorum cohaerentes et infantium feminarumque ploratus et male usque in illum diem servati fato senes: tum illa profanorum sacrorumque direptio, efferentium praedas repetentiumque discursus, et acti ante suum quisque praedonem catenati, et conata retinere infantem suum mater, et sicubi maius lucrum est pugna inter victores. Licet enim haec omnia, ut dixi, complectatur ‘eversio’, minus est tamen totum dicere quam omnia.
[This too is how the pathos of a captured city can be enhanced. No doubt, simply to say ‘the city was stormed’ is to embrace everything implicit in such a disaster, but this brief communiqué, as it were, does not touch the emotions. If you expand everything which was implicit in the one word, there will come into view flames racing through houses and temples, the crash of falling roofs, the single sound made up of many cries, the blind flight of some, others clinging to their dear ones in a last embrace, shrieks of children and women, the old men whom an unkind fate has allowed to live to see this day; then will come the pillage of property, secular and sacred, the frenzied activity of plunderers carrying off their booty and going back for more, the prisoners driven in chains before their captors, the mother who tries to keep her child with her, and the victors fighting one another wherever the spoils are richer. ‘Sack of a city’ does, as I said, comprise all these things; but to state the whole is less than to state all the parts.]
The parallels between Quintilian’s recommendations in particular of how to speak about a city captured and Tacitus’ account of the fire of Rome are remarkable: they underscore the highly rhetorical (and hence conventional) nature of such descriptions. But Tacitus gives this material an interesting and innovative twist: he turns the fire from an instrument into the primary agent of destruction. In his narrative, it becomes a personified force that assaults the city of Rome like an external foe, reducing it to ashes and causing the same kind of human suffering as an enemy army.154
(d) Nero’s assimilation of the fire of Rome to the fall of Troy
Now the archetype of ‘the captured city’ was none other than Troy, the sack of which stands behind the use of the motif – from Homer to Tacitus:155
Its diffusion is owed in large measure, I believe, to the popularity of the theme of the destruction of Troy. The popularity of that theme is attested by the various treatments of the Iliupersis [‘The Fall of Troy’] in poems of the Epic Cycle and by Stesichorus, who is credited with being the inspiration of the scene of Troy’s destruction on a Tabula Iliaca. Various scenes from the sack of Troy frequently appear on vase-paintings. Scenes from the sack appear on the walls of Pompeian houses… The continuing popularity of the theme is indicated by Petronius’ treatment of the Halosis Troiae [‘The Capture of Troy’] (Satyricon 89); the poem, it will be remembered, is inspired by a wall-painting. Its possible relationship to Nero’s Troica (Dio 62.29.1) need not be discussed here; Nero was, however, alleged to have sung of the Troianum excidium during the fire of Rome (Tac. Ann. 15.39). … It is clear that the destruction of Troy and the resulting suffering and grief were firmly established as a literary and artistic theme.
Nero and Tacitus, then, stand in a tradition that stretches back to Homer – but for both the emperor and ‘his’ historiographer one account arguably surpasses all others in importance: that by Virgil in Aeneid 2. It assumes a special significance for both thematic and ideological reasons. As Richard Heinze remarks, ‘in the whole course of the narrative…, it is striking how deliberately Virgil emphasizes the burning of the city.’156 Austin observes that this thematic choice intertwines with issues in ideology by connecting the (unorthodox) emphasis on catastrophic conflagration during the sack to the apologetic subtext that runs through Aeneid 2: ‘traditionally it was only when they finally left Troy that the Greeks fired the city…, and Heinze suggests that Virgil may be following some Hellenistic source. But there is no reason why the innovation may not be Virgil’s own… And the stress laid upon the flames stresses also the uselessness of trying to serve Troy by remaining there.’157 Let us recall, after all, that we get Virgil’s account of the sack of Troy via his internal narrator Aeneas, who needs to justify why he abandoned his hometown in its greatest hour of need: the greater the destruction by fire, the less point there was for Aeneas to keep fighting, the less questionable his decision to turn tail. Within the plot of the Aeneid, of course, the phoenix fated to soar from the ashes of Troy is – Rome. The incineration of Troy in Book 2 is the radical point of departure of a teleological development that will see Rome founded as an alternative world-capital and in due course ascend to the status of Mediterranean top dog, ruling over a far-flung empire without end (or, in Jupiter’s words, a world-wide imperium sine fine: see Aeneid 1.279). The principal agent of this ‘transference of empire’ (translatio imperii) from Troy to Rome was none other than the eponymous hero of the epic, Aeneas –
the founding figure, via his son Ascanius or Iulus, of the gens Julia, to which Caesar, Augustus, and Nero also belonged. The ‘Troy connection’ – more specifically descent from Aeneas and thus divinity – already played a key role in Julius Caesar’s self-promotion long before Virgil wrote the Aeneid.158 And Virgil and Augustus together ensured that Troy acquired a central place in the imagination of imperial Rome more broadly: many events in Virgil’s literary universe stand in creative, etiological dialogue with Augustan investment in Rome’s Trojan ancestry. One of the best examples, not least for its relevance to Nero, is the so-called Game of Troy.159 Its first, legenday celebration, so Virgil recounts in Aeneid 5, happened on Sicily during the funeral games for Aeneas’ father Anchises; and he concludes his lengthy description by anticipating the future history of the Game (Aeneid 5.596–602):
hunc morem cursus atque haec certamina primus
Ascanius, Longam muris cum cingeret Albam,
rettulit et priscos docuit celebrare Latinos,
quo puer ipse modo, secum quo Troia pubes;
Albani docuere suos; hinc maxima porro
accepit Roma et patrium servavit honorem;
Troiaque nunc pueri, Troianum dicitur agmen.
[This manner of horsemanship, these contests Ascanius first revived when he surrounded Alba Longa with walls, and taught the early Latins how to celebrate them in the same way he had done as a boy and with him the Trojan youth. The Albans taught their children; from them in turn mighty Rome received and preserved the ancestral institution; and today the boys are called ‘Troy’ and the troop ‘Trojan.’]
Augustus, we learn from Suetonius, was particularly keen to sustain the tradition of the Game, following in the footsteps of Caesar (see Suetonius, Caesar 39.2) (Augustus 43.2):
Sed et Troiae lusum edidit frequentissime maiorum minorumque puerorum, prisci decorique moris existimans clarae stirpis indolem sic notescere.
[Besides he gave frequent performances of the game of Troy by older and younger boys, thinking it a time-honoured and worthy custom for the flower of the nobility to become known in this way.]
And it continued to be celebrated by his successors as well. In fact, a Game of Troy organized by Claudius provides the context for Nero’s first appearance in Tacitus’ Annals (11.11.2):
sedente Claudio circensibus ludis, cum pueri nobiles equis ludicrum Troiae inirent interque eos Britannicus imperatore genitus et L. Domitius adoptione mox in imperium et cognomentum Neronis adscitus, favor plebis acrior in Domitium loco praesagii acceptus est.
[During the presence of Claudius at the Circensian Games, when a cavalcade of boys from the great families opened the mimic battle of Troy, among them being the emperor’s son Britannicus, and Lucius Domitius, – soon to be adopted as heir to the throne and to the designation of Nero, – the livelier applause given by the populace to Domitius was accepted as prophetic.]
For our purposes, however, it is crucial to note that genealogical and etiological connections between Troy and Rome do not amount to the identity of the two cities. In fact, in the course of the Aeneid Aeneas is forced to undergo the painful process of learning to turn his back on Troy (and the past) and to pursue Rome (and the future). He does not fully grasp this until about midway through the poem. Likewise, in the final meeting between Jupiter and Juno towards the end of Aeneid 12 up in cloud-cuckoo-land, Juno only agrees to desist from further opposing destiny once Jupiter has promised her that the Roman people will bear hardly any trace of Trojan cultural identity (such as speech or dress).160 All of this is unsurprising: in a story that turns world-historical losers (the Trojans) into world-historical winners (the Romans), difference and differentiation from the catastrophic origins are just as important as legitimizing continuities.
Against this background, what happens in Tacitus’ account of the fire of Rome acquires a fascinating intertextual and ideological complexion. As other sources, Tacitus records (though without committing himself to the truth of the rumour) that Nero, when the spirit moved him to comment on the conflagration in verse, allegedly assimilated the fire of Rome to the fall of Troy (15.39): … pervaserat rumor ipso tempore flagrantis urbis inisse eum domesticam scaenam et cecinisse Troianum excidium, praesentia mala vetustis cladibus adsimulantem (‘the rumour had spread that, at the very moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage, and, assimilating the ills of the present to the calamities of the past, had sung the Destruction of Troy’). If he did, Nero would have activated a tragic outlook on Rome’s prospects of eternity that contrasts sharply with the notion of an imperium sine fine. This outlook recalls, rather, Scipio Aemilianus Minor. Greek sources report the Roman general to have been stirred into a moment of tragic reflexivity after his sack of Carthage in 146 BC, when he apparently recited two verses from the Iliad, in which Hector recognizes the inevitability of the fall of Troy (6.448–49):
ἔσσεται ἦµαρ ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαµος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋµµελίω Πριάµοιο.
[The day shall come when sacred Ilios will perish and Priam and the people of Priam with goodly spear of ash.]
Scipio here both thinks backwards in time (to Troy) as well as forward (to Rome), in anticipating the same future for Rome that Troy (and Carthage) have already suffered: destruction.161 In so doing, he clearly identifies Troy and Rome, at least from the point of view of their ultimate destiny.
His (and Nero’s) assimilation of destruction of Rome to the destruction of Troy invokes a cyclical notion of history at variance with Virgilian teleology, the phoenix rising from the ashes being reduced to it. But whereas Scipio simply ponders the ephemeral nature of human achievement at the moment of his greatest triumph, Nero’s Trojan reminiscences, especially as represented by Tacitus in the Annals, are more specific. Nero undoes the achievement of his ancestors, in particular Augustus; under his reign the success story of Julio(-Claudian) Rome that Virgil celebrated in the Aeneid unravels; he destroys the Virgilian masterplot by reducing Rome to its origins: the ashes of Troy. And he sings about it. What Nero does in verse, Tacitus does in prose. By taking his inspiration from the emperor and casting the Neronian fire in terms of a city sacked in his own narrative, arguably in oblique dialogue with the ‘Fiendfyre’ of Aeneid 2, he positions himself as an ideological antipode to Virgil’s Aeneid. If in Virgil the fall of Troy heralds the beginning of Rome and the inauguration of a history that has its positive end in Caesar and Augustus, i.e. the beginning of the Julian dynasty, in Tacitus the fire of Rome under Nero turns into a negative end to history, in which the new foundation that emerged from the ashes of Troy and found its culmination in Augustan Rome is itself reduced to rubble by the last representative of the Julio-Claudian lineage.
Chapter 38 offers ‘a splendid study of the chaos produced by calamity, and of the human suffering involved.’162 Watch Tacitus keep his camera constantly on the move across different groups, using different signifiers for this purpose: quique, alii, pars, quidam, multi etc. This creates a complex and kaleidoscopic picture, with constant and varied activity all over his canvass. Key themes include: (i) The variety of constructions, complex syntax and winding sentences, evoking confusion; (ii) Personification of the fire, especially presentation of it as an invading army; (iii) Snapshot, impressionistic looks at different groups here and there; (iv) Moments of pathos and human suffering; (v) Speed of narrative and the progression of the fire. The structure of the opening paragraph is:
38.1: Introduction and general significance
38.2: Outbreak and causes
38.3: Power of the flames
38.4–7: The humans affected
38.1 Sequitur clades, forte an dolo principis incertum (nam utrumque auctores prodidere), sed omnibus quae huic urbi per violentiam ignium acciderunt gravior atque atrocior.
sequitur clades: This very simple phrase, after the ornate language and structures of the previous passage, comes as a crashing shock, enacting the eruption of the fire. The inversion of verb (sequitur) and subject (clades) and the use of historic present make the opening highly dramatic. sequitur is also a quintessentially annalistic term, which should not obfuscate the fact that Tacitus, under the veneer of reporting events in chronological sequence, has engineered a highly effective juxtaposition. The sense of sequitur here is both temporal and causal: the fire ‘follows’ the abominations, but also ‘follows from’ them. The word clades points backwards as well as forwards, summing up Nero’s perversion of Rome as a preliminary step towards the full-scale destruction of the city. As Syme puts it: ‘another spectacle follows abruptly, the conflagration of the city.’ Tacitus, of course, delays specifying what the clades comprised, slipping in an almost en passant reference to fire in the relative clause. We do not actually learn when precisely the fire broke out (19 July AD 64) until 41.2.
forte an dolo principis incertum: Another classic example of Tacitean ‘alternative motivation’, not explicitly favouring one version or the other (incertum), but giving clear weight to the less reputable option (dolo principis) by placing it in the emphatic second position. We still haven’t heard what the matter at issue actually is.
nam utrumque auctores prodidere: Tacitus likes to record instances where the sources differ for a variety of reasons: (a) it shows him to be a diligent and analytic historian who takes several conflicting accounts into consideration; (b) it allows him to include colourful and dramatic yet perhaps also dubious elements under the protection of referencing other historians; and (c) it obliges us to pitch into the story and figure out what we think must have been going down.
In the light of the seemingly unanimous condemnatory tradition set out above, one also wonders which authors Tacitus refers to when reporting that opinion on Nero’s guilt was divided in the sources he consulted. This question has yet to find a satisfying answer. What is at any rate noticeable is how guarded Tacitus is in formulating the options: he does not commit himself explicitly either way.
sed omnibus quae huic urbi per violentiam ignium acciderunt gravior atque atrocior [sc. erat]: omnibus picks up clades, i.e. omnibus cladibus, and is the antecedent of quae. Rome had suffered many fires in its history, as its location, layout and closely packed, frequently wooden buildings left it highly vulnerable. This Great Fire was remarkable only for the scale of its devastation. The hyperbaton of omnibus (an ablative of comparison dependent on gravior atque atrocior) emphasises the pre-eminent power of this fire, while huic helps to make the event more vivid for Tacitus’ Roman readers – ‘this city of ours.’ Tacitus has already pulled out all the superlative stops in Histories 3.71–72 for the disaster of disasters, arson in civil war of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter (see below).
38.2 initium in ea parte circi ortum quae Palatino Caelioque montibus contigua est, ubi per tabernas, quibus id mercimonium inerat quo flamma alitur, simul coeptus ignis et statim validus ac vento citus longitudinem circi corripuit. neque enim domus munimentis saeptae vel templa muris cincta aut quid aliud morae interiacebat.
initium … ortum [sc. est]: This is technically a tautology (‘the beginning began…’), and serves to give emphasis to the outbreak of the fire.
in ea parte circi … quae Palatino Caelioque montibus contigua est: The Circus Maximus was Rome’s great chariot racing track. It occupied the low land between the Palatine, Caelian and Aventine Hills (see Map of Rome). The part Tacitus refers to here is the south east corner of the Circus, in the vicinity of the Porta Capena.
ubi tabernas, quibus id mercimonium inerat quo flamma alitur: There was a huge mall of shops (tabernas) in the arches of the tiered seats of the Circus. The rare word mercimonium (wares) is an archaism, there for variation and interest as usual but also perhaps evoking the creaking old shops where the fire started. In addition, the flames are personified (not for the last time in this description): quo flamma alitur provides the image of the fire greedily devouring the flammable goods.
simul coeptus [sc. est] ignis et statim validus ac vento citus longitudinem circi corripuit: The two adverbs simul and statim make clear the immense speed with which the fire took hold. The fire’s progression is rapid, from beginning (coeptus), to immediately gaining strength (validus) and speed (citus) to engulfing (corripuit) huge areas. The alliterations (simul, statim; coeptus, citus, circi, corripuit; validus, vento) help to stress the fire’s speedy growth.
neque enim domus munimentis saeptae [sc. sunt] vel templa muris cincta [sc. sunt] aut quid aliud morae interiacebat: A list of three architectural elements which might have stopped the fire: large houses surrounded by walls, temples with a precinct, or – anything else. The polysyndeton helps to underscore the absence of anything that could have stopped the roaring inferno. Tacitus combines parallelism with variation: domus munimentis saeptae and templa muris cincta are virtually identical in construction, but the last colon of the tricolon breaks the pattern, setting aside measured and systematic exposition for a comprehensive expression of despair. quid aliud morae (morae being a partitive genitive dependent on quid aliud) suggests how utterly conducive this part of Rome was to fire.
domus … templa: Miller explains the architectural significance of the absence of large residences and temples in this area of the city: ‘self-contained houses, and temples, would have had walled grounds which might have stopped the flames: instead, there were only insulae (41,1), blocks of flats crowding narrow streets, which caught and spread the fire.’163
38.3 impetu pervagatum incendium plana primum, deinde in edita adsurgens et rursus inferiora populando, antiit remedia velocitate mali et obnoxia urbe artis itineribus hucque et illuc flexis atque enormibus vicis, qualis vetus Roma fuit.
The first part of the sentence (from impetu to remedia) traces the path of the conflagration, marked by the sequence primum – deinde – rursus, and fizzing on through impetus-incendium-in-edita-inferiora. The subject is incendium. The two main verbs are pervagatum (sc. est) with plana as accusative object and antiit with remedia as accusative object. In between comes the present participle adsurgens linked by et with the gerund populando. The second part of the sentence (velocitate … fuit) specifies the reasons why the fire could spread so quickly. Here Tacitus links an ablative of cause (velocitate mali) with an ablative absolute of causal force (obnoxia urbe), to which he attaches two further ablatives of cause (artis itineribus hucque et illuc flexis; enormibus vicis).
impetu: An ablative of manner, which amounts to more personification of the fire, and the first of several instances where it is presented as an assaulting army. The emphatic position here also draws our attention to this highly significant word. Its significance is manifold: (a) the metaphor of the fire as a sack of the city increases the drama and engages the reader in the savagery of the blaze; (b) Tacitus complained (very pointedly) at Annals 4.33 that such is the era he is writing about that he cannot write about great wars and battles but rather immorality and infighting: here he uses the fire to give outlet for the sort of narrative excitement usually reserved for war; (c) the idea of the city being sacked (it hadn’t been sacked by an army since 390 BC) also raises questions about how low Rome had sunk under Nero.
pervagatum … plana primum: Further personification – the verb pervagor usually means ‘to range over’ or ‘rove about’, with the per-prefix conveying the breadth of its spread and the alliteration adding further emphasis and colour.
plana primum … deinde in edita … rursus inferiora: The up-and-down, hither-and-thither surging of the uncontrollable fire is made very clear here with these simple phrases and the adverbs (first… then… again). As the following sentence makes clear, it thereby follows the narrow streets in this part of the city (cf. especially hucque et illuc flexis).
populando: More military personification: this verb means ‘to plunder’ and is usually used of troops ravaging enemy land.
antiit remedia: An emphatically placed verb for emphasis on the fire’s speed and irresistibility. The word remedia is also a subtle medical metaphor, characterising the fire as an incurable disease.
artis itineribus hucque et illuc flexis atque enormibus vicis: The syntax here enacts the sense of the winding alleys of old Rome, their narrowness (artis), irregularity (enormibus) and winding nature (hucque et illuc flexis); the periphrastic hucque atque illuc flexis suggests the weaving back-streets; and the polysyndeton (-que … et … atque) keeps the sentence flowing onwards and adds to the labyrinthine impression.
qualis vetus Roma fuit: Of course Tacitus’ readers, very few of whom would even vaguely have remembered pre-fire Rome, would be used to the more regimented building patterns which became the norm after this disaster. In fact, much of the Rome Tacitus knew was of Nero’s creation; but Tacitus, as John Henderson reminds us, here also stands in dialogue with his historiographical predecessors: as he will go on to rub in (below), many readers would have been familiar with the historian Livy’s (59 BC – AD 17) account of the rebuilding of Rome after near-total destruction by the Gauls, a nostalgic evocation of the citizens’ higgledy-piggledy but faultlessly communitarian reconstruction work that draws to a close his first pentade and Rome down to Camillus, the ‘august’ saviour (and precursor for Augustus). Tacitus’ phrase here virtually signals the intertextual reference.164
38.4 ad hoc lamenta paventium feminarum, fessa aetate aut rudis pueritiae, quique sibi quique aliis consulebat, dum trahunt invalidos aut opperiuntur, pars mora, pars festinans, cuncta impediebant.
With ad hoc, Tacitus moves from the physical destruction to the human cost.
lamenta paventium feminarum, fessa aetate aut rudis pueritiae: More pronounced variatio from Tacitus: first a noun/genitive combination (lamenta paventium feminarum – ‘lamentations of frightened women’), then an ablative of quality (fessa aetate – ‘[those] of feeble age’), and finally a genitive of quality (rudis pueritiae – ‘[those] of tender childhood’). This syntactical variety helps to create interest, but also conveys a sense of the confusion and panic. Tacitus here focuses on the physically weaker and more vulnerable inhabitants (women, the old, children) in just the same way as he might describe the victims of a military attack on the city. This is pathos writ large.
quique sibi quique aliis consulebant: The anaphora quique … quique… and polar contrast sibi … aliis (‘themselves… others’) underlines how all groups, selfish and altruistic, were contributing to the mayhem.
dum trahunt invalidos aut opperiuntur: trahunt and opperiuntur form another polar contrast.
pars mora, pars festinans: mora (an instrumental ablative) and the circumstantial participle festinans form yet another polar contrast, further enhanced by the anaphora of pars and the asyndeton. The overall picture is one of panic.
cuncta impediebant: After a long and twisting sentence revolving around contrasts, Tacitus sums it all up by blurring the distinctions – a ploy that further underlines the scale of the mayhem.
38.5 et saepe dum in tergum respectant lateribus aut fronte circumveniebantur, vel si in proxima evaserant, illis quoque igni correptis, etiam quae longinqua crediderant in eodem casu reperiebant.
The sentence begins with another conjunction, piling on more information about the panic. An arresting image follows: as people look behind them, the fire surrounds them to their front and side. The mention of all three directions (tergum … lateribus … fronte) in close succession, summarised by the verb circumveniebantur, depicts the fire all around these poor incinerated people.
si in proxima evaserant, illis quoque igni correptis: More language from the battle field: the vain efforts and hopelessness of fleeing from the fire is conveyed by the clause si … evaserant, which suggests a successful escape, followed immediately by the fact that there was no safety even in the neighbouring districts (proxima), given the merciless pursuit of the fire.
etiam quae longinqua crediderant in eodem casu reperiebant: The subject of reperiebant is an (elided) ea, which is also the antecedent of the relative pronoun quae. The fire was everywhere: Tacitus’ point here is that, whilst it might not be surprising that nearby neighbourhoods (proxima) are consumed by the fire, in this great fire even (etiam) districts which people believed to be far away from the fire (longinqua) are engulfed.
38.6 postremo, quid vitarent quid peterent ambigui, complere vias, sterni per agros; quidam amissis omnibus fortunis, diurni quoque victus, alii caritate suorum, quos eripere nequiverant, quamvis patente effugio interiere.
quid vitarent quid peterent ambigui: The anaphora, asyndeton, polar verbs, and delayed ambigui underline the utter bewilderment of the citizens who do not know which way to turn.
complere vias, sterni per agros: The historic infinitives complere and sterni, juxtaposed asyndetically, increase the pace of the narrative as the people take desperate action. complere implies a vast number of victims pouring into the streets, whereas sternere is another word often used in military contexts of ‘laying someone low’ or ‘razing cities.’ As John Henderson reminds us, in the human tragedy of the moment we ought not to forget the last pulsating throng that populated this very same cityscape but a chapter ago: struere … completa, 37.1, 3).
quidam amissis omnibus fortunis, diurni quoque victus, alii caritate suorum, quos eripere nequiverant, quamvis patente effugio interiere: The sentence begins with a bipartite structure that in the end converges in a picture of death fraught with pathos. We get:
Two subjects, juxtaposed asyndetically:
- quidam
- alii
Two ablatives, one an ablative absolute with causal force, the other an ablative of cause:
- amissis omnibus fortunis (followed by the further specification in the genitive to stress their appalling plight: diurni quoque victus/‘even of the daily bread’ or ‘down to the last penny’)
- caritate suorum, quos eripere nequiverant
Another, concessive ablative absolute that applies to both groups:
- quamvis patente effugio
The main verb:
- interiere
Overall, the picture we end on is deeply moving – men refusing to abandon their loved ones even if they could not be saved. The final phrase quamvis patente effugio interiere is the most emotional as they refuse the option to save themselves. The last word īntĕrĭērē has a poetic rhythm (scanning like the fifth and sixth foot of a hexametric line), bringing the searing scene to a climax with death.
38.7 nec quisquam defendere audebat, crebris multorum minis restinguere prohibentium, et quia alii palam faces iaciebant atque esse sibi auctorem vociferabantur, sive ut raptus licentius exercerent seu iussu.
Tacitus now returns to the possibility that the fire began as arson; but again he refuses to take an unequivocal line. After the main sentence (nec … audebat), he again continues with two different constructions indicating cause: an ablative of cause (minis) and a quia-clause.
defendere: The verb reinforces the impression that the fire acts like a hostile army bidding to sack the city.
(a) crebris (b) multorum (a) minis restinguere (b) prohibentium: The word-order is interlaced here: crebris goes with minis, multorum with prohibentium.
et quia alii palam faces iaciebant atque esse sibi auctorem vociferabantur: Tacitus first stresses the shamelessness of these men with palam, before finishing his account of the fire as he began it – with suggestion of a sinister and deliberate hand behind this disaster. The unnamed auctorem (instigator, mastermind) lends an air of supernatural mystery and suspicion.
sive ut raptus licentius exercerent seu iussu: Tacitus concludes with an ‘alternative motivation’, pondering the reality of Nero’s hand in the whole disaster. He first mentions the possibility that looting was the cause (as it surely was to some extent), before adding the succinct, yet vague and ominous alternative seu iussu. The ablative of cause, rather than the purpose clause ut … exercerent, continues to linger in the mind.
39.1 Eo in tempore Nero Antii agens non ante in urbem regressus est quam domui eius, qua Palatium et Maecenatis hortos continuaverat, ignis propinquaret. neque tamen sisti potuit quin et Palatium et domus et cuncta circum haurirentur.
After his protestations of devotion to the city in chapter 36, it is not to Nero’s credit that he is not in Rome at the time of the fire but staying in his luxury villa at Antium. As we saw earlier (15.23), Antium was the town of Nero’s birth. While it does perhaps support the idea that Nero was not responsible for the fire, his nonchalance contrasts sharply with the efforts of his predecessors. Apart from the passages cited above, see also Suetonius, Claudius 18.1: Cum Aemiliana pertinacius arderent, in diribitorio duabus noctibus mansit ac deficiente militum ac familiarum turba auxilio plebem per magistratus ex omnibus vicis convocavit ac positis ante se cum pecunia fiscis ad subveniendum hortatus est, repraesentans pro opera dignam cuique mercedem (‘On the occasion of a stubborn fire in the Aemiliana he remained in the Diribitorium for two nights, and when a body of soldiers and of his own slaves could not give sufficient help, he summoned the commons from all parts of the city through the magistrates, and placing bags full of money before them, urged them to the rescue, paying each man on the spot a suitable reward for his services’). Nor does it do Nero credit, especially after his great claims of patriotism, that he only returned when his own property (domui eius) was threatened. The emphatic position of non ante stresses that this was the only thing that motivated his return, and the delayed subject ignis propinquaret suggests he waited for the last possible minute.
qua Palatium et Maecenatis hortos continuaverat: This is the so-called Domus Transitoria: cf. Suetonius, Nero 31.1: Non in alia re tamen damnosior quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam primo transitoriam, mox incendio absumptam restitutamque auream nominavit (‘There was nothing however in which he was more ruinously prodigal than in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House’). Nero’s palace lay between the site of the traditional imperial residence, Augustus’ house on the Palatine (whence our word ‘palace’) and the great gardens of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, which he left to Augustus. The verb continuaverat exaggerates the scale of Nero’s immense crosstown palace – but also skewers Nero’s own hubristic wit in dubbing it ‘Passageway.’
neque tamen sisti potuit quin et Palatium et domus et cuncta circum haurirentur: The emphatically placed neque tamen underlines again the impossibility of controlling the blaze, and the repetition of Palatium and domus from the previous sentence emphasises that nothing could be saved. The polysyndeton et … et … et … and the alliterative cuncta circum both help to underscore the total devastation of the fire.
39.2 sed solacium populo exturbato ac profugo campum Martis ac monumenta Agrippae, hortos quin etiam suos patefecit et subitaria aedificia extruxit quae multitudinem inopem acciperent; subvectaque utensilia ab Ostia et propinquis municipiis pretiumque frumenti minutum usque ad ternos nummos.
The subject of patefecit and extruxit is Nero. patefecit takes three accusative objects, in a climactic tricolon: campum Martis, monumenta Agrippae, and hortos suos. (First we hit a public area of the city, then the building of one of Nero’s ancestors, finally his own gardens.) solacium (also in the accusative) stands in apposition to all three.
sed solacium: Tacitus changes the tone, marked by the sed, from Nero’s selfishness and failure to stop the fire to his more noble efforts at relief. His account is balanced, especially when compared to other historians of the event, presenting Nero’s suspected arson in the same breath as his great energy in trying to help. What an actor! How to tell what’s real in Nero’s world?
populo exturbato ac profugo: Tacitus conveys the misery of the citizens with the powerful and strengthened adjective exturbato (‘frightened out of their mind’) and the fact that they are homeless refugees (profugo) in their own city. Given Tacitus’ investment in aligning the fire of Rome with the sack of Troy (following in the footsteps of Nero, as the end of this paragraph makes clear), the term profugus may also gesture to Virgil’s Aeneid and the most famous profugus in Roman history, Aeneas. See Aeneid 1.2, where Aeneas is introduced as fato profugus (‘exiled by fate’).
campum Martis: The ‘Plain of Mars’ had once been the mustering and training ground for soldiers just outside the boundaries of the old city walls. By this period, it was intensively developed, especially with imperial buildings such as the Pantheon and sporting facilities. It is usually referred to as the Campus Martius (see Map of Rome).
monumenta Agrippae: Agrippa, Augustus’ right-hand man, had orchestrated much of the building on the Campus Martius, including the Porticus Vipsania, the Pantheon and the so-called Baths of Agrippa.
multitudinem inopem: This simple phrase suggests both the number of the impoverished Romans (multitudinem) and their ruin (inopem).
subvectaque utensilia: The emphatic position of the verb subvecta suggests Nero’s speedy measures.
Ostia: The port of Ostia was located on the coast at the ‘gateway’ (‘ostium’) to the Tiber south west of Rome (see Map of Italy).
pretiumque frumenti minutum usque ad ternos nummos: This is a significant step: emperors did not usually intervene to set a maximum price for corn as it damaged the ability of merchants to make profit, so this marks a real emergency. With the price of corn at the time at around five sesterces per modius (about 16 pints of dry corn), this is a significant reduction, stressed by usque ad (‘right the way down to’).165
39.3 quae quamquam popularia in inritum cadebant, quia pervaserat rumor ipso tempore flagrantis urbis inisse eum domesticam scaenam et cecinisse Troianum excidium, praesentia mala vetustis cladibus adsimulantem.
quae … popularia: quae is a connecting relative pronoun (= ea); it modifies popularia, which is an adjective used as a noun (‘these popular measures’).
quamquam: In a main clause: ‘however’
pervaserat rumor: The rumour is personified as a force of its own, wandering around (pervaserat). The inversion of normal word order (verb + subject) adds emphasis to the power of this rumour and the extent of its spread. The pluperfect indicates that the damage had already been done.
rumor: Interestingly, it is again only Tacitus of the extant historians who reports that this was only a rumour: the others cheerfully record it as a fact. See Suetonius, Nero 38 and Dio 62.18.1, both cited above.
inisse eum domesticam scaenam et cecinisse Troianum excidium: An indirect statement dependent on rumor, with eum as subjective accusative and inisse and cecinisse as infinitives (note their front position and rhyme). This is where one of the most famous stories of Roman history comes from – Nero fiddling as Rome burns. Whatever its veracity (not counting the violin!), the plausibility of the rumour feeds on Nero’s notorious obsession with dramatic performances.
domesticam scaenam: This harks back to 15.33, where Tacitus reports on Nero’s desire to appear on stage before a larger public, in venues other than his house. This particular performance here, if it ever happened, took place within the confines of Nero’s palace. There are no eye-witnesses Tacitus can rely on. So he reports a rumour – true to life, in the case of most such catastrophes?
Troianum excidium: The sack of the mighty city of Troy (on the western seaboard of modern Turkey) by the Greeks was one of the defining events of ancient mythology, told at length (above all) by Virgil in Aeneid 2. Nero opts for the grandest possible comparandum and must hint at the Trojan origins of Rome.
praesentia mala vetustis cladibus adsimulantem: The fact that Nero himself compared the fire to a (in fact the) military sack helps Tacitus’ own subtle presentation of the fire as a battle. As our introduction to the section on the fire has tried to make clear, the rumour of Nero conflating in song Troy and Rome plays right into Tacitus’ hands, enabling him to represent Nero, the last scion of the Julio-Claudian imperial lineage, as the ‘anti-Augustus’ of the principate: what started at Troy and climaxed with Augustus (as chronicled by Virgil) comes to an end with Nero (as chronicled by Tacitus).
40.1 Sexto demum die apud imas Esquilias finis incendio factus, prorutis per immensum aedificiis ut continuae violentiae campus et velut vacuum caelum occurreret. necdum positus metus aut redierat plebi spes: rursum grassatus ignis, patulis magis urbis locis; eoque strages hominum minor, delubra deum et porticus amoenitati dicatae latius procidere.
sexto demum die: The fire lasted six days before it was extinguished. demum (‘at last’) suggests both the real length of the fire, and also how long the misery must have seemed.
apud imas Esquilias: The Esquiline hill was another of Rome’s seven hills to the east of the city (see Map of Rome).
finis incendio factus, prorutis per immensum aedificiis: The phrase finis incendio factus, with its alliterative paronomasia (finis ~ factus) and its sequence of light and dark vowels, including all five (i, i, i, e, i – o, a, u), conveys a (premature) sense of closure. Through the demolition of buildings and clearance of the rubble, the fire was deprived of fuel. prorutis … aedificiis is an ablative absolute. The emphatic adverbial phrase with preposition per immensum (‘over a vast area’) makes clear the enormous scale of the demolitions, which razed large sections of the city to the ground.
ut continuae violentiae [sc. ignium or incendii] campus et velut vacuum caelum occurreret: continuae violentiae is in the dative singular (with occurreret). The description of the city as a campus (‘plain’) suggests the utter eradication of buildings, as does the self-proclaimed hyperbole velut vacuum caelum, which evokes the desolation of the Roman skyline. (continua violentia recalls and replaces continuaverat, said of endless palace of Nero in 39.1.) Tacitus here mixes c- and v-alliteration (continuae, campus, caelum; violentiae, velut, vacuum), but does so indiscriminately across the two themes of ‘conflagration’ and ‘counter-measures.’ The emphatic position of continuae violentiae also conveys the constant threat of the fire.
necdum positus [sc. erat] metus aut redierat plebi spes: The text is corrupt here, and based on conjecture. Some editors prefer to read levis instead of plebi. It seems reasonably certain, however, that we are dealing with the expression of the same thought in two opposite ways (‘still fear, no hope’), in each case with the verb coming first. The sentence stresses the despair that prevailed in the populace, with the elusive spes placed emphatically at the end.
rursum grassatus [sc. est] ignis patulis magis urbis locis: The verb (grassatus), once more placed first, is a very strong and evocative one, again personifying the fire in dramatic fashion: its basic meaning is ‘to press on, march, advance’, but it can also refer to brigands prowling around in the search for victims and carries connotations of lawlessness and violence. An inscription to commemorate the fire says VRBS PER NOVEM DIES ARSIT NERONIANIS TEMPORIBVS (‘the city burned for nine days in Neronian times’).166 If the first fire was six days in duration, this implies the second blaze lasted three days. After finis, prorutis, and aedificiis, we now get five words in a row ending in -is: a striking series of thudding homoioteleuta. patulis … locis is an ablative of place: this time it is the more open areas rather than the congested parts which burn.
eoque strages hominum minor [sc. erat]: The -que links grassatus [est] and [erat]. eo is an ablative of the measure of difference (‘to the extent to which’) that helps to coordinate the two comparatives minor and latius. The more open areas enabled people to avoid the flames better. The strong word strages (‘slaughter’, ‘carnage’) reminds us of the damage done by the first conflagration; and given the number of casualties then, the fact that the second fire cost fewer lives is only a qualified relief.
delubra deum et porticus amoenitati dicatae latius procidere: Buildings remained vulnerable, and here Tacitus stresses the importance and beauty of those that fell victim to the flames in the second conflagration. The asyndetic juxtaposition of minor [erat] and latius procidere ensures that the bad news abruptly overpowers the good news, conveying the sense that the lower death-toll among the human population was amply compensated for by large-scale architectural damage (an impression reinforced by the length of the respective clauses). The alliterative delubra deum emphasises the ominous destruction of holy places, and is an epic (Ennian) phrase used in the awe-ful tableau of the last hours of Virgil’s Troy (Aeneid 2.248), in a passage strongly intertwined with Livy’s account of the fall of Veii (5.21.5, alluding to the same – Ennian – forerunner); and the description of the colonnades as amoenitati dicatae, with attention-drawing assonance, makes clear the beauty of the incinerated buildings. Note also the comparative adverb latius, presenting the destruction here as even worse than the one caused by the first fire. Finally, the verb procidere (an historic infinitive) once again evokes the power of the fire, and keeps the music going through to the final collapse (por- … dic- ~ pro-cid- …).
40.2 plusque infamiae id incendium habuit quia praediis Tigellini Aemilianis proruperat videbaturque Nero condendae urbis novae et cognomento suo appellandae gloriam quaerere. quippe in regiones quattuordecim Roma dividitur, quarum quattuor integrae manebant, tres solo tenus deiectae: septem reliquis pauca tectorum vestigia supererant, lacera et semusta.
plusque infamiae id incendium habuit: As Tacitus told us in Chapter 39, Nero attracted opprobrium because of the suspicion of arson in the first fire. Now he says there was more scandal. The comparative adverb plus, like latius before, conveys the escalation in destruction, both of the city and of Nero’s reputation.
plusque infamiae: infamiae is a partitive genitive dependent on plus.
quia praediis Tigellini Aemilianis proruperat: praedium (‘estate’, ‘land’) is not to be confused with the more common/familiar praeda (‘booty’). praediis … Aemilianis is an ablative of origin: apparently the second fire broke out at an estate that belonged to Tigellinus, the very same Praetorian Prefect who just stage-managed Nero’s all-aboard floating orgy. The estate was probably located somewhere between the Campus Martius and the Capitol Hill, in the vicinity of what would become the Forum of Trajan.
videbaturque Nero condendae urbis novae et cognomento suo appellandae gloriam quaerere: The position of the verb videbatur straight after proruperat underscores how immediately the people leapt to conclusions and set the rumour mill spinning. Possibly, Nero or Tigellinus were responsible for the second fire, wanting to clear space for full-scale rebuilding. But it is equally possible that embers from a six-day blaze flared up again, and people acted without evidence on their desire to attribute blame, coming up with the rumour that all this was the emperor’s doing. The chiastic arrangement of condendae urbis novae et cognomento suo appellandae, with the gerundives emphatic on the outside, exaggerates the shocking aims Nero was rumoured to have had. Suetonius, Nero 50, tells us that Nero intended to call the new city he wished to build Neropolis: a Greek name, and therefore yet another suggestion of Nero’s Greek obsession. (Tacitus is careful not to mention the name, nor to report this as anything more than a rumour.)
gloriam quaerere: The implications of gloria are insidious: it is a quality that derives first and foremost from military conquest, and thus feeds into the latent characterization of the fire as a hostile army sacking Rome – with Nero as mastermind and general. Perversely, gloria here derives not from the triumph over a foreign enemy and the return to Rome with the spoils of victory, but death and destruction of his own capital. There is also unmistakable irony in Tacitus’ use of gloria here: Nero desires glory for a re-foundation of the capital in his name, but what he acquires is notoriety for arson and hubris.
quippe in regiones quattuordecim Romam dividitur: The little word quippe introduces the final reckoning of the fire which Tacitus now gives, starting with a summary statement about the city: Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen administrative regions (see Map of Rome). Tacitus’ readers would of course not have needed a reminder about Rome’s administrative grid, especially since he already mentioned it at 14.12.2. And therefore many editors and commentators see this sentence as a marginal gloss by copyists that accidentally entered into the main text in the process of transmission. But one could turn this around if one reads 14.12.2 as an anticipation of the fire: there Tacitus reports that in AD 59 there were several eclipses of the sun and all fourteen administrative districts of Rome were hit by lightning (iam sol repente obscuratus et tactae de caelo quattuordecim urbis regiones). Since no disaster happened immediately Tacitus goes on to dismiss the idea that this striking coincidence was a genuine prodigy (i.e. a meaningful sign of advanced warning of pending disaster sent by the gods): quae adeo sine cura deum eveniebant, ut multos post ea annos Nero imperium et scelera continuaverit. By taking an oblique look back to 14.12.2 here, by means of repeating basic information about the administrative layout of the city, Tacitus almost asks his readers to re-assess his own earlier (already ironic, in view of the upcoming, if somewhat belated, fire?) evaluation of divine efficaciousness.
quattuor [sc. regiones] integrae manebant: It is not entirely certain which four districts are meant. Here is Miller: ‘these would be the districts farthest from the centre of the city and the fire, and would certainly include XIV (Transtiberina): as the fire stopped apud imas Esquilinas §1, V (Esquiliae) may have been another: the other possibilities are I (Porta Capena), VI (Alta Semita) and VII (Via Lata).’167 Koestermann agrees on regio XIV Transtiberina, but disregards V Esquiliae and considers I Porta Capena, VI Alta Semita, and VII Via Lata as the other most likely candidates.168
tres [sc. regiones] solo tenus deiectae [sc. erant]: tenus is a preposition that takes, and follows, the ablative (solo). Again, the districts in question are in dispute: ‘Of the three wholly destroyed, two must have been the 11th and 10th (Circus and Palatium), and the other is thought to have been the 3rd (Isis et Serapis, the Subura).’169 Koestermann opts for regio XI Circus Maximus, X Palatium and IV Templum Pacis.170
septem reliquis [sc. regionibus] pauca tectorum vestigia supererant, lacera et semusta: The systematic account of the destruction continues: the dramatic description of pauca vestigia being left paints the picture of the unrecognizable wreckage of buildings. The adjective lacer, -era, -erum, which means ‘mutilated’ or ‘mangled’ tends to be used of corpses and once more evokes the image of the city as a living being that fell victim to violent assault. Commentators draw attention to the fact that Tacitus here exaggerates. As he himself concedes later, the buildings on the Capitol remained intact and the Forum, too, was largely unaffected. See Annals 15.44.1 and 16.27. Even in the Campus Martius, buildings such as the Augustan portico of the Pantheon remained standing and, as Furneaux points out, ‘the theatre of Pompeius was used for the Neronia [in AD 65] immediately after the conspiracy.’171
41.1 Domuum et insularum et templorum quae amissa sunt numerum inire haud promptum fuerit: sed vetustissima religione, quod Servius Tullius Lunae et magna ara fanumque quae praesenti Herculi Arcas Evander sacraverat, aedesque Statoris Iovis vota Romulo Numaeque regia et delubrum Vestae cum Penatibus populi Romani exusta; iam opes tot victoriis quaesitae et Graecarum artium decora, exim monumenta ingeniorum antiqua et incorrupta, ut quamvis in tanta resurgentis urbis pulchritudine multa seniores meminerint quae reparari nequibant.
Tacitus takes stock of the damage. A good passage to compare this with is Histories 3.72, where Tacitus had described the impact of a later fire on the Capitol, which wrought similar devastation on ancient buildings and heirlooms. (This fire occurred in AD 69 as the result of violence among troops during the chaos surrounding the fall of Vitellius.)
Id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, nullo externo hoste, propitiis, si per mores nostros liceret, deis, sedem Iovis Optimi Maximi auspicato a maioribus pignus imperii conditam, quam non Porsenna dedita urbe neque Galli capta temerare potuissent, furore principum excindi. arserat et ante Capitolium civili bello, sed fraude privata: nunc palam obsessum, palam incensum, quibus armorum causis? quo tantae cladis pretio? stetit dum pro patria bellavimus. voverat Tarquinius Priscus rex bello Sabino, ieceratque fundamenta spe magis futurae magnitudinis quam quo modicae adhuc populi Romani res sufficerent. mox Servius Tullius sociorum studio, dein Tarquinius Superbus capta Suessa Pometia hostium spoliis exstruxere. sed gloria operis libertati reservata: pulsis regibus Horatius Pulvillus iterum consul dedicavit ea magnificentia quam immensae postea populi Romani opes ornarent potius quam augerent. isdem rursus vestigiis situm est, postquam interiecto quadringentorum quindecim annorum spatio L. Scipione C. Norbano consulibus flagraverat. curam victor Sulla suscepit, neque tamen dedicavit: hoc solum felicitati eius negatum. Lutatii Catuli nomen inter tanta Caesarum opera usque ad Vitellium mansit. ea tunc aedes cremabatur.
[This was the saddest and most shameful crime that the Roman state had ever suffered since its foundation. Rome had no foreign foe; the gods were ready to be propitious if our character had allowed; and yet the home of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, founded after due auspices by our ancestors as a pledge of empire, which neither Porsenna, when the city gave itself up to him, nor the Gauls when they captured it, could violate – this was the shrine that the mad fury of emperors destroyed! The Capitol had indeed been burned before in civil war, but the crime was that of private individuals. Now it was openly besieged, openly burned – and what were the causes that led to arms? What was the price paid for this great disaster? This temple stood intact so long as we fought for our country. King Tarquinius Priscus had vowed it in the war with the Sabines and had laid its foundations rather to match his hope of future greatness than in accordance with what the fortunes of the Roman people, still moderate, could supply. Later the building was begun by Servius Tullius with the enthusiastic help of Rome’s allies, and afterwards carried on by Tarquinius Superbus with the spoils taken from the enemy at the capture of Suessa Pometia. But the glory of completing the work was reserved for liberty: after the expulsion of the kings, Horatius Pulvillus in his second consulship dedicated it; and its magnificence was such that the enormous wealth of the Roman people acquired thereafter adorned rather than increased its splendour. The temple was built again on the same spot when after an interval of four hundred and fifteen years it had been burned in the consulship of Lucius Scipio and Gaius Norbanus. The victorious Sulla undertook the work, but still he did not dedicate it; that was the only thing that his good fortune was refused. Amid all the great works built by the Caesars the name of Lutatius Catulus kept its place down to Vitellius’ day. This was the temple that then was burned.]
domuum et insularum et templorum quae amissa sunt numerum inire haud promptum fuerit: The subject of the sentence is the infinitive inire, which governs the accusative numerum on which the genitive plurals domuum, insularum and templorum depend. (The relative pronoun quae, in the nominative neuter plural, corresponds grammatically to the closest of the nouns, i.e. templa, but clearly picks up all three.) The verb fuerit is in the perfect subjunctive, more specifically a ‘potential subjunctive of modest assertion.’172 For the distinction between domus and insula, see Annals 6.45.1, also in the context of a fire (cited above). Cf. Suetonius, Nero 38.2: tunc praeter immensum numerum insularum domus priscorum ducum arserunt (‘at that time, besides an immense number of dwellings, the houses of leaders of old were burned’), who hands syntactical prominence to the aristocratic domus.
sed: The sed marks the contrast between the countless domus and insulae that fell victim to the flames, and the significant number of highly sacred temples and objects that perished – and which can be taken stock of, as Tacitus goes on to do.
sed vetustissima religione, quod Servius Tullius Lunae [sc. sacraverat], et magna ara fanumque, quae praesenti Herculi Arcas Evander sacraverat, aedesque Statoris Iovis vota Romulo Numaeque regia et delubrum Vestae cum Penatibus populi Romani exusta [sc. erant]: In the previous sentence Tacitus explained that he would not enter into an itemized accounting of ordinary buildings (including temples) that fell victim to the flames. But (sed), he now lists those temples of most venerable age and religious import that burnt down. vetustissima religione is an ablative of quality or characteristic modifying the understood subject templa; the main verb comes at the end: exusta, sc. sunt. In-between we get a list of the sacred sites that were destroyed:173
- [templum], quod Servius Tullius Lunae (or Lucinae) [sc. sacraverat]
- magna ara fanumque, quae praesenti Herculi Arcas Evander sacraverat
- aedes Statoris Iovis vota Romulo
- Numae regia
- delubrum Vestae cum penatibus populi Romani
The delayed and strengthened verb (ex-usta), right at the end of the huge list, stresses the total destruction of these sites and how all of them shared one common fate.
sed … et … -que … -que … -que … et …: Tacitus uses a prolonged polysyndeton in his enumeration of the buildings, which is well-balanced between et and -que and helps to generate a good sense of the large number of buildings that burnt down – an effect further enhanced by the sheer length of the sentence, and the variation in constructions and choice of words. To flesh out the special significance of the buildings under consideration Tacitus starts out with two relative clause (quod … Lunae; quae … sacraverat), then moves on to a perfect passive participle (vota Romulo), details one item without any further specification (Numae regia), and finishes with a prepositional phrase (cum penatibus populi Romani). To refer to holy sites, he piles up four different words, which are more or less synonymous with one another: templum (implied from the previous sentence), fanum, aedes, delubrum.
quod Servius Tullius Lunae [sc. sacraverat]: Servius Tullius was the sixth (and penultimate) king of Rome. This is the only place in which he is the founder of the temple of Luna on the Aventine, whereas other sources (Livy 1.45.2 and Dionysius Halicarnassus 4.26) have him as founder of the famous temple of Diana, also located on the Aventine. Since Diana was also goddess of the Moon, we may be dealing with a conflation of the two temples here. Koestermann prefers the alternative reading Lucinae (another name of Diana: see e.g. Catullus 34.13).174 Irrespective of the textual problem and the identity of the temple, it is apparent that Tacitus wishes to insist on the heavy toll taken on the most ancient and religious edifices, and in so doing to suggest the corruption of modern Rome and its fall from its ancient roots.
et magna ara fanumque, quae praesenti Herculi Arcas Evander sacraverat: The Ara Maxima, situated towards the north west of the Circus, was an ancient sanctuary dedicated to Hercules. Evander was a pre-historic/mythical hero who founded a settlement on the site of Rome after he came to Italy from Arcadia (hence Arcas) in Greece. He famously plays host to Aeneas in Aeneid 8. Virgil and other sources recount that Evander dedicated the altar after Hercules slew Cacus, the monster-in-residence at the future site of Rome. Again, the extreme antiquity of this shrine (which predates even the foundation of Rome) emphasises the loss.
aedes Statoris Iovis vota Romulo: Tacitus name-checks two of the greatest and most revered of figures: Jupiter, king of the gods, and the city’s founder Romulus. Romulus was said to have dedicated this temple to Jupiter after he stopped the Romans from fleeing during their war with the Sabines – hence the epithet Stator (‘the Stayer’). See, for instance, Livy 1.12.4–5. The temple stood in the Forum. Tacitus here arguably issues a subtle reminder of the indomitable military prowess of old, which in the inglorious present is literally burnt to cinders.
Numae regia: Numa, the second legendary king of Rome (way back in the eighth century BC), was especially famed for his religious devotion. His temple in the Forum was used as residence of Rome’s chief religious official, the pontifex maximus. It housed many sacred objects of great antiquity, such as the shields of the priesthood of the Salii.
delubrum Vestae cum Penatibus populi Romani: The temple of Vesta, a distinctive circular building in the Forum, was where the Vestal Virgins tended to their sacred flame, symbolising the hearth of the Roman family (but we are also reminded of Nero’s freak-out at Vesta’s Capitoline temple in 37.1). The Penates, the household gods of Rome, were also kept here: these were said to have been brought to Italy by Aeneas on his flight from Troy, so are once again items of the utmost antiquity and sanctity. The destruction of these items, saved from Troy’s fall but now ruined, is an extremely potent and ominous symbol of both the power of the fire and the reign of Nero. In placing a reference to the Penates last – the only object in a list of temples – Tacitus may even hint slyly at Nero’s performance of the ‘Sack of Troy’ during the fire: everyone of his readers would know where they originally came from. The effect is enhanced by the following sentence, where Tacitus switches into a generic lamentation about the number of ancient and venerable objects that burnt, through which the Penates retrospectively gain even greater profile and significance.
iam opes tot victoriis quaesitae et Graecarum artium decora, exim monumenta ingeniorum antiqua et incorrupta [sc. exusta sunt], ut quamvis in tanta resurgentis urbis pulchritudine multa seniores meminerint quae reparari nequibant.
After a list of the shrines and temples (and the Penates) Tacitus proceeds to comment on the (again innumerable) objects that perished in the flames. The adverbs iam and exim, which give structure to the account, help to convey the seemingly endless list of items. The main sentence is designed as a tricolon: opes – decora – monumenta, the three subjects of the (elided) verb exusta sunt. But Tacitus, as is his wont, unsettles the design by linking the first and the second item with et and juxtaposing the first two (introduced by iam) and the last (introduced by exim) asyndetically.
opes tot victoriis quaesitae: The word opes (‘riches’; cf. English ‘opulence’) makes clear the preciousness of the spoils destroyed, whilst the glory of their acquisition is represented by victoriis – in contrast to Nero’s lavish use of riches and opulence, these were won in the proper Roman military manner.
Graecorum artium decora: decora refers to works of Greek art, which had been brought to Rome in the course of Rome’s conquest (and plunder) of the Greek world. In fact, Nero was among the most avid collectors. The use of the word decus, which can designate both social and aesthetic value (‘high esteem, honour, glory’ – ‘pleasing appearance, beauty, grace, splendour’) conveys the magnificence of the artefacts lost.
monumenta ingeniorum antiqua et incorrupta: Tacitus is referring to destroyed works of literature. Although Rome’s great Palatine Library was not damaged until its destruction in AD 363, many important texts may well have been burnt in temple records or private homes. The attributes antiqua et incorrupta contain an oblique and curious appraisal of the value of the works in question: Tacitus almost seems to be saying that these literary products were ancient and hence morally sound (i.e. untouched by the corruption that later set in), passing judgement on literary outputs in imperial times. The loss of this ancient, untainted literature is all the mere keenly felt given that his own times are no longer conducive to producing monumenta incorrupta. Alternatively, one could consider seeing here a rhetorical displacement of the attribute, with incorrupta modifying monumenta grammatically, but ingeniorum in terms of sense. The implications for Tacitus’ view on literary production in imperial Rome are the same.
ut quamvis in tanta resurgentis urbis pulchritudine multa seniores meminerint quae reparari nequibant: Tacitus admits that the new city built by Nero was full of beauty, made clear by tanta, which modifies, in hyperbaton, pulchritudine. The phrase in tanta … pulchritudine embraces the genitive resurgentis urbis, stressing the comprehensive beautification of the new Rome that rose after the conflagration. The vivid present participle resurgentis (lit. ‘rising again’) suggests that, even as the new beauty rose up, people realised the irreplaceable losses.
multa: Tacitus places the accusative object emphatically before the subject (seniores) to stress the enormity of the losses of ancient wonders.
quae reparari nequibant: Tacitus is explicit: although the new city was splendid, the likes of the great relics lost were never to be seen again.
41.2 fuere qui adnotarent XIIII Kal. Sextiles principium incendii huius ortum [sc. esse] [sc. eo die], quo et Senones captam urbem inflammaverint. alii eo usque cura progressi sunt ut totidem annos mensesque et dies inter utraque incendia numerent.
fuere qui…: As so often, Tacitus reports what some people said and thought without endorsing it himself. Here, this takes the form of some rather contrived observations about ‘spooky’ coincidences and parallels – not the sort of things the highly rational Tacitus thinks important or sensible, but he does titillate his readers by including them, even as he makes quite clear his own view on the matter.
adnotarent: The subjunctive is generic. adnotarent introduces an indirect statement with principium as subject accusative and ortum [sc. esse] as verb.
XIIII Kal. Sextiles: The Roman calendar had three marked days each month: the so-called ‘Kalends’ (always the first day of the month), ‘Nones’ (either the fifth or the seventh day of the month, depending on the number of days within), and ‘Ides’ (either the 13th or the 15th of the month, again depending on the number of days within). Dates that did not fall on the Kalends, Nones, or Ides (when the date would simply be ‘on the Kalends, or Nones, or Ides of [name of the month]’) were designated by looking forward to the next demarcation coming up and then counting backwards. This means that all the days in July after the Ides would be designated by looking ahead to the Kalends of August (1 August in our reckoning) and then counting backwards, and this is what is going on here. The day in question is (in our reckoning) 19 July, i.e. ante diem quartum decimum Kalendas Sextiles or, in the abbreviation Tacitus uses, XIIII Kal. Sextiles. There are fourteen days – quartum decimum = XIIII = XIV = 14 – since the Romans counted inclusively: both 19 July and 1 August contribute to the sum. In 8 BC, the Romans renamed Sextilis as Augustus (from which our August derives), but Tacitus pointedly ignores this re-branding.
quo et Senones captam urbem inflammaverint: The (Senonian) Gauls had captured and burned Rome in 390 BC on this same date. This is indeed a fascinating coincidence; but we must remember that there were a great number of fires in Rome, and that the dating of such earlier conflagrations may well have been both less than precise and open to a little massaging, way back in Rome’s history. The sack of Rome by the Gauls was remembered fearfully throughout Rome’s life as one of its lowest points, so the comparison here is an indication of how dire an event the Great Fire seemed to people. Notice how Tacitus stresses that the previous fire was during a military capture (captam), both reinforcing his imagery of the fire as an invading army and hinting further at the more inglorious causes attached to this modern fire (i.e. the emperor himself starting it – ‘then it was our great enemies, now it is our own leader!’). (Conversely, the coincidence could well be mustered as an argument against the suspicion that Nero played arsonist, at least of the first fire: would he have chosen a date that would inevitably have associated him with one of Rome’s worst enemies and nightmares?)
alii eo usque cura progressi sunt ut totidem annos mensesque et dies inter utraque incendia numerent: Miller has the following rather curious note here: ‘from 390 B.C. to A.D. 64 is (on Roman inclusive reckoning) 454 years: this can be expressed as 418 years, 418 months (34 years, 10 months) and 418 days (14 months). The calculation has about as much real significance as have attempts to express the names of, e.g., Napoleon or Hitler in terms of the number of the Beast in Revelation 13,18, and Tacitus’ comment indicates his opinion of such activities’175 – curious since there are compelling scholarly arguments that the number of the Beast in Revelation in fact signifies – Nero!176 Given the apocalyptic anticipations in the run-up to the year 2000 (are you old enough to remember the hysteria caused by the ‘Y2K bug’ and the ‘millennium doomwatch’?) or, more recently, the press coverage of the ancient Mayan calendar insofar as it predicted the end of the world on 21 December 2012, we are in a good position to appreciate the kind of anxieties caused by prophecies that circulated in Neronian Rome. Tacitus makes abundantly plain that he views this alleged coincidence as very contrived. The phrase eo usque, the strong verb progressi sunt (gone, advanced) and the result clause (ut…) all indicate that the men who made these calculations were stretching things rather. Nevertheless, he wants to include it as a potentially amusing little nugget of information (and perhaps a derisive comment on how far some people go on these occasions to make supernatural sense of things). Cf. Cassius Dio 62.18.3: ‘When some portents took place at this time, the seers declared that they meant destruction for him and they advised him to divert the evil upon others.’ John Henderson recommends reading this passage with Livy in mind: ‘Tacitus expects those who know the historian Livy’s account of the Gallic Sack to remember how (well) Camillus underlines the count of years – 365, yes indeed: a significant number under the new Julian calendar! – that the gods looked after Rome since the foundation by Romulus: far too much to throw away … (5.54.5: the religious arguments ‘moved them’ most to stay put in their ruins, 5.55.1!).’
cura: An ablative of cause.
(VI) 42–43: RECONSTRUCTING THE CAPITAL: NERO’S NEW PALACE
Nero’s architectural hubris attracted significant attention from litterateurs. Two voices that can usefully be compared with Tacitus’ account in the following chapters are those of Suetonius and Martial. See Suetonius, Nero 31.1–3:
Non in alia re tamen damnosior quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam primo transitoriam, mox incendio absumptam restitutamque auream nominavit. De cuius spatio atque cultu suffecerit haec rettulisse. Vestibulum eius fuit, in quo colossus CXX pedum staret ipsius effigie; tanta laxitas, ut porticus triplices miliarias haberet; item stagnum maris instar, circumsaeptum aedificiis ad urbium speciem; rura insuper arvis atque vinetis et pascuis silvisque varia, cum multitudine omnis generis pecudum ac ferarum. 2 In ceteris partibus cuncta auro lita, distincta gemmis unionumque conchis erant; cenationes laqueatae tabulis eburneis versatilibus, ut flores, fistulatis, ut unguenta desuper spargerentur; praecipua cenationum rotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur; balineae marinis et albulis fluentes aquis. Eius modi domum cum absolutam dedicaret, hactenus comprobavit, ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse. 3 Praeterea incohabat piscinam a Miseno ad Avernum lacum contectam porticibusque conclusam, quo quidquid totis Baiis calidarum aquarum esset converteretur; fossam ab Averno Ostiam usque, ut navibus nec tamen mari iretur, longitudinis per centum sexaginta milia, latitudinis, qua contrariae quinqueremes commearent. Quorum operum perficiendorum gratia quod ubique esset custodiae in Italiam deportari, etiam scelere convictos non nisi ad opus damnari praeceperat.
[There was nothing however in which he was more ruinously prodigal than in building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country, varied with tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. He had baths supplied with sea water and sulphur water. When the edifice was finished in this style and he dedicated it, he deigned to say nothing more in the way of approval than that he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being. He also began a pool, extending from Misenum to the lake of Avernus, roofed over and enclosed in colonnades, into which he planned to turn all the hot springs in every part of Baiae; a canal from Avernus all the way to Ostia, to enable the journey to be made by ship yet not by sea; its length was to be a hundred and sixty miles and its breadth sufficient to allow ships with five banks of oars to pass each other. For the execution of these projects he had given orders that the prisoners all over the empire should be transported to Italy, and that those who were convicted even of capital crimes should be punished in no other way than by sentence to this work.]
And here is Martial, the second poem from his Liber De Spectaculis, a book of epigrams on the Flavian Amphitheatre (better known today as the Colosseum), which was begun by Vespasian and finished by Titus. In – deliberate – contrast to Nero’s Golden House, this imperial building project was specifically designed to make a significant contribution to the civic life of Rome, thus restoring architectural order at the centre of the city, and it was recognized and hailed as such by Martial:177
Hic ubi sidereus propius videt astra colossus
et crescunt media pegmata celsa via,
invidiosa feri radiabant atria regis
unaque iam tota stabat in urbe domus;
hic ubi conspicui venerabilis Amphitheatri 5
erigitur moles, stagna Neronis erant;
hic ubi miramur velocia munera thermas,
abstulerat miseris tecta superbus ager.
Claudia diffusas ubi porticus explicat umbras,
ultima pars aulae deficientis erat. 10
reddita Roma sibi est et sunt te preside, Caesar,
deliciae populi, quae fuerant domini.
[Where the starry colossus sees the constellations at close range and lofty scaffolding rises in the middle of the road, once gleamed the odious halls of a cruel monarch, and in all Rome there stood a single house. Where rises before our eyes the august pile of the Amphitheatre, was once Nero’s lake. Where we admire the warm baths, a speedy gift, a haughty tract of land had robbed the poor of their dwellings. Where the Claudian colonnade unfolds its wide-spread shade, was the outermost part of the palace’s end. Rome has been restored to herself, and under your rule, Caesar, the pleasances that belonged to a master now belong to the people.]
42.1 Ceterum Nero usus est patriae ruinis extruxitque domum in qua haud proinde gemmae et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem et luxu vulgata, quam arva et stagna et in modum solitudinum hinc silvae inde aperta spatia et prospectus, magistris et machinatoribus Severo et Celere, quibus ingenium et audacia erat etiam quae natura denegavisset per artem temptare et viribus principis inludere.
ceterum: Not a strongly adversative ‘but’ (like at), but more expressing simultaneity: while others tried to probe into the deeper meaning of the catastrophe, Nero is busy taking advantage of it.
Nero usus est patriae ruinis et extruxit domum: A cuttingly short start as we return to Tacitus’ narrative. usus est makes clear how Nero calculatingly saw the large-scale destruction as an opportunity, and Tacitus brings out the emperor’s apparent lack of patriotism (we remember Chapter 36) in the striking phrase patriae ruinis and enhances the effect further by expressing one idea (‘Nero used Rome’s ruins to build a house for himself’) in two separate clauses, each with a finite verb: ‘he used Rome’s ruins and built a house’ (contrast his moonshine over the sideshow non-event at 34.1). The sentence acquires its punch owing to two interrelated contrasts: between ruinis and extruxit; and between patriae (the common fatherland) and domus (Nero’s private house). These give the sentence real bite, developing the sense of Nero turning public misery into his own private gain. See further Annals 15.52.1, where we get a view of the building focalized by the conspirator Piso, who considers the palace a particularly apt location to assassinate the emperor: in illa invisa et spoliis civium extructa domo (‘in that hated palace reared from the spoils of his countrymen’). The house in question is the so-called ‘Golden House.’ The enormous project was not yet completed at Nero’s death, and Vespasian ordered it to be abandoned. He used part of the area to construct the Colosseum instead – which derives its name from the colossal statue of Nero mentioned by Suetonius in the passage cited above.
in qua haud proinde gemmae et aurum miraculo essent … quam: The subjects of the relative clause are gemmae et aurum, with the latter hinting at the name of the house; the subjunctive essent expresses purpose (just as the dative miraculo). haud proinde … quam goes together (proinde … quam: ‘in the same way or degree as’). Tacitus does not omit to mention that there was an abundance of precious metal and stones, but goes on to say that even these weren’t the most amazing thing about the Domus Aurea.
solita pridem et luxu vulgata: The phrase, in the neuter nominative plural, stands in apposition to the subjects of the relative clause, i.e. gemmae et aurum. solita … vulgata frame the further specifications of time (pridem) and of quality (luxu). Even the lavishness of the gold and gems of the palace were barely noteworthy in an age of such extravagance. The emphatic solita (‘familiar’) underlines how commonplace these riches were; pridem (‘long since’) suggests the long-term decline under emperors like Caligula and Nero; the moralising luxu, an ablative of respect, adds to this tone of decadence; and vulgata (coming from vulgus, the mob) implies even the common people were accustomed to such splendour (luxu vulgata = vulgaria). On Tacitus’ preference for uncommon over common diction (in this case luxu instead of luxuria) see above on 37.1: celeberrimae luxu famaque epulae fuere.
quam arva et stagna et in modum solitudinum hinc silvae inde aperta spatia et prospectus [sc. miraculo essent]: A long, polysyndetic list of the rural elements of Nero’s palace, with extra emphasis from the sibilant alliteration. The phrase hinc … inde… conveys the extent of the estate, spreading out on all sides. Tacitus uses the striking noun solitudo (‘lone wilderness’) to make clear how the landscapers created the elements of wild nature in the centre of Rome. It was common for great Roman villas in the countryside to recreate aspects of nature (‘improvements on Nature’); but Tacitus makes clear both the scale of Nero’s efforts and the novelty of doing this in the heart of the city.
magistris et machinatoribus Severo et Celere: A nominal ablative absolute with magistris et machinatoribus in predicative position. We know nothing else about Severus and Celer. The alliteration and use of two nouns to describe them suggest the many skills and artistry of these men; machinatoribus especially implies great technical ability.
quibus ingenium et audacia erat etiam quae natura denegavisset per artem temptare et viribus principis inludere: The relative pronoun quibus, which is in the dative of possession, refers back to Severus and Celer. ingenium again underscores the talent of these men; audacia, however, is not necessarily a positive quality, and can hint at arrogance and recklessness, especially in this context. The architects and engineers are out to challenge the restrictions of nature. The antecedent of quae (and the accusative object of temptare) is an implied ea. The contrasts of this nicely wrought sentence stress how these men viewed nature’s laws as no obstacle: natura (nature) opposes artem (human skill); and temptare challenges denegavisset.
et viribus principis inludere: Tacitus finishes with a cutting and unequivocally negative comment on these men. Their skills are not only in surpassing nature, but also in squandering money. The vivid verb inludere (‘fool away’), from ludo (‘play’), suggests the frivolity and vanity of the projects these men spent money on; and it is juxtaposed to principis to remind us powerfully of who is behind this (and whose resources are being wasted). viribus is dative with inludere.
42.2 namque ab lacu Averno navigabilem fossam usque ad ostia Tiberina depressuros promiserant squalenti litore aut per montes adversos. neque enim aliud umidum gignendis aquis occurrit quam Pomptinae paludes: cetera abrupta aut arentia ac, si perrumpi possent, intolerandus labor nec satis causae. Nero tamen, ut erat incredibilium cupitor, effodere proxima Averno iuga conisus est; manentque vestigia inritae spei.
The idea of the canal was to link the bay of Naples, through Lake Avernus (there was already a canal from the sea to the lake), to Ostia (and hence Rome). It was not necessarily a hare-brained idea: the coastline from the Bay of Naples north to Rome was very dangerous to shipping, but vital for the corn supply to the capital. (Tacitus mentions wreckage of part of the corn fleet at 15.46.2.) An attempt to eliminate this danger was therefore sensible. It is just the scale of the project that is too vast: like Nero’s planned canal through the isthmus of Corinth in Greece, and other gigantesque proofs of tyrant’s megalomania à la Herodotus’ Xerxes, the project was abandoned after Nero’s death; but not forgotten — a Nero skit in Greek preserved in with the works of 2nd-century Lucian keeps the mockery alive.
namque [sc. se] ab lacu Averno navigabilem fossam usque ad ostia Tiberina depressuros [sc. esse] promiserant: The subjects are still Nero’s architects Severus and Celer. promiserant introduces an indirect statement, with an implied subjective accusative (se) and the future infinitive depressuros (esse) as verb; it takes fossam as accusative object.
ab lacu Averno … ad ostia Tiberina: Tacitus separates the two ends of the canal in the sentence to enact the immense length of it, further made clear by usque ad (‘all the way to’) – Suetonius, in the passage cited above, estimates the length as about 160 miles.
squalenti litore aut per montes adversos: Tacitus stresses the (insurmountable) difficulties of the project through: (i) the emphatic position of the entire phrase at the end of the sentence; (ii) the variatio of the ablative phrase and the prepositional phrase; (iii) the highly poetic and vivid adjective squalenti (barren, rough); (iv) the chiastic arrangement; (v) and climactic, final adversos.
neque enim aliud umidum gignendis aquis occurrit quam Pomptinae paludes: Tacitus continues to list problems to do with the building of the canal. The absence of water is strongly emphasised by the litotes neque … aliud umidum (lit. ‘not anything moist’), which suggests utter aridity. gignendis aquis is a gerundive in the dative (expressing purpose). Already Caesar had tried to drain the (malarial) marshes behind Cape Circeo in Latium.178 Mussolini managed to make some headway in the 1930s.
cetera abrupta aut arentia [sc. erant] ac, si perrumpi possent, intolerandus [sc. erat] labor nec satis causae [sc. erat]: Assonance emphasises the unsuitability of the land, made clear by the two graphic adjectives abrupta and arentia. Tacitus finishes with a scything comment on the futility of the operation. Even if the alternative route were feasible in principle, the work would be too much (intolerandus), and the positives would not outweigh the problems (nec satis causae). Tacitus delays this phrase in particular to finish off the description.
nec satis causae: causae is a partitive genitive dependent on satis.
Nero tamen, ut erat incredibilium cupitor, effodere proxima Averno iuga conisus est; manentque vestigia inritae spei: Despite all of what Tacitus has said, Nero still went ahead with the project. The tamen stresses how Nero is at odds with all logic.
ut erat incredibilium cupitor: A wonderfully succinct characterisation of Nero’s attitude. The -tor ending in Latin indicates a profession (as in mercator, imperator, machinator etc), and so the word cupitor or, according to another reading, concupitor represents Nero’s love of the impossible as something he does for a living. This is also a very rare word, coined by Tacitus, and thus conveys in and of itself something of Nero’s love of the unusual.
effodere proxima Averno iuga conisus est: The hyperbaton effodere … conisus est stresses the manifold difficulties that Nero dismissed: he pushed on regardless.
manent vestigia inritae spei: Tacitus finishes off his account of the canal by revelling in the folly of the undertaking, pointing to the traces of the failure which are still visible even today. The emphatic position of the verb manent, and the dismissive last words inritae spei, leave us with a picture of a vainglorious emperor with no understanding of practicalities.
43.1 Ceterum urbis quae domui supererant non, ut post Gallica incendia, nulla distinctione nec passim erecta [sc. sunt], sed dimensis vicorum ordinibus et latis viarum spatiis cohibitaque aedificiorum altitudine ac patefactis areis additisque porticibus quae frontem insularum protegerent.
Tacitus frames this sentence with an initial and a final relative clause: urbis quae domui supererant – quae frontem insularum protegerent. In between he gives details on the architectual principles that informed the rebuilding of Rome, revolving around the main verb: erecta [sc. sunt]. (The subject, which is also the antecedent of the first relative pronoun, i.e. ea, is elided.) Tacitus first lists two modes in which the city-planners (unlike their predecessors after similar catastrophes) did not proceed: nulla distinctione nec passim; then, in antithesis, he enumerates the principles that were applied, not least as precautionary measures against future fires:
- dimensis vicorum ordinibus
- latis viarum spatiis
- cohibita aedificiorum altitudine
- patefactis areis
- additis porticibus
Tacitus’ verbal design emulates the layout of the new Rome: the adjectives or participles dimensis, latis, cohibita, patefactis, additis, which give a sense of careful planning and a desire to create a beautful city stand in stark contrast to nulla distinctione and passim before; they also all come first in their phrases. Likewise, the first three phrases dimensis vicorum ordinibus || latis viarum spatiis || cohibita aedificorum altitudine are of identical construction (ablative phrases sandwiching a genitive plural).
ceterum: This is the second chapter in a row that Tacitus begins with the adverb ceterum.
urbis quae domui supererant: The partitive genitive urbis depends on the elided ea. With the relative clause, Tacitus makes a savagely ironic comment on the inordinate size of Nero’s new palace – as if it left marginal space for reconstructing the rest of the city that had burned down. Koestermann thinks the phrase quae domui supererant is ‘suspicious’, but cites a two-line poem (a ‘distich’) transmitted by Suetonius, Nero 39.2 (Roma domus fiet: Veios migrate, Quirites, | si non et Veios occupat ista domus – ‘Rome is becoming one house; off with you to Veii, Quirites! If that house does not soon seize upon Veii as well’) and Martial, Liber de Spectaculis 2.4 (cited above) as two other sources that crack the same joke.179 In further support, one could point to the fact that Tacitus concluded his stock-taking of the destruction wrought by the fire in Chapter 40 by using the same verb as here: septem reliquis pauca tectorum vestigia supererant, lacera et semusta. The lexical coincidence seems to intimate that the large-scale devastation inflicted on the cityscape by the fire are similar in kind to those inflicted by Nero’s palace.
ut post Gallica incendia: Another reference to the torching of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC. In Livy’s account (as we saw above), when the Gauls sacked Rome, a proposal to move Rome to the site of Veii was flattened by the re-founding hero Camillus with the rhetorical question (5.54):
Si fraude, si casu Veiis incendium ortum sit, ventoque ut fieri potest, diffusa flamma magnam partem urbis absumat, Fidenas inde aut Gabios aliamve quam urbem quaesituri sumus quo transmigremus?
[If by crime or chance a fire should break out at Veii, and that the wind should spread the flames, as may easily happen, until they consume a great part of the city – are we to quit it, and seek out Fidenae, or Gabii, or any other town you like, and migrate there?]
nulla distinctione nec passim erecta: Livy tells us that, after the Gauls, the city was rebuilt in a rushed and haphazard way (5.55):
… promisce urbs aedificari coepta. tegula publice praebita est; saxi materiaeque caedendae unde quisque vellet ius factum, praedibus acceptis eo anno aedificia perfecturos. festinatio curam exemit uicos dirigendi, dum omisso sui alienique discrimine in vacuo aedificant…
[… people began in a random fashion to rebuild the city. Tiles were supplied at public expense, and everybody was granted the right to quarry stone and to hew timber where he liked, after giving security for the completion of the structures within that year. In their haste men were careless about making the streets straight and, paying no attention to their own and others’ rights, built on the vacant spaces…]
In Tacitus, the emphatic nulla and the vivid passim (‘all over the place’) evoke the weaving, irregular streets that resulted.
latis viarum spatiis: Remember the narrowness of the streets before, mentioned in Chapter 38 as a cause of the fire’s rapid progress and one of the reasons for the high death toll. Nero’s vision is for wide boulevards.
porticibus: Colonnades to walk and talk in. Here, the stone colonnades also have the extra advantage of protecting the jerry-built blocks of flats from fire, from passing traffic and from the sun.
quae frontem insularum protegerent: The subjunctive in the relative clause expresses purpose. Cf. Suetonius, Nero 16.1: Formam aedificiorum urbis novam excogitavit et ut ante insulas ac domos porticus essent, de quarum solariis incendia arcerentur; easque sumptu suo exstruxit (‘He devised a new form of buildings of the city and in front of the houses and apartments he erected porches, from the flat roofs of which fires could be fought; and these he put up at his own cost’).
43.2 eas porticus Nero sua pecunia extructurum purgatasque areas dominis traditurum pollicitus est. addidit praemia pro cuiusque ordine et rei familiaris copiis finivitque tempus intra quod effectis domibus aut insulis apiscerentur.
Tacitus now details measures undertaken by the emperor to relieve the stricken city. This was expected – it was the standard way to restore confidence among the population after the catastrophe. Apart from the instances of rapid response by Tiberius and Claudius cited above, see Suetonius, Augustus 30, who reports that Augustus gained renown by putting in place proactive measures and taking general care of intelligent town planning:
Spatium urbis in regiones vicosque divisit instituitque, ut illas annui magistratus sortito tuerentur, hos magistri e plebe cuiusque viciniae lecti. Adversus incendia excubias nocturnas vigilesque commentus est; ad coercendas inundationes alveum Tiberis laxavit ac repurgavit completum olim ruderibus et aedificiorum prolationibus coartatum. Quo autem facilius undique urbs adiretur, desumpta sibi Flaminia via Arimino tenus munienda reliquas triumphalibus viris ex manubiali pecunia sternendas distribuit.
[He divided the area of the city into regions and wards, arranging that the former should be under the charge of magistrates selected each year by lot, and the latter under ‘masters’ elected by the inhabitants of the respective neighourhoods. To guard against fires he devised a system of stations of night watchmen, and to control the floods he widened and cleared out the channel of the Tiber, which had for some time been filled with rubbish and narrowed by jutting buildings. Further, to make the approach to the city easier from every direction, he personally undertook to rebuild the Flaminian Road all the way to Ariminum, and assigned the rest of the highways to others who had been honoured with triumphs, asking them to use their prize-money in paving them.]
It would be interesting to compare the reaction of the Berlusconi government to the earthquake that flattened the Italian city of L’Aquila (in Abbruzzo) in April 2009 or the people of Japan to the 2011 tsunami. Tacitus, like other Roman historians, lets his emperor play one-man rescue team and take all plaudits and complaints as if he has no advisers behind him: for a while he suspends his ‘it’s all a[nother] big act’ rhetoric of suspicion.
eas porticus Nero sua pecunia extructurum purgatasque areas dominis traditurum pollicitus est: The subject is Nero, the verb is pollicitus est, which introduces an indirect statement. The subject accusative (se, i.e. Nero) is only implied. Tacitus does not say that Nero did do these things, only that he promised. We never find out if he delivered on this promise. But Suetonius (Nero 16.1: see above), too, reports that Nero built the colonnades at his own expense. In addition, he took on the expense of clearing away the rubble, so that those who lost their property in the fire had a clean construction site on which to rebuild their houses.
addidit praemia pro cuiusque ordine et rei familiaris copiis finivitque tempus intra quod effectis domibus aut insulis apiscerentur: Nero also provided financial support for the rebuilding effort, correlating the amount according to the rank (pro … ordine) and wealth (pro … rei familiaris copiis) of each individual (cuiusque); he also specified a deadline by which the reconstruction had to be completed if the owners wished to cash in on the reward-scheme. The house-owners are the subject of the deponent verb apiscerentur; its (implied) accusative object is ea (= praemia). effectis domibus aut insulis is an ablative absolute. Despite the fact that landlords received a sum of money on timely completion of houses or flats which complied with the regulations, the rebuilding nevertheless proceeded slowly, as Suetonius notes in his biography of Vespasian (8.5): Deformis urbs veteribus incendiis ac ruinis erat; vacuas areas occupare et aedificare, si possessores cessarent, cuiusque permisit (‘As the city was unsightly from former fires and fallen buildings, he allowed anyone to take possession of vacant sites and build upon them, in case the owners failed to do so’).
43.3 ruderi accipiendo Ostienses paludes destinabat utique naves quae frumentum Tiberi subvectassent onustae rudere decurrerent; aedificiaque ipsa certa sui parte sine trabibus saxo Gabino Albanove solidarentur, quod is lapis ignibus impervius est;
ruderi accipiendo Ostienses paludes destinabat utique…: This verb has two objects, connected by the -que after uti: the accusative Ostienses paludes; and the uti-clause. Nero and his advisers came up with a smart scheme, by which the boats that brought corn up the Tiber returned loaded with rubble, to be deposited at Ostia, where the Tiber reached the sea. On previous occasions, people apparently dumped the rubble straight into the Tiber, which caused blockages: see Suetonius, Augustus 30.1, cited above.
ruderi … rudere: The position of this word (rubble) at the beginning and end of the sentence enacts the sense of the conveyer-belt system Nero is trying to achieve.
subvectassent: The syncopated form of subvectavissent.
aedificiaque ipsa certa sui parte sine trabibus saxo Gabino Albanove solidarentur: The Latin reflects the building blocks under discussion: aedificia ipsa – certa sui parte – sine trabibus – saxo Gabino Albanove + the verb that indicates the aims and objectives of the effort: solidarentur.
aedificia ipsa: The ipsa helps to stress Nero’s attention to detail in the reconstruction of the city.
certa sui parte: sui refers back to aedificia. The lower part of the buildings was to be made out of stone only.
saxo Gabino Albanove: An instrumental ablative. Its position next to sine trabibus helps to emphasise the replacement of wooden beams with fire-proof rock. Gabian rock was quarried in Gabii, ten miles east of Rome; Alban rock came from the shores of the Alban Lake, 15 miles south-east of Rome.
quod is lapis ignibus impervius est: These types of rock were of volcanic origin and hence known for their fire-resistant qualities. But, as Miller points out, ‘they are also rough and not very decorative: hence the regulation to ensure their use.’180
43.4 iam aqua privatorum licentia intercepta quo largior et pluribus locis in publicum flueret, custodes; et subsidia reprimendis ignibus in propatulo quisque haberet; nec communione parietum, sed propriis quaeque muris ambirentur.
Tacitus here enumerates three further measures undertaken by Nero for the benefit of the Roman citizens, as precautions against future fires. They are designed to ensure (a) a good supply of water; (b) means of fighting fires at the moment they break out; (c) measures to prevent fires from spreading. The syntax of this chapter still depends, in a loose way, on the destinabat of 43.3. Thus custodes could be taken either as a direct object (‘he designated guardians’) in parallel to Ostienses paludes or as the subject of an elliptical ut-clause in parallel to the uti-clause ([ut] custodes essent). custodes is preceded by a long purpose clause introduced by quo, but with the subject, i.e. aqua, which agrees with intercepta, placed in front for emphasis. Tacitus elides the ut in the two following clauses as well: et … haberet; nec … ambirentur.
aqua privatorum licentia intercepta: Tacitus begins with the problem – irresponsible citizens diverting Rome’s water supply for their own use (often only for ornamental fountains). The prominent position of aqua (a long way from its verb flueret) stresses the need to address this problem; and the pejorative licentia (an ablative of cause) heaps condemnation on the Romans who thieve from their fellows.
privatorum … in publicum: The contrast between private and public also dominated Tacitus’ account of Nero’s Domus Aurea. It is almost as if the emperor here seems to make some amends for his own encroachment of civic space by stopping the private theft of public resources.
custodes: Nero’s arrangements here build on the public administration of a vital resource (water) first put into place by Augustus.181 Nero’s custodians were meant to patrol the aqueducts to ensure individuals could not siphon water off for themselves.
subsidia reprimendis ignibus: A remarkably modern, ‘health and safety’-style idea.
quisque haberet … quaeque … ambirentur: The quisque and the quaeque (which refers back to aedificia) emphasise the attempt to achieve universal fire protection.
nec communione parietum, sed propriis quaeque muris: There is classic Tacitean variatio at play here: firstly in the two different words for wall (parietum … muris); and secondly in the change of construction from ‘noun + genitive’ to ‘noun + adjective attribute.’ This not only keeps the narrative from becoming monotonous, but also enacts the change of the regulations itself. Clearly detached houses are much less conducive to the spread of fire than semi-detached buildings. As Koestermann points out, already the 12 Tables (Rome’s most ancient code of law) specified a distance of 2.5 feet between housing blocks (insulae).182
43.5 ea ex utilitate accepta decorem quoque novae urbi attulere. erant tamen qui crederent veterem illam formam salubritati magis conduxisse, quoniam angustiae itinerum et altitudo tectorum non perinde solis vapore perrumperentur: at nunc patulam latitudinem et nulla umbra defensam graviore aestu ardescere.
ea ex utilitate accepta decorem quoque novae urbi attulere: attulere = attulerunt. The pronoun ea (nominative neuter plural) sums up the measures Nero put in place. Motivated in the first place by utilitarian considerations, they also (quoque) helped to beautify the city. decus is a very positive word, implying glory and achievement as well as purely aesthetic qualities. In addition, novae urbi gives a flavour of what post-conflagration Rome must have looked like, a city renewed, with a different outlook than before.
erant tamen qui…: Even after such a positive passage on Nero’s work, Tacitus reports the comments of some more sceptical voices (although, as usual, he refrains from indicating whether he shares their opinion). This finish to the chapter helps to convey Nero’s unpopularity: even when he did well, there were plenty of critics. Miller, following Koestermann, notes that ‘there always are such people: and they sometimes (as here) have a point.’183 Perhaps, though the open streets, even if affording less shade, may well have been healthier in terms of preventing disease and ensuring a supply of fresh air. (Contrast Livy’s affectionate nostalgia for the rabbit warren of Rome as shoved up after the Gallic wipe-out, above.)
qui crederent: The subjunctive in the relative clause is generic.
angustiae itinerum et altitudo tectorum: Tacitus had occasion to mention the (notorious) narrowness of the Roman streets in Chapter 38 as one of the key causes of the fire’s rapid spread. So one wonders whether he is making a point here about Nero’s no-win position and the intractability of some of his critics. You may reflect on how sensitive the handling of disasters such as the New Orleans floods has proved for the standing of American presidents.
non perinde solis vapore perrumperentur: perrumperentur is in the (oblique) subjunctive: this is not Tacitus’ own explanation but the argument of the critics who exaggerate the power of the sun’s rays so as to be able to harp about the new layout of the city. Put differently, this sentence does not mean ‘since the narrowness of the streets etc. were not so easily penetrated’, but ‘since they argued that the narrowness of the streets etc. were not so easily penetrated.’ This subtlety keeps the historian at an arm’s length from the comments of these men.
solis vapore: A metaphorical expression for ‘the heat of the sun’ – Tacitus here stays within the idiom used by Nero’s critics.
patulam latitudinem et nulla umbra defensam graviore aestu ardescere: Tacitus continues to reproduce the exaggerated language of the critics: note the metonymic expression patula latitudo, picking out for emphasis the offending feature of the new streets (they are broad and open); the hyperbole in nulla umbra; the powerful phrase graviore aestu; the almost-military idea of defensam; and the emphatic metaphor in ardescere. At Annals 4.67.2 Tacitus calls the volcano Vesuvius a mons ardescens. The verb also ominously recalls the fire and anticipates the burning of the Christians.
(VII) 44: APPEASING THE GODS, AND CHRISTIANS AS SCAPEGOATS
44.1 Et haec quidem humanis consiliis providebantur. mox petita dis piacula aditique Sibyllae libri, ex quibus supplicatum Vulcano et Cereri Proserpinaeque ac propitiata Iuno per matronas, primum in Capitolio, deinde apud proximum mare, unde hausta aqua templum et simulacrum deae perspersum est; et sellisternia ac pervigilia celebravere feminae quibus mariti erant.
haec refers back to the measures covered in the previous chapters. In addition to efforts that relied on human skill and ingenuity, Nero and his advisers looked into the perceived supernatural dimension of the fire. The Romans had the option of ascribing catastrophic events at least in part to the will of the gods, as an expression of their wrath with human failings in religious observance. In the aftermath of natural or military disasters, they therefore tried to figure out what had gone wrong and what they needed to do to make amends, to re-establish good relations with the divine sphere. The chapter is therefore replete with technical words from Roman ritual and cult: piacula, Sibyllae libri, supplicatum, propitiata, templum et simulacrum deae, sellisternia, pervigilia. The persistent use of perfect passives (petita, aditi, supplicatum, propitiata, perspersum, with sunt/est systematically elided except in the last item) conveys a sense of the formality characteristic of ritual proceedings – as does the pronounced p-consonance petita … piacula … supplicatum … Proserpinae … propitiata … primum … apud proximum … templum … perspersum … pervigilia.
mox petita [sc. sunt] dis piacula: A piaculum is an expiatory offering to an offended divinity, though it can also refer to an act or event (such as a natural disaster) that requires expiation. dis [= deis] is in the dative. The Romans looked into making atonements to the gods they held responsible for the fire.
aditique Sibyllae libri: Tacitus uses noun + genitive (lit. ‘the books of the Sibyl’) rather than the more usual Sibyllini libri (‘Sibylline books’). These were a collection of prophecies consulted by the Romans in times of dire national crisis (hence Tacitus’ stress on them). The greatest sibyl (a female priestess struck by divine inspiration) of the ancient world was the Cumaean Sibyl, and it was works from her that were said to have been brought to Rome by the fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus. The original collection, housed in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, was destroyed in the fire that ravaged the Capitol Hill in 83 BC, but the collection was re-constituted. Augustus vetted the holdings (burning many prophecies that were ruled apocryphal) and transferred the collection to the temple of Palatine Apollo (which apparently survived the fire more or less unscathed). The priesthood in charge of the books and their interpretation were the so-called quindecimviri sacris faciundis. At Annals 11.11.1 Tacitus tells his readers that he, too, was elected into this priesthood (see the Introduction for further details).
ex quibus supplicatum [sc. est] Vulcano et Cereri Proserpinaeque ac propitiata [sc. est] Iuno per matronas, primum in Capitolio, deinde apud proximum mare, unde hausta aqua templum et simulacrum deae perspersum est: ex quibus (the antecedent being Sibyllae libri) refers to the recommendations extrapolated (cf. ex) from the books. They included: (i) appeasing sacrifices to the god of fire, Vulcan; (ii) appeasing sacrifices to the goddess Ceres and her daughter Proserpina (their temples stood in the vicinity of the Circus Maximus near the Aventine Hill, i.e. close to where the fire broke out); (iii) appeasing sacrifices to Juno, first in her temple on the Capitol, then in Ostia at the sea, from where they brought ritually purified sea-water back to Rome for the cleansing of the temple and the cult-statue in the city.
Iuno per matronas: Juno, goddess of marriage, is appropriately appeased by married women.
sellisternia: A sellisternium was a sacred banquet at which the (female) divinities sat on chairs.184 (It is a subcategory of the lectisternium – from lectum sternere, i.e. ‘to spread out a couch’ – during which the images of the gods in attendance were placed on couches.) A sellisternium was usually offered by women. See e.g. Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, in a section on ‘Ancient Institutions’ (2.1.2): Feminae cum viris cubantibus sedentes cenitabant. quae consuetudo ex hominum convictu ad divina penetravit: nam Iovis epulo ipse in lectulum, Iuno et Minerva in sellas ad cenam invitabantur. quod genus severitatis aetas nostra diligentius in Capitolio quam in suis domibus conservat, videlicet quia magis ad rem <publicam> pertinet dearum quam mulierum disciplinam contineri (‘Women used to dine seated with their reclining menfolk, a custom which made its way from the social gatherings of men to things divine. For at the banquet of Jupiter he himself was invited to dine on a couch, while Juno and Minerva had chairs, a form of austerity which our age is more careful to retain on the Capitol than in its houses, no doubt because it is more important to the commonwealth that discipline be maintained for goddesses than for women.’)185
feminae quibus mariti erant: This is virtually identical in meaning to matronas, but Tacitus’ variatio here helps to exaggerate the number of means (and people) mustered in the appeasement process. The passage here stands in striking contrast to the prostituted illustres feminae at the sex pageant (37.3).
44.2 sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat.
The clause introduced by sed brings out the tremendous effort Nero invested to make up for the loss of confidence in his reign caused by the fire and to combat the pernicious rumour that he was responsible for it – all to no avail. The sentence is designed as a scale, with the verb (decedebat) at the centre. On one side, we have three phrases that summarily rehearse Nero’s measures in the wake of the fire, in syntactical variation: ablative noun + adjective (ope humana), ablative noun + genitive singular (largitionibus principis), genitive plural + ablative noun (deum placamentis); on the other side, the simple noun (and subject of the sentence), i.e. infamia, which finds further elaboration in the quin-clause. The anaphora of non … non… underlines the failure of the efforts, which cover the human sphere more generally (ope humana harks back to humanis consiliis in 44.1), the emperor (specifically the praemia mentioned in 43.2 and his other forms of aid), and the gods (the large-scale campaign of appeasement Tacitus just recounted). These were not sufficient to quell the rumours, and hence Nero decided on more drastic measures – he needed a scapegoat to detract attention from his own perceived culpability. For this purpose, the Christians came in handy: Christianity was spreading through the Roman empire at the time, with two of its founding figures, Peter and Paul, still active. Legend even had them perish in Nero’s persecution. The sect quickly acquired a foul reputation because of its secrecy and idiosyncratic rites, such as the holy communion, during which worshippers consumed the body and blood of Christ, which an uncomprehending public turned into lurid and slanderous charges of ritual infanticide and cannibalism. This is the earliest reference to Christians in Roman historiography.
Nero’s persecution set a dangerous precedent. Rives draws out the implications of this incident for the fate of Christians in imperial times: ‘This episode provided a very clear precedent that being a Christian was in itself enough to justify condemnation to death. Thereafter, if anyone came before a Roman governor with a charge that someone was a Christian, the governor would have been fully justified in following this precedent and condemning that person, provided that he or she did nothing to disprove the allegation.’ At the same time, ‘Roman officials nevertheless had considerable leeway in how they responded to particular situations.’186
decedebat infamia: The delayed subject is greatly emphasised after the long list: all of the methods Nero tried to crush this infamia (scandalous rumour) were to no avail, there it is still.
quin iussum [sc. esse] incendium crederetur: quin = ut non. A very compact, Tacitean expression of the belief that persisted. The position of iussum adds emphasis, whereas the passive construction leaves it open who actually gave the order, though the rumour under discussion clearly fingered Nero as the culprit.
abolendo rumori: The advanced position of this phrase underlines Nero’s desperation to eliminate the suspicions which fell upon him. The verb aboleo (‘to demolish, destroy’) is very powerful, conveying Nero’s desperation to crush the rumour.
subdidit reos: This verb, here meaning ‘to put someone up on a false charge’ leaves us in no doubt as to Nero’s unscrupulous and hypocritical conduct, offering up scapegoats to cover his own perceived responsibility for the fire. The legal term reos (‘defendants’) is an ironical comment on Nero’s perversion of justice. Remember Tacitus’ preoccupation with pretence, hypocrisy and reality here as Nero happily massacres innocent people as a diversion. Or is this still sensible ‘damage-limitation’ within an effective crisis management?
quaesitissimis poenis adfecit: The superlative quaesitissimis makes clear the savage ingenuity Nero applied to the task. Although Tacitus shares his compatriots’ suspicion of the Christians, he shows palpable sympathy for the victims of Nero’s cruelty throughout this section.
quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat: The antecedent of quos is reos, the subject of the relative clause is vulgus. Nero picked on a group already unpopular with the people (cf. invisos). The -iani suffix in the term Christiani is ‘somewhat contemptuous’,187 suggesting the mob’s feeling towards this new, little-known sect. The strongly moralising flagitia (‘outrages’) denotes the abhorrence felt towards the Christians: ‘their crimes were those (like incest and infant cannibalism, cf. Tert. Apol. 7) which a lurid imgination attributed to an apparently peculiar and secretive group, and of which members of that group were automatically presumed to be guilty (cf. flagitia cohaerentia nomini Pliny, Epp. 10.96.2).’188 Miller’s references are to Pliny the Younger, Epistle 10.96.2 (cited in the next note) and the Apologeticum of Tertullian, a Christian living around AD 200. In this work, Tertullian offers a defence of Christians against charges of (i) taking part in crimes like ritual incest, infanticide, and cannibalism of the babies killed; (ii) high treason and contempt for the Roman state religion.
Christianos: There is some dispute as to whether Tacitus wrote Christianos or Chrestianos and, if (as seems now consensus) the latter, whether he meant to refer to Christians or, as some have argued, Jewish followers of an agitator called Chrestus, who is mentioned by Suetonius, Claudius 25.4,189 and whose Greek name, or title, ‘Useful, Good Guy’, would make a usefully sardonic point here, unlike ‘The Anointed One’; all the same, as Lichtenberg puts it, ‘there is no question that the Christians are to be understood under the name Chrestiani, for in what follows Tacitus traces them back to their founder Christus.’190
appellabat: As Miller points out, the imperfect appellabat is perhaps best translated as ‘was beginning to call’: ‘The name originated (Acts 11.26) in Antioch, some twenty years before this date.’191 Even from Tacitus’ point of view, the Christians were still a fairly novel sect that just began to rise to public consciousness. About half a century after Nero’s persecution, his friend, fellow-litterateur, and correspondent Pliny the Younger asked the emperor Trajan what to do with Christians while he was governor of the province of Pontus/Bithynia from 111–113. The most famous letter and Trajan’s response (Letters 10.96–97) are well worth reading as background information, and are available in English translation here:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html.
44.3 auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque.
auctor … adfectus erat: A brief Tacitean digression to explain the sect’s origin and growth ‘with documentary precision.’192 This is the earliest reference to the execution of Christ by order of Pilate in pagan literature.
Tiberio imperitante: An ablative absolute.
imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio: The alliteration here is very pronounced, adding colour and interest to the Latin and perhaps stressing the lowliness of this religion’s founder from the Romans’ point of view – a condemned criminal. The designation procurator is an anachronism: as Brunt has shown, the use of this term to refer to provincial governors of equestrian status dates to the reign of Claudius. Pilate’s official title was praefectus.193
Pontium Pilatum: Praefect of Judaea AD 27-37 and in charge of Jesus’ crucifixion, which took place in the thirties (but before AD 37). This is the only mention of him by a Roman historian. He is part of the Apostles’ Creed (Symbolum Apostolorum/Symbolum Apostolicum), a late-antique precis of the key articles of the Christian faith, which remains in use in Christian services today and pegs Christianity to a claim to historicity:
Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine, passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad caelos, sedet ad dexteram Patris omnipotentis, inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos. Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem, vitam aeternam. Amen.
Different Christian communities use different translations of the creed. In the Church of England there are currently two authorized variants: that of the Book of Common Prayer (1662) and that of Common Worship (2000). We cite the latter:
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio: Although Roman religion was usually tolerant of other religions, Christian monotheism led to mistrust and suppression. As we have seen, Christians refused to recognize official Roman religious practices, including the worship of the emperor in the imperial cult. Other authors contemporary with Tacitus also reject the new creed in no uncertain terms as a pernicious perversion of true religion (superstitio). See Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96.8: nihil aliud inveni quam superstitionem pravam, immodicam (‘But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.’), and Suetonius, who in his biography of Nero notes the emperor’s persecution of Christians though without reference to the fire (16.2):
Multa sub eo et animadversa severe et coercita nec minus instituta: adhibitus sumptibus modus; publicae cenae ad sportulas redactae; interdictum ne quid in popinis cocti praeter legumina aut holera veniret, cum antea nullum non obsonii genus proponeretur; afflicti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae; vetiti quadrigariorum lusus, quibus inveterata licentia passim vagantibus fallere ac furari per iocum ius erat; pantomimorum factiones cum ipsis simul relegatae.
[During his reign many abuses were severely punished and put down, and no fewer new laws were made: a limit was set to expenditures; the public banquets were confined to a distribution of food; the sale of any kind of cooked viands in the taverns was forbidden, with the exception of pulse and vegetables, whereas before every sort of dainty was exposed for sale. Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition. He put an end to the diversions of the chariot drivers, who from immunity of long standing claimed the right of ranging at large and amusing themselves by cheating and robbing people. The pantomimic actors and their partisans were banished from the city.]
With supreme economy, Tacitus uses the forceful attribute exitiabilis (‘deadly’, ‘bringing death or destruction’) to hint at the nature of the charges commonly brought against the Christians, such as the killing of infants (see above). But it suits neither his style nor his purpose to delve into lurid details. Instead, he goes on to generalize on Rome as a cesspool of the world, a place where everything immoral or atrocious (whether to do with religion or otherwise) quasi-naturally converges: see below on quo … celebranturque.
rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam: The vivid verb erumpebat (‘burst out’) conveys the Roman fear of this allegedly dangerous sect, an effect further enhanced by the potent phrase originem eius mali. The province of Judaea was the region around Jerusalem in modern Israel/Palestine. urbem, as usual, refers to Rome.
quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque: A savage comment on multiculturalism in Rome, with the hard c-alliteration conveying Tacitus’ bitterness. The hyperbolic cuncta and undique exaggerate the immorality which Tacitus perceives as seeping into the city, as does the vivid, metaphorical verb confluunt: just as all rivers utimately end up flowing into the sea, so Rome naturally attracts anything atrocious and shameful. Tacitus tops the natural metaphor by adding the surprising celebranturque: not only does Rome function as a cesspool of global vice; the inhabitants of the city revel in the immorality. In fact, on the lexical level the formulation, which exudes Tacitean disgust, recalls 37.1: et celeberrimae luxu famaque epulae fuere quas a Tigellino paratas ut exemplum referam: however depraved the imports from all over the world they have a hard time rivalling the degree of depravity achieved by the natives.
44.4 igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus adfixi aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies in usum nocturni luminis urerentur.
igitur: Tacitus uses this word to resume his narrative after his digression on Christianity.
primum correpti [sc. sunt] qui fatebantur: The antecedent of qui (and the subject of the main clause) is an elided ii. It is (perhaps deliberately?) unclear what the (enforced?) ‘confession’ of those who were initially apprehended consisted in: admission of guilt for the fire or participation in Christian rites?
indicio eorum: Most of the first group were probably tortured for evidence to denounce their fellow Christians. Roman citizens were immune from torture, but few Christians were likely to have held citizenship.
multitudo ingens: The hyperbole (though it is not perhaps a massive exaggeration) leaves Nero’s cruelty in no doubt. There is no way of telling what the actual numbers were.
haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt: convicti refers back to correpti. As Koestermann points out, the two strategically placed verbs mark the beginning and the end of the judicial proceedings against the sect.194 The Roman people were willing to acquiesce in the Christians’ conviction, not because they really believed they had been involved in arson, but because of their anti-social reputation. But the haud proinde … quam… construction makes it clear that Nero’s efforts to exculpate himself were in vain.
et pereuntibus addita [sc. sunt] ludibria: The emphatically placed present participle in the dative pereuntibus evokes pathos for the Christians, mocked even as they die: ludibria (‘humiliations’), from the verb ludo, ‘to play’, seems especially shocking in the context of mass killings: ‘They suffered not only death, but a shameful death.’195
ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent: Tacitus goes on to detail the kind of indignities that the emperor inflicted on his victims. The scenario he describes first sounds as if Nero staged a contemporary variant of the Actaeon myth: the Christians were covered in animal hides and then torn apart by dogs. The chiasmus (a) ferarum (b) tergis – (b) laniatu (a) canum, the first half governed by the participle contecti, the second half by interirent underscores the careful planning that went into the atrocious spectacle. As in the tale of Actaeon, who was turned into a ‘stag-man’ by Diana before being torn apart by his own hounds for having seen the nude goddess at her bath (see Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 for details), the procedure dehumanizes the victim: a human consciousness continues to reside in what looks like an animal body. According to Suetonius, Nero had a foible for this sort of thing: he reports that the emperor sponsored turns in which dancers brought ancient myths to life (or, as the case may be, death) (Nero 12.2):
Inter pyrricharum argumenta taurus Pasiphaam ligneo iuvencae simulacro abditam iniit, ut multi spectantium crediderunt; Icarus primo statim conatu iuxta cubiculum eius decidit ipsumque cruore respersit.
[The pyrrhic dances represented various scenes. In one a bull mounted Pasiphae, who was concealed in a wooden image of a heifer; at least many of the spectators thought so. Icarus at his first attempt fell close by the imperial couch and bespattered the emperor with his blood.]
The re-enactment of mythic archetypes fits well with Tacitus’ use of ludibria.196
aut crucibus adfixi aut flammandi: After dilaceration, Tacitus lists two further alternatives: crucifixion and burning. The verb continues to be interirent. The text of this passage is uncertain throughout and one manuscript reading is flammati (instead of flammandi). But the correlation of two perfect participles (contecti, adfixi) with a gerundive is typical of Tacitean variatio, and syntactically anticipates what follows. There is clearly an extra element to this humiliation, as the Christians were mockingly subjected to the same punishment as their founder, though Tacitus does not dwell on this. That some were nailed to the cross ‘proves that the Christians executed in the Vatican Gardens certainly had no Roman civil rights’ since Roman citizens were protected from suffering the mors turpissima crucis (‘the most humiliating death on the cross’), an atrocious penalty reserved for slaves and other subject people without citizenship.197 Those sentenced to be burned alive were dressed in the so-called tunica molesta, a shirt impregnated with inflammable material (such as pitch).
atque ubi defecisset dies in usum nocturni luminis urerentur: The phrase in usum nocturni luminis (‘for the purpose of nightly illumination’) brings home the appalling use of these human beings as torches: the horribly practical in usum (‘for the purpose/use of’) conveys Nero’s callousness. Miller draws attention to the Virgilian echo in nocturni luminis.198 See Aeneid 7.13 (when Aeneas and his crew pass by the island of Circe – she who turns human beings into various forms of wildlife): urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum (‘she burns fragrant cedar-wood to illuminate the night’).
44.5 hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens. unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur.
hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat: Tacitus here steps back in time (note the pluperfect obtulerat) to supply information about the setting, in which the appalling executions took place. The sentence unfolds with deliberate relish: we have the chiastic design of hortos suos – ei spectaculo, the delayed subject Nero, and the placement of the emperor’s name right next to spectaculo, which generates the mocking rhyme -lo -ro. At this stage in the Annals, the gardens are already notorious: Tacitus has brought them to the attention of his readers beforehand. At 14.14.2, they were the location for some ‘private’ chariot racing that soon become an attraction in the city: clausumque valle Vaticana spatium, in quo equos regeret, haud promisco spectaculo. mox ultro vocari populus Romanus laudibusque extollere, ut est vulgus cupiens voluptatum et, se eodem princeps trahat, laetum (‘and an enclosure was made in the Vatican valley, where he could manoeuvre his horses without the spectacle being public. Before long, the Roman people received an invitation in form, and began to hymn his praises, as is the way of the crowd, hungry for amusements, and delighted if the sovereign draws in the same direction’). And at 15.39, Tacitus reports that Nero opened his gardens to those Romans rendered homeless by the fire. As such, though he had decided that they would cramp his own style (33.1), they made an ideal location to put on a show to distract the populace.
et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens: In addition to the spectacles provided by the public executions, Nero organized circus games to regain popularity with the inhabitants of Rome. He used the occasion to present himself as a princeps of the people, dressing up in the garb of a charioteer, mingling with the common folk in attendance, and presenting himself on a chariot. In the early years of his reign, as 14.14.2 (cited in the previous note) makes clear, this tactic had some measure of success. But it was risky. For one, it could only ever appeal to the plebs, and not to the senators (or historiographers of senatorial standing like Tacitus who makes no secret of his disapproval). The upper classes frowned on the emperor, the mightiest man in the word, debasing himself by dressing up like a lowly professional or even slave on the fringes of society (as we saw with the gladiatorial games at 34.1-35.1). The deliberate exposition continues with the chiasmus (a) permixtus (b) plebi (note the mocking p-alliteration, achieved through the use of the intensifying per-) (b) curriculo (a) insistens. It sets up the next sentence, in which Tacitus wryly informs us that Nero’s efforts proved futile.
unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica, sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur: Tacitus here generates a memorable paradox: he stresses the guilt of the Christians and deems them deserving of extreme and unprecedented punishment (novissima exempla meritos: note the superlative), and yet records that the Roman populace, despite their hostility, began to feel pity towards them. The juxtaposition of meritos and miseratio stages the clash at the level of sentence design. Nero achieved the opposite effect to the one he aimed at. Tacitus could almost certainly have had little evidence for this generalisation of the mindset of the Roman spectators at the time. But there are other instances in which the cruelty on display triggered unexpected feelings of pity. Compare, for instance, the sympathy the Roman audience felt towards the elephants that were slaughtered as part of the games staged by Pompey the Great to celebrate his victories in the Eastern Mediterranean.199
quamquam adversus sontes: quamquam modifies the prepositional phrase (‘albeit towards guilty persons’). Focalization is an issue here: who considers the Christians guilty? And of what? Tacitus? He previously cast the Christians as scapegoats, so not responsible for the fire, but could have regarded them as criminals in a more general sense. Or the Roman populace? (If they pitied the Christians despite believing them to be guilty of causing the fire, it would make the miseratio even more striking.)
tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur: The contrast is once again between public duty and private desire, articulated by the antithesis of publica and unius. Bestial monarchic power overshadows public need; the contrast between the positive utilitate and the highly negative saevitiam, is sharp to begin with and further reinforced by the variatio: Tacitus moves from an ablative phrase (utilitate publica; an ablative of cause) to in + acc. + gen. (in saevitiam unius), with the change of construction emphasising the second half. Nero did not manage to shed his image as arsonist. Tacitus famously returns to this failure in his account of the conspiracy of Piso when narrating the sentencing of Subrius Flavus (15.67, cited above).
(VIII) 45: RAISING OF FUNDS FOR BUILDINGS
45.1 Interea conferendis pecuniis pervastata Italia, provinciae eversae sociique populi et quae civitatium liberae vocantur. inque eam praedam etiam dii cessere, spoliatis in urbe templis egestoque auro quod triumphis, quod votis omnis populi Romani aetas prospere aut in metu sacraverat.
Tacitus now focuses attention on the economic consequences of Nero’s efforts to rebuild the burnt-out city and his ravaged reputation. The money-raising affected every part of the Roman empire: we move from Italy to the periphery (provinces, allies, supposedly autonomous civic communities within the reach of Roman power) before zooming in on Rome itself and its divinities. As in his stock-taking after the fire, Tacitus here bemoans the loss of treasures in the temples accumulated over centuries of Roman military success. The riches that resulted from close collaboration of Rome’s civic community and its supernatural fellow-citizens are now squandered by an irresponsible emperor.
conferendis pecuniis pervastata [sc. est] Italia: The juxtaposition of these two phrases makes horrifyingly clear again Nero’s abuse of the country for his own ends. The strengthened verb pervastata (‘thoroughly ravaged’) suggests his ruthless exploitation of Italy. Clearly vast sums of money were needed for the building projects. Cf. Suetonius, Nero 38.3: conlationibusque non receptis modo verum et efflagitatis provincias privatorumque census prope exhausit (‘and from the contributions which he not only received, but even demanded, he nearly bankrupted the provinces and exhausted the resources of individuals’). More generally, as John Henderson points out, this is how capital cities of empires work, and not just Nero’s – the exotica and the scum of the earth are scoured and flood in, as we have seen, and the resources of the world are put at the service of beautifying, ennobling, and in case of disaster of putting them back on their feet, back on top, where they presume they belong.
provinciae eversae [sc. sunt] sociique populi et quae civitatium liberae vocantur [= et eae civitatium quae liberae vocantur]: eversae, which here refers to financial ruin, takes three subjects: provinciae, socii populi, and civitates liberae, though Tacitus presents the last item in such a way as to show that Nero and his agents made a mockery of the attribute ‘free.’ civitates liberae were specially privileged states such as Athens that were supposed to be immune from taxation – hence the ironical vocantur.
inque eam praedam etiam dii cessere: The polysyndeton continues (-que). In addition, the use of the word praeda to describe Nero’s fundraising is telling: it is used primarily in a military context for the booty stripped from a defeated enemy. Its use here paints Nero’s action as ruthless, thieving and hostile to his own subjects – and the gods. Tacitus’ use of the gods as subjects unable to withstand the emperor’s onslaught dramatically magnifies Nero’s greed and sacrilege, an effect helped by the emphasising etiam. As often, Tacitus does not leave Nero’s crime as simple rapacity, but introduces connotations of sacrilege and brutality as well.
spoliatis in urbe templis: An ablative absolute. spoliatis implies military booty seized from a defeated foe, but here is used to convey the savage execution of Nero’s fund-raising campaign. The targets of his greed and desperation are the temples of the gods within the city of Rome: in urbe makes clear that Nero’s abuse of the city did not stop at the building of the Domus Aurea. Pliny the Elder, after listing the greatest works of Greek art in Rome in his Natural History, finishes by saying (34.84): ‘And among the list of works I have referred to all the most celebrated have now been dedicated by the emperor Vespasian in the Temple of Peace and his other public buildings; they had been looted by Nero, who conveyed them all to Rome and arranged them in the sitting-rooms of his Golden House.’
egestoque auro quod triumphis, quod votis omnis populi Romani aetas prospere aut in metu sacraverat: egesto auro is another ablative absolute that leads into a quod-clause, in which Tacitus details what kind of gold is at issue: the material investment made by successive generations of Roman magistrates in their communication with the divine sphere, either in situations of triumph (quod triumphis ~ prospere) or of crisis (quod votis ~ in metu; Roman generals vowed gifts to the gods in return for their support on the battlefield; it was often a measure of last resort to avert defeat). The anaphora quod … quod… lays emphasis on the many grand occasions on which these golden statues had been dedicated to the temples. The totalising omnis … aetas makes explicit Nero’s abuse of the shared and ancient Roman heritage, emphasised by the formal term populi Romani. The polarities prospere aut in metu, set off by variatio (adverb; in + abl.), cover the whole range, suggesting that all precious objects were fair game to Nero. Finally, the verb sacraverat reminds us of the holy origin of these items and Nero’s irreligiosity.
triumphis: The triumph was the highest honour which could be awarded to a victorious Roman general. Nero perverts this sacred ritual. Far from celebrating public service and dedicating great riches to the Roman people, he steals from the accumulated public treasure for his own uses.
45.2 enimvero per Asiam atque Achaiam non dona tantum, sed simulacra numinum abripiebantur, missis in eas provincias Acrato ac Secundo Carrinate. ille libertus cuicumque flagitio promptus, hic Graeca doctrina ore tenus exercitus animum bonis artibus non induerat.
enimvero: Highly emphatic, denoting the culmination of the list of Nero’s victims.
per Asiam atque Achaiam: The provinces of Achaea (mainland Greece) and Asia (Turkey) were the richest in statuary and religious wealth.
non dona tantum sed simulacra numinum abripiebantur: The non … tantum, sed … construction emphasises Nero’s lack of restraint, whilst the violent verb abripiebantur underlines his rapacity. And again, Tacitus points to the sacrilegious nature of Nero’s plunder. The Greek travel writer Pausanias (writing in the mid-second century) tells us that Nero stole 500 statues from Delphi alone (10.7.1), while also swooping up treasures from other sanctuaries such as Olympia (6.25.9; 6.26.3).
missis in eas provincias Acrato ac Secundo Carrinate: Tacitus uses an ablative absolute to name Nero’s agents: Acratus, one of Nero’s freedmen, mentioned later in the Annals but otherwise unknown, and Secundus Carrinas, who was believed to have been the son of an orator exiled by Caligula. A right pair, this, ‘Uncontrollable’ Greekling [akrates in Greek ethics is someone without command over himself or his passions] plus Roman-sounding ‘Winner’, for the dirty work.
ille [sc. erat] libertus cuicumque flagitio promptus: A freedman rather than a senatorial official being sent to collect money was, for Tacitus, a sign of the unhealthy influence of ex-slaves at the imperial court. Almost by definition, such creatures were depraved and Acratus is no exception: Tacitus stresses that his immorality knew no bounds.
hic Graeca doctrina ore tenus exercitus animum bonis artibus non induerat: Secundus Carrinas apparently studied philosophy (Graeca doctrina), but only superficially (ore tenus: lit. ‘as far as his mouth’, i.e. he talked the talk but did not bother to walk the walk): his mind (animus) remained unaffected by the exposure to the excellent education (cf. bonis artibus) he received. Tacitus revels in hypocrisy of this sort, and here stresses this with the simple and scathing contrast between ore and animum: a wonderfully concise and acid description of a hypocrite.
45.3 ferebatur Seneca quo invidiam sacrilegii a semet averteret longinqui ruris secessum oravisse et, postquam non concedebatur, ficta valetudine, quasi aeger nervis cubiculum non egressus. tradidere quidam venenum ei per libertum ipsius, cui nomen Cleonicus, paratum iussu Neronis vitatumque a Seneca proditione liberti seu propria formidine, dum persimplici victu et agrestibus pomis ac, si sitis admoneret, profluente aqua vitam tolerat.
To his account of Nero’s sacrilege, Tacitus appends an anecdote about the Stoic philosopher Seneca, Nero’s boyhood tutor and chief adviser in the early years of his reign. He last made an appearance in the Annals at 15.23, when he congratulated Nero on his reconciliation with Thrasea Paetus. At Annals 14.56, Tacitus reported that Seneca put in a request for early retirement and, after Nero refused to grant it, withdrew himself from the centre of power as much as possible. Now he again tries to put suitable distance between himself and Nero, yet again without success. The incident here prefigures his death in the wake of the conspiracy of Piso, which is given pride of place in Tacitus’ account of AD 65, at Annals 15.48–74. Tacitus makes it clear that he does not wish to vouch for the veracity of the anecdote: with ferebatur and tradidere quidam he references anonymous sources without endorsing them. But at 15.60.2 Tacitus recounts the attempt to poison Seneca as fact: … ut ferro grassaretur (sc. Nero) quando venenum non processerat (‘… as poison had not worked, he was anxious to proceed by the sword’).
quo invidiam sacrilegii a semet averteret: A purpose clause (hence the subjunctive). Tacitus makes Nero’s sacrilege explicit, to the point of saying that his close adviser wanted to avoid being tainted by association. The noun invidiam is strong, implying real hatred, whilst the emphasised pronoun semet (himself) conveys Seneca’s fear that he himself might be held in some way responsible.
longinqui ruris secessum oravisse: The emphatically positioned longinqui suggests Seneca’s desperate wish to be far from the firing line, as does the verb oravisse.
ficta valetudine quasi aeger nervis: ficta and quasi return us to a favourite theme of Tacitus: the gulf between reality and presentation. Here, even the noble Seneca resorts to deceit – such is the nature of Roman political life under Nero. Seneca chose to simulate a muscular disease that restricted his mobility, presumably because it would have been difficult to prove that he faked it; it also offered a good pretext to stay away from court and he kept it going till his number was up (15.61.1). valetudo can mean both ‘good health’ and ‘ill health’ and here of course means the latter. In the gruesome event, the old valetudinarian bird was so tough he took a great deal of killing to see himself off (15.63.3, 64.3-4).
postquam non concedebatur: The subject is secessus. For the tense (postquam + imperfect) see Miller’s note at 37.3: ‘postquam with the imperfect indicative describes an action which continues up to the time of the main verb. Because of this, it often conveys a causal connection too, “now that”.’200
cubiculum non egressus [sc. esse]: The infinitive egressus esse, which here takes an accusative object (cubiculum), depends like oravisse on ferebatur.
tradidere quidam venenum ei per libertum ipsius, cui nomen [sc. erat] Cleonicus, paratum [sc. esse] iussu Neronis vitatumque [sc. esse] a Seneca proditione liberti seu propria formidine: tradidere [= tradiderunt] introduces an indirect statement with venenum as subject accusative and paratum (esse) and vitatum (esse) as infinitives. The marked position of venenum gives special emphasis to the horrifying fact that Nero tried to poison his old friend and teacher. Note again that it is a freedman involved in this skulduggery, with ipsius (his own) emphasising Nero’s role.
The detail cui nomen Cleonicus may render the story more concrete and hence plausible but, as John Henderson reminds us, the usual point in Tacitus’ naming especially Greek ‘extras’ for walk-on parts is that they tote ‘speaking names’: so, enter ‘Glory-Be-Victory’ [from kleos = glory and nike = victory]. (A favourite is ‘Invincible’ ‘Anicetus’, whose persistence finally clinched another staggered sequence of (botched) butchery, when eliminating Nero’s mother Agrippina to inaugurate Annals 14 and Nero’s first break out from the shackles of boyhood (notably Seneca’s control)).
paratum iussu Neronis vitatumque a Seneca: The failure of the plan is stressed by the balanced phrases here: ‘prepared by Nero’s orders, avoided by Seneca.’ The hand of the emperor behind this crime is explicit.
proditione liberti seu propria formidine: Again Tacitus gives two possible explanations, linked by the alliteration and paronomasia proditione ~ propria and with emphasis on the second. The crime could have been revealed to Seneca by the crumbling of Cleonicus (proditione liberti), with the word proditio (‘treachery’, ‘betrayal’) used with immense irony – his ‘betrayal’ was to save the life of Seneca, a cutting comment on the perversity of Nero’s reign. Or the crime could have been foiled by Seneca’s own fear (propria formidine): this is the more incriminating explanation because it implies that Seneca was already expecting an assassination attempt from his one-time supervisee. There is variatio in constructions (noun + subjective genitive (proditione liberti) followed by attribute + noun), which generates a chiasmus that helps to stress the second option, as does the following dum-clause.
dum persimplici victu et agrestibus pomis ac, si sitis admoneret, profluente aqua vitam tolerat: Seneca managed to prolong his life by only consuming non-processed food and running water, which pre-empted any possibility of adding poison – though the anecdote brings to mind Livia’s murder of Augustus by poisoning figs still on the tree. See Cassius Dio 56.30: ‘So Augustus fell sick and died. Livia incurred some suspicion in connexion with his death… she smeared with poison some figs that were still on trees from which Augustus was wont to gather the fruit with his own hands; then she ate those that had not been smeared, offering the poisoned ones to him.’ (Tacitus, at Annals 1.5, mentions the rumour that Livia tried to poison Augustus, but without going into details.) et agrestibus pomis explicates persimplici victu. Koestermann points out that the indicative tolerat within indirect speech is designed to convey Tacitus’ admiration for the Spartan simplicity of Seneca’s chosen way of life,201 but it may just as well cash out as sage precaution against the risk of poison at court (cf. 15.60.3). The subjunctive admoneret in the si-clause expresses repeated action (and thus has affinity with the generic use of the subjunctive).202