De C. Petronio pauca supra repetenda sunt. nam illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu. ac dicta factaque eius quanto solutiora et quandam sui neglegentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur. proconsul tamen Bithyniae et mox consul vigentem se ac parem negotiis ostendit. dein revolutus ad vitia seu vitiorum imitatione inter paucos familiarium Neroni adsumptus est, elegantiae arbiter, dum nihil amoenum et molle adfluentia putat, nisi quod ei Petronius adprobavisset. unde invidia Tigellini quasi adversus aemulum et scientia voluptatum potiorem. ergo crudelitatem principis, cui ceterae libidines cedebant, adgreditur, amicitiam Scaevini Petronio obiectans, corrupto ad indicium servo ademptaque defensione et maiore parte familiae in vincla rapta.
A few things must be further said concerning C. Petronius, namely that his days were spent in sleep, but night was saved for his duties and delights of life. It was such that whereas others reached fame through hard work, he achieved the same through idleness, and was considered not a glutton and profligate like those who squander their own possessions, but a man trained in extravagance. His words and his deeds were so much more graciously received as the very image of natural simplicity the freer and more characteristically careless he made them. Nevertheless, he was Proconsul of Bithynia, and soon after Consul, and showed himself to be active and equal to the task. Then, either falling to vice or making play that he had indeed fallen to vice, he was invited to join the few of Nero's close associates, as his Elegantiae Arbiter, his "Fashion Decider", and henceforth the Princeps thought nothing beautiful or chic unless Petronius had already approved of it. Whence came the jealousy of Tigellinus, who looked on him as a rival and a more experienced disciple of debauchery. And so, Tigellinus stroked the cruelty of the Princeps that his other lusts were given way to it, and, after he had bribed one the man's slaves as witness, he pointed out the friendship Scaevinus had with Petronius; he then robbed the Petronius of any defense, and seized a greater part of his household in chains.
The Sickness In The Republic
For centuries, power in the city of Rome was held in a, more or less, peaceful, yet delicate, balance between several families who claimed descent from the original Roman elite. These so-called patricii, the "fathers", had been instrumental in Rome's development from a small collection of hill-top villages ruling over swampy lowlands to an imperial metropolitan monster of a city, and while also mounting the defense against her various surrounding neighbors who seemed ever so keen on picking a fight with her. The Romans, under the commands and control of the patricii, excelled in warfare, and the borders of the city's power grew beyond her early meager walls; and so, she added territory after territory, province after province, until these Roman elite controlled most of the waterways of the Mediterranean and much of continental Europe.
Then the civil wars broke out in the 1st century B.C. Sulla's capture of the city herself in 88 B.C, an act of gross religious blasphemy, was the death knell of the Republic and the "Roman old guard", so to speak, the patricii. Though the sickness in the Republic had long been festering, Sulla was the catalyst, for he signaled not only that the time for great change had arrived, but he mapped out the blueprint for how to guide and rule such a change. With the balance of power between the patricii threatened by a single man seizing the reins of the state, the scions of the ancient Roman houses, amply nurtured their whole lives on the Roman ideal, the warrior-farmer who wielded both sword and plow for the glory of the Republic, were dutiful in their zeal to fight to the death over it.
Augustus' Marriage Laws
After Octavian's victory over Antony at Actium in 31 B.C, a peace settled over the Roman world; indeed, there were few left to fight further over the matter. The patricii, who had the most "skin in the game" so to speak, had fought for the Republic, and they had fought well -- but now they were mostly dead. Assuming his new title and powers, Augustus, as Princeps, ("leading citizen", yet "first amongst equals"), enacted a series of laws in 18 & 17 B.C. designed to strengthen the old morals and customs of the ancient Roman families, the houses of the slain patricii, particularly in regards to marriage: bachelors and childless marriages were taxed, or their inheritances withheld in part; adulterers banished or executed, their property confiscated; and a tax on inheritances made out to anyone other than close kin. The purpose of passing this legislation was twofold: firstly, Augustus is reported to have crafted these laws with an aim to repopulate Rome with Romans, for the ancient houses had been seriously depleted; secondly, the new-made emperor (in all but name), saw the way to keeping his hold on power was to control the mores and the morals of the people. "Augustus" is a religious title more than a military one, encompassing a meaning close to "revered" or "blessed" -- he was nearly a living god walking amongst mortals, ensuring the immortal gods smiled upon the Romans and their empire. And thus, under such a shadow, his successors would rule.
In the end, the Roman historian Tacitus tells us that the marriage laws largely failed to encourage Romans to procreate (Ann.III.25); however, the godhead of the Princeps was secure.
So Ends "The Golden Age"
In the beginning, the powerful executive magistracies of the Republic were entirely constitutional. The office of Dictator was bound by the classic Roman checks and balances. Even when unconstitutionally altered, Caesar attempted to make his Dictatorship, to some degree, adhere to the ancient principles of the Roman Republic. When he overstepped those boundaries and violated those principles, his fellow elite struck him down. Augustus painstakingly sought to distance himself from that perception of tyranny which caused Brutus and Cassius to act murderously against his grand-uncle. Wrapped up in patriotic verses and a nationalistic propaganda and arts program centered around the supposed divine right of the Roman Empire to rule the lands and seas, Augustus' tyranny was dressed up in Republican trappings. The Senate voted for everything; this was not a problem, for the Senate knew how to vote and they voted well. As time went on, Augustus' delegating and dividing power among his younger relations (stepsons, nephews, grandsons, etc, for a he lacked a male heir) chipped away at the quickly crumbling Republican façade. When Augustus' stepson and heir, Tiberius, succeeded him, the recently deceased old man who had ruled the Roman world for forty years was made a god. It is here in his Annales that Tacitus writes his oft-quoted and bittersweet line:
Iuniores post Actiacam victoriam, etiam senes plerique inter bella civium nati: quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset?
There was now a generation younger than Actium's victory, and the majority of men who were born during the Civil Wars were now old -- how many were left who had seen the Republic?
-Tacitus, Annales I.3
So ends "The Golden Age".
The Nouveau riche
Tiberius' reign was marked by the treason trials and the rapacious conduct of his minister Sejanus. Caligula who followed him made Orientalism vogue amongst insane-seeming all-powerful Romans-turned-gods, so it's no wonder that his nephew Nero wasn't one to shy away from precedent. Claudius, who reigned betwixt the these last two, hired a large coterie of liberti, "freedmen", to handle the administrative work of running the machinery of the imperial bureaucracy. One could already see Augustus straining to staff all the people necessary to keep the Empire working -- the young ages at which he gave sweeping political and military power to his relations shows how monstrous the workings of the government had become. The Republic had never been designed to govern an empire of the size Rome controlled. The problems of ruling such territories, many of which grew increasingly further from the capital city, were solved slapdash and haphazardly, and were never designed for the long-term. Claudius' freedmen were talented and hard-working; but they were also suspect, because, of course, they once were themselves or were descended from former slaves. In the vacuum left after the funerals of all those patricii who had died in the civil wars, these liberti rose to great wealth and power in post-"The Golden Age" Rome. By Nero's day, these liberti had become the nouveau riche of Roman society, and were increasingly despised by the vieux riche. the surviving patricii. Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon serves as the most well-known description of the stock character of the fantastically wealthy, yet ignorant and boorish libertus. Keeping in mind that The Satyricon is a satire and its writing is purposefully taken to the extreme, one should not take it literally; however, one can sense how we are meant to feel towards Trimalchio, how the Roman patricii have often looked down on the novus homo -- how the haute bourgeoisie of any age feel towards their respective nouveau riche. That story is always the same.
Enter Nero
The boy who would become Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, "Bronze-Bearded", in A.D. 37. His mother was Agrippina the Younger, daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, and niece of the Emperor Claudius. Upon the death of Claudius' lascivious third wife Messalina, the emperor remarried, this time taking his niece as his bride, and adopting her son as his own. In A.D. 53, Nero married his step-sister, Claudius' daughter, Octavia, and in the following year, Claudius died, supposedly poisoned by Agrippina who administered the toxin in the elderly emperor's mushrooms during dinner. At the age of sixteen, Nero became the ruler of the Roman world.
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| "Roman Trump" or "If You Made Logan Paul An Emperor". |
Guided by his mother for the first five years of his reign, he increasingly grew tired of her and sought to emancipate himself from under her overbearing eye. He murdered her, and then became too wild for his two "handlers", the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sextus Afranus Burrus, who died under suspicion of being poisoned in A.D. 62, and the young emperor's tutor, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who resigned from the staff of the young Princeps following the death of Burrus and the rise of Tigellinus and the other freedmen. The young ruler, his passions for rage and murder inflamed by such characters who had wormed their way about him, then ordered his wife Octavia to be banished, on the grounds that she was infertile; when public outcry against this order was too great, Nero ordered her executed on grounds of adultery. Two years later, the Great Fire of Rome blazed throughout the city. Though he is blamed for it's origin, reportedly "fiddling while Rome burned", if the sources are trusted, then the man was not even in Rome at the time and he seemed to try his best to contain and fight the fire. Still, Nero's actions following the fire's demise didn't help matters: he deemed that he would construct a Domus Aurea, a "Golden House" an enormous 300 acre estate, a true "rus in urbe (countryside in city)" which would be built over what the blaze devoured:
Non in alia re tamen damnosior quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam primo transitoriam, mox incendio absumptam restitutamque auream nominavit. De cuius spatio atque cultu suffecerit haec rettulisse. Vestibulum eius fuit, in quo colossus CXX pedum staret ipsius effigie; tanta laxitas, ut porticus triplices miliarias haberet; item stagnum maris instar, circumsaeptum aedificiis ad urbium speciem; rura insuper arvis atque vinetis et pascuis silvisque varia, cum multitudine omnis generis pecudum ac ferarum. 2 In ceteris partibus cuncta auro lita, distincta gemmis unionumque conchis erant; cenationes laqueatae tabulis eburneis versatilibus, ut flores, fistulatis, ut unguenta desuper spargerentur; praecipua cenationum rotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur; balineae marinis et albulis fluentes aquis. Eius modi domum cum absolutam dedicaret, hactenus comprobavit, ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse.
Yet in nothing else was he more wasteful than in his building, for he built a home from the Palatine Hill to the Esquiline, which first he called the The Passage-Way House, but it was soon consumed in a blaze, and he rebuilt it and renamed it The Golden House. In respect to space and elegance a few details will suffice to describe it: its vestibule was such that a colossal statue of Nero stood 120 feet tall. It was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long. Likewise there was a standing lake, much like the sea, with buildings all around it made to look like a city. Beyond that were countrysides dotted with tillage, vineyards, pastures, and woods, with a whole host of beasts of all kinds, both of burden and for the hunt. In the other parts, the rest of the house was lined with gold, glittering with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining rooms ornamented with panels of ivory made to turn so that flowers might rain down on guests or pipes might sprinkle people with perfume. The main banquet hall was a rotunda which never stopped moving either day or night in keeping with the turning of the world. Baths were stocked with both sea water and sulfur water. When Nero dedicated the edifice finished in this style, he enthusiastically affirmed his delight no further than by stating that he could at last begin to live like a human being.
-Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, Nero. XXXI
The following year, A.D. 65, C. Calpurnius Piso sought to liberate the state from Nero by forming a conspiracy with several prominent persons, including a centurion of the Praetorian Guard. Nero's loyal liberti learned of the plot, told the Princeps, and the conspiracy failed. The conspirators were executed, including the retired tutor Seneca, who was ordered to commit suicide, for he had been accused by a freedman of his involvement in the plot.
Fear and Loathing in Neronian Rome
When things become too absurd, satire becomes the lens through which we can process the absurdity. Of course we laugh; for if we didn't, we'd cry. The Satyricon is set within this span of years in which the decadent empire described above tottered on the brink of utter chaos, corruption, and ruin. The Satyricon is a satire, but a Menippean satire, where The Joke never stops, no one is safe, and no topic is off limits -- it's a style which can only exist after a society has "seen it all" and nothing is left sacred. By contrast, the satires of Horace's Sermones were meant to poke fun at characters, tropes, and themes found in life, philosophy, politics, and religion. The poking is gentle, the teasing is mild, for the goal is to draw attention to topics and then gently lead the reader to discern the follies and absurdities in their own lives and then heal that divide through laughter. This style is more akin to the original etymology of the word "satire", a satura, a Roman medley of fruits served on a dish; therefore, a satire was a medley of topics. meant to heal human misery through humor. However, such a gentle style of satire would not work under Roman society under Nero -- such an unfettered attack on imperial bureaucracy, academia, philosophy, and religion would require a more Hellenic approach, such as the satirical barbs penned by Aristophanes, or the now-lost Menippeus. Thus the title: The Satyricon -- "The Book of Satires" or "The Satyrs' Book", a hodgepodge adventure tale sharply satirizing the decadence and senselessness of contemporary society. Just as the American Hunter S. Thompson wreaked havoc in his 1973 Las Vegas odyssey looking for the now-elusively found "American Dream", a Platonic ideal of what the American Founders wrote when they said "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", the Petronian rogues wander equally haphazardly around the ancient world and wonder if the Dream is actually a Nightmare.
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