A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Nero’s tutor Seneca - a distinguished dramatist and philosopher - managed to persuade Nero to
send his former friend to Portugal as a governor. Soon afterwards, to Nero’s delight, Poppaea
became pregnant; he had always wanted an heir. There was only one obstacle in the way of
marrying Poppaea, Nero’s wife Octavia. They had been, betrothed as children - she was the
daughter of Claudius and Messalina - and she was now only just out of her teens. Her conduct was
irreproachable, so she had to be ‘framed’. The commander of the guard, Tigellinus, was given the
job of torturing her slaves until he had enough confessions to ensure a divorce. At this point, the
unpredictable Roman populace suddenly decided to take the part of Octavia and demonstrated in
front of the palace. More evidence was needed, so Nero’s friend Anicetus - the one who had
designed the collapsing ship - made a public confession that he had committed adultery with
Octavia and that she had aborted a child. The divorce went through. Octavia was exiled to an island
and then ordered to kill herself. When she protested, Nero’s henchmen bound her and opened up
her arteries. To hasten the process, she was placed in a steam bath. Tacitus states that her head was
sent to Poppaea to convince her that her former rival was dead. It was something of an anticlimax
when Poppaea presented Nero with a daughter.
In the following year, 64 A.D., Rome was devastated by a fire that lasted a week. The later rumour
that Nero started this fire is undoubtedly false; on the other hand, there seems to be some evidence
that he ‘fiddled’ while Rome burned - in fact, he took his lyre and sang a tragic song of his own
composition called The Fall of Troy’. Since the fire lasted so long, Nero can hardly be accused of
callousness for singing during that period; but when the story became current, it caused a steep
decline in his already plummeting popularity. When the fire was finally halted - by demolishing
public buildings - Nero seems to have behaved rather well. He organised relief, had large quantities
of corn brought in from Ostia, and cut its price to one sixteenth of normal.
Why should Nero have wanted to start a fire? According to the historians, because he wanted to
clear a large area in the centre of the city to build himself a new palace. In fact, Nero did build
himself an immense and magnificent palace called the Golden House. He also rebuilt a great deal
of the rest of Rome. But the rumours of his responsibility for the fire persisted, and Nero looked for
scapegoats. This was no problem, since Rome was now full of members of a ‘deadly superstition’
called Christianity. (Tacitus mentions that its prophet, Jesus, had been executed in Tiberius’s reign
by Pontius Pilate.) Rumours of the ‘notoriously depraved Christians’ spread. The Romans disliked
Christians partly because they were associated with the Jews, and the Jews were regarded as
religious fanatics who caused endless trouble. Tacitus also remarks that the Christians hated the
human race. To the Romans, this foreign religious sect, with its belief in the imminent end of the
world, must have seemed almost insane. If the Christians hated ‘earthly things’, then it seemed
quite possible that they might have started the great fire. What struck the Romans as even more
incredible and disgusting was that many of these Christians seemed to have no fear of dying for
their religion and confessed to it willingly. So the Christians were killed with exceptional ferocity.
They were smeared with tar and tied. to posts, to be ignited as living torches after dark. They were
dressed in animal skins and then set upon by wild dogs, who tore them to pieces. They were thrown
to wild beasts in the arena, and crucified in enormous numbers. And yet, paradoxically, Nero’s
good intentions backfired. He had overestimated the bloodthirstiness of the Roman populace.
People were sickened by so much torture, and his popularity declined yet again.
Nero’s problem was that he was too self-absorbed to react to the state of public opinion. It seemed
to him that he was an excellent emperor who was always giving the public what it wanted. As to
being bloodthirsty, he felt it was shockingly untrue. In 61 A.D., the prefect of the city had been