Not all of the rebuilt Palatine was taken up by the Golden House or by private residences. His route took him through an area of shops and taverns that normally catered to a very exclusive clientele. The shops were all closed and shuttered, but one of the taverns was open and seemed to be doing a good business, especially for so early in the day. Passing by, Titus heard the drunken patrons inside singing a song:

Mother-killer,

Wife-kicker,

Who’s sicker than Nero?

Burned his city,

Killed his baby.

Crazy maybe? Nero!

Suddenly a group of men rushed by. They looked panic-stricken. One of them Titus recognized as a fellow senator, a staunch supporter of the emperor, like himself, but the man was wearing a common tunic instead of his senatorial toga. The man recognized Titus and grabbed his arm.

“What in Hades are you doing in the street, Pinarius? You should be home with your family. Or better yet, get out of town. Don’t you have a country estate to go to?”

The man hurried on without another word.

Titus saw more people coming up the street. They were brandishing clubs and chanting a slogan. Titus did not stay to hear what they were saying. He quickly headed in the opposite direction.

He passed through empty streets and came to a small square with a public fountain. A marble statute of the emperor stood nearby. Titus groaned. Someone had put a crude stage wig on the head, tilting it askew, and tied a sack and a sign around the neck. The sign read: THIS ACTOR HAS EARNED THE SACK!

Titus shuddered. The sack was the sort into which a convicted parricide was sewn up before being thrown into the Tiber to drown.

It had come to this. When had it all gone wrong?

Was it when Nero, tired of Seneca’s advice, dismissed his old tutor and replaced him with the cold-blooded, insanely suspicious prefect of the Praetorian Guards, Tigellinus? Things had certainly taken a turn for the worse after that.

Or was it when the senatorial conspiracy against Nero came to light? The bloodshed that followed tore the city apart, but what choice did Nero have but to ruthlessly suppress the plotters? To be sure, Nero might have flung his net too wide. The senator Piso and a handful of others were certainly guilty, but what about Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, and so many others who had made the court of Nero such a vibrant place? All were gone now, either executed or forced to commit suicide. Their deaths had been as memorable as their lives, and were already the stuff of legend.

Petronius held a lavish banquet, then cut his wrists and bound them up so that he could slowly bleed to death while he conversed with his closest friends. He was said to be as witty and outspoken as ever that night, thumbing his nose at Nero by dictating a letter in which he listed all the emperor’s sexual partners and the intimate details of their couplings. His final act as the arbiter of elegance was to seal the letter and send it to Nero.

Shortly after the punishment of the Christians, Lucan fell out with Nero and was forbidden to publish more poems. Nevertheless, verses attributed to him were widely circulated, in which he accused Nero of starting the Great Fire. When he was arrested for conspiring with Piso, Lucan was pressed to name accomplices and shamed himself by implicating his mother, then took his own life. While he bled to death he recited the words of a dying soldier from his poem about the civil war:

My eyes are opened wide by death’s mark.

You who go on living do so in the dark.

The gods keep you blind so that you may endure,

But I see the truth: death is the cure.

Seneca, whom many suspected of wanting to replace his protege as emperor, spoke bitter words when Nero’s Praetorians came for him. “Is this how all my efforts to educate him end? All my teaching, for this? He killed his brother and his mother, and now he kills his tutor!”

Seneca’s wife decided to die with him. They cut their wrists and lay side by side. But death was slow to come. Seneca took poison – hemlock, in emulation of Socrates – but that did not work either. Finally he was placed in a hot bath to quicken his bleeding and was suffocated by the steam.

When Nero was told that Paulina still lived, he declared that she had done nothing to harm him and ordered that her wrists should be bandaged. Paulina survived. Following the dictates of her husband’s will, she cremated Seneca without funeral rites.

Tigellinus’s investigation of the conspiracy became so far-flung that Titus began to fear suspicion might fall even on him. But no one was more loyal to Nero than Titus. The emperor never doubted him.

As each conspirator was convicted, Nero confiscated the guilty man’s assets. By Roman law, traitors always forfeited their property to the state. Still, the confiscations caused a great deal of grumbling. People said that Nero convicted wealthy men simply to lay his hands on their estates. It was true that Nero needed all the money he could get. The lavish construction of the Golden House and the massive rebuilding of monuments and temples all over Roma had sent the emperor deeply into debt. People complained when he proposed that the resurrected city should be called Neropolis, but had he not purchased the right to rename it?

Money – that was the problem, thought Titus. If Nero still had money, he might yet be in control of the city, the Senate, and the empire. But all Nero’s money was gone. The treasury was empty. When Titus realized the severity of the situation, he had offered to donate his own property to the public coffers, a token of his gratitude for all the blessings Nero had showered on him. Nero only laughed. Even Titus’s considerable wealth was a pittance compared to Nero’s debts, a drop of water in the ocean.

Trouble in the provinces had also taken a toll. The bloody uprising of Boudica in Britannia, earlier in Nero’s reign, had been summarily dealt with, but the revolt that had been going on in Judaea for the last two years was more vexatious. Nero had appointed Vespasian to put down the Jewish rebellion. Resistance along the coast and in the northern part of Judaea had been quelled, but the city of Jerusalem, a hornet’s nest of fanatics, had so far resisted the Roman siege. It was in Jerusalem that the cult of the Christians had originated, Titus recalled. Why was that part of the world such a breeding ground for dangerous ideas and so resistant to Roman rule?

There had also been a revolt led by Vindex, the governor of Gaul, ostensibly against Nero’s exorbitant taxes. The revolt had been suppressed, but not before Vindex’s slanders about Nero’s personal life incited a great deal of prurient speculation across the empire.

Titus sighed. As crushing as events in the public sphere had been – the Pisonian conspiracy, the rise of Tigellinus and the loss of Seneca, the decimation of Nero’s inner circle, the vast expenditures required by the rebuilding of the burned city, the troubles in Britannia and Judaea and Gaul – perhaps the most pivotal event of all was the death of Poppaea Sabina. Was that when the trouble really began?

Poor Nero! With his own eyes, Titus had seen the emperor’s remorse after the death of Poppaea. Nero had been drinking heavily that night. The imperial couple were heard shouting at each other. Nero flew into a rage. No one witnessed what happened, but the physician who examined Poppaea later told Titus that only a kick in the belly could have caused the bleeding that killed both her and her unborn child.

Nero was inconsolable. Instead of cremating Poppaea in the Roman way, he had her body filled with fragrant spices and embalmed. Some said that this was in deference to her peculiar religious beliefs, but Titus thought it was because Nero could not bear to see her beauty consumed by flames.

It was purely by chance one day that Titus noticed a boy who might have been Poppaea’s double. The boy’s name was Sporus and he was a servant in the imperial household. When Titus drew Nero’s attention to the uncanny resemblance, Nero was instantly infatuated. But his attraction was not merely sexual or even romantic; Nero seemed to think that Sporus was linked in some mystical way to Poppaea, that his dead wife had returned to him in the form of a boy. This strange notion became such an obsession that Nero induced Sporus to undergo castration. Nero declared that by an act of divine will he had transformed the boy into a girl. He called his creation Sabina, which was Poppaea’s cognomen.