The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Read Online Free PDF Page B

practice of putting two prefects over the Praetorian Cohorts. Rome’s oldest military unit had been created by the praetors of Rome as their personal protection force after the formation of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. Later, the two consuls elected to power each year had controlled the Praetorian Cohorts, with each appointing one senior officer to jointly command them. By the time of Julius Caesar, the Praetorian Cohorts had fallen into disuse, only to be reformed by Mark Antony in 44 BC in the wake of Caesar’s assassination, again as a personal protection force. At that time, the most senior Praetorian officers were their tribunes. This changed with the coming of the emperors. Augustus made the Praetorians more than bodyguards. Employing the hand-picked auxiliary troops of the Germani corporis custodes for his close personal protection, he had turned the nine Praetorian Cohorts that then existed into his political police; they had become his enforcers and executioners, and via their muscle and steel, they and their commanders wielded enormous power.
     
    It had been wise Augustus’ intent that a check should be placed on the misuse of Praetorian power by emulating the old custom of putting not one but two men in overall charge of these household troops, with both men holding the equal rank of prefect. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, had learned the wisdom of this through bitter experience when his sole appointee, Sejanus, had attempted to usurp him. Later emperors adhered to the policy of appointing a pair of Praetorian prefects, but Claudius, several years before his death, and under the influence of his last wife, Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, had appointed a single Praetorian prefect, Afranius Burrus.
     
    Burrus, a physically imposing man, had overcome the disability of a withered left hand to become a soldier of great renown before he took command of the Praetorians. He proved to be an honest and able prefect and a clever military strategist, serving in the capacity of what in modern terms would be considered a secretary of defense. Retaining his post when Nero came to the throne, Burrus had been, in combination with Nero’s chief of staff (the famed and flawed philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca), another of Agrippina’s favorites, a steadying influence on the boy emperor for the first five stable years of Nero’s reign.
     
    In AD 62, Burrus had died from throat cancer, although the gossips would claim that Nero, tiring of the prefect’s strict influence, murdered Burrus by sending him a poison-laced medicine for his throat. Following Burrus’death, Nero, on the advice of Seneca, had reverted to the custom of two Praetorian prefects. To satisfy Seneca and the public, he first chose Faenius Rufus, yet another favorite of Agrippina. Nero had earlier appointed Rufus to the post of commissioner of the corn supply. The poet Juvenal said that Romans would be content just as long as they were provided with bread and circuses, and there was much truth in this. The man who controlled the capital’s supply of corn, most of which had to be shipped in from the wheat fields of Egypt and North Africa in vessels of the Mediterranean grain fleet, controlled the lives of the people of Rome. Some of the 150,000 tons of grain shipped into Rome each year was sold to bakers, but since the reign of Augustus, most was doled out free of charge to the poorer residents of Rome and sold to soldiers at a subsidized rate.
     
    Some past holders of the post of commissioner of the corn supply had been lazy; others had been inept, and others still, corrupt. Rufus was an exception; he had gained “vulgar popularity,” according to Tacitus, through “his administration of the corn supplies without profit to himself.” 1 Yet, just as Rufus was widely known as a virtuous man, he was equally well known as a passive, if not downright timid man. And this admirably suited both Nero and his second choice for prefect.
     
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