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1. What did Nerva do for Nero?

Tum quasi gesta bello expositurus vocat senatum et triumphale decus Petronio Turpiliano consulari, Cocceio Nervae praetori designato, Tigellino praefecto praetorii tribuit, Tigellinum et Nervam ita extollens ut super triumphalis in foro imagines apud Palatium quoque effigies eorum sisteret. (Tacitus, Ann. 15.72)

Neither Syme¹ nor Ehrhardt² knows what prompted Nero to reward Nerva so signally along with Tigellinus. Neither do I, but renewed³ speculation is in order. First, however, it should be said that Syme exaggerated the worth of the ornamenta triumphalia in calling them “the high military award.” Tacitus himself had earlier twice deprecated the cheapening of such honours by the prodigal bestowals of Claudius and Nero (Ann. 11.20; 13.53); Suetonius likewise alludes to the matter, both at Claud. 24 where he is clearly critical, and at Nero 15. 2 where (this being in the section consecrated to the good or unexceptionable deeds of that emperor) a covert reference to Nerva might be divined. Nor were triumphal statues in the forum unique or indicative of sinister eminence;⁴ Augustus had allowed these, according to Dio 55.10.3.

An effigy on the Palatine, however, was quite another matter; senatus honore rarissimo, statua in Palatio posita, prosecutus est, observed Suetonius, Otho 1, of the emperor’s father. But what Nerva might actually have got is a place in the Palatine library, where busts and other physical remembrances of orators were placed. At least one non-imperial individual, the pleader Hortensius, had been so honoured, and this was the probable location of Tiberius’ medallion for Germanicus.⁵

Tigellinus, to be sure, was no literary man, but Nerva notoriously was, being hailed as exponent and connoisseur of erotic verse in the Tibullan mode (Martial 8.70; 9.26). One element of Nerva’s virtuosity much puffed up was his facundia. Perhaps, then, he produced a poem to celebrate Nero’s crushing of Piso. That would have been an opportune gift to his emperor, for the Pisonian conspiracy had involved both the affronted versifier Lucan and Afranius Quintianus whose debaucheries had been satirised in a poetic lampoon by Nero himself. A statue amongst the images of other littérateurs would be ideal recompense from cultured ruler to cultured courtier.

Alternatively, it might be held that the speeches delivered to soldiery and senate by Nero in the Pisonian aftermath (Ann. 13.3) were furnished by the pen of Nerva. For, as Tacitus famously remarked (Ann. 13.3) à propos the speech on Claudius’ deification provided by Seneca, Nero depended upon alienae facundiae.

Syme would presumably object to this latter suggestion, having himself (Tacitus 577) adduced the words of Fronto (117.6 Van Den Hout), et Nerva facta sua in senatu rogaticiis verbis commendavit, as proof of oratorical incompetence. But this is part of a sequence in which Fronto absurdly derogates all previous imperial eloquence in order to magnify that of Verus, and cannot be taken seriously. Moreover, the exact nuance of rogaticius is unclear, this term being a hapax legomenon, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, one absent indeed from Lewis & Short. In the preceding sentence, Fronto had charged Ventidius with plundering a speech from Sallust to adorn his message of victory over the Parthian, hence Nerva may stand accused of excessive use of others’ words, more a proof of deep reading than of oratorical inability.

2. Did Nerva abdicate?

Regarding Lactantius’ apparent claim (de Mort. Pers. 18.2-4) that Diocletian gave Nerva for the precedent of abdication, Ehrhardt remarks casually that this is “presumably a genuine mistake.” To leave it at that is to be a bit behind the scholarly times. J. Moreau long ago suggested in his edition of the de Mort. Pers. ([Paris 1954] 308-9) that this was a misunderstanding of Dio 68.3.1 where Nerva boasted that he had done nothing that would prevent his living safely as a private citizen, and this is followed in the most recent edition of J.L. Creed ([Oxford 1984] 97).

Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that if Lactantius did misunderstand a source, that source was not Dio but Pliny, Pan. 8. 4, inde (sc. after his adoption of Trajan) quasi depositi imperii qua securitate qua gloria laetus⁶ (nam quantulum refert, deponas an partiaris imperium?). But has Lactantius made a mistake? Error on this scale in the de Mort. Pers. would be highly untypical.⁷ He may, of course, be simply reporting a tendentious claim by Diocletian himself. The actual words of Lactantius are: simul et exemplum Nervae proferebat, qui imperium Traiano tradidisset ... Nervam vero uno anno imperantem, cum pondus et curam tantarum rerum vel aetate vel insolentia ferre non quiret, abiecisse gubernaculum rei publicae atque ad privatam vitam redisse, in qua consenuerat. Now vita privata is an ambiguous concept. It can of course mean the life of someone who is not in authority (cf. for easy instance Pliny, Ep. 2.1.2; Tacitus, Agric. 39; Juvenal 1.16) or in later legal Latin someone who is not a soldier (Papinian, Dig. 21.2.66.1). Furthermore, the whole tenor of the phraseologies of Pliny and Lactantius (both emphasising how securus Nerva becomes after relinquishing imperial cura to Trajan) comports the Epicurean notion of freedom from public responsibilities.

Tibi terras te terris reliquit, summed up Pliny, Pan. 10.6, and his very next sentence moves on to Nerva’s death. Likewise in Dio (68.4.2) and Aurelius Victor (Epit. 12.9) there is the same transition from adoption to demise. And despite Pliny, Pan. 11.1, no great fuss was made of the late Nerva — the alleged temple is not on record, and it took a decade or so before ‘divus Nerva’ made its numismatic début.⁸ A de facto abdication, then, does not seem unlikely, or at least quiescence brief and final enough to deceive Romans some 200 years later.⁹ If Lactantius made a mistake, it was no silly one, and if Diocletian was being tendentious, it was not by very much.

Footnotes

1 R. Syme, Tacitus (Oxford 1958) 2.

2 C.T.H.R. Ehrhardt, “Nerva’s background,” LCM 12.1 (1987) 18-20.

3 Syme, Tacitus 629, in his Appendix on the reign of Nerva, deprecates the notion of Schiller (the only speculation on record) that Nerva earned his reward for judicial services rendered; Ehrhardt offers no suggestions of his own, and mentions no theory of anyone else.

4 Syme, incidentally, claims that the inscription commemorating Nerva’s career (ILS 273 = no. 90 in E.M. Smallwood, Documents illustrating the Principates of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian [Cambridge 1966] suppresses mention of the statues. But its text is far from secure or complete, and the presence in it of the title salius Palat. is to be remarked.

5 Cf. Tacitus, Ann. 2.37, 2.83, with the notes of both Furneaux and Goodyear. Germanicus, of course, also qualified in his own literary right, as pleader and poet; cf. Suetonius, Cal. 3; Pliny, NH 8.155.

6 The one phrase not quoted by Syme, Tacitus 12, though he adduces the balance of the sentence, and well recalls Pan. 6.3, ruens imperium super imperatorem, along with 7.3, suscepisti imperium postquam alium suscepti paenitebat. Regarding Lactantius’ sources, there is no trace of either Dio or Pliny in R.M. Ogilvie, The Library of Lactantius (Oxford 1978), albeit this study is largely restricted to the Divine Institutions.

7 Cf. Creed, xli-xliv, for his reliability.

8 As pointed out by Syme, Tacitus 11; cf. the pertinent notes of B. Radice in her Loeb edition of the Panegyricus (1969).

9 Syme, who did not choose to go into the Lactantius passage, calls the adoption “tantamount to an abdication.”