Nero's Heirs Read Online Free PDF Page A

your hands.'
    'Your life, and the life of others,' I replied. Yet, despite everything, I would not yield. His eyes, I have remembered, were small and too closely pressing on his nose.
    I was however sufficiently touched by the candour he had displayed to me, even though I was in no doubt as to the motive, to draw on my conversation with Titus in order to convey some sort of warning to my admirer.
    So I asked him what measures he and his friends had taken to secure the support of the legions.
    'The army,' he said, 'will be obedient to the Republic which will speak through the Senate.'
    Then, young though I was, I knew that he was lost in silly dreams.
    Naturally I reported our conversations to Titus, employing, as I had promised, the cipher he had taught me.
    Lucan was not, as I learned much later, central to the conspiracy. His suggestion to me that he was proved to be only another example of that vanity characteristic of literary men. The head of the conspiracy was a man of much higher birth, G. Calpurnius Piso. (He had a nephew whom I often saw with Lucan at the baths; perhaps it was through him that Lucan became involved.) Even Piso may only have been the nominal head. He certainly wasn't cut out for that sort of thing. For instance, when it was proposed that Nero should be invited to Piso's villa near Velletri and murdered there, after a banquet, Piso vetoed the plan. He said that to stain his hospitality in this manner would create a bad impression. Even Lucan, with his absurd admiration for that 'Republican virtue', belonging to an age which had vanished, found this ridiculous.
    'Really,' he said, 'if you are murdering an emperor, it's an excess of delicacy to worry about the abuse of hospitality.'
    That bon mot was often quoted, subsequently; 'excess of delicacy' became a sort of catch-phrase, as in, for example, 'It would be an excess of delicacy not to bugger that boy.'
    Curiously, however, I believe that Lucan's admiration for Piso was enhanced rather than diminished by this evidence of his leader's scruples. I even once heard him compare Piso to Marcus Brutus, his Republican hero. Not that Brutus showed any 'excess of delicacy' when despatching Julius Caesar on the Ides of March.
    The second plan was apparently to dispose of Nero in his box at the Games. One of the conspirators would approach him, and throw himself at his feet as if begging a favour. Then he would seize Nero's ankles and pull him to the ground to allow his fellow-conspirators to rush in with their daggers. No doubt the intention was that they should then all leap up crying that Liberty had been restored to Rome.
    Even as a boy I could see that this imitation of the murder of Julius was grotesque. I could imagine Titus laughing aloud when he read my account of what was proposed, before inveighing against the folly of the times. Lucan on the other hand was offended when I told him that this scheme was ridiculous and could never succeed.
    In short the whole thing was amateurish. It would have been discovered even if Lucan had never blabbed to me and if I had not recounted all he said in my letters to Titus. As it happens, I have never known whether Titus made any use of my information.
    I can't recall now how many executions took place when discovery was finally made. The story circulated that the conspiracy was revealed by a freedman in the employment of Flavius Scaevinus, who had volunteered (as had others, including, by his own account, Lucan) to strike the first blow. It was said that in his excitement he had blabbed at his own dinner-table. Perhaps so. It was certainly convenient that a freedman should be held responsible.
    What is certain is that investigations ordered by the Emperor were first conducted by Faenius Rufus, who shared command of the Praetorian Guard with Tigellinus, the most disgusting of Nero's creatures, and a colonel of the Guard called Subirius Flavus. Both men were actually privy to the conspiracy. Yet, in their degenerate