The women of the Caesars

by Guglielmo Ferrero

[Illustration: Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome.]

Agrippina, then, with the assistance of Seneca and Burrhus, had kept the highest office in the state in the family of Augustus, and she had done so by a bold move which had not been without its dangers. She was too intelligent not to foresee that a seventeen-year-old emperor could have no authority, and that his position would expose him to all sorts of envy and intrigue, and to open as well as secret opposition. She succeeded in mitigating this evil and in parrying this danger by another very happy suggestion—the virtually complete restoration of the old republican constitution. After the funeral of Claudius, Nero introduced himself to the senate, and in a polished and modest discourse, seemingly intended to excuse his youth, he declared that of all the powers exercised by his predecessors he wished to keep only the command of the armies. All other civil, judicial, and administrative functions he turned over to the senate, as in the times of the republic.

This "restoration of the republic" was Agrippina's masterpiece, and marks the zenith of her power. It followed, as a result of her decision, that Nero, who was to go down to posterity as the most terrible of tyrants, was that one of all the Roman emperors who had the most limited power; and furthermore it was likewise the result of her activity that the constitution of the empire had never been so close to that of the ancient republic as under the government of Nero. Most historians, hallucinated by Tacitus, have not noticed this, and they have consequently not recognized that in carrying out this plan Agrippina is neither more nor less than the last continuator of the great political tradition founded by Augustus. In the minds of both Augustus and Tiberius the empire was to be governed by the aristocracy. The emperor was merely the depositary of certain powers of the nobility conceded to him for reasons of state. If these reasons of state should disappear, the powers would naturally revert to the nobles. It was therefore expedient at this time to make the senate forget, in the presence of a seventeen-year-old emperor, the pressure which had been brought to bear upon it by the cohorts, and to wipe out the rancor against the imperial power which was still dormant in the aristocracy. This restoration was not, therefore, a sheer renunciation of privileges and powers inherent in the sovereign authority, but an act of political sagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of government had been received in the school of Augustus.

[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger.]

The move was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperial authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply grounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority was specially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nero therefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope in the general promise of concord. The disaffection which had been felt in the last six years of Claudius's government was changed into a general and confident optimism, which the first acts of the new government and the signs of the future seemed to justify. Agrippina continued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done before the election: together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, she suggested to him every word and deed. The senate resumed its ancient functions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina in conjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressing wonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government was in a better way than it ever yet had been.

But the situation soon changed. Agrippina, to be sure, had given her son a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with a simplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she had early given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternal authority. But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was a temperament which rebelled against this species of education as strongly as did Nero's. His taste for the arts of drawing and singing, the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from his childhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his raging exoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power. His was one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperaments which feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition, education, and the general opinion of the society in which they live have prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful. In the case of Nero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were to become apparent.

The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon one of those early marriages of which we have spoken in the first of these studies. Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young lady who, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education, might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevation to the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made the acquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses and imagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom he had married from a sense of duty and not for love. This person was Acte, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardent youth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that he one day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry Acte. But a marriage between Nero and Acte was not possible. The Lex de maritandis ordinibus prohibited marriages between senators and freedwomen. It was therefore natural that Agrippina should have opposed it with all her strength. She, the great-granddaughter of Livia, the granddaughter of Drusus, the daughter of Germanicus, educated in the strictest ideas of the old Roman aristocracy, could not permit her son to compromise the prestige of the entire nobility in the eyes of the lower orders by so scandalous a mésalliance. But on this occasion the youth, carried away by his passion, resisted. If he did not actually repudiate Octavia, he disregarded her, and began to live with Acte as if she were his wife. Agrippina insisted that he give up this scandalous relationship; but in vain. The mother and son disagreed, and very shortly after having resisted his mother in the case of Acte, Nero began to resist her on other occasions. With increasing energy he shook off maternal authority, which up to that time he had accepted with docility.