The Emperor Nero's Henry VIII Problem - Part Two
A wife you don't want. A woman you do. What's an emperor to do?
In the last instalment, the ancient Roman emperor Nero had resolved to rid himself of Octavia, the popular and virtuous wife he despised, in order to marry his pregnant mistress, the beautiful and infamous Poppaea Sabina. If you haven’t read it yet you might want to catch up here.
Octavia could not simply be killed or exiled without explanation. Her position and her public popularity necessitated the creation of a narrative; one which drew Octavia as the villain and Nero her innocent victim. It would not be an easy sell.
The plan, at first, was to remove her by way of a scandal: an accusation of adultery would be brought, the requisite evidence would be fabricated, and Nero, the wronged husband, would have no choice but to expel Octavia from the court.
For some time now, this had been the usual way of getting rid of unwanted or problematic imperial women. It was supremely convenient. Evidence of a love affair was easy to fabricate and difficult to disprove, and the punishment - exile to some barren island and the confiscation of a woman's property by the imperial treasury - ensured that she would never be able to return to Rome and to power unless by the mercy of the sovereign. Whole factions could be defanged simultaneously if a woman's male supporters in the senate and the imperial household were cast as her lovers and tried alongside her. It was a tested and proven formula.
Poppaea (and it is almost all Poppaea in the narrative provided by our main source, the Roman historian Tacitus) arranged for a member of Octavia's own household to claim that the empress had been unfaithful in the most shameful way the Roman mind could fathom - she had been sleeping with a slave. Eucaerus, an enslaved Alexandrian flute player, was cast as Octavia's lover. The choice was carefully calculated to induce prurient horror: both performers and Alexandrians had reputations in the Roman world for unspeakable debaucheries.
Now for the evidence. Octavia's maids were rounded up and questioned about the affair under torture. A few were forced into false confessions, but the majority held out. One even spat back at her questioner Tigellinus, prefect of the praetorian guard, that Octavia's genitals were purer than his mouth.
Faced with such unforeseen setbacks in what had been meant to be a simple show-trial, Nero decided to take a simpler route. Claiming Octavia was barren, he offered her a divorce and she accepted. There was little interval before Nero married Poppaea.
Initially, the arrangement seemed to work and Nero even provided Octavia with his own version of alimony, granting her the vast estates of two prominent statesmen whom he had recently had killed. It was, Tacitus says, 'an inauspicious gift'.
Before long Nero changed direction, placing Octavia under a punitive house-arrest in the countryside of Campania. This, the people would not tolerate. The urban crowds adored Octavia and there was undisguised discontent on the streets of Rome.
Rumour spread notoriously quickly in Rome and soon a report was circulating that the people's protests had been effective: Nero had repented, sent Poppaea away, and recalled Octavia to her rightful position as his wife.
Protest turned to celebration. A mob gathered, carrying statues of Octavia garlanded in flowers. They spread through the temples and the forum, pulling down images of Poppaea as they went, and finally they reached the imperial palace on the Palatine hill. They streamed inside, exulting Octavia, cheering Nero's praises. The soldiers, thinking this was sedition, fell upon them with whips and drawn swords.
The mob was pushed back; the streets cleared; the garlanded statues of Octavia removed and replaced, once again, with those of Poppaea. Within the palace, however, the panic had not abated.
Poppaea, Tacitus suggests, recognised this as a turning point. Throwing herself at her husband's feet, she claimed it was only the lack of a leader which had prevented this unrest tipping over into revolution. Now the movement had begun, she said, it would only continue to grow whilst Octavia was allowed to live.
Tacitus gives Poppaea a set-piece speech. She conjures an image of Octavia "whose far-off nod had stirred such turmoil" being visited in Campania by revolutionaries, or arriving, in person, in the city to stake her claim to power. She goads Nero to "send for the lady who rules him" - but if he won't (and she knows he won't) he must then "look to his own safety". She ends on an ominous warning: "If the mob despairs of seeing Octavia once again the wife of Nero, the mob will find Octavia a husband."
This is the only direct speech in the whole episode, and it is an object-lesson in rhetorical drama. Nero is first terrified, then enraged, and by the time Poppaea finishes he has decided that Octavia must die.
A new plan was formed: Octavia would be accused of adultery once again but this time with a man who could conceivably be suspected of revolutionary as well as libidinous intent. Nero called on Anicetus, commander of the southern Italian fleet, who had been instrumental in aiding the emperor in murdering his mother Agrippina some years before. This service had made Anicetus both trusted and comprised; this was the perfect opportunity to make use of and get rid of him at same time.
Anicetus was promised a comfortable fortune, and a pleasant place of exile should he confess to having committed adultery with Octavia - and threatened with death should he not. He chose the former option.
Nero convened the court, staffed its council with his friends, and called Anicetus for examination. His performance justified Nero's faith in him: his 'innate depravity' made him believable, and he added an inventive flourish of uncalled for detail to the confessions he had been asked to make. He was 'exiled' to Sardinia where he died sometime later, naturally and rich.
An imperial edict was published. It stated that Anicetus had been exiled on account of adultery with Octavia; explained that she had seduced him in the hopes of securing his fleet's cooperation in her revolutionary schemes; and even claimed that she had become pregnant with his child and procured an abortion.
Octavia was removed from the relative comfort of house arrest in Campania and transferred to the infamous prison island of Pandateria. There was a few days' wait and then the warrant arrived for her execution. She pleaded for her life - stressing that she had accepted her divorce, begging that Nero be reminded of the family ties which bound them - but it was no use.
She was tied down and the main veins cut in both her legs and her arms. She was meant to bleed out quickly, but she did not. The blood, Tacitus says, was 'slowed by fear'. Eventually a boiling bath was prepared and she died in the steam. People said that Octavia's head was then cut off and brought to Rome for Poppaea's viewing pleasure. She had been around twenty-two.
When news of her death reached Rome, the senate rushed to congratulate Nero, voting that monuments should be raised in the temples to commemorate the removal of such a threat to state and emperor. There could be no better proof, Tacitus suggests, of the perversity of the times. The public honours which had once marked out Rome's victories now celebrated her calamities. The Senate's old morality was gone too; replaced by "novel depths of flattery and the furthest reaches of submission".
The detail of Octavia's downfall comes to us from Tacitus - a historian writing around sixty years after the events described and one of the greatest ever observers of autocracy.
We need not doubt the basic shape of his narrative, which is well attested in other sources. Nor need we doubt that public opinion fell generally in Octavia's favour. Not long after her death a play (our only surviving roman History Play, traditionally, though almost certainly erroneously, attributed to Seneca the Younger) had been written casting her as the tragic heroine.
The colour and emphases of Tacitus' narrative, however, must be read with the intentions of his wider narrative in mind. For Tacitus, the story of Octavia's death marks the degeneration of Rome's political culture. It demonstrates the cruel totality of Nero's tyranny, but it also demonstrates the political perversions of the Julio-Claudian regime more generally. Nothing here is as it should be: Poppaea, a woman and a bad one at that, is left to drive events forward; the mob spill over into uncontrolled riots; a virtuous woman dies; and through it all the senate - putatively the best men in Rome - stay mute and servile.
Mám dotaz,vy jste vystudovaná historička nebo milovnice historie jako já?
World history.com
Great story, thanks for sharing! It’s always been said that there was a good woman standing behind every great man, so I guess it could also be said that there is a bad woman whispering in the ear of every tyrant.