Read Nero's Heirs for Free Online Page A

impulse to make sense of what happens. But can the sense they create be true to experience? I think not. Does any man really understand even himself? And if that is beyond us, how can one pretend to understand other people whom we know only by observation and intermittent congress?
    Of course I did not think like this when I was young. In those days I had few doubts, and was confident of conquering the world, and winning love where I chose. I had been certain that Titus loved me. Now that I had, at the age of seventeen, assumed the toga virilis and had entered on adult life, that love properly fell away, or rather was transformed into, as I thought, the friendship between equals, formed of mutual respect and affection, which Roman noblemen have always valued as the foundation of social and political life. Or so I told myself, Titus being absent in the East.
    Moreover, I was at that stage when the developing soul turns its most ardent and compelling desires from the immature passions of boyhood, characteristically addressed to others of one's own sex, to the other and more mysterious opposite. So, as I watched Domatilla push her hair away from her eyes with a rapid, unconscious flickering of her long pale fingers, and saw Titus reflected in that gesture, I sensed that he had been the forerunner, and told myself that Domatilla was the love of my life, that perfect other half, union with whom would bring me that harmonious joining of souls which Plato affirms is the supreme experience and the goal of love.
    Such at least were my dreams, in that last early summer before Rome tore itself apart and I was forced into a premature and morally corrupting knowledge of the vileness of men, and found my character so deformed by what I learned that I emerged incapable of generosity of spirit, incapable of love but only of lust. That year - I tell myself now - killed most that was good in me, as in many others. As for Domatilla . . . what can I say? Even now the thought of her is too painful. It quickens my senses, and then I remember how, at last, she turned away from me, because (she said) I demanded everything, entire possession, and she was not to be possessed by anyone. Her husband, she said, was a man who asked little of her, only the appearance of virtue. 'When we were young,' she said, 'I loved you. Now . . .' she stroked my cheek with soft fluttering fingers, 'no, not now . . .'
    Can I understand this? Can I make sense of the barriers that were erected between us? Not at all.
    So I question the possibility of understanding another person. Yet Tacitus is certain he understands Nero - even Nero. Well, I had a closer acquaintance - too close on that occasion I have alluded to - with the tyrant than Tacitus, who indeed had no personal knowledge of him, and was only fourteen or fifteen when Nero fell, but I do not claim to know how or why the young man whom my mother remembered (before the murder of Britannicus) as 'charming, ingenuous, a little naive, shy, and lacking in self-confidence', should have been transformed into a perverted and vicious monster.
    Tacitus believes that character is fixed, so that what emerges at one stage in life was merely hidden before. He may therefore conclude that the young Nero was merely a hypocrite concealing his true nature. I have indeed heard him make this argument. He takes the same view of the Emperor Tiberius.
    Then, tracing Nero's degeneration, he will undoubtedly blame Greek influences. I remember how often in our late-night conversations over another flask of wine - and Tacitus in his early thirties was as hard a drinker as myself, or indeed as Tiberius is reputed to have been - he would curse the foreign tastes which were, he said, 'reducing our youth to a bunch of gymnasts, loafers, and perverts. The Emperor and Senate,' he would mutter, 'are to blame. They not only allow these vices and practise them themselves, but they even force Roman nobles to debase themselves by appearing on the stage