Under Cæsars' Shadow

by Henry Francis Colby

From his very accession Nero felt uneasy on account of the jealousy of Britannicus. He knew that the sense of right would assert itself in the breasts of many in behalf of Britannicus and might become dangerous to his reign. He therefore proceeded with caution. He pronounced a funeral oration over Claudius, which Seneca is believed to have composed for him. In it he made many conciliatory promises. There were not any of the nobles who had courage to call in question his claims. They cared not to risk their heads simply for the sake of a mere righteous succession. They preferred to tolerate him as long as he treated them with respect. They held the weakness of his title to the throne as a weapon to be used against him if he should offend them.

Meanwhile Seneca and Burrus, the young emperor’s principal advisers, did all they could to make his government a good one and so establish its authority. Their chief difficulties were to control his headstrong nature and to prevent his mother from exercising too much influence over him. She, who had supplanted Messalina and had murdered Claudius, was not going to let her power go, if she could help it. She leagued herself with Pallas, the wealthy and unprincipled freedman at court, and it soon became evident that she was making trouble.

Her son, too, at first was too ready to give her honors. She was borne in public in the same litter with him. She caused coins to be stamped having her head with his upon them. She sent dispatches to foreign courts and gave answers to ambassadors. She even ordered the murder of Silanus, the proconsul of Asia, who was obnoxious to her. Burrus and Seneca were alarmed at her bold assumptions of authority. They determined to break down her power at any cost. To draw away Nero from confiding too much in her they even favored his intrigue with a freedwoman named Acte, which greatly enraged Agrippina. And this rage was increased when Nero removed Pallas from his position of influence and dismissed him from court.

Agrippina then declared herself the patroness of Britannicus, notwithstanding she had set him aside to bring Nero to the throne, and she appealed to the army to make that young man now the emperor in the place of her son. Nero saw there was danger of a revolution. He therefore adopted the iniquitous course then so common with jealous rulers. He had Britannicus poisoned. The poison, it is said, was prepared under the emperor’s own eyes and was administered in the wine-cup of Britannicus as he sat at a banquet in the palace. The youth fell back lifeless, but Nero passed the occurrence by as one of the fits, to which, he said, his brother was subject. That same night the corpse of Britannicus was solemnly cremated with funeral ceremony on the Campus Martius.

Nero then tried to divert attention from the event and to cover up his crime by showering presents, houses, and estates on the favorites of the palace. The much praised philosopher, Seneca, extolled the clemency of Nero during this, the first year of his reign; yet this cool and calculated murder of Britannicus seems to have occurred within the limits of that year. Seneca probably tried to excuse himself by saying that, if Nero should not be sustained, Agrippina would flourish in her power; and that would be worse for the public weal. Meanwhile, he directed the administration of the national affairs in a manner to please the Senate and made the first five years of Nero a prosperous time for the great body of the people. They were afterward spoken of as a period of great happiness. This must have been largely in contrast with the great gloom that followed; yet doubtless Nero was to a great extent then pliant to the advice of his tutor and the prefect.

Nero prudently declined having magnificent statues erected in his honor. He reserved severe measures for notorious criminals, and seems even to have been touched at times with emotion of compassion. Seneca, to increase the youthful emperor’s popularity, circulated an anecdote of him to the effect that when asked to affix his signature to an order for the execution of a condemned person he exclaimed:

“How I wish that I did not know how to write.”

But these moments of tenderness seem to have been only of short duration. The spirit which had been manifested in the poisoning of Britannicus soon reappeared in other acts of meanness and cruelty. He had been trained from his childhood in too hard and selfish a school.

The emperor’s mother, Agrippina, was continuing to plot against him, and her various designs to disenthrone him were, of course, reported to him. This disturbed him in the midst of the recklessness with which he was carrying on his debaucheries with his boon companions. “The Best of Mothers,” as he had called her on his accession, had now become the worst of his relentless enemies. She seems to have allowed all her maternal affection for him to be chilled by the disappointment of her love of personal power.

For our knowledge of those times we are indebted largely to the “Annals” of Tacitus. Some questions arise as to the reliability of his accounts. Josephus, who, as a foreigner, may have been more impartial, says that different historians of Nero’s reign were swayed by opposite prejudices; yet he believed in the poisoning of Britannicus and in other cruel murders by Nero now to be related.