The dirty dozen

I have this fantasy in which I’m the Emperor Nero. I’m relaxing in my toga, and there are these slave girls dancing for me, and one of them has the most incredible … Like all the best fantasies, it’s a little unrealistic, let us say, but I didn’t know how unrealistic until I read this magnificent book by Matthew Dennison. For Nero’s life, as absolute ruler of the known world, was hell, haunted by twitching doubts and gibbering fears.

He was bisexual, to begin with. That was OK in ancient Rome, but when it came to sleeping with men he received rather than gave, and that was definitely uncool. (During the act itself, the sources say, Nero would ‘imitate the cries and laments of a maiden being deflowered’.) Paranoid, he killed his mother at the request of his wife. Then, a few years later, he killed that same wife, pregnant at the time, by kicking her repeatedly in the stomach. Why? She nagged him for returning late from the races.

With absolute power comes absolute permissiveness. Ordinary vices pall, and the tired hand reaches, with diminishing returns, for ever stranger fruit. Moving through the catalogue of their crimes, sexual and otherwise, one is continually astonished by the sheer inventiveness of the Caesars, their desperate originality.

Augustus (31 BC to AD 14) started out quietly. He used to ravish the wives of senators during dinner parties. One of them, we’re told, returned to the table with her ‘ears glowing’, which makes it sound like he knew what he was doing.

Mere adultery wasn’t enough for his successor. In misanthropic seclusion on the isle of Capri, Tiberius trained little boys to swim under him as he bathed, and nibble his genitals. Distinguished guests were encouraged to gorge on wine.