Confronting the Classics by Mary Beard

Author:Mary Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2013-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

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BIT-PART EMPERORS

The Emperor Nero died on 9 June 68 AD. The Senate had passed the ancient equivalent of a vote of no-confidence; his staff and bodyguards were rapidly deserting him. The emperor made for the out-of-town villa of one of his remaining servants, where he preempted execution by committing suicide. An aesthete to the end, he insisted that marble be collected to make a decent memorial, and as he lingered on the choice of suicide weapon, he repeated his famous last words – ‘Qualis artifex pereo’ (‘What an artist the world is losing by my death’) – interspersed with some appropriately poignant quotes from Homer’s Iliad. Or so the story goes.

Whatever Nero’s popularity may have been among the grass roots, he had sufficiently outraged elite opinion that by 68 almost every army commander and provincial governor had an alternative candidate for the imperial throne – or harboured ambitions to run for the office himself. Four contenders came forward in turn. Galba, the elderly governor of Spain, had been hailed as emperor before Nero’s death. He arrived in the capital sometime in the autumn of 68, only to be murdered in mid-January 69 in a coup that handed the throne to Otho, one of his already discontented supporters. But Otho didn’t last long either. He was defeated by the forces of Vitellius, governor of Lower Germany, who was himself crushed a few months later, in the autumn of 69, by a coalition backing Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the general who had been directing the Roman campaigns against the Jews. Vespasian’s propaganda tried hard to suggest that he had been propelled somewhat unwillingly to the throne by the urging of his troops, and out of a sense of duty to save his country from yet more carnage. It is much more likely to have been a brilliant piece of calculation: Vespasian bided his time while the other major contenders fought it out, then moved in to ‘save the state’. Either way, the result was a new imperial dynasty: the Flavians.

‘The Year of the Four Emperors’, as it is euphemistically called in modern accounts, as if to avoid the term ‘civil war’, marks a crucial turning point in Roman history. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. With him died not only an artist, but the very idea that claims to imperial power could be legitimated by direct or indirect genealogical connection with the first emperor. Augustus’ own arrangements for succession had been a weak point in his regime. For the rest of imperial history, what made an emperor – or what gave one candidate for the purple a better claim than another – would be an even more intense matter of dispute. And, as Tacitus sharply observed, in the conflicts between rival provincial governors with their rival armies in 68–69 AD, one ‘secret of empire’ had been let out of the bag: ‘It was possible for an emperor to be created somewhere other than Rome.’

The first contender of the four seems to

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