The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (14 page)

His stepson and successor, Tiberius, continued the gradual downward trend. Early in his career, for reasons that are not entirely
clear, he undertook a voluntary eight-year exile in Rhodes, where he lived a life of extraordinary privacy and where, perhaps,
he picked up many of the habits that he took with him when he later retired from active statecraft. He was a humble, if laconic,
ruler, prone to depression, more austere than authoritative - "mud kneaded with blood," his own tutor called him. He built
no public monuments and held few games. Despite having exerted every effort (including murder) to secure the title, he was
always more comfortable in a private setting than in a public one. In the spirit of his dynasty, he despised and tormented
the members of his immediate family, driving his own daughter-in-law Agrippina to starve herself to death.

In the year 26, about halfway through his reign, he left Rome, never to return, and fell back on Capri, where one Titus Caesonius
Priscus reigned as Master of the Imperial Pleasures - a sort of beta version
of Arbiter Elegantiae.
On Capri, Tiberius was able to give free rein to his vices, the least of which was an inordinate thirst. His villa was a veritable
museum of pornography, while teams of male and female prostitutes roamed the woods and groves of his estate, ready to solicit
or perform with each other at his pleasure. He trained young boys, his "little fishes," to dart around him as he swam, nibbling
and licking his imperial parts. He was particularly fond of fellatio, not only demanding it of high-born female guests but
also coaxing it out of unweaned babies.

His cruelty and cold-bloodedness thrived and blossomed in the balmy island climate. He found the very loveliest spot on the
island, commanding spectacular views of the exquisite Bay of Naples, from which he delighted in watching his torture victims
flung to their death. One of his favorite pranks was to ply his male guests with copious draughts of wine, then have them
seized and their penises tightly bound with cord.

He was succeeded by his great-nephew Gaius, more commonly known as Caligula. Caligula reigned for a mere four years, but in
that time did much to advance the Julio-Claudian marriage of hospitality and cruelty. It was under Caligula that accepting
the emperor's hospitality became a game of Russian roulette in earnest. Forcing senators to wait on him, "napkin in hand at
either end of his couch," he would laugh loudly at the thought that he could have their throats cut at any moment. He was
an eager poisoner and, like Tiberius, enjoyed watching torture, most especially at mealtime. He perpetuated the Augustan tradition
of seducing his senators' wives and enjoyed incestuous relations with all his sisters, whom he elevated above his own wife
at the banquet table. He once forced a man to attend his own son's execution, then threw him a banquet to cheer him up. He
sincerely believed in his own divinity, was an occasional cross-dresser, and liked to walk barefoot on carpets of gold coins.
He was finally struck down by members of his own bodyguard and succeeded by his uncle Claudius.

By the time of Claudius' accession in 41, most of the family traits were firmly entrenched. Although an accomplished scholar,
Claudius was every bit the profligate host, gambler, drunk, glutton, lecher, and audience for torture as his forebears. He
was an inveterate vomiter and issued an edict encouraging flatulence at table, "quietly or noisily." His charms were complemented
by a tendency to foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose when upset. He is largely held to have been poisoned with tainted
mushrooms at a family meal, allegedly by his wife, Agrippina, on behalf of her son by a previous marriage, sixteen-year-old
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Whatever the circumstances of Claudius' death, young Lucius, under his adoptive name Nero, was
acclaimed emperor in 54.

It will be fairly clear by now that Nero descended from a champion line and was destined to fulfill the promise of his ancestors.
His natural father, Domitius, who killed one of his own freedmen "for refusing to drink as much as he was ordered," accurately
predicted that nothing good could be hoped of the offspring of such parents. His mother had the foresight to prevent him from
studying philosophy, which she considered a burden to any future ruler. Just to make certain, she entrusted his early education
to a dancer and a barber - and sure enough, Lucius was equal parts artist and cutthroat. His later tutor, Seneca, for all
his moral stature and carefully crafted Epicurean brand of stoicism, could do nothing with him and let him run wild in the
deluded hope that the boy would burn himself out. Again, too much has already been said of Nero's crimes. What else, after
all, could be expected from a self-anointed musical genius whose three favorite songs were "Orestes the Matricide," "The Blinding
of Oedi­pus," and "The Frenzy of Hercules"?

It might be useful even so to look into the annals of Nero's home life and hospitality, in which he perfected and surpassed
the clumsy beginnings of his predecessors. Like them, he reveled in a good poisoning, which, like them, he preferred to witness
firsthand at the dining table. Thus, he watched impassively as his brother Britannicus died horribly at a family luncheon.
The good prefect Burrus, who had been highly instrumental in his accession to empire, he dispatched with a toxic throat medicine,
replacing him with the venomous Tigellinus. At the dining table he murdered friend and foe alike - "a number are known to
have been slain all together at a single meal along with their preceptors and attendants." Three attempts were made to poison
his mother, with whom he was rumored to be incestuously involved; when these failed, he sought to drown her in an elaborately
booby-trapped ship, and when she managed against all odds to swim safely to shore, he lost all patience with her and had her
run through with swords. When the opened veins of his first wife, Octavia, failed to kill her fast enough, she was suffocated
in a hot vapor bath. In a fit of pique, he kicked his pregnant second wife, Poppaea Sabina, to death, then regretfully honored
her memory by castrating the slave boy Sporus (who bore an unfortunate resemblance to the martyred woman) and marrying him
ceremoniously. Thus, Nero could proudly claim the fourfold portfolio of parricide, fratricide, matricide, and regicide. It
is hardly any wonder that, like Augustus, he considered himself the living incarnation of Apollo.

Almost as atrocious as his crimes against family and hospitality were those he committed against music. He scandalized all
of Rome not only by his appearances on the professional stage but also by his dreadful voice and mediocre lyre playing, which
he inflicted on all and sundry, proudly and indiscriminately, in public and private settings alike. Tacitus says in wry understatement
that his poems "lack vigour, inspiration, and homogeneity." He competed in musical competitions with apparently sincere trepidation,
although no one was permitted to win but him and the statues of previous victors were torn down and dragged away. As it was
forbidden to leave any theater while Nero played, women were known to give birth during his performances, while others risked
life and limb by leaping from the closed gates or feigned death in order to escape. It was probably not hyperbolic for Cassius
Dio to claim that everyone "regarded the dead as fortunate."

This, then, was the history and reality of the imperial household to which Petronius found himself summoned from the depths
of Asia Minor in the year 60. As an educated and erudite man, he was certainly intimately familiar with that history. As an
aristocrat with impeccable social connections, he must have been well informed of all of the gossip and known most of its
subjects personally, including the emperor. As a worldly slave-owner, he had had ample opportunity to indulge in many of the
same luxuries and vices. As a former soldier, he was no stranger to bloodshed, betrayal, and intrigue. On all these counts,
it is impossible not to believe that he knew just what he was getting into and the kind of people he would have to deal with
when he set out to make himself indispensable to Nero. In fact, it may even be fair to say that he should have been able to
foresee the fate that awaited him. He could undoubtedly have avoided it by maintaining a low profile and safe distance from
the court; he was wealthy and accomplished enough not to need to put himself in the way of such dangerous patronage. And yet,
by all evidence, he plunged headlong into the lion's den and eagerly sought out its darkest recesses. Why did he do it? What
could he possibly have had to gain when he had so much to lose?

The brief but incisive portrait of Petronius by Tacitus is full of telling contradictions. On the one hand, he was said to
be a man who spent his days in sleep and his nights in self-indulgence; on the other, he is reported to have been an energetic
and canny administrator in Bithynia. "Indolence had raised him to fame, as energy raises others," but he cannot possibly have
achieved his meteoric rise as Nero's confidante and guide merely by the example of his indolence - he must have worked hard
and cunningly to do it. He was
"erudito luxu"
- learned in luxury, a delicious oxymoron - but was never ranked among the herd of debauchees and spendthrifts, "like most
of those who squander their substance." He somehow managed to set himself apart from and above the common sycophants and self-seekers
- most pointedly and at manifest risk from the thuggish Tigellinus and still cultivate a reputation for casual and catholic
charm. "His talk and his doings, the freer they were and the more show of carelessness they exhibited, were the better liked,
for their look of natural simplicity." From Tacitus emerges the picture of a complicated and clever man who succeeded in placing
self-gratification and aesthetic principles at the service of his political ambitions. Unlike Tigellinus and other political
operatives of Nero's household, whose lusts and ruthlessness are nakedly exposed for all eternity, Petronius remains opaque
in his motives and ultimate beliefs and convictions. The otherwise gimlet-eyed Plutarch could not see beyond his superficial
charge against Petronius as a mere flatterer, while, for all his insight, Tacitus is completely stumped as to whether the
arbiter was indulging a true taste for vice or merely affecting it. Petronius may have imagined that such opacity guaranteed
his safety as one of Nero's favored guests and companions.

In
Quo Vadis,
Henryk Sienkiewicz portrays Petronius - whom he calls Gaius - as a self-serving, world-weary cynic without morals or conviction.
Unfortunately, Petronius' principal function in the story is to serve as a foil to his nephew Vinicius as he undergoes a soul-shattering
conversion to Christianity. The last thing I would want to do is to impugn the early Christian martyrs, but in his zeal to
contrast them to the unredeemed pagans, Sienkiewicz got Petronius all wrong, including his given name.

The entire subject of Petronius' inner soul would be sterile had he not left a testament to himself. Some historians believe
that the
Satyricon
was written at the height of his influence as a kind of unpublished amusement for the members of the court. This is unlikely
for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that it could not have failed to incur the imperial wrath had it come to Nero's
attention. In the year 62, Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento was found guilty of insulting senators and priests and all
his books were burned; we can only imagine what Nero would have done to a lampooner of his divine self and company. Another
reason to believe that Petronius kept the
Satyricon
more or less to himself during his lifetime is that by far the most scathing and damning episode, Trimalchio's banquet, was
not discovered until the mid-seventeenth century, when a later transcription was found in a small village on the coast of
Dalmatia. How was this section of the book preserved intact when so much of the manuscript is almost certainly lost forever?
It is not implausible that, for reasons of self-preservation, Petronius kept the Trimalchio chapter sequestered, separate
from the rest of the novel and safely hidden from the gossips and professional informers who infested the imperial court.

Because of the fragmentary nature of its surviving portions, there is not much of a discernible plot to the
Satyricon.
In the convention of Menippean satire, it parodies contemporary philosophical thought, partly in verse, partly in prose. It
is especially harsh on rhetoricians. The story follows the adventures and misadventures of the student Encolpius; Giton, his
beautiful slave boy and lover; and Ascyltos, his friend and sometimes bitter rival for Giton's affections. They argue and
part; they meet up again and reconcile; Giton abandons Encolpius for Ascyltos, then returns; they encounter the poet Eumolpus,
who is viciously assailed for the mediocrity of his verse; they are attacked, seduced, enslaved, and freed; Encolpius suffers
a debilitating and humiliating bout of impotence that is ultimately cured by a sorceress. The book begins in midsentence and
ends in mid-sentence. The longest continuous episode of the book is that in which Encolpius and Ascyltos, through their teacher
Agamemnon, are invited to supper at the home of the enormously wealthy freedman Trimalchio. The meal is attended mostly by
the host's aging cronies, who, like him, are poorly educated former slaves who have made good. Trimalchio is tirelessly, epically
vulgar. Throughout the night, he and his guests talk about little but money, how to get it and how to spend it. His household
gods are Gain, Luck, and Profit. At one point, he has his bookkeeper read out the daily profit sheet from his estates, including
the birth of seventy slaves, five hundred thousand pecks of wheat put up in the barn, five hundred oxen broken in, and ten
million sesterces locked up in the strongbox. Trimalchio boasts loudly of his constipation, cured by "suppository of pomegranate-rind
and pine sap boiled in vinegar." He discusses in great detail the design of his future tomb, to be engraved with scenes of
the entire town carousing at his table and to be inscribed prominently with the epitaph "HE NEVER ONCE LISTENED TO A PHILOSOPHER!"
He thinks it the very height of sophistication to have his slaves sing as they serve, but, for all his efforts, the entertainment
is dismissed as "low cabaret." Like prompters at a sitcom, the servants must lead the audience in clapping.