The Nero-Poppaea Sporus Affair
Okay, so this is just about the craziest story ever, even for Ancient Rome, which is saying a lot! Nero. What a guy. Sheesh!
To begin, let me back up a tiny bit and introduce his delightful parents. Ladies first: Agrippina the Younger was Nero’s mother, and she was like Rome’s version of Erika Kane from All my Children. So imagine if, instead of controlling today’s Pine Valley while operating just within the confines of modern-day laws and conventions, Erika Kane had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted in Ancient Rome. Now you have a sort of watered-down, diaper-baby version of Agrippina the Younger. She’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.
She came from an interesting family, for sure. Her dad was Germanicus, a general with a name that I, for one, find super intimidating. Tiberius, founder of Rome, had once promised Germanicus the entire Roman Empire, so it goes without saying that he was a Mr. Fancy Pants Big Shot. Agrippina’s mother, Agrippina the Elder, was a granddaughter to Rome’s first emperor, and her older brother was Caligula — ever heard of him? He’s the same guy who discovered orgies, changed his title to “New Sun” (God), and appointed his horse consul.
So, long story short, Agrippina was not nouveau-riche.
Sisterly incest was totally Caligula’s jam, but even within these taboo relationships, he played his favorites, and he loved one sister, Drusilla, above the two others, and treated her like a wife, even though she was already happily married to a man who loved her. When she died of fever (can you get a fever from incest? Probably. I’m gonna go ahead and blame Caligula for her death), Caligula lost whatever existed of his mind. Meanwhile, Agrippina and her other sister, Livilla, (scorned women?) as well as the brother-in-law, (who apparently hadn’t really been all that cool with Caligula’s whole “I’m-Gonna-Treat-My-Sister-Who-Is-Also-Your-Wife-Like-She’s-My-Wife” policy) were plotting to have Caligula assassinated. And if you think about it, it was only natural and just a matter of time. Because this is Ancient Rome we’re talking about, and there has never been a more dangerous job in the history of the world. Those Deadliest Catch crabbers ain’t got jack shit on an ancient Roman politician.
So, the plot was uncovered, and unsurprisingly, Caligula’s relationship with his sisters (just like the Deadliest Catch crabbers!) hit a reef. They were a zany family, to be sure, but the line had to be drawn somewhere, and that line was evidently attempted murder. Now, one might expect that a guy who’d killed his adopted cousin, poisoned their shared grandmother, and hated his other grandmother so badly that he’d spread it around town that his own mother was a result of incest would send his sisters to the gallows for conspiring against him, right? Wrong! Caligula is nothing if not a surprise. He banished his sisters instead. To a Mediterranean island. Off the coast of Italy, between Naples and Rome. I’m sure it was the kind of Hell on Earth that people pay thousands of dollars to vacation at now.
But you needn’t worry about our spurned Agrippina, because she is quite the little conspirator. She’s going to spend her days sunning herself and taking long walks on the beach, making dastardly plans about what she’s going do after she stages her bizarre comeback, because . . . having a Caligula in the family wasn’t weird enough for her, I guess?
Caligula died. How, you might ask? Not of old age, that’s a given. He was murdered, stabbed to death by senators, just like everybody else in that town.
So Agrippina came back from her little island vacay and did what any normal woman would do — she married her Uncle Claudius, of TV’s “I, Claudius” fame. The emperor now had a niece-wife, bringing new meaning to the term “nasty uncle”. Doctor warns, “Watch out for webbed toes, hemophilia, and stark raving lunacy!”
Agrippina had gone into this union knowing full well how to handle men; this wasn’t her first rodeo. She had been married before — a lot. She’d only had one kid, though, from her first marriage as a child-bride. Upon being congratulated on his birth, the father, a truly despicable man who had once been charged with treason, adultery, and incest, said something to the effect that he didn’t think that anything he and Agrippina had created together could possibly be good for this world. Was the father a prophet? Maybe. Their son was Nero, who is famous for things like fiddling while Rome burned and using Christians as outdoor lamps.
Agrippina, who was only 34, can’t have been sexually attracted to her Uncle Claudius — he was a sniveling, weak-kneed, slobbering man with tics and a speech impediment. But she was used to this sort of thing — this was her fourth marriage, and she’d been sleeping with disgusting older men since her first wedding at thirteen years old. Still, this one must’ve been a tough row to hoe. Claudius’ own mother had called him “a monster of a man, not finished but merely begun by Dame Nature.” (This is a very cruel statement, but I’m not in their family, and the guy has been dead for eons, so I also find it kind of hilarious.)
Obviously the marriage was purely a power move on Agrippina’s part, and it involved a five point plan. Next up: Get Claudius to adopt Nero, thus establishing Nero’s place in line as heir. Then, she got Claudius to agree to marry his daughter from a different marriage, Octavia, to Nero, cementing Nero and Agrippina’s legitimacy to the throne. Now Nero was not only Emperor Claudius’ son, he was also his son-in-law. It would be kinda like if Carol Brady had made Mike Brady agree to marry off Greg and Marsha Brady because Mike Brady was king. Then, Agrippina poisoned Claudius’ mushrooms.
But! The thing about old Claudius is that even though he looked stupid (very!), that didn’t mean he actually was stupid (he wasn’t, not at all, not even a little). So, he had an antidote at the ready: a feather with which to induce vomiting. But here’s where the whole Erika Kane of Ancient Rome thing starts coming in to play . . . Agrippina foresaw this, and so she’d poisoned the feather, too! Oh, Agrippina. No one could ever accuse you of not thinking ahead!
So Claudius died. Poor Claudius. All he’d wanted to do was eat his bowl of mushrooms. “What a total bummer!” said the stricken people. “He was such a good emperor!”
His widow grieved not, however; she‘d been on Nero’s campaign trail since he’d been about six years old, and now, with her disgusting slob of an uncle/husband out of the way, she saw her opportunity to get Nero crowned, or wreathed, or whatever it is they did in Ancient Rome.
So, to recap, Agrippina’s plan had been:
Marry my uncle and get him to adopt my son;
Marry my son off to my stepdaughter;
Poison my uncle/husband’s bowl of mushrooms;
Poison the feather he’ll use to make himself hurl;
Seat my son as the new emperor and Rule the World.
It was, if nothing else, an ambitious plan, and so far, it was going great.
After her father’s murder, I’m gonna go ahead and take a wild leap and guess that Octavia probably wasn’t too keen on her stepbrother/husband and stepmother/mother-in-law. (Sorry, basically everyone in this story plays two family roles.) But Octavia was a virtuous Roman wife and didn’t complain, probably because it would have been fatal for her to do so. It’s worth mentioning that Nero periodically tried to strangle her, anyway.
Meanwhile, Agrippina wasn’t the only scheming woman in Rome — there was at least one other: Poppaea Sabina. That’s a really weird name, so I’m just gonna call her Poppy. Poppy was (of course!) already married to a man named Otho, and he was one of Nero’s guys. Poppy wanted an in with Nero, and insisted that Otho introduce them, which he did. Dumb, stupid Otho. Poppy so enchanted Nero that he was jealous of her husband, and she cleverly abstained from him until, mad with lust, he sent Otho away as governor of Lusitania. (Apparently in Rome, you didn’t really need to get a formal divorce. Your husband just had to go away, because that was also how Poppy had wrangled out of her first marriage. Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter would have been soooooo jealous!) Now, with Otho in Lusitania, Poppy was free to marry again, if only Nero would get his stupid stepsister/wife out of the picture.
The problem was, the people loved Octavia. Loved her! She was like the Melanie Wilkes of Rome, and maybe the only person in her family who hadn’t killed a bunch of people. So the citizens were like, “Wow! This Octavia chick is pretty great! Give that girl a medal!” You know who they did not feel that way about? Nero. They didn’t really like Poppy, either, and Agrippina agreed with them. (I doubt she truly cared, but since Octavia actually had the blood of kings in her veins, it just looked better for the empire.)
Now, if Agrippina was looking to piss Poppy off, she was doing just fine. Nothing made Poppy angrier than being cast into the shadows as someone tried to keep her from her man. Thus commenced The Great “But What About Meeeee?!” Campaign. Poppy was his lady love, not Octavia! Had his mother been taking little nibbles of his testicles every morning since boyhood? Nero was the emperor, was he not? If he were any kind of man whatever, he would stand up for their love.
Okay. This is not an unheard of situation. I’ve seen it on TV. Exciting love affair, everything is going along swimmingly . . . I mean, yeah, the fact that you‘re both married is kind of a bitch, but you can certainly sidestep this landmine; he’s the freaking emperor, he’s madly in love, he wants you to be his queen, and that don’t sound too shabby for Poppy! So, I get why she was like, “Dude, if you want it, you gotta put a ring on it.” That’s reasonable to me.
What is not reasonable to me is that instead of having what might’ve been an uncomfortable conversation with his mom about how the heart wants what it wants, Nero decided to kill her instead.
(This story is already pretty good, but this is where it really gets going and doesn’t let up.)
So, it seems to me like if you were of a certain class in Rome, any time there was any kind of trouble afoot, you just reached for your trusty vial of poison. They must have had those suckers tucked away all over the place. There had never been a better time to be a witchy woman! Those ladies must’ve been hustling a killing, hyuck hyuck.
Three times Nero tried to poison Agrippina, and three times he failed because she always had an antidote handy. I think this is awesome. As a master poisoner herself, she‘d apparently learned early the Boy Scout motto to always be prepared.
So then Nero was like, “What to do, what to do. I can’t get my friends to help me stab her openly on the street like what normally happens, because the whole matricide thing might not go over well. Damn these societal taboos jamming us up again! The men in my family like to sleep with our sisters, and we want to kill our mothers!”
He had this navy commander who hated Agrippina over some past slight, and he badly wanted to see her dead. He was a, shall we say, ‘creative’ man; he had this really, really, fantastically stupid plan to construct a collapsible ceiling in her bedroom that would fall in and crush her in her bed while she slept. (That idea would never occur to me in a zillion years, but then again, I lack his ‘creativity’.) The idea was scrapped, however, when it was realized it would be logistically difficult to construct a brand new ceiling in her room without anyone noticing. (This, of course, infers that it required a minute to reach this conclusion.)
However, from maybe the dumbest plan ever, they did come up with one that was actually workable (and which should have, to my mind, occurred to the navy guy long before the whole collapsible bedroom thing). The idea was that Nero would send his mom a note saying, “Meet me at six at that cute little spot we used to visit when I was a boy, on Island Such and Such. I want to talk to you about our rift and work things out.” Agrippina would be escorted in one boat, have her conference with her son, then he’d shove her off in a second, disabled boat that was totally unseaworthy, whereafter she would drown.
It was not a nice plan, but it was not a poor plan, especially for 55 AD, or whatever year it was. And it was actually kind of a revolutionary innovation, because the murder didn’t include stabbing or poisoning! That’s weird.
Agrippina went out and met Nero. They had their little talk, and then, after “kissing her eyes and breasts”, he sent her off. (I’m sorry. Say what?! That’s your mother. I get that you’re cool with your family members having two titles, and I’m on board with the fact that things are different in your day, but that detail is fucking creepy, dude. Forever odd.)
So Agrippina puts out to sea, and almost immediately, the canopy of her boat starts falling in — just like her bedroom ceiling might be prone to do! The ship capsized. But even though she was all old, and wearing all her clothes, and her shoulder had been injured in the collapsible boat, Agrippina was unsinkable. She just started swimmin’ for shore. Eat your heart out, Michael Phelps!
Agrippina’s maid, on the other hand, was floundering at sea and having a panic attack. She screamed out, “Save me, save me, I am Agrippina, mother of Caesar!” She thought she was being clever. She thought this little moment of identity theft would earn her first-class service. Instead what it got her was a swift beating until she was dead. Death by oar! How disappointed Nero’s henchmen must have been to discover she wasn’t actually Agrippina, and how furious Agrippina must have been to learn that she didn’t get to beat her to death herself for impersonating her.
So, obviously the jig was up. After witnessing the fatal oaring, Agrippina was convinced Nero was trying to kill her; duh. She’d have to be a stone-cold fool otherwise. She was probably pretty angry with him, or maybe not. Attempts on the family don’t appear to be considered as big of a deal back then as they are today. So, she played it cool. She sent him a note: “Hey, darling, my boat sank. I know you’ll want to visit me in my convalescence, but I really think it’d be better if you just stayed away till I’m recovered. XOXO Kisses and Canoodles, Mom.” He was like, “Okay, Mommy, whatever you think is best,” but then he sent hired assassins to her house with the instructions they could not fail. They burst into her bedroom and announced they were there to murder her at the behest of their emperor, and they did not use a falling ceiling to bring about her demise! They clubbed her in the head; her dying words were, “Smite my womb!”
So that’s lovely.
Later, Nero popped by to examine his mother’s body. Is this normal? I don’t think so. After he was finished, he announced that he was finally aware for the first time how truly beautiful she was. Again, is this normal? Is that a normal thing to say about your dead mother whom you’ve ordered murdered after you’ve just seen her lying in rigor mortis? And again, I don’t think so. For years afterwards, Nero claimed Agrippina’s furious ghost pursued him while issuing cries of lamentation, like Dickinson’s Marley with his chains in A Christmas Carol. Damn right she did! I would, too!
People in Rome were pissed about the matricide. Someone actually left a baby in the Forum with a note that said: “I will not raise you up, lest you slay your mother.” Whoa! We think we feel politics! Someone left a real live baby in the middle of town just to make a statement! Good God!
Nero divorced Octavia and banished her to an island. Naturally. Because this was one of the go-to moves — emperors seem to be kind of one-trick ponies in that regard. (I don’t know anything about these islands, but I think I‘d probably rather be banished to one than live in a town where everyone was getting stabbed, poisoned, and babies were being left in the street.) The divorce pissed Nero’s subjects off, though, because they really liked Octavia! She was a nice, lovely Roman wife, like Kate Middleton, not an overbearing, self-important, “I-Want-The-Emerald-Tiara-NOW!!!” Veruca Salt horror-show like Meghan Markle. Which was how Poppy was.
The people organized. They marched. They shouted, “Bring back Octavia!” This perturbed Nero. It caused a little hitch in his day. That couldn’t be tolerated, so naturally, he had Octavia suffocated in her vapor bath. Consequently, he had bad dreams wherein he was dragging her to her watery grave. Poor Nero. Haunted by both his mother and his wife. It’d all be super tragic if he hadn’t been the one who’d murdered them both.
Erstwhile, Poppy, in perfect Meghan Markle form, did not give one good goddamn about breaking up the family and bringing about popular unrest and kind of jacking up an entire empire. She wanted the world, she wanted the whole world, she wanted to lock it all up in her pocket and she did not want to share it! She became empress, just as she and Nero had schemed all along. Cool. Even though they were two truly disgusting individuals, maybe they could find some perverted version of happiness in their grossness together.
Or not.
They had a daughter, which actually pleased Nero. I think it must have been a completely new emotion for him, and it surprises me, because he seems exactly like the kind of guy who would promptly defenestrate any baby girls of his own issue. But, he was happy — temporarily. The girl died within a few days, and Nero instantly became bored.
Now, when I’m bored, I’ll read a book or play a hand of solitaire or take a nap. Nero opted to start setting little fires everywhere in Rome. I don’t mean this figuratively — he was literally sending out his henchmen to set little fires about the city in coordinated attacks, and everyone was outside of their minds not knowing why, or where this madness was coming from.
“The Christians did it!” proclaimed Nero. No, they did not. Rome wasn’t a great town for Christians anyway, but now came a new breed of bad: the Time of Great Tribulation. They were torn to ribbons by dogs, they were crucified, they were burnt alive and used as lanterns at Nero’s garden parties. (Question: Who the hell went to a party where humans were being used as lights?) Nero and his men also went into public spaces and just slept with any woman they felt like, whether she be a tavern wench, born of high class, married to a senator, daughter of an Oracle, whatever, didn’t matter. This pissed off the men, who weren’t particularly into their women being violated just for going into public. It was beyond the pale, even by Roman standards, and people started whispering behind their hands that maybe, just maybe, this Nero character was actually a deranged fiend. (The mother and stepsister/wife murders hadn’t been enough to convince them, apparently.)
In the meantime, Poppy was living the life of luxury like an ancient Marie Antoinette, bathing in mass amounts of donkey milk (and this ostensibly improved her smell?) and shoeing her horses with gold. Now, one would think that if you married a man like Nero, you‘d pretty much expect that the combination of him and Rome would not be a stellar recipe for fidelity, right? I wouldn’t think so, anyway. However, this concept either did not occur to Poppy, or, so deep in thrall with her own hyper-abnormal vanity, she thought she was above it. Thus, when she learned of Nero’s debaucheries, she threw a royal tantrum. Personally, I think this makes her galactically stupid, given the time and her situation and the temperament of her husband (and this instinct bears out as a good one), but as far as Poppy was concerned, what Poppy wanted, Poppy got, damn it.
Or so thought Poppy.
One night, Nero came home from the tavern drunk as a skunk and smelling of about sixteen other women. This made Poppy mad — she’d had it! Daily donkey milk bath or not, she deserved better than this. She was pregnant with his child, what kind of man did what he did and walked straight in this world? (I’m definitely not on Team Poppy, but as a woman, I think this is a totally reasonable question to ask your husband, even Nero, when you are pregnant with his child.) Nero, however, disagreed. He was sick of talking about this same thing over and over. An argument ensued wherein he shoved Poppy to the ground and jumped up and down on her stomach and up and down on her stomach until she was dead. (Fun fact: Ivan the Terrible did much the same thing to his daughter in law, resulting in her miscarriage. When his son protested over it, he hit him in the head with a staph and killed him. There’s even a really awesome painting of the whole scene: Ivan and His Son. This painting has been vandalized — twice! But the painting of Ivan and His Son is another story.)
So Poppy was dead, and Nero had killed yet another one of his darlings. At this rate, there was going to be a famine of women in Rome! Maybe the thing I said earlier about Roman politicians was wrong. Maybe being a leading lady in Nero’s life was the most dangerous job.
This time, though, Nero had the novel experience of feeling bad. He’d just wanted to smash Poppy, smash her good. He hadn’t meant for her to die. Whoops. He had her body stuffed with fragrances and embalmed, and in all the plays he starred in (he harbored dreams of achieving fame on the stage or through poetry), he would wear a mask depicting Poppy’s face for all the female roles in the play. Every one of them. This to me is incredibly creepy and I so would not go to that play. Hard pass.
Remember how Poppy had once been married to Otho, the guy who was banished and became Lusitania’s Governor? Well, they’d had a son together. He was little and Nero had adopted him, but then someone told Nero that the boy had been seen playing at general and emperor. What?! Uh-oh. Silly boy. Doesn’t he know that’s a capital offense in Ancient Rome? I thought everyone knew that! Playing at soldier can only mean truly horrible things, and obviously you are plotting your own father’s downfall. Nero promptly ordered the boy’s slaves to drown him next time they went fishing, which they did. (The whole scene sort of reminds me of when they shoot Fredo in The Godfather. Except Fredo was a man, and a loser, and a total liability, and this kid was like, seven.)
Then, in a manner which Stalin might’ve envied, Nero cleaned house. He eliminated basically everyone who was anyone, friend or foe alike. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it, and mostly he poisoned all these people. I personally do not ever worry about being poisoned, ever, but clearly it should have been foremost in the minds of Romans! Why they kept eating and drinking Nero’s stuff without at least having an antidote near to hand like Claudius and Agrippina is not explained. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they were like, “Screw it. If living in this upside down world is what’s considered right, then to hell with it, and I don’t mind being wrong.”
And they may’ve made the correct choice, because things about to get all fucked up in hyah.
Nero had a prepubescent slave boy named Sporus who is said to have looked a little like Poppy. Let’s just assume he bore a passing resemblance, as much as anyone who is much younger and of the opposite gender as a person can bear. (Who would my prepubescent male equivalent be? I’m going with this kid.)
Nero wanted to pursue a relationship with Sporus, but here he ran into a little problem. Homosexuality had always been in and out of fashion throughout the ages of Rome, and it was currently out. Nero, suddenly and atypically, found himself concerned about social taboos. All the rapin’ and murderin’ were like two strikes against him already, and if he added homosexuality to his list of crimes, well. That would just be the corker!
Nero ordered for Sporus to be castrated so he could marry him. Not cool on so many levels. I know eunuchs used to be a thing, but they were all foreigners. One of the big bonuses of being a Roman citizen was, you got to keep your own gonads. So the castration was doubly uncool for the cursed, unfortunate Sporus. The story gets rough here; I really wish it was going to get better for him, and that he exacted some sort of delicious Count-of-Monte-Cristo-style revenge on Nero (whom some Christians believe actually might’ve been the Devil incarnate) . . . but sadly, it doesn’t work out that way.
Nero changed Sporus’ name to Sabina, which had been Poppy’s maiden name. (Hereafter, I will not refer to Sporus as Sabina because a. He is not female, and b. The whole thing reminds me of Kunta Kinte shouting that his name is not Toby.) Nero dressed Sporus up in all of Poppy’s best togas, and he made the people call him “Lady Empress”. (This is so psychologically messed up!!! I can’t even.) He took him shopping, and to the courts in Greece, and they could be seen cruising around the squares, with Nero petting poor Sporus and kissing him from time to time.
After their wedding, Nero made inquiries into having a sex-change operation performed on Sporus. (O God, please, no.) Thankfully, no one made a compelling pitch, because, spoiler alert: That technology just did not exist in 60 AD.
Stockholm Syndrome is not something I‘d normally wish on a person, but I do wish it‘d happened for Sporus, and only as a mercy. He was not into his new arrangement, not at all. One year for a gift, he, Sporus, as Nero’s wife, gave him a piece of jewelry. Everyone loves jewelry. That’s a nice gift, right?
Wrong. When it’s a ring depicting The Rape of Persephone, it’s not nice.
The Rape of Persephone is my favorite Greek story by a mile. So we have Demeter, Goddess of Agriculture, and she has a lovely daughter, Persephone. The father is who else but Zeus, because he bedded anything even remotely beddable. Zeus had struck a deal with his brother Hades that he could marry Persephone, and so Hades abducted her; this is the “rape”, it’s not in the same sense we know it today. (Although I’m sure he did it the other way, too.)
Down in The Underworld, Persephone was depressed and melancholy and totally not being Hades’ Happy Wife. She had only eaten three pomegranate seeds the whole time she was there. Meanwhile, the earth was dying, because Demeter was on the hunt, looking for her daughter. Fuck ag. She wanted her child! Zeus saw that they were heading into famines and never ending winters, so he appealed to Hades to release Persephone.
But Persephone was super hot! And not just from being in Hell. Hades loved her, she was his dark queen. Zeus was like, “Dude. I run the show here and I’m taking my daughter home.” But Hades, operating under the “a little bit is better than nada” theory, declared, “Too late! She has eaten the fruit of the dead!” (Meaning the pomegranate seeds.)
She has to stay in Hell one month for every pomegranate seed she ate. She ate three, so every year, she has to go back and join Hades in The Underworld, and every year, Demeter mourns her. This is what we know as winter.
Okay, so I have so many questions about the Rape of Persephone ring. First, why would anyone make that scene into jewelry? Who was their intended market? Who would have wanted to wear it, and who except Nero could one give it to? Secondly, how did this transaction transpire? Was Sporus just at the mall one day, and this bizarre little peculiarity caught his eye, and did it speak to him as though it had been fatefully and fortuitously placed there? Or did he have it commissioned? If so, that was super ballsy, which is a terrible pun but seriously, bravo, Sporus. 👏
So basically he gave Nero a ring explicitly calling him The Devil, but Nero was delighted.
By this time, Nero’s sexual proclivities had become so completely unhinged that they were sociopathic. It’s gross. One of his favorite games was to tie people up to stakes and then, while dressed up in animal skins, be released from a cage, whereafter he would seize upon their private parts with his teeth. Jesus. I mean, that’s depraved even for Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. It’s utterly obscene. After Nero’s literal bloodlust was satiated, the prisoners, of course, were fatally dispatched.
Once tales of mangled genitalia got into the public ear, popular opinion really began turning against Nero. Once at a dinner at his house, Suetonius even had the audacity to say to his face that, if only Nero’s own father had kept the same type of wife as Sporus (meaning, not an actual woman), the state would be free of a great evil.
Nero was a wicked human being, but that wasn’t what did him in. No, it was money . . . in Ancient Rome, you could rape, murder, and poison to your heart’s content, but you best not overtax the provinces you have invaded in your pursuit to lavishly fund the capital city. It was not all that different in theory than what happened with our own revolution, and all things come down to money in the end, do they not?
So there was a revolt, and the provinces demanded Nero’s resignation, and he committed suicide after the Praetorians left him and the palace to their individual fates. His final words were, “What an artist dies with me.”
Coward.
Nero had expected Sporus to die right alongside him, like those crazy Indian ladies that throw themselves on the funeral pyre, but Sporus was no dummy, and he cut and ran as soon as shit started going down at the palace and he saw a chance to try and escape in the confusion. But it got no better for him, because he got picked up, and the new emperor, a guy named Sabinas, decided to keep him on as his wife for the sake of continuity. Like there had been a merger and he wanted to keep some of the former staff. Sporus was now “Lady Empress Sabina Sabinas”, and this was the new norm for Roman royalty. Man, the women in that town must have been pissed!
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Sabinas got killed almost immediately. Otho came back from Lusitania. Remember him? He’d been married to the real Poppy, before Nero had decided to get him out of the way so that he could marry her. Otho was crowned emperor, and he took Sporus as a wife. Thus, only Otho and Nero had the unique distinction of being a Caesar married not only to the real woman Poppy, but also her younger, opposite-sex, kind of quasi-doppelgänger.
Otho committed suicide three months later after a botched battle; Vitellius had been on deck. Would Vitellius be a kind man who would treat Sporus the same way Tyrion Lannister had treated Sansa Stark when she had been forced to marry him? Surely Fate would not treat Sporus as cruelly as before! Alas, it would. Vitellius was way more like Roose Bolton than Tyrion Lannister, and decided to stage a fatal halftime show during a gladiatorial contest, wherein Sporus would play the role of Persephone, be physically violated, and then murdered. For sport and amusement. A spectacle. A show. It’s too, too vile to even contemplate — it’d be like the actual rape and murder of Doug Emhoff in the middle of the Super Bowl. Are ya kidding me? Sporus thought so, too, and rather than face this humiliation, he very tragically (but also wisely) took his own life. He probably used poison, and it’s the only time in this whole sordid story that I’m glad it was lying around everywhere.
I do not suffer from anachronistic thinking in that I don’t project the values of today onto past societies; I think there is a great danger in that action, consequences of which we are seeing manifested today. That being said, it is beyond madness to me that these people really lived and openly did these things to other people, in any place, in any era. I have been to Vatican City; I have seen Nero’s bathtub and his Grotto, and I cannot believe I have walked the same halls wherein these things took place. This story is insanity unchained.