ASSASSINATIONS AND CONSPIRACIES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden Read Free Book Online Page A

on her son’s behalf as regent. She was the sister of Caligula, the wife of Claudius and the mother of Nero: a woman unique in Roman history.
    Agrippina’s dominance over her son was not to last for long. Nero was keen to rule on his own and he soon pushed her to one side, moving her out of the imperial palace. It seems that she may have anticipated that Nero might let her down, and that for this reason she was holding Claudius’s son Britannicus in reserve. When in February 55 Britannicus died suddenly at a dinner party in the palace, Agrippina was alarmed. She must have guessed that Nero had had him poisoned. She should also have begun to fear for her own safety.
    Nero was a physically unattractive figure: fair-haired, with weak blue eyes, a fat neck, a pot belly and a body covered with spots. He usually wore a sort of unbelted dressing gown, a scarf and no shoes. His personality was full of contradictions. He was artistic, sporting, brutal, weak, sensual, erratic, extravagant, sadistic and bisexual. As time passed he became deranged, but at first things went well, largely due to the guidance of Burrus and Seneca. The senate was treated with respect. Sensible legislation was introduced to improve public order, and reforms were made to the treasury. Nero himself was ready to consider some radically new and liberal ideas, such as ending the killing of gladiators in public spectacles, which seems extraordinary in view of his heedlessness of other people’s lives later on.
    It may have been largely due to the influence of his tutor Seneca, but Nero started out as a promisingly humane ruler, potentially the best of emperors. When the city prefect Lucius Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of his slaves, the law required that all four hundred slaves of Pedanius’s household must be put to death; the humane Nero was intensely upset to have to allow these executions.
    It was retreat from such terrible decisions which caused him to withdraw more and more, devoting himself to such interests as horse racing, singing, acting, dancing, poetry and sex. Seneca and Burrus tried to restrict his excesses, encouraging him to have an affair with a freed woman named Acte, provided that he understood that marriage to her was impossible. Agrippina was outraged at this. She was jealous of Acte, deplored her son’s dabbling in the arts and was foolish enough to tell everyone what she thought. This increased Nero’s hostility towards his mother.
    Then Nero took as his mistress the beautiful Poppaea Sabina. She was the wife of his partner in many exploits, Marcus Salvius Otho. In 58 Otho was dispatched to be governor of Lusitania, no doubt to get him out of the way. Agrippina wrongly saw the friend’s departure as an opportunity to reassert herself, and sided with Nero’s wife, Octavia, who naturally opposed her husband’s affair with Poppaea Sabina. Nero’s response was to make a series of attempts on Agrippina’s life. He tried three times to poison her. Once he tried to kill her by rigging the ceiling over her bed so that it would collapse on her. He supplied her with a sinking boat in an attempt to drown her in the Bay of Naples; the boat duly sank but Agrippina gamely swam ashore. In the end, in 59, he tried a more direct and less artistic method. He sent an assassin who clubbed and stabbed her to death.
    Nero admitted his responsibility, reporting to the senate that his mother had plotted to have him killed, forcing him to act first in self-defence. The senate appeared to accept this. There had never been any love lost between the senate and Agrippina. Nero celebrated his mother’s murder by staging wild orgies and creating two new festivals of chariot racing and athletics. He staged music festivals, which gave him the opportunity to sing in public while accompanying himself on the lyre. This was a political mistake, as actors and musicians were regarded as socially inferior; the emperor was stooping too low.
    In 62 Nero’s reign