Emperor of Rome, page 27
Acting up
Romans in general were actually as keen on drama of all sorts as they were on the bloody spectacles or racing chariots for which they are now best known. But the theatre could be another risky place for the emperor. By the end of the reign of Augustus, there were three permanent, open-air theatre buildings in the city, and any number of temporary or pop-up locations, where you could see different styles of performance: from farce to tragedy and revivals of classic Greek drama, from stand-up and slapstick to recitals, spoken or sung. Some, like the Circus races, were attached to official religious festivals, others were more private enterprise. The theatres were far smaller in capacity than the other entertainment buildings. The largest of the three was the so-called ‘Theatre of Marcellus’, started by Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus, in memory of one of those potential heirs who didn’t live long enough. It now houses some very upmarket apartments, after its remains were converted into a palatial residence in the sixteenth century. Even this theatre would have seated at most 20,000 people in the audience, and probably a couple of thousand fewer. But, to offset the smaller capacity, theatrical performances were much more frequent than other shows, with the same fourth-century calendar that marked sixty-four days for circus races marking 101 days for drama.
The same strict principles of segregation were supposed to operate in the theatres as in the Colosseum: men and women kept separate, the audience in semi-circular banks of seats facing the stage, in rank order, the senators given places at the very edge of the performance space itself. Where the emperor himself regularly sat is not so clear (partly because in none of the city’s theatres does the seating area survive). But he was certainly visible to the audience and so a target once again for their demands. It was in a theatre that Tiberius was forced by audience protests to give back the antique Greek statue he had taken for his own house from outside a set of public baths. And Augustus suffered a dose of full-view humiliation at the opening of the Theatre of Marcellus. On that occasion, he must have been with the senators around the performance space because he was using a portable sella curulis, an elaborate folding chair that was as close to a physical ‘throne’ as the Romans usually got. Embarrassingly for the emperor, the joints of this chair gave way. It completely collapsed and he fell flat on his back in front of the assembled people.
60. The exterior of the Theatre of Marcellus, with the Renaissance additions above. The three columns in the foreground belong to a temple of Apollo, also built in the reign of Augustus.
What was distinctive about these theatrical performances, though, was the way that satirical critique of the emperor was scripted into the shows or was improvised by daring actors, and enjoyed by the audience. Part of the freedom (or licence, licentia) of the theatre meant the freedom to jest about those in power, even to their face. One of the best and most damning ‘jokes’ came from a performer by the name of Datus in a musical during the reign of Nero. Rumours were then current that the emperor had not only been complicit in the murder by poison of his adoptive father, the emperor Claudius, but that he had also attempted to drown his mother by sending her off from Baiae in a collapsible boat, which disintegrated on the open sea. (She actually survived by swimming to the shore – Nero hadn’t reckoned on mum being a swimmer – and he was then supposed to have sent a hit squad to finish her off.) One of the songs Datus had to sing included the line ‘farewell father, farewell mother’. He delivered these words with added hand actions, first pretending to drink (poison), and then pretending to swim. A hundred years later Marcus Aurelius had to put up with a couple of actors on stage making a feeble pun on the name of one of the supposed lovers of his wife Faustina. One character in the play asked the other what the name of his wife’s lover was: ‘Tullus Tullus Tullus’ was the reply. ‘I don’t get it’, responded the first man. ‘I’ve told you three times’, came the follow-up, ‘it’s “Tullus”’. The predictable, groan-making joke here was that the name of Faustina’s lover was ‘Tertullus’, or, literally, ‘Three times (ter) Tullus’.
The question for the emperor was how best to react to jibes like this. It was easy to get it wrong. Caligula is reported to have had a writer burned alive for introducing a double entendre (against the emperor, presumably) into one of his lines. Marcus Aurelius, however, did not apparently win much praise for patiently sitting through the jibes on the name of Tertullus without punishing the culprits. It looked as if he was allowing himself to be walked over, by the comedians as well as by his wife. On this score, it was Nero who performed the imperial balancing act best, showing that he could take a joke, but was not a pushover. He did not put him to death, but merely sent Datus into exile for his cheeky poisoning and swimming impressions.
But Nero was also at the centre of big controversies connected with the stage: namely, how to align his role as emperor with his personal passion for acting and performing. Actors, like gladiators and charioteers, were socially despised but at the same time glamorous and sexy celebrities. Claudius, for example, is supposed to have put up with repeated heckling in the theatre about why the famous actor Mnester was not performing – when it was widely believed that Mnester was having fun in the palace with Messalina, Claudius’s then wife. And, as with the fighters in the arena, there were enough members of the Roman elite who fancied trying their hand on stage that it was thought worthwhile banning them from doing so. It was Nero, however, who was believed to have broken these rules most flagrantly, and was remembered for centuries as the ‘actor-emperor’.
It all started in private, but gradually, according to the usual story, Nero went public, first in Naples, where ominously the theatre collapsed directly after he had appeared, and later in Rome itself, acting in recitals (not as member of a regular cast, but as a solo performer with a small backing troupe), singing, and playing the lyre. There are any number of colourful and curious anecdotes about his performances and theatrical ambitions. He took on some extravagant roles, playing both men and women, ‘Canace in Childbirth’ being one of the most notorious (the part of a Greek mythological ‘heroine’ who gave birth to her brother’s baby, then killed herself). But he had a whole repertoire of themes about mythical kings and tyrants, including the ‘Blinding of Oedipus’ and ‘Orestes the Mother-Killer’. He was reputed to keep tight control of the audience. No one was allowed to leave the theatre while he was performing (it was said that some people even pretended to be dead in order to make their escape, and women actually gave birth at their seats for want of an exit route). The future emperor Vespasian was even banished from Nero’s circle because he was caught napping during one of his recitals. And Nero’s interest in theatre repeatedly appeared to trump his interest in government. When he was preparing a task force to fight an uprising in Gaul at the end of his reign, his first priority was arranging the wagons to transport his stage equipment. Most famously of all, he turned the great fire of Rome into a performance opportunity, watching from a safe distance and singing to his lyre on the theme of the destruction of the city of Troy, the original ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.
Some of this is straightforward exaggeration. If Vespasian was distanced from the emperor’s circle the exclusion did not last long, for he was very soon appointed to a major command in the Jewish War. Whatever Nero did during the great fire, it is fairly well established that the relief programme he sponsored after it (including opening his own grounds to the homeless) was unusually effective. Even hostile ancient critics conceded that. Anyway, some of these performances were probably rather popular. (It’s all too easy for ancient and modern writers to give a dark impression by injecting, here and elsewhere, a hint of compulsion, suggesting that ‘many people were compelled to attend’ when they might well have been there of their own free will.) But, skewed or exaggerated or not, these stories of Nero’s theatricals are much more than outrage about an emperor’s bad behaviour or tyrannical tendencies. In exploring the implications of the emperor as actor, Roman writers were cleverly turning the spotlight onto the problems and discontents of one-man rule.
As we saw in the fantasy dystopian world of Elagabalus, one of the most destabilising questions of Roman autocracy was how you could recognise what was true, or how, in the world of the emperor, you could ever know whether to believe what you saw and heard. The fact and fiction of the stage put a particular spin on that. For a start, in some of the stories of Nero’s performances, the business of ‘pretending to be someone you are not’ fell not on the actor, but on the audience. They might have to act dead in order to escape, or (unless they were Vespasian) pretend they were enjoying it. It was as if, when the emperor was an actor, everyone else was forced to be an actor/dissembler too.
But there was also the question of the difficult, shifting boundary between, on the one hand, Nero the emperor and, on the other, the stage parts he played. Some of his most famous roles had clear resonances with his own life. The ‘Blinding of Oedipus’ (on discovering, according to the myth, that he had married his mother) surely chimed with allegations that Nero had himself committed incest with his own mother, Agrippina. And, not so very different from Datus’s joke, ‘Orestes the Mother-Killer’ recalled the reports that he had later killed her. Those resonances were amplified by his stage costume. Following ancient tradition, he wore a mask to perform, but in his case it was said that the mask was not the usual, highly stylised creation that actors regularly wore, but was sometimes made with his own recognisable features. When he played women, it had the features of his female partner at the time. In other words, he took the part of the most famous Mother Killer of mythology while wearing a mask that mimicked his own face. So how did you tell the difference between the real emperor and the stage character? Was the emperor always acting? To put it another way, as Philostratus, the Greek intellectual, mused one hundred and fifty years later, what separated an actor who played a tyrant on stage and then wanted to become a tyrant in real life from a tyrant in real life, such as Nero, who wanted to play a tyrant on stage?
These questions of pretence and dissembling are captured most vividly in the story of one of those ‘time-off’ occasions when Nero went out at night, in disguise, searching out seedy bars, low-life, brawling and worse (Suetonius claims that some of his victims got dunked in the sewers). On this particular evening, the fun went horribly wrong for an innocent, and otherwise unknown, senator by the name of Julius Montanus. He was out with his wife when Nero, in his wig and careful camouflage, made a rough pass at her in the street. Montanus responded by beating the emperor up and leaving him with a black eye. Dio, in his version of the story, points out that all would have been well if Montanus had then just kept quiet. But many people in Rome were well aware of what Nero was getting up to after dark, and the unfortunate senator, who had recognised the emperor, wrote to apologise. That was a big mistake. When he read the letter, the emperor simply said: ‘So he knew he was hitting Nero.’ Hearing of that reaction, Montanus killed himself, no doubt fearing worse to come. In the logic of the story, his crime was spotting the real emperor through the acting.
Hunting for boys
When Commodus shot the animals from gangways across the Colosseum, he was only pretending to be a hunter. But in the Roman repertoire of recreation there was another side to killing animals. Far from the amphitheatre, some emperors, notably Trajan and Hadrian, made hunting in the wild, on horseback or on foot, their trademark pastime, which was on at least one occasion immortalised in sculpture in the city of Rome, in scenes of the emperor triumphant over a lion, a boar and a bear. Yet despite all the associations of the chase with bravery, masculinity and glamour, and without a large and possibly confrontational audience, this particular imperial pleasure too carried reputational risks.
Hunting had an ambivalent image at Rome. One school of thought condemned what it regarded as the ‘Eastern’ tyrannical practice of keeping animals penned up in special enclosures or game parks, to be sitting targets for the huntsman (not so very different from Commodus’s animal victims), while approving of the skill and risk of ‘real’ hunting, for ‘real men’. Others wondered whether hunting, even in the wild, was good training for military combat or merely a playful distraction from it. Others thought that, if you were just killing for fun anyway, why would you bother to go into the wild. You might as well just watch in the arena, ‘and keep your legs whole instead of getting them scratched to bits as you jog through the woods’. There were very different styles of hunting too. Pliny was predictably at the bookish end of the spectrum, taking his writing materials with him when out chasing boars, just in case a thought should occur to him that was too good to forget.
61. Relief panels of Hadrian hunting, re-used from an earlier monument, were incorporated into the Arch of Constantine, completed in 315 CE. Here Hadrian and his party are shown hunting a boar. The face of Hadrian (the main figure on horseback) has been recut to resemble that of Constantine, but Antinous is recognisable in the background (second from left).
Even if hunting was largely practised away from the public eye, those different styles could say a lot about the character and qualities of different emperors. On one occasion the young Marcus Aurelius, who was also rather bookish, explains in a letter to Fronto how he came back from the chase, not actually having seen what they had caught, took off his hunting gear and devoted himself to two hours’ reading of classic Roman speeches (no doubt exactly what his tutor wanted to hear). Augustus was apparently not a hunting man in the ‘big game’ sense at all, preferring an afternoon’s quiet angling. And the contrast between Domitian and Trajan in how each hunted gave Pliny, in his Speech of Praise, another way of exposing their vices and virtues.
Trajan’s recreation, according to Pliny, was to go out alone on foot, climb lofty mountains, and chase beasts from their lairs, or drive them out of the low-lying ground and protect farmers from the damage they did. It was almost as if he was doing in his spare time what he did in his day job: defending Rome against its enemies and protecting its citizens. Domitian, by contrast, was one of those whose amusement was to kill animals that were more or less in captivity anyway, in a game park at his Alban estate. Suetonius describes him, pointlessly and nastily (even if with a sharp aim), shooting two arrows into the heads of his victims to make it look as if they had a pair of horns. One Greek intellectual, another Dio, nicknamed ‘the Golden Mouth’ (Chrysostom), puts it even more clearly. Some emperors, of whom he disapproved, whimpered and wailed on the stage in their spare time (he had Nero in mind here), or they went to no effort at all to bag game that was penned up in their private parks. Good emperors, such as Trajan, showed their mettle in the kind of activities that made them stronger, braver and more ready for the fight.
Pliny’s line was that the emperor was revealed most clearly in what he chose to do in the time he had for himself. But his loud defence of Trajan’s hunting may suggest that not everyone thought Trajan had got it right. Certainly, we can detect all kinds of debates and anxieties about the passion for hunting of his successor, Hadrian.
Hadrian left the traces of his hunting across the Roman world, not only on those sculptures in Rome itself. He founded a city, in what is now Turkey, with the name of ‘Hadrian’s Hunts’ (Hadrianoutherae) because of a successful hunting expedition there, and he appeared on the city’s coinage in hunting costume. After killing a bear in Greece, he dedicated ‘the best parts of it’ to Eros, the god of love. In an uncomfortably sentimental dedication inscribed on stone, which still survives, he asks the god to breathe on him the grace of his mother Aphrodite. A few years later in 130 CE, in Egypt, he went hunting with his boyfriend Antinous, an occasion elaborately commemorated in Greek verse by an Egyptian poet of the time, Pankrates, who has been remembered only because he was lucky enough to have the emperor notice and enjoy this tribute. Four lines survive, quoted in a vast literary miscellany compiled a few decades later, but over thirty more lines, almost certainly from the same poem, have been discovered on scraps of Egyptian papyrus.
These verses build up the chase of Hadrian and Antinous into an epic encounter, against a lion that had been ravaging huge tracts of the North African countryside. Hadrian strikes first, with his bronze spear, but only wounds the animal who is left raging, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth and pawing the ground so violently that the cloud of dust raised obscures the sunlight. Hadrian’s near miss was intentional, for he wanted to discover how straight Antinous could throw (the over-the-top, epic language, more reminiscent of Homer than of a description of a hunt in the here and now, even gives the ‘lovely’ young man divine parentage: ‘the son of the god Hermes’, he is called). Which of the two men in the end killed the lion we do not know, for that section of the poem is lost. But in a surviving romantic touch, combined with some pretence of abstruse learning, we read that it was the lion’s blood, dripping to the ground, that gave the distinctive red colour to the Egyptian red lotus flower. That, of course, is not the only romantic touch in the poem. Following a long-standing ancient theme that saw the hunt not just as a symbol of martial prowess and endurance but as a metaphor for erotic pursuit (as it still is, in the phrase ‘on the hunt’), Pankrates hints that Hadrian’s target is as much the lovely Antinous as it is the fierce lion.
What ancient readers thought about the emperor being ‘on the hunt’, in that sense, we can only guess. But there is evidence that Hadrian’s passion for the chase itself was seen by some to go too far. The Imperial History, for example, suggests that it was too much even for Trajan, who is supposed to have recalled him to Rome from Spain, when he was a young man, to keep him away from the hunting opportunities there. And too much, for me, is the poem that Hadrian composed to be inscribed on the gravestone of his favourite hunting horse, Borysthenes, the ancient name for the Dnieper river, from where, presumably, the horse came.
