066 - 666

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 6666. At the end of last week's episode, I hinted that today we would be getting into the Great Jewish Revolt, which erupted in Judea in 66 AD and led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. However, as I began to unpack my outline for this week, I quickly realized that this hinting was premature. So to those of you out there who got really psyched for that story, sorry, you're going to have to wait until next week. There is too much I want to get into about Nero, the Great Fire of Rome, the Emperor's relationship with the early Christians, and his relationship with the Senate to cram the Great Revolt in there too. So the Great Revolt will be next week. This week, was Nero actually the Antichrist?

You'll remember from two weeks ago that in 59 AD, Nero had grown so tired of his mother Agrippina that he conspired to have her killed. Though this act of matricide could not be said to mark a clear line between Nero the self-indulgent and Nero the sadist, since on the one hand killing your own mother goes way beyond self-indulgent, and on the other, Nero the sadist didn't really get going until after the death of the Praetorian Prefect Burrus in 62 AD, the death of Agrippina pretty clearly foreshadowed what Nero was capable of and what he was becoming. But like I say, it wasn't a clear breaking point.

For a few years, Nero continued on as he always had, moderately interested in the affairs of state and excessively interested in affairs of, well, excess. He served as consul four times from 55 to 60 AD, an office which, while not as important as it had once been, was still a key administrative cog in the empire, signaling that Nero enjoyed at least some aspects of practical governance, but at the same time, he began to take his leisure pursuits even more seriously than he had in the past. Nero was essentially a bohemian emperor. He liked drinking, poetry, and music. He liked lazing around during the day and partying his way through the night. He and his friends would go on drunken romps through the city, stirring up trouble at brothels and bathhouses, and generally making the LA nightclub scene look like a meeting of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. But even with the emperor whirling around Rome in a debauched frenzy every night, the day-to-day operations of empire were still in relatively good hands. The Prefect Burrus and Seneca the Younger continued to act as moderating hands, steering the no-doubt perpetually hungover Nero away from this terrible idea and toward that sound policy. But in the early 60s AD, things began to change, and the sort-of-embarrassing-but-harmless bohemian emperor began to turn into something much darker, and in response, the people of Rome began to turn on him.

In 58 AD, Nero met the wife of his friend Otho, who was a stunning and ambitious woman named Papaea Sabina, and was immediately smitten with her. Papaea was more than happy to return the emperor's affections, as it was widely rumored that she had initially targeted Otho for marriage specifically to get closer to Nero. The two began to have an affair shortly thereafter, that some pointed to as the key factor in Nero's decision to off his disapproving mother, and though that explanation has been pretty well debunked, it is worth noting again that the accusation was thrown around at the time. The reason Agrippina disapproved is that Nero was still married to Claudia Octavia, the daughter of Claudius. The union between Nero and Claudia kept the two wings of the Julio-Claudian dynasty tied together, and Agrippina didn't want Nero to throw that away in a fit of young lust. Mistresses were fine, as long as they remained mistresses, but Nero was never happy in his arranged marriage and was always looking to turn his mistresses into wives, something that would shatter the only recently reunited bonds of the Julians and the Claudians. Poppaea, for her part, had no interest in remaining Nero's mistress, and was forever whispering in the emperor's ear that he ought to ditch his prudish wife and marry her instead.

In 62 AD, things came to a head when Poppaea announced that she was pregnant with Nero's child. The emperor finally decided that it was time to give up all the pretenses, and announced to the people that on grounds of infertility, he was divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppaea instead. He then banished Octavia to the same small island that had previously been the de facto prison of her aunt, Agrippina the Elder. 18 days later, Nero married Poppaea in a lavish ceremony.

The divorce and remarriage of Nero marks the first time the public really turned on the young emperor. Up until now, he had been writing his Julian blood and generous social programs right into the hearts of the masses. But the people seemed to take the betrayal of Octavia personally. Well liked for her noble demeanor, they couldn't understand why Nero was suddenly dumping this fine Roman woman who they were all proud to call their empress. And who was taking her place? Some harlot adulterer? No, they weren't happy about this at all. It got so bad that people began carrying statues of Octavia through the streets, demanding that she be recalled from exile. Nero, spooked by the sudden demonstrations, nearly caved in, but Poppaea convinced him to do the other thing. The thing where, sorry, Octavia is dead, so as much as I'd like to, there's no one really left to recall. Imperial agents staged the murder of Octavia to make it look like a suicide, but no one was buying it. Whatever benefit of the doubt Nero had been receiving was now gone, and two years later, when Rome went up in flames, no one hesitated to accuse the emperor of setting the blaze himself for his own insane purposes.

But it wasn't just the incident with Octavia that turned the people against Nero. In general, his policies were trending towards unsustainable extravagance. Not typical rich boy extravagance, mind you, but a budget-busting, megalomaniacal extravagance that was beginning to weigh the whole empire down. The key shift in his attitude came later in 62 AD, when the Praetorian prefect Burrus died of an illness. Though he had been gradually losing favor with the emperor, especially since the arrival of Papua, Burrus was still a positive influence on Nero, and his death left a giant hole where moderation used to be. His death also left the key office of Praetorian prefect open, and Nero filled the vacancy not with a man who would moderate his vices, but who would openly encourage them. Further, with Burrus dead, Seneca the Younger found himself isolated in an imperial court that was now dominated by Papua and her friends. After they began passing around rumors that the old man was embezzling from the state treasury, Seneca knew that he was a marked man. Rather than run the risk of winding up in front of some treason trial on trumped-up charges, Seneca resigned from his post and retired to a quiet life of philosophical contemplation. Not that it would all do him much good. Recognizing that his young charge was becoming a massive liability for the empire, Seneca would get caught up in the Byzonian conspiracy and then be exposed along with everyone else when the plot was betrayed in 65 AD, all of which I'll get to in a moment.

The man who replaced Burrus as prefect was Gaius Ophonius Tigellinus, and it can be justifiably said that the downfall of Nero coincides neatly with the rise of Tigellinus. The new prefect quickly gained a reputation for cruelty, and spent the majority of his seven-odd years in office either persecuting the enemies of Nero or orchestrating his mass orgies. As I just said, where Burrus had acted to keep Nero in check, Tigellinus actively encouraged the emperor to indulge himself without reservation or hesitation. The combined influence of Papua and the new Praetorian prefect unhinged Nero completely from his superego, and sent him down a path that eventually led to him committing suicide after being declared an enemy of the state in 68 AD. So remember kids, the superego may be a joyless old stick in the mud, but it's there for a reason.

In 64 AD, the negative consequences of the emperor's excesses were finally put on full display following one of the seminal events of Nero's reign, the Great Fire of Rome. The accusations and counter-accusations about who was behind the disaster paint a picture of an emperor who had not only lost the faith of the aristocratic classes, but of the general public as well, because the widely spread and widely believed rumor was that Nero had himself started the blaze. A popular and well-regarded ruler does not usually have to answer questions about whether or not he has burned his own capital down, but an increasingly disliked and despotic Well, those are exactly the sorts of questions that everyone starts asking. As disconnected as he was becoming from reality though, Nero wasn't oblivious to this evidence of his sinking popularity, or the threat that posed to his regime. His decision to scapegoat the early Christians and blame them for starting the fire is clear evidence that Nero decided he needed some kind of evil foil to point to to keep the public's attention off of his own failings. With the Romans already suspicious of those weirdo Christian cultists, Nero guessed that it would be easy to fan the flames of bigotry, and in the process maybe regain some of his lost popularity.

Accounts of the breadth and depth of the Great Fire differ, but the classic accounting is that three of the fourteen districts of Rome wound up utterly destroyed, and another seven were badly damaged. The fire broke out near the Circus Maximus, and quickly raged out of control, ultimately burning for somewhere between five and seven days before running out of fuel. In addition to the countless homes and businesses that were destroyed in the blaze, portions of the imperial palace were consumed, along with the hearth of the Vestal Virgins and the temple of the Jupiter Stator, which legend had it had been founded by Romulus himself after the Romans' first successful battle with the Sabines. The fire was devastating, and in its aftermath the displaced victims, families who had lost everything, naturally wanted to know what had happened, why it had happened, and how it had happened. But there was no clear cause, and in the absence of a plausible explanation, rumors began to fly that perhaps Nero was behind the whole thing. It had long been known that the emperor dreamed of building a massive palace complex in the heart of the city, so wasn't it obvious that Nero had sent his agents, led by that damned Tigellinus, to start the fire in order to clear out the existing buildings that were in the way of his opulent vision? Reports began to crop up that while the fire raged, a joyful Nero had plucked at his prized lyre while watching the city go down in flames. In fact, wasn't it true that setting the fire hadn't even been about building his golden palace? Wasn't it just that Nero desired a magnificent backdrop for some new performance, and that in the midst of the blaze he had dressed in a costume and sung the sack of ilium for him and his monstrous friends? Wasn't it true that Nero had fiddled while Rome burned? So turned the rumor mill.

But were any of these rumors actually true? I tend to follow Tacitus on this, because as biased as he is against Nero, he's usually reliable with his facts, and he reports that Nero wasn't even in Rome at the time, and when news that the city was on fire reached him, that he rushed back and immediately spearheaded a relief effort, housing refugees in the standing portions of the palace and arranging for food and water to be dispersed to victims throughout the city. Once the immediate emergency had passed, Nero then began a reconstruction effort that led to some pretty major revisions to the fire code and a rationalization of the organic mess that had been the urban plan of Rome. But for all these good works, Nero still managed to come off as the leading candidate for having set the fire, because in the aftermath, he did indeed set to work on building his Golden Palace, a complex of opulent buildings that eventually covered somewhere between 100 and 300 acres of prime downtown real estate. It was this blatant land grab as much as anything else that led many to believe that Nero had indeed set the fire.

Conscious that his standing with the people was taking a hit, Nero decided he needed to find someone to take the fall for the fire. Someone he could point to and say, it was them, not me, I didn't have anything to do with it. But he couldn't just grab someone off the street, because with his popularity sinking like a stone, that would just engender the further charge that he was setting up some innocent to take all the blame. What Nero needed was someone, some group, that the people disliked even more than him. ready, willing, and able to believe had done this horrible thing, if for no other reason than that the people were looking for an excuse to round up and punish them. Enter the Christians.

In the 30 odd years since the death of Christ, nascent Christian communities had begun cropping up throughout the empire. At first, they were primarily Jewish in character, but through the missionary work of St. Paul, known later as the Apostle to the Gentiles, this new religion began to spread into the Greco-Roman world. By the reign of Nero, a tiny community of believers, led, according to tradition, by St. Peter, had established a religious beachhead in Rome itself. The problem the early Christians faced in Rome, though, was not just that their religion, in comparison to the wider pagan world, struck the average Roman as downright weird, but also that at this point most Christian adherents were non-citizen resident aliens of the city who spoke primarily Greek or Hebrew. So the Christians in Rome looked different, spoke a different language, usually came from the lower rungs of the social ladder, and belonged to a strange monotheistic cult that seemed to have cannibalistic overtones. All in all, they were capital O Other in every sense of the word, and as has been proven over and over again by history, whenever terrible things happen to a community, economic problems, floods, plagues, fires, it is the capital O Others who usually get blamed. So desperate to shift responsibility for the Great Fire away from himself, Nero looked at these Others and decided to lay it all on them. He sent out his agents into the city and had them round up as many identified Christians as they could find, drag them into dark rooms, and torture them until they admitted to starting the fire. These confessions in hand, Nero then decided to expand his persecution beyond some limited group of conspirators and target the Christian community as a whole.

According to Tacitus, Nero embarked on his persecution with a cruel zeal. Christians were thrown to the dogs for public amusement, crucified and left to die, or, perhaps most gruesomely, crucified and then burnt alive to serve as torches for Nero's nightly parties. But if Nero was hoping that he could regain the public's favor by torturing Christians, he underestimated the humanity of the masses. Sure the Christians are weird and nobody really wants them around, but at a certain point, burning them alive for sport while you and your friends watch and drink yourselves stupid? Really? That seems a bit excessive, you know? Sympathy for the Christians grew while Nero wound up even more unpopular than he had been when he started. So you could say that the plan backfired. I should also note that while it is not confirmed that St. Peter himself was caught up specifically in the Great Fire persecution, tradition does have him being crucified by the Romans at some point in the mid-60s AD. St. Peter's Basilica, the beating heart of the Catholic Church, is allegedly built upon the spot where he was buried.

As unpopular as Nero was becoming with the people of Rome, their dissatisfaction paled in comparison to the feelings of the Christians themselves who now came to revile Nero with an understandable fury. It has been suggested, I think plausibly, that the reference in the Book of Revelations to 666, being the number of the beast, is a coded reference to Nero. I'm not going to get into the specifics of Jewish numerology, but basically, if you take the Greek spelling of Nero's name and translate it into Hebrew, you are left with a name that has the numerological value of 666. After Nero's suicide, there was a great deal of speculation, especially in the East, that Nero had not really died, and was poised to make a dramatic comeback at any time. Fearful of Roman reprisals for speaking against the Caesars, but still wishing to warn their brethren about the threat that Nero posed, the early Christians used numerology to code in a reference for those with the wisdom to see. I think it's fair to say, too, that one of the primary reasons Nero has such a terrible historical reputation is that, around about the 4th century, the Church Fathers got a hold of the history books, and saw no reason to paint Nero as anything more than a demonic monster. While that perhaps went too far, even in his own time, Nero was fast running out of defenders.

The people no longer trusted him, and the aristocracy, well, they hadn't liked him from the beginning. Like most autocrats, Nero had come to the throne promising greater power for the Senate and a lighter imperial hand, but before long, as usual, those promises were forgotten, and the Senate returned to its natural state of irrelevancy. While this irrelevancy suited many men who were members primarily for the social status it conferred upon them, there was still a core group of senators who either had an interest in good governance for its own sake, or had personal political ambitions that they thought membership in the Senate could advance. In either case, Nero's actions in the early to mid-60s AD inflamed both. The emperor was slashing taxes, while increasing public works projects, and diverting funds into the construction of his palace, which now featured a 120-foot statue of himself looking down upon the city, all of which left the state teetering on the brink of insolvency. This of course offended the good government types. At the same time, if you weren't a part of Nero's inner circle of friends, good luck advancing your career. Nero played favorites early and often, and there were dozens of powerful men who didn't get on with the emperor personally, which left them out in the cold politically. This of course offended the ambitious types. These various offenses bubbled under the surface until a formal conspiracy to assassinate Nero coalesced around Gaius Calpurnius Piso.

Piso was a distinguished statesman and orator, who enjoyed a fine reputation at all levels of Roman society, and who had been watching the devolution of Nero's reign with disgust. If Rome could be ruled again by a man of talent like Augustus, rather than men like his incompetent and insane descendants, the empire might thrive again, rather than simply stagnate as it seemed to be doing. Piso, a man of modest ego, decided that the very best candidate to rule Rome, if the criteria was basic merit, was himself. Details of the plot remain sketchy, but it seems as though Piso had secured the support of Tigellinus' Praetorian prefect colleague, Phineas Rufus, and the two men had agreed that upon the assassination of Nero, however that went down, Rufus would lead Piso to the Praetorian camp where Piso would be declared the new emperor. Dozens of men in the senate, in the imperial bureaucracy, and in the army eventually joined in the word of mouth conspiracy, including Seneca the Younger. But before the plan could be initiated, it was betrayed. When a young officer was heard complaining that his career had stalled because Nero didn't like him, he was approached about joining the growing plot. But rather than join, he decided to use the information he obtained to betray the plot as a means of currying favor with the emperor. Though the young officer lacked details, he put the imperial court on notice that a sizable chunk of the aristocracy was actively plotting the regime's downfall.

In April of 65 AD, a freedman's secretary confirmed the existence of the plot and provided the details that Nero's agents were looking for. Piso and everyone else were either ordered to commit suicide or were exiled to the provinces. Seneca committed suicide. The Pisonian Conspiracy represented a very real threat to Nero. It was not some ham-fisted caper. It was a well-orchestrated plot that involved some of the most prominent men in Rome. Scared out of his wits that now everyone was out to get him, an increasingly paranoid Nero re-initiated indiscriminate treason trials, the bloody calling card of imperial insecurity. The trials, of course, only entrenched the aristocratic hatred of Nero, and in a few short years, he would find himself fleeing his golden palace, friendless, and officially an enemy of the state.

I'm going to leave it there for this week. Next time, we'll hop back and forth between the final stages of Nero's reign and the great revolt that erupts in Judea in 66 AD, and after that, I'll lay the groundwork for the year of the four emperors, the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the rise of the new Flavian dynasty that took its place once all the dust had settled. But before we take off into that next phase of Roman history, as some of you have already noticed, the history of Rome will be going off the air for about four weeks, following the September 13th episode. I am getting married on September 23rd, and then immediately moving from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas, so long story short, I am going to be a very busy man, and will not be able to pay my little podcast the attention it deserves.

I want to direct all of you back to thehistoryofrome.tipad.com, where I have posted a brief message on all of this, and also address the growing movement to have me keep going with this thing until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which, as I explain, is most likely not going to happen. So, after this, we'll have three more episodes, the last of which will probably be a fun episode dedicated to Roman wedding customs, because, hey, right now, it's basically wedding stuff all the time for me, so why should the history of Rome be any different?