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It Ended Badly
Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History
By Jennifer Wright Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Wright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-287-5
CHAPTER 1
Nero
Poppaea
You know what's amazing? That we become upset when a politician cheats on his wife. Remember President Bill Clinton? Or would you like to discuss other of our country's leaders? And every time we, as a society, react with distress and disappointment, my heart sings a little. It rejoices because people actually behave extremely well now. That sense of collective indignation would not have happened had we lived in ancient Rome. To those living under the reign of Emperor Nero, the idea of a high-ranking political figure getting into trouble because they had sex with another willing adult would be hilarious.
That is because ancient Rome was a world full of nightmares, where every romance became a horror movie ending in poisoning, murder, suicide, and, in Nero's case, what may be the most terrifying rebound in history.
Maybe you could blame a tiny bit of Emperor Nero's difficulties with relationships on his parents. Most people learn about relationships from their parents — how to keep love alive and overcome differences and all of those good things, but also in some cases how to break up without killing each other. Sadly, the humane approach was not something Emperor Nero was taught by his mother, Agrippina the Younger.
There are many accounts about her horrible activities, but this one story sums up her villainess-on-a-soap-opera persona. First you have to understand that, in addition to being the mother of Emperor Nero and the sister of Emperor Caligula, Agrippina was married to Emperor Claudius. I bet you remember him. You picked up this book, so you strike me as the kind of person who studied a dead language and watched the I, Claudius television miniseries with a container of your favorite Ben & Jerry's ice cream resting in your lap.
(In college I studied ancient Greek, Late Night Snack is my favorite flavor, and I'll be coming to your house next week for a BBC movie night. I am really looking forward to it!)
But if you need a refresher: Claudius was the fourth emperor of Rome. He is probably best remembered for his numerous tics including a stammer and a limp. He was also thought to be partially deaf. The historian Suetonius wrote, "His knees were weak and gave way under him and his head shook. He stammered and his speech was confused. He slobbered and his nose ran when he was excited." Suetonius also said that his mother, Antonia, often called him "a monster of a man, not finished but merely begun by Dame Nature." If she accused anyone of dullness, she used to say that he was "a bigger fool than her son Claudius."
She was wrong. In reality, Claudius was a smart man who needed a hanky.
Seriously. None of his tics had any influence on Claudius's very considerable intellect. Those quirks caused people to assume he was mentally delayed, though. That was great. If you are transported back to ancient Roman high society, begin with this pretense. If you show any trace of intellect, ambition, or popularity, whoever is in power will more than likely decide you are an enemy trying to usurp them and will kill you. Acting like a simpleton is your best bet for survival. To stay alive in ancient Rome, you should operate the way you would if you suddenly discovered all of your friends were in the Mafia.
So Claudius was fortunate, because his tics caused everyone to dismiss him. While his relatives were killing one another, they simply overlooked him. Except for a consulship that he shared with his nephew Caligula in 37 CE, Claudius didn't really enter public life until age forty-nine in 41 CE. He was then crowned emperor following the assassination of Caligula, in which he may or may not have been involved. Supposedly the people loved him. Following the assassination, according to Suetonius, "the populace, who stood about the [senate] hall, called for one ruler and expressly named Claudius. He allowed the armed assembly of the soldiers to swear allegiance to him, and promised each man fifteen thousand sesterces; being the first of the Caesars who resorted to bribery to secure the fidelity of the troops."
See? Smart.
He then revealed himself to be extremely competent and intelligent, and had a brilliant reign, greatly expanding the Roman Empire, even as far as Britain. His only real misstep might have been marrying Agrippina and adopting Nero.
Almost all historians agree that in 54 CE Agrippina poisoned a dish of Claudius's mushrooms. This is referenced in many comedies of the time; there are tons of mushroom jokes. In his Epigrams Martial directs the comment "May you eat such a mushroom as Claudius ate!" to an unlikable character. All of the jokes are identical; they're all just "go eat a mushroom and die." Today, you can really only use that line to insult your four friends who studied ancient Greek and Latin (who are also invited to our BBC drama night), but maybe it will give them a chuckle.
Perhaps because of all those bad jokes, people remember the mushrooms today. What is often forgotten is that, according to the historian Tacitus, Claudius attempted to use a feather to induce vomiting. Remember, Claudius was a smart man, and doubtless thought if he had been truly poisoned, he could tickle his throat and vomit up the poison. Great planning, right? Really clever.
Agrippina poisoned the feather.
At least that's my favorite version of the story about how Claudius died. There's some dispute. Suetonius claimed that Agrippina fed Claudius a second helping of poison in a bowl of gruel that she said would soothe his stomach. That just never strikes me as being as elegant as the feather. The point is, though, that she not only poisoned her husband but poisoned him twice.
If you are feeling really bad for the emperor right now, know that Claudius had executed his third wife, Valeria Messalina (Agrippina was the fourth), and her lover. Supposedly Valeria married her lover, Gaius Silius, while Claudius was away on vacation. She celebrated with an enormous wedding and a public banquet — never a smart thing to do, under any circumstances, if you are already married. (And especially risky today, with Twitter and Instagram.) Claudius also ordered the deaths of all the wedding guests. Allegedly when he was informed at dinner that his orders had been carried out and they'd all been killed, he just calmly asked for more wine.
Remember, these tales are only intended to set up the story of Emperor Nero's breakup. His parents had nothing on him.
Have I mentioned that ancient Rome was a mind-bogglingly bloody place? Many people mistakenly believe that Rome was somehow a more civilized place to live than, say, medieval Europe. Granted, the Middle Ages were a terrifying time. Scholars from the period were more or less in agreement that it was a time when everyone who did anything deserved to die. In the eleventh century Saint Peter Damian ruled that a Venetian princess deserved to die of a wasting disease because she ate her food with a fork. There was a lot of talk around that time about whether or not forks were tools of Satan. (Answer: maybe. I guess we'll never know.)
Compared to that deadly religious fervor, ancient Rome, with its indoor plumbing and togas and organized system of government, seems pretty cool. If people think that it was violent at all, they kind of confine that vision to gladiatorial arenas and just imagine Russell Crowe killing people. And as every single middle school Latin or history teacher will point out, gladiatorial matches did not necessarily end in death.
Do you know what those teachers do not tell us? That gladiatorial matches ended in death most of the time and not just for the gladiators. That sometimes audience members — just people who'd shown up for a good time to see the fights! — would be pulled into the arena and thrown to wild animals. Extra death!
Romans loved finding creative and unexpected ways to kill people. The Roman punishment for patricide was to blindfold the offender, beat him repeatedly with rods, and then toss him into a sack. An ape, a snake, a dog, and a rooster would also be put in the sack, and then it would be sewn up. The idea was that those animals would not be friends. But, you know, it didn't really matter because then the bag would be thrown into a river. Even if you had some sort of Kumbaya moment where you were able to simultaneously charm an ape, a snake, a dog, and a rooster (in this situation you are not only a time traveler but also Dr. Doolittle), you would drown anyway.
So I don't know why history teachers try to make ancient Rome sound civilized. If the city-state had a motto, it would be ABSOLUTELY NO ONE HERE DIES OF NATURAL CAUSES. There is a very bad movie called The Purge (2013), starring Ethan Hawke, whose illogical premise — and tagline! — is FOR ONE NIGHT OF THE YEAR, ALL CRIME IS LEGAL. That was seemingly the generally accepted operating system in 50 CE Rome — 365 days a year.
Accordingly, if a Roman couple broke up and one or both of them killed the other, that would not even merit a footnote. It would be surprising if that did not happen. And yet it was completely unnecessary — divorce was common in ancient Rome. I have only mentioned Nero's mom and dad in this story:
• To provide fun facts for you to bring up the next time anyone anywhere praises ancient Rome as the first great civilized nation. You are going to crush seventh-grade history teachers.
• To offer some insight into the severity of Nero's reaction to his own breakup with Poppaea. Which was terrible.
If you know anything about Emperor Nero, it's that he was insane and supposedly played the fiddle while Rome burned. He was mad. That part is true, and we'll get to that. He didn't actually fiddle, though! According to the historian Dio, he climbed to the roof of the palace, dressed up in professional singer garb, and sang verses about the burning of Ilium (Troy). Which is not an improvement, really, now that I think about it.
Nero inherited his mother's love of pageantry and ruthlessness, and had none of his stepfather's understated intellect. At every key moment in his life, he expressed his desire to be a poet or a musician. He was not very good at either, as far as we know, but it's possible that had his mother not been pushing him to be emperor, he would have had a reasonably happy, sane life, perhaps killing only one or two or three people. So, a normal number for the time.
Agrippina had been campaigning for Nero to be emperor since he was age nine, when she told everyone that he slept surrounded by snakes. He didn't. That was just something she told people, like some parents say their kid aced the SATs. All of those people are lying, maybe. I don't know. I did not ace the SATs and am not a sleuth.
Nero had the kind of disposition where he saw himself performing on a grand stage all the time. And he wanted a partner. He was married to Claudius's daughter, Octavia, in 53 CE. Agrippina arranged the marriage because she thought it would lend an appearance of legitimacy to his reign — that is to say, he should be emperor because he was not only adopted by Claudius but also married to his daughter.
Octavia was, according to Tacitus, a virtuous Roman wife. I imagine she had some problems being married into the family that murdered her father, but she took it in stride — as a virtuous Roman wife who did not want to die. Nero did not desire her and responded to her virtue by periodically trying to strangle her.
But that is not the bad breakup in this story.
The bad breakup involved Nero's love affair with Poppaea Sabina, which began in 58 CE. Poppaea Sabina supposedly possessed every virtue someone like Nero could want. In other words, Tacitus claimed she "possessed every virtue but goodness." He also wrote, "From her mother the loveliest woman of the day, she inherited distinction and beauty. Her wealth, too, was equal to her birth. She was clever and pleasant to talk to. She seemed respectable. But her life was depraved." A fun fact: according to Suetonius, her beauty secret was donkey milk and gladiator jism.
The philosopher and dramatist Seneca also compares her to Octavia in his play Octavia thusly:
NERO: I have a consort whom her rank and beauty make worthy of my bed; Venus would yield to her, Venus and loyal Juno and armed Minerva.
SENECA: Virtue and loyalty and the pure heart — these things should please a husband, these alone. The glories of the soul live to eternity. The flower of beauty fades from day to day.
NERO: God had united every high perfection in her: the Fates created her for me.
Nero liked her a lot! If you believe Seneca, Poppaea was superhot (this seems true, based on a posthumous depiction of her where she closely resembled the actress Christina Hendricks), and Nero decided that meant he was her soul mate.
By the time Nero began his romance with Poppaea, she had already been married twice. The first marriage was to Rufrius Crispinus in 44 CE. Rufrius had been commander of Emperor Claudius's Praetorian Guard until Agrippina had him banished in 51 CE, suspecting that he had too much affection for the recently murdered Valeria. Agrippina did not have him killed. Weird! He was killed, of course, but that was later, in 65 CE, by Nero. He was sixty-six years old, which is, I think, as long as anyone could ever hope to be alive in Rome.
Following her first husband's banishment, Poppaea was married to Otho, a close friend of Emperor Nero's. She had likely been Otho's mistress while still married to Rufrius, which probably accounts for a sliver of that dig about her depraved behavior. There's some conflict in accounts over this relationship. Tacitus writes in his Historiae:
Otho's had been a neglected boyhood and a riotous youth, and he had made himself agreeable to Nero by emulating his profligacy. For this reason the emperor had entrusted to him, being the confidant of his amours, Poppaea Sabina, the imperial favorite, until he could rid himself of his wife Octavia. Soon suspecting him with regard to this same Poppaea, he sent him out of the way to the province of Lusitania, ostensibly to be its governor.
If that's the case — and the biographer Plutarch presents a similar account in Life of Galba — then Nero wanted Poppaea for himself and married her off to Otho assuming that Otho would be too preoccupied with his many other women to focus on just one. Mistake! Otho fell in love with Poppaea. Nero was not allowed in their house and was reduced to begging outside to see Poppaea.
Then the accounts differ. Suetonius's Life of Otho claims that Poppaea reciprocated Otho's feelings, so much so that she turned Nero away. Meanwhile, Dio maintains that she cleverly used Nero's jealousy of her husband in order to have Otho banished and reinforce Nero's desire for her. And the Wikipedia page claims that "Otho introduced his beautiful wife to the Emperor upon Poppaea's insistence," which would seem to indicate even more plotting was afoot on her part.
All of these theories result in the same outcome. Otho was banished to Lusitania in 58 CE, and Poppaea was free to marry again. Agrippina was not all that keen on Nero breaking things off with Octavia in favor of Poppaea. According to Tacitus in Annals, Poppaea knew this.
[Nero's] passion for Poppaea daily grew more ardent. As the woman had no hope of marriage for herself or of Octavia's divorce while Agrippina lived, she would reproach the emperor with incessant vituperation and sometimes call him in jest a mere ward who was under the rule of others, and was so far from having empire that he had not even his liberty. "Why," she asked, "was her marriage put off? Was it, forsooth, her beauty and her ancestors, with their triumphal honors, that failed to please, or her being a mother, and her sincere heart? No; the fear was that as a wife at least she would divulge the wrongs of the Senate, and the wrath of the people at the arrogance and rapacity of his mother."
You know how it is. Your boyfriend keeps taking his mother's advice on everything, his mom hates you, you tell him to stop being a mama's boy and imply that his mother is a ... not nice lady ... and your boyfriend promptly proves his devotion by murdering his mother.
Or maybe that was a thing that happened only this one time.
Interestingly, Tacitus notes that no one really saw that murder coming. Except for you, I bet, because you know how these people operate. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, He is reaching for a vial of poison. That is correct! Suetonius claimed that Nero did try to poison Agrippina three times, and each time she took an antidote and survived. Because Agrippina won all the poisoning prizes. You do not spit into the wind, you do not kid a kidder, and you do not poison Agrippina.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from It Ended Badly by Jennifer Wright. Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Wright. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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