The Confessions of Young Nero Read online

  We were quiet on the way back. But halfway there, we were met by a company of horsemen and a contingent of Praetorians.

  “He is here,” said Claudius. “T-take him. Transport him to Rome.” He turned to Silanus. “You are under arrest for c-conspiracy against my life. I h-have been expecting you to strike during this journey. That is wh-why we have been closely followed all day by my guards.” He nodded to the guards. “Take him away.”

  Silanus shrieked, “I have done nothing! Nothing! I am your loyal subject!”

  Claudius just looked at him sadly.

  “Then I shall speak!” he cried. “Ask your wife! Ask Messalina! She has pursued me for months. Trying to get me into her bed. I refused, and this is her revenge!”

  “T-take him away,” repeated Claudius.

  The guards stepped up to the carriage and hauled Silanus out, dragging him over to a horse.

  “She’s a whore!” yelled Silanus. “And a murderer, if she kills me for this! For rejecting her—I, her stepfather. Filth, filth!”

  “For slandering my w-wife, you deserve to d-die,” said Claudius.

  Before my eyes, the company of soldiers took Silanus away. I heard him yelling and then—silence.

  Claudius turned to me, affably. “Lucius, I will return to Rome here at this f-fork in the road. I have an escort to take you b-back to your aunt’s. And a letter to give her explaining wh-why you return alone.” He thrust it into my hand.

  • • •

  My joy at seeing the objects of my torture vanishing beneath the waves was short-lived, now eclipsed by the terror that gripped Aunt’s household. She had collapsed upon reading the letter, shrieking and running to her bedroom, only to sink to the floor sobbing before reaching it.

  “Silanus, Silanus—what did he say?” she kept asking me, clutching my arm. The sight of my revered aunt reduced to a whimpering lump begging me—me—for information terrified me. And I was hard put to answer, for it had all happened so swiftly.

  “He—he cried out that he was innocent.” It was all I could remember.

  “Of course he is innocent!” She wiped her eyes, pulled herself up to a sitting position. “But who accuses him? Claudius talks about a dream that both Messalina and his freedman Narcissus had that—that proves his treason.”

  “Silanus said that Messalina wanted revenge on him and this was her way.”

  “Revenge? But why? I thought she was fond of him.”

  A brave Praetorian spoke up. “Too fond,” he said. “Silanus said she tried to seduce him, and when he refused, she promised to ruin him.”

  Her eyes wild, Aunt clutched her head. “No, no. It cannot be.”

  • • •

  But it was. Soon the entire story was out. Not the seduction part, for presumably that took place in private. But the plot to damn Silanus, which rested on complicity between Messalina and her tool Narcissus. Each had come separately to Claudius troubled by a dream in which Silanus would come secretly armed into Claudius’s presence to assassinate him. The credulous Claudius had believed that their having the same dream proved it was a true warning. In truth it only proved they were good actors and collaborators.

  The motive was despicable. Could Messalina’s vanity really demand such a human sacrifice, one that would make her own mother a widow? It was my first, and most brutal, lesson in what lengths to which evil people will go, and for what flimsy reasons. I have never forgotten it, nor let down my guard since. Let them call me cruel. Better that than dead.

  • • •

  Aunt took to her bed for several days, while the sham of a trial was being readied. Then she rallied and one night sent for me. I was ushered into the room with the busts, where she and a man whose face was veiled stood before an altar with smoking coals.

  She seemed like a statue herself, exuding no warmth and little movement. She had died and been resurrected in a new form, this shell before me.

  “We have decided on a course to save Silanus.” Her voice had no intonation. “The only possible way to save him. The emperor puts stock in dreams, does he? Even other people’s dreams? How much more will he listen to his own dreams, then. We know a way to send him a dream, a specific dream that will show him the truth.” The silent man next to her nodded. She gave him no name.

  “It is well-known that an innocent young mind is the best receptacle of dreams,” the man said, with a voice like sand shifting across desert wastes—subtle, quiet, murmuring. “That is why we have selected you, Lucius. We will show you a painting. Stare at it, imprint it on your mind. Then inhale these vapors.” He tossed grains of something onto the coals. A hiss of steam rose, then a sharp, bitter smell.

  “That will seal the image into your dreams. Go silently to your bed, lie down, and do not move until morning. The image will seek out Claudius while he dreams, push the other dreams aside, and lodge in his mind.”

  This itself seemed a dream—the room, dark save for two torches and the glowing coals; the busts barely visible in the gloom, watching; these wraithlike people taking my hands and leading me to the altar.

  I wanted to cry out, “No! No! I won’t do it! Keep my mind free of your magic!” But like a sleepwalker, I submitted to the ritual. I bent over the coals and inhaled the smoke, making myself dizzy. I gazed on the painting, showing Silanus’s likeness turning away from Messalina, who was grabbing his tunic and trying to pull him onto a couch. A second depiction showed him kneeling loyally before Claudius with no knife or weapon.

  “Now,” murmured Aunt, turning me around, “I shall lead you back to your room and put you to bed. Keep your eyes closed the entire time. Do not open them again until morning.”

  To my knowledge, I did not dream of either of the images, although I have seen them many times in my own mind since. I hoped that somehow, by the magic Aunt had invoked, they had flown to Claudius anyway.

  But they had not, for Silanus was executed soon thereafter.

  VII

  The household never recovered—indeed, how could it? Yet we had to continue on our same everyday paths, while Aunt drifted through the rooms, ghostlike. Once she clasped me to her, whispering, “I have no child; my daughter is not my daughter. Lucius, you are my son now,” but she never said it again. Paris and I went on with my lessons, some the proper ones and others the interesting ones. Needless to say, there were no invitations to the palace, and I knew I would never see a chariot race or hear the sounds of the cithara again. There would be nothing but this plodding, placid country life. The sun would go round and round over rolling fields and rustling forests, the seasons blur into one another, but at each turn of the year the same earth would be beneath it.

  I was left unsupervised much more than I had been before the “incident” (as we referred to it, to tame it and let us go on). I could spend much time not only playing with my chariots but also painting my crude little pictures and making clumsy pots from clay. I even persuaded Paris to find me a little flute so I could learn to play simple melodies.

  The quiet was in some ways soporific, in others like soil in winter, nurturing what will burst through in spring. The very sameness, peace, and routine allowed me to plant the seeds that would bloom later in my life, but they needed time to develop. There is no rushing creativity. It must have firm roots.

  • • •

  I was sprawled out on the floor, painting the flower I had plucked earlier, now wilting. It had not lasted long. Dimly I heard footsteps coming down the corridor but that meant nothing to me. There were murmurs, strange voices, but that also meant nothing. It must be a merchant making a delivery of some sort.

  “So this is how you treat him!” said a low, loud voice at my door. I looked up to see a strange woman standing there, staring at me.

  If I say she seemed to take up all the space in the doorway, is that hindsight? She was not fat, not even hefty, yet she was formidable. I thought of
the Amazons that Paris had told me about. Was this what they looked like?

  Her hair was pulled from her face, with neat rows of curls on either side. Her nose was straight, her lips both curvy and small. Her eyes were wide set and direct, and they were focused on me. She had the face of Athena.

  “I have taken good care of him,” said Aunt. “To me, he is my son.”

  “Oh, so you would treat your own son to a small room with a hard bed, shabby clothes, and low-class tutors? An actor and a barber? How could you, to the grandson of Germanicus and the great-great-grandson of the divine Augustus?”

  Were my clothes shabby? I had never noticed. And Paris was wonderful. Life without Paris would have been unbearably boring. “That isn’t fair!” I said. “I love my tutors. They are good to me. And Aunt is good to me, too.”

  “Hah.” The strange woman laughed, but it was not a real laugh. “That’s because you know no better. But why should you? You are just a child. So young you will soon forget all this.”

  Even then I thought it sad that, if I were so young, I already had so many memories I longed to forget. Caligula. The boats. Silanus. The magic. Now this lady wanted me to forget the good ones, too.

  “Do you have no other greeting for him than that?” said Aunt. “You hardly deserve the name of mother.”

  Mother! Oh, no! I had no mother, at least none I knew. She was only a name, someone who had disappeared. She did not even have ashes, like my father, who rested in the Domitian family tomb. She was not real.

  “And you do? With that murderous slut for a daughter? The gods forbid that you should influence my dear Lucius any further.” She bent down and looked me straight in the eyes. “I am your mother. I have come to take you home.”

  • • •

  And thus my sojourn at my aunt’s house ended as abruptly as Silanus’s life. I was whisked away without even a chance to bid farewell to Paris and Castor, deposited like the object I was in a new house with a new woman who called herself my mother, and expected me to, too.

  The new house was in Rome, halfway up the Palatine Hill, on the far side of the imperial dwellings. The woman—Agrippina—talked incessantly all the way into Rome. She seemed to be talking to herself rather than to me because she did not look at me but stared straight ahead.

  “At least I have managed to find a house,” she said. “Caligula took all our property, the furniture, too, and sold it. Stripped us. Uncle Claudius has kindly restored it, but of course he couldn’t get our old house back. Nonetheless, this will do. Anything is better than that wretched island my brother sent me to.” She sniffed. “Of course I shall make a show of properly interring his ashes, but I’d rather throw them in the Tiber.”

  Oh, yes, she was Caligula’s sister. It was hard to keep all these connections straight. But knowing she shared his blood was frightening to me. Would she also go on mad rampages?

  The litter stopped and we alighted. We stood before a house situated midway up the hill, cypress trees framing its entrance, and a formal garden surrounding it. Agrippina marched toward the door, hardly glancing at the shrubs and flowers on each side. I trailed along, watching the bees burrowing into the peonies until she called out, “Stop dawdling!”

  The entrance led into a light-filled atrium, the floor of shiny marble, the ceiling high and divided into ivory and gold coffers, with an opening to the sky in the middle. Directly below it was a little pool. I went to inspect the pool and dipped my fingers into the water. It was shallow, with a blue mosaic on the bottom that made it appear deeper. I looked up at the sky overhead, marveling at seeing the clouds floating past, almost part of the ceiling.

  “Come along!” said Agrippina, pulling my hand. She hurried me out of the hall before I could see what the wall paintings depicted in their gaudy hues of burnt yellow, rusty red, and bluish green. Now I was marched down a passage that gave out onto an enclosed garden ringed by rooms. Some workmen were sitting in an arbor in the middle, but they leapt up as we arrived.

  “Idle? Nothing to do?” said Agrippina. “Have you finished already?”

  “No, but we were having a rest and a snack,” said one.

  “I don’t pay you to snack,” she said. “Get on with it.”

  She went into one of the rooms near the garden and ushered me in. It was small, and its main light came from the door to the garden, but it had a proper bed, a lampstand of many oil lamps, several three-legged tables, a small couch, and a chest.

  “They have managed to get this ready, at least,” she said. “This will be your room, Lucius.” For the first time she knelt down, eye level with me, and really looked at me. Her voice changed. “You cannot know how I thought of you all the days I was in exile. My only child, far from me, at the mercy of relatives. I did not know if I would ever return. The list of women in our family who have perished in island exile is frightening: Julia, Augustus’s own daughter and my grandmother; Julia the Younger, her daughter; my own mother, Agrippina, for whom I was named. I was meant to be next. But here I am, and you are with me. We will never be separated again. We will never be at the mercy of anyone again. I promise you that, on my honor. I will do everything on earth to keep you safe, and to make sure I am by your side to protect and guide you.”

  Her wide eyes continued to hold mine. They were gray, like—like Caligula’s. A little shudder ran through me. Could she feel it?

  “I am yours, and you are mine. The two of us against the world. But I will never be bested again. So do not fear, little one. You may lie down in safety.” She pulled me to her and held me so tightly I could hardly breathe. Her body was strong and solid, and as I rested against it, I felt it could indeed shelter me from all storms.

  • • •

  Children are resilient. For a little while I missed Aunt, but I was soon absorbed in my new life in the heart of Rome. The big house that we lived in became more luxurious every day. Painters were busy in the atrium and reception rooms; couches with tortoiseshell feet, tables of Moorish wood, bronze tripods with ornamental tendrils, and inlaid braziers were carried in on the shoulders of muscular workmen. Then came the works of art—marble sculptures, bronze busts, mosaics. Some of the marbles looked so much like living people I watched them carefully to see if I could detect any breath.

  “Greek,” said Agrippina. “They aren’t good for much else, but their statues can’t be bettered. You can always tell the Roman copies from the originals.” She saw me frowning.

  “If the Greeks are not good at anything besides art, why did you appoint Greeks as my tutors?” I had two—Anicetus and Beryllus.

  “I should have said they are good for only two things—art and scholastic studies.”

  Only the two most important things in the world! “Agrippina,” I said, “those are—”

  “You must stop calling me Agrippina,” she said. “I know in some ways we are still strangers, but you must call me Mother. If you do not, then you will never think of me that way. Anyone can call me Agrippina, but only one person in the world can call me Mother. And I expect him to do so.” Then she hugged me, kissing my ear.

  • • •

  Days passed and gradually the grand house began to feel like home. Familiarity seeps in and takes root and even luxury seems commonplace—is this not the way everyone lives? Slaves hovering to take orders from Mother, and even from me; flowers out of season, grown under glass in greenhouses; floors heated by steam underneath so that my little feet were never cold, even when I could see frost on the juniper hedges outside. My new tutors were attentive but in awe of me, I could tell—such a difference from Paris. Anicetus was a burly young Greek freedman from Greece itself with a broad and seemingly open face, quick to laugh and quick to oblige. Beryllus, from Palestine, was quieter and more standoffish. Both were ardent partisans of Greek studies.

  One day as Beryllus was drawing a big chart of all the characters in Homer, with lines con
necting them, Anicetus said, “You need to see them!” and, taking my hand, led me into the big atrium. It was a clear day and sunlight was pouring in through the open skylight, illuminating the room.

  “There! Who is this?” he said, stopping in front of one of the large wall paintings. A swirl of blue-green enveloped an angry-looking muscular man with a trident.

  “Neptune,” I said.

  “We are speaking of Homer!” said Beryllus. “You must not use Roman names for the gods. His proper Greek name is Poseidon. Poseidon!”

  “Why is he so angry?” Or were the gods always angry at something or someone?

  “He had a grudge against Troy,” said Anicetus. “But we needn’t talk about why. And look, here is Troy.” He led me to the next painting, of a great city with high walls and towers, on the top of a hill, with a wide plain stretching away on all sides and down to the sea. A number of ships were anchored by the shore, with a little city of tents nearby. “This painting is incorrect. There should be many more ships—a thousand of them! But of course the artist could not paint them all. Yes, a thousand ships went to Troy to fight the Trojans.”

  “Why?” It seemed a basic question.

  “To bring Helen back,” said Beryllus, sighing, as if he could not imagine anyone not knowing the story.

  “Who is Helen? And why did they want her back so badly? Would not one ship have done?”

  “Who is Helen?” Anicetus closed his eyes and smiled. “Helen is beauty. Helen is everything you want and cannot have. Helen is what you have lost and must find. Helen is that which cannot be possessed.”

  “In his long-winded way, Anicetus is trying to say that there is a real Helen and a Helen of the mind,” said Beryllus. “The real Helen was the queen of Sparta in Greece, married to Menelaus of the family of Atreus. She ran away with the Trojan prince Paris—or was she kidnapped? So her husband and all his kinsmen and subjects went to Troy to rescue her. They fought a ten-year war and eventually won. Troy was destroyed.”