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AVENGERS IN DYNASTIC CONFLICTS
the imperial court as well as upon the ability to conduct himself as emperor
in public. This reminds us of men like the avengers of Agrippa Postumus
and of the son of Herod. Though it cannot be proved, one suspects that the
false Nero was also an imperial slave who set himself up as the avenger of
his ruined master. At any rate, he exploited the desire for vengeance by
Nero’s supporters for his own ends, thereby stamping the affair with the
usual association of vengeance and the assumption of the identity of the
avenged.
The rumour that Nero was not dead, which in 69 allowed a warm reception
for a first imposter, was still doing the rounds ten years later, so that in
79 or 80 a second false Nero appeared, 113 and just ten years after this a third.
The second imposter was one Terentius Maximus, a freeman from the province
of Asia. He is supposed to have looked and sounded like Nero and, like
the emperor, to have accompanied his singing on the lyre. In these respects,
what is said about him is fully in line with what was said of the first false
Nero. He gave out that Nero had escaped the squad of soldiers come to kill
him and had spent many years in hiding. The story goes that, with a core
of followers from Asia Minor, 114 Maximus made his way into Parthia 115 and
attracted lively support. According to Dio, a Parthian commander called
Artabanus, who nursed a grudge against the emperor Titus, made the false
Nero welcome and promised him support in his intended return to Rome.
In John of Antioch ‘Nero’ likewise reached the Parthian Empire, sought
support on the basis of reciprocal generosity in respect of the Armenian question,
but in the end failed to achieve anything. 116 The swindle soon collapsed,
and the imposter was forthwith disposed of.
The third false Nero 117 sought his fortune in the same way as his predecessor,
by claiming to be ruler of the Roman Empire. He too operated from
Parthian territory and received support from the Parthian king who, we are
expressly told, 20 years later still cherished a special regard for Nero. 118 We
do not know what happened in detail, but from the brief reports in the texts
the incident clearly caused a great deal of fuss and seriously strained Romano-
Parthian relations. Suetonius writes that the Parthians yielded only reluctantly
to Roman efforts to have the man handed over, 119 and Tacitus even
reports that war was threatened over this ‘piece of trickery’. 120 The basis for
the repeated appearance of false Neros was persistent eastern sympathy
for this emperor on both sides of the Parthian border. 121 Though they never
posed a real danger to Vespasian, Titus or Domitian as usurpers or foci of
opposition forces, we should not overlook the fact that each of the Flavian
emperors was confronted by an imposter. In particular, the rulers of the
Parthian empire made no secret of their regard for Nero as opposed to the
Flavians. 122 This should not surprise us, given Nero’s ceremonial confirmation
of Tiridates as monarch of Armenia in 66. 123 Flavian policy towards the
Parthians was hardly deliberately revanchist; but what the Flavians did could
be (and, by the Parthians, certainly was) interpreted as a means of improving
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