Rome in 66 A.D. – the year in which The Uncertain Hour is set – was a seething cauldron of resentment, intrigue and repression. It was the twelfth year in the reign of the emperor Nero, whose cruelties, arbitrariness and mental instability had grown all too familiar to the weary and fearful citizens of the empire. The decade had begun badly with the rising of the British tribes under their warrior queen Boudica, and setbacks for the Roman armies in Armenia.
Bad turned to worse. In 62, having already killed off his mother Agrippina and his brother Britannicus, Nero rid himself of the two most stabilizing influences in his government: the Praetorian prefect Sextus Burrus, whom he killed with a poisoned throat lozenge, and his own childhood tutor, the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Thenceforward, the emperor was counseled chiefly by the murderous thug Tigellinus and his lackeys.
Outrage and scandal ruled the day. In 63, the Roman Gymnasium was struck by lightning and destroyed – an evil omen. In 64, Nero scandalized all Rome with his stage debut in Naples, winning an award for his performance of “Niobe”. The theater collapsed after the performance.
That same year, the entire Roman fleet foundered on the Tyrrhenian shore above Naples. Bad omens were seen everywhere – lightning, comets, the birth of two-headed animals. And then, on 19 July, fire broke out near the Circus and quickly spread through the narrow streets of the ancient city along the flanks of the Palatine and Caelian hills. Four of Rome’s 14 districts were totally destroyed. Rumors abounded that Tigellinus had set the fire to make room for Nero’s monumental palace, the Domus Aurea, the construction of which was begun almost as soon as the flames were doused. To deflect the blame, Nero scapegoated the Christians, who were crucified and burned by the thousands to serve as nighttime torches illuminating the city’s avenues.
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In
65, Nero kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea Sabina to death. It was the
last straw. Led by Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a plot was hatched to assassinate
the emperor. It was soon betrayed, and retribution was swift. The conspirators,
including Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan, were quickly dispatched.
Seneca committed suicide. By the following year, Tigellinus had widened
the circle of so-called suspects to include anyone he considered a political
enemy. Among them was Titus Petronius Niger.
The historian Tacitus tells us most of what little we know about Petronius:
“He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. His reckless freedom of speech, being regarded as frankness, procured him popularity. Yet during his provincial governorship, and later when he held the office of consul, he had shown vigour and capacity for affairs. Afterwards returning to his life of vicious indulgence, he became one of the chosen circle of Nero's intimates, and was looked upon as an absolute authority on questions of taste (arbiter elegantiae) in connection with the science of luxurious living.”
But
by the year 66, Petronius’s glory days were behind him, and his
former intimacy with the emperor afforded him no protection from Tigellinus.
He was indicted for conspiracy, and the sentence was a foregone conclusion.
That is the situation at the opening of The Uncertain Hour.
Historical characters in The Uncertain Hour
Petronius
Almost everything we know about Titus (sometimes Gaius) Petronius Niger
(born c.27) comes from two paragraphs of Book XVI of Tacitus’ Annals
of Imperial Rome. The events described in The Uncertain Hour
are largely consonant with that account. In his Natural History,
Pliny the Elder recounts the story of Petronius’ destruction of
the myrrhine ladle to prevent Nero from inheriting it. In addition to
a small body of poetry, Petronius is widely believed to have been the
author of the Satyricon. Although it may originally have been
a work of 20 volumes and some 400,000 words, the Satyricon was not published
in his lifetime, and only fragments of it survive. Petronius committed
suicide at Cumae in the year 66.
Martialis
Marcus Valerius Martialis (40-102 AD) was born in Bilbilis (now Calatayud),
Spain, and moved to Rome in the year 64. Known in English as Martial,
he published twelve volumes of bawdy, satirical epigrams between the year
86 and his death. He enjoyed the patronage of the emperors Titus and Domitian,
but fell out of favor and retired to Spain in the year 98. There is no
historical evidence that he was related to Seneca.
Melissa
Melissa Silia is an entirely fictional character, though Tacitus briefly
mentions a woman named Silia, “on terms of the closest intimacy
with Petronius,” who was exiled from Rome following Petronius’s
suicide for having divulged court secrets.
Lucilius
Gaius Lucilius Junior (?-?) was born in Campania. Starting out as a penniless
plebeian, he rose to knighthood and the imperial procuracy of Sicily.
He was the recipient of the Letters to Lucilius by Seneca the
Younger, who called him “meum opus” – “my work.”
Seneca
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) was a Spanish-born Roman Stoic
philosopher, playwright and statesman. Appointed as tutor to the boy Nero,
he served as the emperor’s advisor from 54 to 62. He retired in
62 and committed suicide in 65 upon being implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy.
Petronius Turpilianus
Turpilianus was a Roman politician and general. Elected consul in 61,
he was soon sent to Britain as governor to restore order following Boudica’s
rebellion. Nero gave him a triumph in 65. There is no historical evidence
that he was related to Titus Petronius.
Nero
The crimes and excesses of the emperor Nero are, of course, amply documented
by the Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, among many
others. Nero was deposed and committed suicide in the year 68, two years’
after Petronius’s death.
Cumae and the Campi Flegrei
Just west of Naples is a region known as the Campi Flegrei (from the Greek for “Burning Fields”), an area of intense and ongoing volcanic activity. It was first settled by the Greeks in the ninth century BC, conquered by the Etruscans, and eventually ruled by Rome. By the first century BC, its principle villages – Bauli (modern Bacoli), Cumae (Cuma) and especially Baiae (Baia) – had become the “East Hampton” of ancient Rome, their shores lined with monumental imperial and aristocratic villas, to which all Roman society flocked in the summer and holiday months. The Roman fleet wintered in the nearby harbor of Misenum (Miseno).
Cumae,
where Petronius owns a waterfront villa in The Uncertain Hour,
was at a slight remove from the social epicenter, and plagued with sulphurous
fumes from Lake Avernus, thought to be the entrance to the underworld.
It was not as popular as Baiae, but nevertheless was home to such notables
as Varro, Cicero, Pompey and Sulla. It was also home to the famous Sibyl,
who lived in a cave beneath the ancient Greek acropolis, which can still
be visited by the public today.
Further reading
The best ancient sources, and a lot of fun to read,
are Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius’s
Twelve Caesars (although background material for The Uncertain
Hour is confined to the first six).
For good all-round histories of the fall of the Republic and the early
Roman empire, I recommend Tom Holland’s Rubicon and Roman
Empire by Nigel Rogers.
Two classic novels of first-century Rome that should
not be missed are Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz and I,
Claudius by Robert Graves. Robert Harris (Pompeii) and Wallace
Breem (Eagle in the Snow) are two quite readable contemporary
historical novelists of ancient Rome.
