(iii) 23.1–4: Start of Tacitus’ account of AD 63: the birth and death of Nero’s daughter by Sabina Poppaea, Claudia Augusta

23.2 iam senatus uterum Poppaeae commendaverat dis votaque publice susceperat, quae multiplicata exsolutaque [sc. sunt]: As with his account of Nero’s reaction, Tacitus manages to convey his distaste in how he represents the senate. The front position of the adverb iam helps to generate the impression of escalation: already during Poppaea’s pregnancy, the senate had decided to turn the wellbeing of her unborn child into an affair of state. The priesthood of the Arval Brothers, which consisted of senators, vowed sacrifices in case of a successful delivery. After the birth, the manifestations of joy, so Tacitus implies, knew no bounds: collectively, the senate joined in with the emperor’s excessive reaction to the birth by multiplying and fulfilling their – proliferating – vows. The Arval Brothers too fulfilled their vows, as recorded in their Acta under 21 January 63: in Capitolio uota soluta quae susceperant pro partu et incolumitate Poppaeae.⁷ When the couple returned from Antium with their newborn, the Arval Brotherhood celebrated their arrival with sacrifices to Spes, Felicitas (or Fecunditas), and Salus Publica. (Tacitus’ publice possibly alludes to the occasion, though he refrains from providing details.)

et additae supplicationes templumque fecunditatis et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis decretum, utque Fortunarum effigies aureae in solio Capitolini Iovis locarentur, ludicrum circense, ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas, ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur: Tacitus now gives more specific details of what the vows consisted in, in his usual elliptical style:

– et additae [sc. sunt] supplicationes

– templumque fecunditatis et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis decretum [sc. est]

Tacitus now switches construction, using decretum [est] as an elegant pivot: the verb governs both the nouns templum and certamen (as subjects) and the following ut-clause (analysed in more detail below):

– utque Fortunarum effigies aureae in solio Capitolini Iovis locarentur, ludicrum circense, ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas, ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur

In other words, we have (i) public thanksgivings (supplicationes); (ii) a temple to Fertility (templum); (iii) highly prestigious public games (certamen); (iv) the dedication of two golden statues to the two Fortunes (effigies); and (v) circus races (ludicrum circense). Polysyndeton (the alternating et ... -que ... et ... -que) underscores the impression of excess – just as Tacitus’ persistent use of the passive voice from multiplicata exsolutaque onwards (additae, decretum, locarentur, ederetur) suggests a loss of purposeful agency on the part of the senate.

supplicationes: ‘In times of crisis, the senate sometimes decreed public days of prayer, on which the whole citizenry, men, women, and children, went from temple to temple throughout the city praying for divine aid (supplicationes). In turn, a favorable outcome of such prayers led to public days of thanksgiving, on which the citizen body gave thanks for their deliverance.’⁸

et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis: After his victory over Mark Antony at Actium (on the coast of Western Greece) in 31 BC, Octavian founded the city of Nicopolis (‘Victory City’) nearby. Every five years, it was to hold Greek games in memory of the victory, modelled on the Games at Olympia: see Suetonius, Augustus 18. A Roman colony may have been set up in the vicinity. But, as R. A. Gurval points out, ‘Nicopolis was, above all, a Greek city with Greek institutions. Its local government, coinage, and public inscriptions were Greek.’⁹ In establishing Greek forms of entertainment in Italy and Rome, the senate, then, seems to have tried to pander to the philhellenic passions of the emperor – much to the ire of Tacitus, who despised the Greeks. We have already had occasion to discuss Nero’s ill-fated gymnasium (see above on 15.22.2). The topic will resurface forcefully later on in the set text. Here it is important to note that the senators clearly knew how to please their princeps. But in Tacitus’ narrative, the contrast between the foundational victory of Octavian at Actium, which brought to an end a century of intermittent civil bloodshed, and the successful birth of Nero’s doomed baby daughter remains: it strikingly underscores the utter lack of proportion in the farcical measures proposed.

Fortunarum effigies: Two sister goddesses of Fortune were worshipped in Antium, and their images are taken to the Capitol in Rome in a lunatic’s idea of honouring Antium, the birthplace of Nero’s un-fortunate daughter.

Capitolini Iovis: Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus was Rome’s supreme divinity; he had his main temple in Rome on the Capitoline Hill.

ludicrum circense ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur: ludicrum circense ... ederetur is the second part of the ut-clause, in asyndetic continuation of Fortunarum effigies ... locarentur. At issue are races in the circus, which already were established at Bovillae in honour of the gens Julia (see Map of Italy). (The town of Bovillae, about ten miles from Rome, was a colony of Alba Longa, which in turn was founded by Aeneas’ son Iulus.) Now Antium was to receive games as well, in honour of the gens Claudia and the gens Domitia (the dative singular genti is to be supplied with both Claudiae and Domitiae). Nero shared ancestors with all three gentes. His mother Agrippina was the daughter of Agrippina maior (who in turn was the daughter of Augustus’ daughter Julia and his general Agrippa) and Germanicus (the son of Nero Claudius Drusus); Nero’s father was Cn. Domitius. But the extraordinary honour he now accorded to Antium – in implicit rivalry with Bovillae – suggests a deliberate attempt to step outside the shadow of Augustus. John Humphrey’s analysis of the stone circus at Bovillae is suggestive here:¹⁰

Fully-built stone circuses will be seen to be very rare outside Rome at such an early date. Undoubtedly it was the special connection of the Julian gens with Bovillae that prompted the construction of this circus, for the reputed origin of Julus was at nearby Alba Longa whence the ancient cults had been transferred to Bovillae prior to the Augustan period. Under Tiberius at the end of AD 16 a shrine to the Julian gens and a statue of the divine Augustus were dedicated at Bovillae. Augustus may have established a college of youths (collegia iuvenum) at Bovillae, while in AD 14 Tiberius established the sodales Augustales which administered the cult of the gens Iulia. Both organizations may have been involved with the games at Bovillae. Circus games are specifically alluded to in AD 35 ... and in AD 63 (circus games given in honour of the Julian cult) [with reference to our passage]; by implication these circus games had also been held in previous years. Thus the circus was probably used chiefly for games held under the close auspices of the emperor or the cult of the emperor, and it may have been located in close proximity to the shrine (sacrarium) of the Julian gens. ... It is hard to resist the conclusion that the monumental entertainment buildings of Bovillae, like some of its other public buildings, were a special project of Augustus and Tiberius.

The passage also should put into perspective the sacral investment on the part of both Nero and the senate. Nero’s predecessors and in particular Augustus had set high benchmarks in terms of honours received and self-promotion, and if he wanted to stand out against them – a virtual requirement of someone who took on the role of ‘princeps’: the elevated position of ‘the first or most outstanding member of society’ required permanent justification, not least vis-à-vis those who had held that role before. Nero could clearly not hold his own in terms of military achievement, so he decided to excel in a field of social practice on which no princeps had hitherto left a conspicuous mark: cultural activities cultivated in Greece. Meanwhile, as John Henderson reminds us, what he forgot was the meaning of the dual Fortunes’ rule over Antium – ‘Fortune’ and (her opposite number) ‘Mis-Fortune’ (Or as Horace puts it at Odes 1.35.1–4: O diva, gratum quae regis Antium, | praesens vel imo tollere de gradu | mortale corpus vel superbos | vertere funeribus triumphos; ‘Divine Fortune, who rules over pleasing Antium, ready to raise a mortal body from the lowest rung or change proud triumphs into funeral processions’). He might have reflected both on what befell the gens Iulia when Bovillan Augustus’ daughter Julia was born (he divorced her mother Scribonia and took the baby ‘on the same day’: Dio 48.34.4) and that these games were most likely one feature of Tiberius’ celebration of Augustus’ death and deification (or ‘deathification’). And as for the Claudian clan, it was more lunacy to insist simultaneously on both Nero’s adoptive and birth lineage; and it was less than fortunate a reminder to recall the end of the last Claudian princess Octavia, whose gruesome death Tacitus had just recounted at the end of the previous book.

23.3 quae fluxa fuere quartum intra mensem defuncta infante: quae is a connecting relative (= ea). fuere = fuerunt. All the efforts were as written on water. Tacitus announces this anticlimax with laconic brevity and a mocking f-alliteration. quartum intra mensem defuncta infante is a good example of another hallmark of Tacitean style, that is, the surprising distribution of information across main and subordinate clauses. Here the ‘vital’ element is packed into a (causal) ablative absolute, with the participle (defuncta) and noun (infante) further delayed for special effect. The language is very matter-of-fact and unelaborated, again contrasting the simple reality of the death with the extravagant honours previously listed. In terms of syntax (and placement in the sentence) the phrase mirrors dato et Poppaeae eodem cognomento at 23.1 and the two ablative absolutes thus bracket the birth and the death of Nero’s daughter, adding to the overall sense of futility and finality.

rursusque exortae [sc. sunt] adulationes censentium honorem divae et pulvinar aedemque et sacerdotem: The rursusque (‘and again’) at the beginning of the sentence gives a sense of despair to Tacitus’ words: for him, the new outpouring of sycophantic adulation is depressingly predictable. The verb exorior hints at novelty, and the proposed honours were indeed unprecedented: (i) deification (honorem divae); (ii) a sacred couch (pulvinar); (iii) a temple (aedem); and (iv) a priest (sacerdotem). All four items are accusative objects of censentium (the genitive plural present active participle of censeo, dependent on adulationes: ‘of those, who...’). Tacitus again employs polysyndeton to stress the profusion of honours showered on the dead baby by the supine senators and (as with the ablative absolute) to set up a correlation (this time on the level of style) between the events at her birth and upon her death. (See above 23.2 ‘et additae...’)

honorem divae: The senators proposed to deify the baby-girl. Accordingly, Tacitus calls Poppaea ‘mother of the divine infant’ (divinae infantis parens) at Annals 16.6.2. The move may seem preposterous (and Tacitus’ dry laconic account presents it as such). But we are supposed to recall what other emperors had dreamed up in this respect. Here is Cassius Dio’s account of how Caligula reacted to the death of his sister Drusilla:

Drusilla was married to Marcus Lepidus, at once the favorite and lover of the emperor, but Gaius [sc. Caligula] also treated her as a concubine. When her death occurred at this time, her husband delivered the eulogy and her brother accorded her a public funeral. 2 The Pretorians with their commander and the equestrian order by itself ran about the pyre and the boys of noble birth performed the equestrian exercise called ‘Troy’ about her tomb. All the honours that had been bestowed upon Livia were voted to her, and it was further decreed that she should be deified, that a golden effigy of her should be set up in the senate-house, and that in the temple of Venus in the Forum a statue of her should be built for her, 3 that she should have twenty priests, women as well as men; women, whenever they offered testimony, should swear by her name, and on her birthday a festival equal of the Ludi Megalenses should be celebrated, and the senate and the knights should be given a banquet. She accordingly now received the name Panthea, and was declared worthy of divine honours in all the cities. 4 Indeed, a certain Livius Geminius, a senator, declared on oath, invoking destruction upon himself and his children if he spoke falsely, that he had seen her ascending to heaven and holding converse with the gods; and he called all the other gods and Panthea herself to witness. For this declaration he received a million sesterces.

Take this as a benchmark and you could argue that the senators who proposed divine honours for Nero’s baby-girl showed remarkable... restraint.¹¹

pulvinar: A sacred couch on which the images of the gods were placed at a special celebration (the lectisternium) – the suggestion here is that the young baby’s image be placed among them as a new goddess (diva Claudia, Neronis filia).

sacerdotem: The singular surprises in its conspicuous modesty: in contrast to the twenty priests and priestesses that Caligula appointed for the shrine of his sister, the temple of diva Claudia looks decidedly under-staffed.

atque ipse ut laetitiae, ita maeroris immodicus egit: Another very short and therefore emphatic sentence, in which Tacitus makes explicit how highly strung Nero was. The advanced position and parallelism of ut laetitiae, ita maeroris (both genitives are dependent on immodicus) highlight that Nero is prone to excess at either end of the emotional spectrum. The adjective immodicus (‘excessive’) carries strong negative connotations in traditional Roman morality, which regarded control of one’s emotions as a sign of excellence; it correlates with the ultra mortale at 23.1, effecting a further bracketing of birth and death. Tacitus perhaps also invites us to evaluate Nero’s emotional reaction to the arrival and departure of his baby daughter against the high infant mortality rate in antiquity. Valerie French provides some numbers:¹²

If we retroject the worst mortality rates of the modern world back into the Greco-­Roman one, we would estimate that about 5% of all babies born alive would die before they reached the age of one month, and that among every 20,000 women giving birth, five would die. If we include late fetal and in­-childbirth deaths, the probability of infant mortality climbs from 5% to 8%.

These figures help to explain the high level of anxiety (and the investment in religious supplications) as the date of birth was approaching – as well as the tangible sense of relief thereafter; but they also help to underscore the emotional excess of the emperor: in light of the rather high likelihood that the child would not survive, the degree to which Nero was buoyed with joy and struck down by grief generates the impression of an emotionally unbalanced individual.

23.4 adnotatum est ... Thraseam prohibitum immoto animo praenuntiam imminentis caedis contumeliam excepisse: adnotatum est introduces an indirect statement with Thraseam as subject accusative and excepisse as infinitive. contumeliam – which is modified by the attribute praenuntiam (in predicative position and governing the genitive phrase imminentis caedis) – is the direct object of excepisse. prohibitum modifies Thraseam – it is Tacitus’ condensed way of saying that Nero forbade Thrasea to attend his reception of the senate. Nero’s decision to uninvite just him from the birth celebrations amounted to a renuntiatio amicitiae (renunciation of friendship) from the emperor, often a precursor to banishment or worse: this is what Tacitus refers to with praenuntiam imminentis caedis contumeliam (an affront which foreshadowed his impending murder). At 16.24, Tacitus notes that the emperor had prohibited Thrasea to join in the celebrations that greeted the arrival of Tiridates (the Parthian king) in Rome: Igitur omni civitate ad excipiendum principem spectandumque regem effusa, Thrasea occursu prohibitus non demisit animum, sed codicillos ad Neronem composuit, requirens obiecta et expurgaturum adseuerans, si notitiam criminum et copiam diluendi habuisset (‘The whole city, then, streamed out to welcome the emperor and inspect the king, but Thrasea was ordered to avoid the reception. [Aptly named for ‘Boldness’] He didn’t lower his spirits, but drew up a note to Nero, asking for the allegations against him and stating that he would rebut them, if he was allowed cognizance of the charges and facilities for dissipating them’).

omni senatu Antium ... effuso: Embedded within coverage of Thrasea occurs an ablative absolute in which Tacitus dispatches the rest of the senate. The whole (cf. the totalising omni) of the senate troop out to Antium to pay their homage to the newborn. The strong verb effundo (literally ‘to pour out’; this picks up on the image of flux in the previous sentence: quae fluxa fuere) helps to convey how the senators were falling over themselves to be seen congratulating the emperor and his wife.

sub recentem partum: Immediately after the birth.

immoto animo: The contrast between Nero’s wild emotions and Thrasea’s unshaken spirit is pointed.

secutam [sc. esse] dehinc vocem Caesaris ferunt qua reconciliatum [sc. esse] se Thraseae apud Senecam iactaverit ac Senecam Caesari gratulatum [sc. esse]: The sentence introduces a surprising turn: after the reference to Thrasea’s impending doom (and its Stoic acceptance), we now hear [the story] that Nero reconciled himself with his adversary and boasted about it to his old tutor Seneca. ferunt introduces an indirect statement with vocem and Senecam as subject accusatives and secutam (esse) and gratulatum (esse) as verbs. Within the relative clause iactaverit introduces an indirect statement with se as subject accusative and reconciliatum (esse) as verb. There is an interesting shift in grammatical position from the relative clause to the second part of the indirect statement dependent on ferunt: in the relative clause Nero is the subject of the main verb and the subjective accusative of the indirect statement (se), whereas Thrasea is in the dative; afterwards Nero is mentioned in the dative (Caesari), whereas Seneca becomes the subject accusative. It is another instance in which Tacitus uses evaluative syntax: he elevates Seneca to a more prominent syntactic position than the emperor and uses style to reinforce theme: as Furneaux puts it, ‘the answer of Seneca implies that the friendship of Thrasea was worth more to Nero than Nero’s to him.’¹³

apud Senecam: What we get here is a throw-back to the times when Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was Nero’s tutor and tried to guide him in thought and practice, not least through his treatise de Clementia (‘On Mercy’), which he addressed to his charge. At Annals 14.53–6, we were treated to an excruciating interview exchange when Seneca tried to let go his graduate and retire, only to run into a sample of the fancy rhetoric he had taught his prince pupil, and be refused.

ferunt: Tacitus often reports a story in this manner, neither mentioning his sources nor vouching for the story himself. Here, he tells the little tale to illustrate aspects of the intertwined characters of three major figures.

unde gloria egregiis viris et pericula gliscebant: egregiis viris refers to Seneca and Thrasea. Seneca won glory because of the fearless reaction to the emperor’s vaunting, thus speaking an unwelcome truth to power (always a dangerous thing to do), whilst Thrasea won glory through the recognition of his status as a benchmark of political excellence and integrity – again a worrisome position to be in if the ruler is a tyrant who falls short of the standards set by some of his subjects. The position of gloria at the beginning suggests that the outcome of the event was as it should be, then the delayed and threatening pericula reminds us that the world of Neronian Rome was not so fair and just, and that something more sinister was awaiting them. Ultimately, both had to commit suicide. That the same action simultaneously brings glory as well as danger reveals the perverse nature of Nero’s regime: qualities that ought to bring renown entail peril.

et pericula: This is another instance of Tacitean style, what Oakley calls ‘the pointed use of et.’ He cites Annals 12.52.3 as an example: de mathematicis Italia pellendis factum senatus consultum atrox et irritum and translates: ‘with regard to the expulsion of the astrologers from Italy, a decree of the senate was passed that was fearful – and ineffectual.’¹⁴ The same effect is in play here: ‘from this incident (unde) glory grew for these eminent men – and danger.’

gliscebant: This powerful metaphor gives the ominous sense of their futures: glisco is literally ‘to swell up, blaze up.’ Tacitus is fond of it: he uses it at the very beginning of the Annals to describe flattery and obsequiousness ‘swelling’ under Tiberius: gliscente adulatione (1.1). It belongs into the category of recherché or archaic words that Tacitus and other historiographers prefer over more common possibilities: ‘The similarity exhibited by Sallust, Livy, Quintus Curtius Rufus (in his History of Alexander the Great) and Tacitus in their choice of vocabulary allows the generalisation that Latin historical style was marked by frequent employment of archaisms: e.g. the use of cunctus for the more mundane omnis (‘all’), glisco for cresco (‘grow’) and metuo for timeo (‘fear’).’¹⁵ Moreover, ‘grow’ is just what Nero’s baby didn’t manage to do. And with her went – the whole shooting-match. Soon. Poppaea and Nero, Seneca and Thrasea. The dynasty of Augustus, the Annals of Tacitus.

Footnotes