“As evidence of my friendship,” he said, “I had thought of selling you the house at a reasonable price. But it disgusts me that you insolently and unworthily begin to bargain before I’ve even mentioned a price. I no longer regret having asked you to get yourself circumcised. To show you that Nero is Nero, I hereby present you with your father’s house. I refuse to lower myself by haggling with you.”

Naturally I thanked Nero with all my heart, although he was not giving me the house for nothing, but in exchange for my old house on Aventine. Sufficient that I gained on the exchange.

I thought with satisfaction that Tullia’s house was almost worth circumcision, and that thought still consoled me when I sickened with fever. I myself had done my best to stop the house being sold by spreading rumors about ghosts and having a couple of slaves rattle pan lids and thump furniture at night in the abandoned house. We Romans are super-stitious when it comes to ghosts and the dead.

So now I can with good conscience go on to tell you about Nero’s victorious progress through Greece, about the regrettable deaths of Cephas and Paul and about how I came to take part in the siege of Jerusalem.

Book XIII

Nero

The suppression of the Pisonian conspiracy continued for nearly two years and extended to those wealthy men in the provinces and allied states who had evidently known what was happening but had said nothing. Merciful though Nero was in replacing the death sentence with exile wherever possible, thanks to the conspiracy he managed to put the State finances into some kind of order despite his enormous expenses.

In fact the preparations for war against Parthia accounted for the greater part of the State income. Nero was quite moderate in his living habits for an Emperor, compared with some of the wealthy and newly rich in Rome. Due to the influence of the dead Petronius, Nero attempted to replace the vulgarity of Rome’s upstarts with good taste, though of course he often made mistakes now that he no longer had Petronius to consult.

To Nero’s credit it should be said that he did not, for instance, burden the State treasury with more than the costs of transport when he replaced the works of art which had been destroyed by the fire with new statues and objets d’art. He sent an arts commission to Achaia and Asia to search every town of any size and send the best sculpture they could find back to the Golden Palace.

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This aroused considerable discontent among the Greeks, and in Pergamon there was even an armed uprising. But the commission completed its task so well that even in Athens they discovered irreplaceable statues and paintings dating from the time when Greece had been a great power, though Athens had of course been thoroughly plundered during the Roman conquest.

In newly prosperous Corinth too, where once hardly a stone had been left untouched, they found treasures, for the wealthy merchants and shipowners had done a good job building their collections over the years. And in the islands, which had not hitherto been searched for works of art for Rome, old statues were found which deserved the place of honor they were given in the great rooms and arcades of the Golden Palace.

The Palace was so large that it remained spacious although the commission sent one shipload of objects after another to it. Some of the sculptures which Nero thought less worthy he gave to his friends, for he himself wished only for the very best of ancient art. In this way I acquired my marble Aphrodite which is by Phidias and whose colors are marvelously preserved. I still set great store by it, despite your grimaces. Try to calculate some time what it would fetch if I had to sell it at a public auction to pay for your racing stable.

Because of the coming war with Parthia and to calm his own conscience, Nero revoked his monetary reforms and had full-weight coins struck in the temple of Juno Moneta as gold and silver flowed into the State treasury. The legions which had secretly begun to move eastward to strengthen Corbulo’s forces were discontented with their lessened pay, and while Nero could have raised the soldiers’ pay by a fifth, everyone knew what huge outlays that would have necessitated. So it became cheaper in the long run to restore the value of money. Nero granted the legions certain additional reliefs, just as he had earlier granted the Praetorians free grain.

In fact it was a matter of juggling, an art many a wise man has attempted in vain. I shall say nothing against the State treasury freedmen, whose office is burdensome and who thought out the plan. But personally I thought it scandalous that Nero’s silver coins containing copper had to be exchanged at the rate of ten for eight, so that one received only four new coins for five old ones.

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