Secrets of the Dead: Nero's Sunken City (3BM Television, Channel 4 Television Corporation, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I capped off Sunday night with a show we’d caught on KPBS’s second channel after surfing the TV which turned out to be quite compelling: a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Nero’s Sunken City” about the ancient Roman town of Baiae (a name the people on the show couldn’t agree on how to pronounce: the announcer, Jay Sanders, called it “BYE-yuh” but the archaeologists he was interviewing tended to go with “BYE-aye” with a long “i” sound on the second “i”), which was a high-class resort community for the Roman 0.1 percent until it literally sank into the sea in the fourth century C.E. Ironically, what caused it to sink was the same factor that had made it such a popular resort in the first place: it was located near an active volcano that created natural hot springs so the Romans could build baths there and not have to worry about having giant furnaces burning wood or other fuel to heat the water: there was already hot water there naturally. Baiae was a complex of villas owned by the wealthiest Romans, including the Emperor Claudius and his stepson and successor, Nero, who not only liked the baths of Baiae but the sybaritic lifestyle enjoyed there, with plenty of alcohol, fine food (including fish grown in the villas’ own fish ponds) and sex of every conceivable description. As one Roman historian put it, “Baiae is the place where old men go to become young boys, and young boys go to become young girls.”

Nero liked being at Baiae so much he wanted to rule Rome from there by remote control; he murdered his aunt Domitia just to get control of her villa there so he could add it to his own imperial villa, and he also murdered his mother at Baiae because, having plotted and schemed to get him on the throne (including marrying the old Emperor Claudius and then killing him),she’d intended to be co-ruler. The show depicted a Roman coin from the first years of Nero’s reign showing him and his mother Agrippina as equal-sized figures -- only Nero got tired of having to run everything by his mom and decided to off her. First he put her in a boat that had been deliberately rigged to sink -- only she was rescued from the wreckage by a sailor from another ship and Nero had to order his henchmen to do her in in a more obvious and less plausibly deniable way. Most people even remotely familiar with Roman imperial history know at least some of the Nero stories -- including the one about him supposedly fiddling while Rome burned (and though violins actually hadn’t been invented yet Nero was apparently an accomplished virtuoso on the lyre, the plucked string instrument that dominated ancient Roman music) and him actually setting the fire that consumed Rome because he wanted to burn it down so he could construct his own city, Neropolis, in its place. Nero was also the first Roman emperor to organize deliberate persecution of Christians, then a minor Middle Eastern sect which had drifted into Rome during Claudius’s reign (at least that’s the first recorded mention of Christians in ancient Rome) and whom Nero seized on as a convenient scapegoat for the Roman fire.

The Nero stories that weren’t so familiar but got told in this film included the super-canal he wanted to build over 150 miles of Italian shoreline to connect Baiae to Rome so he could rule there and send his imperial decrees to the ostensible capital; the canal was started and Nero requisitioned all the convict slave laborers in all of what is now Italy to work on it. But it was never finished because in the meantime the Roman Senate was able to depose Nero and force him to commit suicide when he was only 30 years old. (This was when some vestiges of Rome’s former republican government still existed, before control of the empire fell to the Praetorian Guards -- who’d originally been formed as the emperor’s security force but became a private army of their own, accountable to no one; in the later years of the empire it was the Praetorian Guards who actually picked the emperor, sort of like the Secret Service electing the U.S. President.) The show interspersed Nero’s story with those of the modern archaeologists who uncovered Baiae and explored both the above-ground and the underwater ruins -- helped by the fact that the same volcanic forces that sank the city in the first place are now working in reverse and raising the earth on which it stood. The archaeologists, many of whom had to use SCUBA gear to explore the city and painstakingly dig it out, included Italians, Britishers and Americans -- including an attractive young Bear-type named Kevin Dicus, who charmed me not only physically (I’ll admit it: I get some weird celebrity and semi-celebrity crushes, including MS-NBC’s elections guru Steve Kornacki,the epitome of nerd sexiness) but vocally when he blessedly and beautifully pronounced the “t” in “often.”