Murdering Nero by Paul Bannister

Author:Paul Bannister [Bannister, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIV: Emperor

An oily, obsequious fat man with a fringe of carefully-arranged curls and multi-ringed fingers greeted us as we entered the atrium of a large domus. “Welcome, my lords,” he said, bowing and wringing his hands as if drying a soaked rag. “My name is Lucius Livius and I am the steward of my master, the consul Servius Sulpicius Galba, who is in Iberia. He offers this house to you to use during your time in Rome.” We expressed our thanks and learned that the generous offer had come at the command of Nero. It was a pleasing place, one of the aristocrats’ villas that crowded the Palatine Hill but its best feature was the information that came from the gossipy Livius.

From him over the next few days as we waited for Nero to return to Rome we learned much about the Caesars. The old emperor Caligula had an affliction that made him fall down, believed himself a brother of the god Jupiter and had a walkway built between the god’s temple and his own palace so the ‘brothers’ could be closer. He deified himself and validated it by having his own bust placed on the decapitated statues of gods, He was noted as an inventively cruel tyrant and was ultimately assassinated by his own guards.

His successor Claudius, the previous emperor and adoptive father of our current tyrant was also subject to seizures, stuttered and drooled, was a glutton and alehouse regular and a puppet of his wife, who poisoned him to clear the way for her son Nero to take the throne.

Nero, we learned in cautious whispers, compelled the patricians to attend his ultra-long musical concerts, (“They go on so long that women have been known to give birth during them, and men have pretended to die, to escape the interminable things” ) was a sexual deviant who had raped a Vestal and had two scandalous mock-weddings solemnly performed. One was to his catamite Sporus, a boy who resembled Nero’s dead wife Poppea Sabina. Nero had the youth castrated and made into his ‘bride’ in one ceremony; in the other a freedman called Pythagoras was married to the emperor in a wedding at which Nero was the veiled bride. From then onwards, the trio shared a ‘marital’ bed.

Nero was an actor-emperor who believed he was an Apollo of music and the equal of Hercules as a hero. “He bribed his way into the Greek Olympics and won every athletic contest he entered,” said Livius. “He even won a chariot race that he did not finish after crashing.” The judges, our informant told us, were so terrified of invoking the imperial displeasure they crowned him champion on the basis that he would have won if he had continued. “But it is more than just cheating in contests. Nero is a monster who dresses in the hides of wild animals and sates his evil lusts by attacking bound and naked boys and girls while he is so disguised. He is surrounded by sycophants who feed his desires and pander to his distorted realities.

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