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and give it to Plautus. When defending herself against the charge, Agrippina had said that no one would testify against her, even “if Plautus or any other were to become master of the State and sit in judgment on me.” 5 The charge had come to nothing, and neither Agrippina nor Plautus suffered on account of it. But Nero would not forget that Plautus had the credentials to replace him.
     
    In AD 60, Nero had celebrated his first Neronian Games, which he had created as a festival of contests of both mind and body, along the lines of games conducted in Greece for centuries past and which Augustus had emulated at Rome and Actium with his Actiaca, Greek games held every four years during his reign. Not long after the last poet had spoken his last line in the Neronian Games and the last naked boxer had been crowned victor with a laurel wreath, a comet was seen to blaze across the night sky. According to Tacitus, to superstitious Romans the appearance of a comet was a portend of revolution. 6 It soon reached Nero’s attention that many people were suggesting that should the emperor be dethroned in such a revolution, then Plautus would make the ideal successor.
     
    Plautus, who lived austerely and discreetly, encouraged none of this talk. Guided still by Seneca at that time, Nero had written Plautus a letter in which he had suggested that for the sake of “the tranquility of Rome,” Plautus “withdraw himself from mischievous gossip.” Plautus had inherited large estates in the province of Asia Minor, and Nero said that there Plautus “might enjoy his youth safely and quietly.” 7 Taking the hint, and taking his wife and a few close friends with him, Plautus had departed for Asia and a quiet life.
     
    The second man feared by Nero was Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix, brother of Messalina, who had been the late, unwise, and unlamented wife of the emperor Claudius. Though comparatively poor, Sulla was descended from the same Sulla who had ruled Rome as dictator during the youth of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Well known and well liked, Sulla had in AD 47 married into the imperial family, wedding Nero’s cousin Antonia, one of the daughters of the emperor Claudius. The couple had produced a son, who would have had a claim on Nero’s throne in adulthood, as the next most senior male of the Julian line. But the sickly boy had died at the age of two.
     
    Several years after Nero came to the throne, one of the imperial freedmen, the elderly Graptus, had invented a story that Sulla had planned to murder Nero one night as the emperor returned from his revels at the Milvian Bridge, on the northern outskirts of the Campus Martius. The bridge was then a famous haunt of prostitutes, male and female, and Nero used to go there so that he could take his pleasures more freely outside the city. No proof was produced to support this accusation, but Sulla was ordered to depart Italy and confine himself within the walls of Massilia, modern-day Marseilles in the south of France. Sulla had been living at Massilia ever since.
     
    In an AD 62 meeting with Nero, not long after Seneca’s retirement, Tigellinus had made his move against the two men. With Sulla in southern Gaul in self-imposed exile, and Plautus in Asia, Tigellinus had used their very absence from Rome against the men, claiming that their distance from Italy actually exacerbated the threat they posed to Nero.
     
    “I have no eye, like Burrus, to two conflicting aims,” Tigellinus had said, implying that his Praetorian predecessor Burrus had divided his loyalty between Agrippina and Nero. His one thought, he said, was for Nero’s safety, “which is at least secured against treachery at Rome by my presence. As for distant uprisings, how can they be checked?” 8
     
    He claimed that Sulla could lead an uprising of the Gauls against Nero, using his family connection with Sulla “the great dictator.” At the same time, he said, he did not trust the nations of the East,