Rosalie Crutchley playing Acte opposite Peter Ustinov as Nero in Quo Vadis
The two women embraced.
"Welcome to my home, Caenis. I rejoice to see you. We both still live"
Caenis smiled, "May we both live for a long time, my dear Acte."
The two women sat down by a table in the garden at Acte's villa in Villitrae, a day away from Rome.
"I have to ask you right away, are Epaphroditus and Phaon safe?"
"Yes, my dear, the Emperor will ask them to rejoin the administration. I also have a letter here from Titus for them. They saved his life and he will never forget his debt."
Acte began to weep.
It is July 70 AD. Vespasian is Emperor and he and Caenis have just returned from Egypt. Acte is in one of her three Villas, in Velitrae, a day's walk south of Rome, off the Via Appia and where the future Emperor Augustus summered as the boy, Octavian.
Our story is full of strong women who are out for power. Acte is the mysterious exception. She is strong but she retires to the background. Who is she and why is she important?
An inscription tells us that her name is Claudia Augusti liberta Acte. As a "Freed Woman" (liberta) this naming, by convention, suggests that she had once been a slave of Claudius. If so, she was part of the old Familia Antonia and so bound to Caenis, the now de facto leader, by the rules of the Familia.
How and why was Acte connected to Nero?
The sources suggest that she was a "plant" by Seneca and Burrus. They suggest that the two men hoped that she could keep the young Nero in control and also defend him from his mother. But as logical as this seems, it makes more sense to me that she was an agent of Caenis. For Caenis has both the authority and the personal relationship to insert Acte into the bed of the young Emperor.
Why would Caenis do this? The death of Claudius had removed the support and protection for the Familia. How vulnerable they all were was established by the immediate murder of Narcissus. Titus is still at court and Vespasian cannot leave Italy. I suspect that Caenis would have fled to Egypt and the protection of the Familia Alexander. Her men were exposed. How could she protect them? The only answer is to get the support of the new Emperor. Only a woman can do that and Acte succeeds brilliantly.
It is clear that Nero' heart was captured by Acte. Being an older women and freed, Acte was "safe" in a way that no free Roman upper class woman could be. This is how Caenis and Vespasian began their life-long relationship. Such deep friendships between the Freed and the Upper Classes were quite common and even extended between men. The closest friend that Cicero had was his freedman, Marcus Tullius Tiro. In high society in Rome, trust was rare and valuable and could often only exist between the freed and the free. For in Rome, your greatest rivals were your peers.
What might have begun as sex soon developed into love. For Acte also offered Nero protection from his mother as only a lover can. She gave him the platform of her love and the mystery of her body. So successful was she, that Agrippina, who had tried to break them up, was finally forced to accept Acte. Agrippina recognized that if she attempted to dislodge Acte, Nero would chose Acte. Even Poppaea, who had driven Nero to murder Octavia, left Acte alone. Anyone who went for Acte would pay for it. The deal was that Acte would not supplant any Roman Lady in public.
Like Caenis, Acte was prepared to live and work in the background. There were attempts by Nero to pass her off as a princess, but she rejected that. To rise like that would simply make her another player for power and so a target. As a background partner and an ex slave, sharks like Poppaea would leave her alone and Nero could always be sure of a refuge.
I mention Epaphroditus in the clip above. He played the same role for Nero that Narcissus played for Claudius. He too had been in Nero's Familia during the dark and lonely times when he had been abandoned. Epaphroditus, Phaon and Anicetus, a post on him later, could be trusted like no others by Nero. It was in Phaon's villa, minutes away from Caenis's house that Nero killed himself with the help of the hand of Epaphroditus.
If Nero, by Acte's influence, was to protect Titus, it would have been by hand of this man. How else did Titus survive the poison that killed Britannicus? There must have been some intervention and maybe even some theatre here. Why else would Epaphroditus be given a major role in the Imperial household when Vespasian became Emperor.?
Ironically, many years later, Domitian forced Epaphroditus to commit suicide for the crime of helping an Emperor to die. The Imperial bureaucracy responded by having Domitian killed with the support of Nerva, one of Vespasian's closest friends. Nerva became Emperor as a result after a lifetime in the shadows of Roman power politics.
It is so fitting that the last we hear of Acte is that she is the one, with the help of Nero's two nannies, Egloge and Alexandria, who buries her boy in the tomb of his father. She retires to a quiet life among her three Villas, in Velitrae, Puteoli and Sardinia, and I bet a major pension.
I think it is time for me to talk more about the concept of the Familia as it plays such a role in this story and in the lives of Romans. That is what I will do in the next post. But a quick explanation is this. As the cast assembled to make the wonderful TV series, I Claudius, the actors were confused about how it all would work. A visitor resolved all of this confusion in a stroke. "Family in upper class Rome was structured like a Mafia family."
We will see how true this is with one exception. In Rome, often the power centre was a woman.
