The Nero Prediction (21 page)

Poppaea's cheeks glowed as she warmed to my theme. "My love, you are the last son of Aeneas, the final hope of a glorious dynasty that goes back to Troy. Do not allow shallow pity to snap this precious thread of life that reaches back to the age of gods and heroes. For the sake of your ancestors, your unborn child and its children, for the sake of music, act now!"

Nero used his knuckles to wipe death out of his eyes.

I wrote out the warrants.

That evening there was a tap on the door. A figure entered without waiting for permission, definitely female, undressed in transparent gauze, blowing into the room like a cloud. She looked like one of the sculptor Lysippus's sylphs. "Greetings Epaphroditus," said Rachel, "as you see, once more I've been sent to you."

Because she lived in the palace with Poppaea's attendants, I saw Rachel quite often, usually at a distance, sometimes with other men, knights and senators Poppaea had lent her to. Jealousy made me angry, tempted me, sometimes, to take her roughly until reason reminded me that she had no control over her body. The only sign that she was aware of my existence was the expression of mild reproach she occasionally directed at me. On the few occasions that we talked, our conversation always seemed to follow the same lines: she'd bristle while I complimented her on her outfits or her hair style which were always on the cutting edge of fashion - Poppaea saw to that. She looked particularly regal in the elaborate, high-piled hairdo that Messalina had made popular. Then, as soon as I'd incensed her sufficiently, she'd denounce me for my base attachment to physical perfection when it was the perfection of the soul that mattered. My teasing wasn't pointless. It melted her reserve and brought a touch of emotion to her serene beauty.

One warm summer night when I’d drunk too much wine and the full Moon had burnished the trees with silver, I ran into her in the palace garden. By chance, at least I thought it was chance, she was alone. Perhaps she’d just completed an assignment with another guest. In my drunken state that excited me.

“Are you still only offering me your body?" I asked after squeezing a bottom that felt as firm as a melon.

The delicate nose rose half an inch and the wide eyes narrowed. "You know that perfectly well."

My temples hammered, drumming my concern for her inner feelings out of my mind. I drew her towards me and kissed her roughly. "Then that will have to do."

With a resigned sigh she pushed me away very gently as if I were a boisterous child. She turned her back on me and walked to a couch that had been placed in the deep shade of a nearby plane tree. A torch on an ornate bronze tripod burnt nearby, faintly illuminating it. Without looking at me she undid the jeweled clasp at her throat and shrugged the gauze off her shoulders. It was at the moment of nakedness that she glanced at me. In spite of what she'd said about not caring about her body it was clearly important to her that I did.

Her waist was narrow as a wasp’s, her breast were large and firm, her hips and legs perfectly contoured. Venus in the flesh. But what else would you expect from Poppaea?

In spite of all the wine, my throat was suddenly dry. “You’re lovely.”

"Your tunic," she said. I pulled it over my head. When I emerged from the moment of darkness her eyes were on my upended manhood. She reached out for it slowly, her right hand palm upwards, her nails scratching the underside of the shaft from the base to the tip. The sensation was exquisite.

Her breathing shortened to a pant, her eyes were glutinous pools of lust. "Come."

She took me into her mouth, swallowed me until her teeth nibbled my pubic hair. Passion overwhelmed me like panic. I threw her down on the couch. When I thrust myself into her viscous interior, she let out such a loud, primitive cry that I thought she’d bring the palace police running. Her vulva was extraordinary, more dexterous even than Claudius’s Indian girl in the way it opened for me when I drove inwards and closed tightly on me while I withdrew. It seemed she wanted to keep me inside her forever. Her nails tore at my back, she arched as we climaxed and screamed her ecstasy to heaven. Whatever her soul was, her body was all woman.

Afterwards she rearranged her clothes and combed her hair as gracefully as a pantomime but I had the curious sensation that she had become someone else.

"Thank you," I said.

Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. "For taking you a step closer to the fire? You have been given another taste of evil and I was the one who fed it to you with a spoon. Don't thank me, curse me."

A few weeks later Nero deprived the conservative Claudians of their imperial patroness by divorcing Octavia for sterility. Fourteen days later he married Poppaea. Less than a month later Octavia was helped to take her own life. She was part of the past and therefore had to go, Tigellinus and Poppaea persuaded Nero of that sad fact. I did nothing to contradict them.

On the evening I heard of her death, Octavia's large sad eyes seemed to be watching me from the dark corners of my living room. Not even Rachel’s arrival in a cloud of aphrodisiac musk could banish the ghost. She seemed to feel the same way as I did. Instead of making love we played checkers. She beat me with embarrassing ease. 

Of course the Claudians did their best to make Octavia's death into a major political scandal. Not even naming the daughter that Poppaea gave birth to in January Claudia Augusta and declaring her a goddess disarmed their malice. Far from it. Four months later, when the infant died of a lung congestion and Nero was prostrate with grief, they spread the rumor that divine retribution would see to it that the next life he took would be his own. 

Xenophon, Nero's physician, took the rumor seriously. "Like many men of creative genius," he told me, "the emperor has a disposition for sudden and extreme alternations of mood. Until he recovers from his melancholy he must be watched at all times."

"Impossible," I told him. "He insists on being alone. He refuses to allow even Poppaea to spend the night with him."

"Then you must make certain that he doesn't have access to anything with which he can harm himself, particularly ropes, razors and knives."

I'd already taken that precaution as far as the contents of his room were concerned. What hadn't occurred to me was that Nero's enemies might smuggle him a dagger with his food. Since there wasn't a slave who couldn't be bought, I searched everything that went into his bedroom and slept on a mat outside his door in case he called for something after dark.

Near the middle of the seventh night after the infant's death I was awoken by the sound of his kithara that had been silent until then. After a few bars of a simple melody Nero began to sing, in a pathetic, broken voice, the familiar lines from Sophocles's play
Orpheus and Eurydice
, the lines we used to recite during a game I played with him when he was ten years old.

Musical interludes in plays were common, but never before had I heard anyone attempt to sing the dialog. I knew why Nero was doing so, he was out of his mind, but I remembered my part and sang it also, to humor him, following the rhythm of his kithara as best I could.

At first Nero's responses were hesitant as if even in his madness he couldn't believe that his plaintive wails were being answered in song. Quickly his confidence grew. It took some improvising such as a lengthening of the vowels to make up for the mismatch in poetic meter and musical beat, but soon we were both going at it, hammer and tongs, through the locked bedroom door. It was at the climax of our childish game, where Orpheus turned for that forbidden look at Eurydice, that Nero threw the door open.

He was stark naked, his hair was as tangled as a bush but his face was alive with excitement. "Epaphroditus, we've found it!" he roared. "The secret weapon of musical war! Fall to your knees, you Greeks, it is you who deserve to be conquered first!"

Since such an art form had never been conceived of, and therefore he had no models to build on, it took Nero nine months to perfect his first singing play, based on the tragic legend of Niobe, the mother of Tantalus. We were back in Baiae for the spring Minerva Festival when he performed it for the first time - in Naples, which is of course a Greek city. Tigellinus wanted an audience that could be guaranteed to give Nero a warm reception. I suggested the thousand sailors from the Alexandrian fleet that had just put in and suggested to the admiral that he instruct his men to applaud in the Alexandrian mode, carefully orchestrated sets of rhythmic clapping called “the buzzing”, “the tiles” and “the bricks”.
Niobe
was a stunning success. Led by the sailors, the audience clapped until their hands hurt. Their feet thundered on the floorboards. It sounded like an earthquake – people outside the theater said there indeed had been one – the earth is unstable in this region, brooded over by smoking Vesuvius. Nero had indeed discovered a powerful weapon and he intended to unleash it immediately on Greece. But he had composed so little! That was the thought that tormented him. The month that followed was a crush of statecraft until midday and composition and rehearsal until midnight.

Perhaps because Poppaea thought it would sap my energy, Rachel wasn't sent to me once during that period and such was the pressure of work that I didn't have time to seek her out. I was at the quay-side in Naples watching the fleet being loaded with stage scenery, costumes and musical instruments, the ordnance of musical war, when I had my next conversation with her.

There was something about her, an earnestness, which told me that for once she hadn't been sent by Poppaea. "I come from someone not of this world but of the next," she said. "You must fly from Nero. Rather lose your life than your soul. Nero is Satan. He’s just proved it in the theater."

I did my best to keep a straight face. “You told me he was the Antichrist. Is this a promotion?”

She shot me a look of reproach, stared at me with eyes that asked if I was toying with her. "It’s the same thing. He’s evil."

"Nonsense, Nero's just the opposite of evil. He is about to enlighten the world like a modern-day Bacchus."

She spat out the word like a grape seed. "Bacchus! You want Bacchus for your god?"

"I was thinking of Bacchus's patronage of the theater," I said a little defensively.

 "You call the theater enlightenment? It's nothing more than a parade of all the vices of the age. Instead of soaking yourself in wine, you feast on folly. It's all the same, a mere diversion, not an illumination. True illumination doesn't come from man, it comes from god. And this is what god says, there is no true joy in this world, only in the next. You are like the ignorant savage who is eager to sell his patrimony for a few glass beads. I can see it in your eyes, you have allowed Nero to steal your soul." A little cry of realization cut short by a hand clapped to the mouth. "No, I see it now, it's worse than that, much worse. You're feeding Nero's evil just like in the past I was forced to feed yours. Epaphroditus! Mark said you were chosen. Open your eyes, it’s time!"

Her confused outburst puzzled me. "Time? Time for what?"

For several seconds she gazed at me in silence as if she was weighing whether or not to answer my question. "We are commanded to go out and become fishers of men, so I'll tell you. He is returning soon, very soon, to overturn this kingdom and establish the kingdom that is to come, his kingdom."

“You are talking about the return of Christ, aren’t you?”

“Yes!” she said, her voice resonant with joy.

“He’s about to come down from the sky trailing clouds of glory,” I said, recalling Peter’s words as they were translated by Mark all those years ago in Alexandria.

Her eyes lit with anger. “Those who have heard the message and do not receive it will be thrown into a pit of everlasting fire!”

I tried not to smile. "Exactly when is this revolution going to take place?"

“Soon! Very soon!”

“But you don’t know the date?”

She hesitated just too long then jumped to her feet and hurried away, graceful even in her fury, another beautiful woman deranged by religion.

At the end of April the artistic army set out across the Italian peninsula for the Adriatic port of Brundisium where we were to rejoin the fleet. We got no further than Beneventum, a city in the middle of the peninsula. Almost exactly an hour after sunset on May 3 there were muffled shouts from outside. Entering at the kitchen, a rumor ran through the slaves like a ripple. Something had happened. The doors to the dining room opened. The colonel of the Watch entered. With his plumed helmet and glistening armor he seemed like a creature from another world.

Nero was composing. His dream world evaporated from his eyes. "What is it?"

The colonel threw up his arm in the salute. "Caesar, another comet has been sighted."

I think Nero would have preferred to hear that Britain had fallen. "A comet? Where?"

We followed Nero outside. It had been cloudy earlier in the evening but now heaven was unveiled, the stars brilliant. The group of soldiers who stood below us on a garden terrace whispered among themselves.

The colonel indicated an apparition directly overhead. "There it is."

It was faint and its tail was short but it was undoubtedly a comet.

Poppaea, dressed in a dark hooded cape, came out with Ptolemy Seleucus, her astrologer. Clearly she was agitated. "An evil omen," she said, "it's in Virgo."

Nero stared at her dully. "Virgo? What's wrong with that?"

Ptolemy, who'd added to his height by perching himself on a hump in the lawn, cleared his throat pretentiously. "A comet in Virgo is a black portent for every woman in the empire, especially the empress."

Nero looked at me. "Get Balbillus."

The astrologer was already hurrying towards us, charts in hand, with Tigellinus, looking grim, half a step behind.

"Caesar's worried," I told Balbillus.

He ignored me, took up a position at Nero's elbow. "You have good reason for concern, Caesar. Not only has the comet appeared right on the Zodiac in Virgo, but it points directly at you ruling planet, Saturn. To make matters worse, the comet is in a precise and very unfortunate square with your Mercury. Your Mercury, as you know, is situated in your House of Enemies. This means that the visitor is feeding your enemies evil thoughts."