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THE
DEATHLESS
CITY
1
THE DEATHLESS CITY
A Foreword by Kenneth Hite
Let there be rivalry in guilt of every kind… let their passions know
no bounds, no shame; let blind fury prick on their souls; heartless be
no bounds, no shame; let blind fury prick on their souls; heartless be
parents’ rage, and to children’s children let the long trail of sin lead
parents’ rage, and to children’s children let the long trail of sin lead
down… For crimes’ sake exiled… to crime may they return, and may they
down… For crimes’ sake exiled… to crime may they return, and may they
be as hateful to all men as to themselves; let there be naught which
be as hateful to all men as to themselves; let there be naught which
passion deems unallowed; let brother fear brother, father fear son, and
passion deems unallowed; let brother fear brother, father fear son, and
son father; let children vilely perish and be yet more vilely born; let a
son father; let children vilely perish and be yet more vilely born; let a
murderous wife lift hand against her husband, let wars pass over seas,
murderous wife lift hand against her husband, let wars pass over seas,
let streaming blood drench every land…
let streaming blood drench every land…
— Seneca, Thyestes
Rome is, and was, an eternal city — a deathless city,
an undead city. Ancient Romans were bound by their
dead, in a web of ancestral rituals that not even they
remembered the reason for. The Romans had no taboo
against suicide, although almost every culture believes
that suicide leads to restless corpses. For the Romans,
the dead were always with the living anyway. The
Romans worshiped their ancestral spirits, the Lares,
and propitiated the Manes, the shades of the dead, by
blood and incense. For Romans, the world of ghosts
and the world of flesh were barely separate. The dead
talked to the living in dreams and at night, lapping up
blood and taking flesh. And death was all around the
living: swarming in with foreigners or handed down by
the Romans’ own rulers. Reading the lives of the Cae-
sars, you view a catalogue of rapine, murder, treason,
poisoning and cruelty more grotesque than any Grand
Guignol performance. All of it for the highest stakes
imaginable, and all against the backdrop of an undying
city centuries old.
I Sing of Battles, Blood,
and Rage
“The grandeur that was Rome” was an abattoir erected
on a mass grave. No wonder Rome bred vampires like a
corpse breeds flies. Begin with Rome’s own sons. Over
the nine centuries between 500
BCE
and
CE
400, approxi-
mately 885,000 Roman soldiers died, to save the city and
to line senators’ pockets. Soldier and civilian, perhaps
300,000 Romans died by political violence — under the
blades of fellow Romans — during the century from the
time of the Gracchi to the end of the Second Triumvirate.
Romans died for their city’s amusement, as well as for its
enrichment. Over the four centuries between Spartacus
and Constantine, approximately 750,000 gladiators
died in the arena (not counting the 7,000 crucified with
Spartacus), their blood soaking the sand along with that
of 100,000 Christian martyrs and an uncounted horde
of other criminals, prisoners of war and slaves.
Many of the gladiators were foreign, but foreigners
hardly had to come to Rome to die for it. The legions
slaughtered 80,000 Britons in the wake of Boudicca’s
revolt, and Caesar may have killed as many as 100,000
Gauls in his conquests. (Plutarch claims a million dead at
Caesar’s hands all told.) In the second century
BCE
, Marius
killed perhaps a quarter of a million Germans, while in
the third century
CE
the Emperor Aurelian sent 400,000
THE DEATHLESS CITY
Let there be rivalry in guilt of every kind… let their passions know
 Goths and Persians to their foreign gods. During and
after the three Jewish Revolts (from
CE
67 to 135), the
Romans practically extirpated Jewish Palestine, leaving
1,000,000 corpses behind. Tacitus said of the campaign
in Britain, “Rome makes a desert, and calls it peace.”
Rather, Rome makes a swamp of blood and bones, and
grows fat on its fruits. As Virgil says in the
Aeneid,
“the
blood of victim beasts enriched the ground.”
Blood in Rome’s Great
Quarrel Shed
So much for Caligula as emperor; we must now tell of his career as
monster.… His body was conveyed secretly to the gardens of the
Lamia, where it was partly consumed on a hastily erected pyre and
buried beneath a light covering of turf. Later his sisters, on return
from exile, dug it up, cremated it, and consigned it to the tomb.
Before this was done, it is well known that the caretakers of the
gardens were disturbed by shades, and that in the house where he
was laid not one night passed without some terrible apparition…
— Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars
If the Roman Empire itself is eerily vampiric — long-lived,
bloodthirsty, insatiable and prone to frenzy and torpor — so,
too, are the Roman emperors. Just as vampires, Roman em-
perors lived in a constant broil of plot and murder against
their own children and progenitors, against members of
their clan and bloodline. Indeed, Roman history would al-
most make more sense if it had been hijacked by a bickering
sept of vampires somewhere along the line: Caesar “from
his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” and Cleopatra, the
(infernally?) seductive initiate of the Nile, suggest much to
such a viewpoint. And the people of Rome perhaps sensed it
as well. When the Emperor Tiberius died, Suetonius reports
that the people of Rome “prayed to Mother Earth and the
Manes to allow the dead man no abode except among the
damned.” If he wasn’t there already, that is.
If Rome was diablerized under the Republic, before
the Caesars, it was on a smaller scale. The “reign of ter-
ror” of the dictator Sulla killed 4,700 men — barely a
patch on Tiberius’s 38,000 political murders. Tiberius’s
degenerate, megalomaniacal heir Caligula managed only
35,000 executions before his assassination. (And, as Sue-
tonius reminds us above, Caligula didn’t lie easy after
death.) Domitian had 20,000 lives snuffed out (he also
liked to torture flies in his spare time). Even the “good
emperor” Claudius may have executed 3,000 people for
treason. It didn’t get better over time, either; in
CE
215,
Caracalla killed 30,000 supporters of his rival Geta in a
single purge. And these deaths were not the impersonal,
industrialized slaughters of the 20th century but personal
ones, often named by the emperor and ideally carried
out by specialists. Or sometimes, by the emperor’s own
hand: Commodus boasted of hacking to death 12,000
men in the arena, not counting his political purges.
The personal excesses of these and other emperors rede-
fine the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Each
had his own sadistic flavor, more than colorful enough for
gaming: Tiberius hosted midget sex parties and quizzed his
guests about the secret truths of Greek mythology, while
Elagabalus was fond of roasting people alive in bronze
bulls or smothering refractory dinner partners under
2
FOREWORD
 THE
DEATHLESS
CITY
3
mounds of rose petals. If you’re looking for a Goth before
the Goths, look no further than Domitian’s banquets.
At these affairs, everything — the draperies, the statuary,
the couches, the food and the slaves — was black. Guests
occasionally arrived to find their names carved on broken
pillars or on tombstones scattered about the chamber, and
Domitian would discuss their chosen means of execution
(or their earlier deaths?) over wine and caramelized hum-
mingbirds. He also covered the pillars of his palace with
“highly polished moonstone” — perhaps to determine
which of his guests or courtiers showed no reflection?
Of course, the topper is Nero’s famous feast in the late
summer of
CE
64, lit by the burning human tallow of
crucified Christians. Imagine the smell, the sound, the
horror of making light conversation on music or art, all the
while knowing that one false word will have you — human
or vampire — writhing up there beside the illuminations.
Over a mere dozen years, Nero killed some 22,000 people,
including his mother, his stepbrother and both his wives,
the second of whom he kicked to death while pregnant.
Even in that record, Nero’s execution of the philosopher
and poet Seneca, Nero’s old tutor, stands out. Because
Seneca’s blood “flowed too slowly” to die by the sword,
and because (as Suetonius reports) his “peculiar diet”
made him immune to poisons, Nero finally had Seneca
smothered in a steam bath after yet another banquet.
But all this talk of banquets has made us thirsty. Let’s
recline here, for a few minutes, and watch a play. Octavia,
the estranged wife of the Emperor Nero, recounts his
atrocities, and tells us her dreams of divorce, exile and
death. Nero enters, ordering murders and glorying in
his tyranny until he is confronted by the bloody shade
of the mother he murdered, Agrippina. She prophesies
his death, and Octavia’s supporters raise Rome in revolt.
In response, Nero orders her killed and Rome burnt; he
marries Poppaea, who is herself haunted by the revenant
Agrippina. The play ends with Octavia’s dying lament at
a Rome that wants only blood from its favorites.
The play is
Octavia,
credited to Seneca although it seems
to refer to events that took place after his death. (Or perhaps
Seneca rose from the fatal bath and returned to write a play
about it. Suetonius records that Octavia’s blood, too, flowed
not at all from a knife wound. Did art imitate unlife?) Even
if
Octavia
is not by Seneca, the play is nonetheless a fully
Senecan tragedy. It shares Seneca’s three-part structure: the
play opens with a cloud of evil, demonstrates evil’s defeat
of reason and concludes with the triumph of evil in hor-
ror and catastrophe. Senecan tragedy strongly influenced
Shakespeare:
Titus Andronicus, Macbeth
and
Richard III
are
all shaped to the Senecan framework.
Hamlet
is another
Senecan tragedy, specifically a revenge play. Such plays open
with the appearance of a ghost or Fury, transform the hero
into a killer and end in bloody ritual revenge.
Seneca lovingly brings the shades of the dead onstage,
frequently invoking witchcraft and the supernatural. Incest,
mutilation, torture and corpses are his building blocks,
telling a claustrophobically brooding tale of crime and
death. Seneca is obsessed with crime and violations of mo-
rality; his princes, driven by ambition, commit ever-greater
atrocities until the almost unimaginably bloody climax. As
Seneca writes in
Agamemnon,
“For crimes, the way to safety
Novel Feasts
of Crime
Let the ancestral hearth
be stained with blood, let
the feast be spread — to no
novel feast of crime wilt
come as banqueter. To-day
have we made thee free,
have loosed thy hunger
to the banquet yonder;
go, feed full thy fasting,
and let blood, with wine
commingled, be drunk
before thine eyes. I have
found feast which thou
thyself wouldst flee…
— Seneca, Thyestes
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