The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Nero found it easy to slip into the Roman habit of ordering executions whenever he felt like it. A half-hearted conspiracy to murder him, led by an aristocrat named Piso, provided him with an admirable excuse in 65 A.D.; Petronius was one of the victims on this occasion; so was Nero’s old tutor Seneca. Unlike Claudius, Nero derived no pleasure from watching men die; instead, he preferred to order them to commit suicide. Soon he was adding disapproving senators to the list, in the best tradition of Tiberius and Caligula. It began to dawn on the senate that getting rid of Nero was a matter of self-preservation.

Meanwhile, Nero was preoccupied with grandiose schemes. He was rebuilding Rome, with wide streets and buildings of stone and marble. His own Golden House had an arcade a mile long, and his apartments were plated in gold set with jewels. The ceilings slid back so that showers of perfume could be sprinkled down, or a rain of flowers. (Flowers were a kind of status symbol in Rome – one rich man spent a hundred thousand pounds – four million sesterces – on roses for one banquet.) At the entrance stood an immense statue of Nero, twelve storeys high.

In 67 A.D. – the twelfth year of his reign – Nero set off on a tour of Greece, taking part in various games and contests. He continued to be obsessed by the thought of plots against him and, while he was in Greece, sent for his greatest general, Corbulo, and ordered him to commit suicide; as he died, Corbulo murmured the ambiguous phrase ‘Serves me right’. Nero also suspected the loyalty of his Rhine armies – completely without reason – and sent for the two brothers who commanded the provinces on the Rhine. Without being allowed to defend themselves or see Nero, these were also ordered to commit suicide.

But things were already drifting towards the point of no return. In Judea, the Roman prefect was causing deep offence by trying to force the temple treasury to pay enormous tax arrears, and when he allowed his men to plunder parts of Jerusalem, Jewish terrorists organised a revolt; the Roman population of Jerusalem was massacred. The governor of Syria tried to recapture Jerusalem and was driven back with heavy losses. Nero appointed a middle-aged general named Vespasian to suppress the revolt. Then, in March 68, he heard that the governor of Gaul, Gaius Vindex, had also rebelled, after issuing a proclamation denouncing Nero’s extravagances. He was supported by Galba, the governor of Nearer Spain, and by Nero’s one-time friend Otho, governor of Portugal. The neurotic emperor was thrown into a panic by the news, and it was obvious to his guards that he was totally incapable of dealing with the situation – he left the dining-room one day with his arms around the shoulders of two friends, explaining that he intended to go to Gaul, stand in front of the rebel army and weep and weep until they felt sorry for him; then, he said, he would stroll among his troops singing paeans of victory – which, come to think of it, he ought to be composing at this very moment. What really seems to have cut him to the quick was a comment by Vindex that Nero played the lyre very badly.

On 8 June a report arrived stating that an army in northern Italy had decided to join the rebels. For Nero, this was the last straw; he decided to flee to Egypt. It was a scheme he had been considering for some time – he had remarked that, if he lost the throne, he could always live by his art. He left the Golden House and moved to his mansion in the Servilian gardens, en route for the port of Ostia, where ships had been ordered to get ready. When he woke from a short sleep to find that the Praetorian Guard was no longer on duty, he seems to have realised that this was the end. In fact, the commander of the Praetorian Guard had decided to go over to Galba and had bribed the men with an offer of 30,000 sesterces each (about £750) to proclaim Galba emperor. Nero hurried to the houses of various friends but could get no reply. Returning to his house, he found that his bodyguard had fled and had taken his bedclothes and his box of poison. Sounds of shouting and cheering from a nearby army camp convinced him that the revolt was spreading. With only four companions – including his ‘wife’ Sporus – he set out for the house of his freedman Phaon nearby. There he crawled into a cellar, ordered his grave to be dug, and had hysterics, repeating over and over again: ‘What a loss I shall be to the arts.’ A runner arrived with a message; it declared that the senate had branded him a public enemy and decreed that he should be executed in the ‘ancient style’ – which meant being flogged to death. He asked one of his companions to commit suicide first, and then, when he showed reluctance, muttered: ‘How ugly and vulgar my life has become.’ When he heard the sound of approaching hooves, he placed the sword point to his throat; one of the others also placed his hand on it, and pushed it in. He was already dying when a centurion entered to arrest him; as the man tried to stanch the blood with his cloak, he murmured ‘How loyal you are,’ and expired.

The lesson of Nero is very simple. He makes it possible to see that criminality is basically childishness. He was not a particularly ‘evil’ man – he completely lacked the kind of misdirected resentment that characterises most real criminals, from Alexander of Pherae to Carl Panzram. But because he became Caesar before he had time to grow up, he was totally subjective, completely self-absorbed. He saw other people as slightly unreal; to him, in fact, the whole world was slightly unreal. So when he wanted something, he simply grabbed it. When someone stood in his way, he ‘removed’ him. Because of his childishness, this came as naturally to him as killing mice to a cat.

In Nero, we can see the basic problem of human development: the moment human beings are released from the pressure of necessity they seem to go rotten. And if that is so, then there is something self-defeating about the very idea of civilisation, since its aim is to release us from necessity. It seems to be a vicious circle. Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

Yet although this is the truth, it is not the whole truth. As we examine human history, we realise that man also seems to possess an instinctive counterbalance to this natural drift towards criminality. In its most basic form, this seems to consist of an intuitive certainty that this narrow world of the personal ego is not the whole world – that something far greater and more interesting lies beyond it. This excited feeling of the sheer interestingness of the universe is inherent in all poetry, music, science, philosophy and religion. When we read of great men – an Alexander or a Frederick II – dying in a state of world-weary pessimism, we feel that they have somehow allowed themselves to become blinded by fatigue and allowed their senses to close. Somewhere along the way, they have missed the point. And when the conquerors and criminals have wreaked their havoc and left the scene, the sense of magic and mystery flows back like a tide and sweeps away the wreckage, leaving the beach smooth and clean again.

It is necessary to grasp this if we are to understand the remarkable spread of Christianity across the civilised world. There had been dozens – probably hundreds – of religions before Christianity; we have seen that there was a kind of worldwide religious explosion in the fifth century B.C. None had achieved the same impact or spread with the same speed as Christianity. And this is basically because Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism. Just as a pessimist is a man who has to live with an optimist, so an idealist is a man who has to live with a materialist. Roman religion was almost comically literal-minded; they believed, for example, that a vote in the senate could send their late emperor to the abode of the gods. (It is true that this is not so different from the Catholic Church’s procedure for canonisation.) Roman religion was not even original; it was simply taken over wholesale from ancient Greece. Roman literature, Roman art, Roman philosophy, were all superficial. There was nothing in Roman culture that could appeal to a man of imagination. Christianity was an expression of a craving for a deeper meaning in human existence.