place usurped, I’m nothing and no one.
Till now, Octavia’s title has meant naught;
At court she is ignored, her aid unsought.
The favors I alone used to dispense
Won me men’s loyalty as recompense.
Now someone new has captured Caesar’s heart:
Mistress and wife, she’ll play a potent part.
All that I’ve worked for, Caesar’s majesty —
One glance from her will win it all from me.
(III.v.9–19)
And this scenario, in which it had been Nero’s intention before ever seeing Junia to marry her, answers, at least as satisfactorily, Nero’s putative objective. Again, QED.
Now, can we think of any further reasons why Nero would want to marry Junia (and thereby, or therefore, “obtain” her), apart from his being in love with her? Well, Nero himself has provided us with two, neither of which depends on his being in love with Junia. First, as he makes quite clear, he is heartily sick of Octavia:
Not that a remnant tenderness, in truth,
Attracts me to my wife or pleads her youth.
Long weary of the kind concern she shows,
I seldom deign to watch her weep her woes:
Too happy if a merciful divorce
Relieved me of a yoke imposed by force!
(II.ii.91–96)
Second, she has proved barren:
Heav’n, too, in secret, shows itself severe;
Four years she’s prayed, but heaven will not hear:
Octavia’s virtue leaves the Gods unmoved,
And with a barren bed she’s been reproved.
In vain the Empire asks an heir of me.
(II.ii.97–101)
What further incentives could any husband require to remarry? But, of course, Nero is not just any husband, and I would suggest that there may be another, darker reason for his wishing to marry Junia. I take my cue from several remarks of Racine’s in his second preface: “[Nero] could not bear Octavia, a princess of exemplary goodness and virtue” and “He had not yet killed his mother, his wife, his tutors; but he bore in him the seeds of all those crimes.... He hates these people one and all, and he hides his hate from them under false caresses.” Racine’s description of Octavia as “a princess of exemplary goodness and virtue” is striking, since it serves also as a perfect description of Junia and, indeed, of the crucial thematic role she plays in Britannicus. Racine alludes to Nero’s murder of Octavia, but he did not merely murder her; he systematically tortured her, psychologically as well as physically (see note 14 for Act II for Tacitus’s wrenching account of her short, sad life and her horrific death); as Racine tells us, Nero hated her, and, undoubtedly, for just those attributes that she so conspicuously shares with Racine’s Junia. It may be, then, that when Tobin suggests that Nero wished “to replace one female presence with another,” the female presence he wished to replace was not Agrippina but Octavia. Given Nero’s sadistic personality (of which additional evidence will be adduced later), nothing seems more likely than that, having extracted from his relationship with Octavia all the pleasure to be derived from torturing and, ultimately, destroying her, Nero, like a serial killer, craves a new victim to demean, degrade, and destroy, and who more eligible than Junia, who, her virtuous reputation having preceded her, would surely prove an enticing and entertaining challenge to debauch or, failing in that attempt, a helpless victim on whom to unleash his sadistic vindictiveness?
XVI
We have established, then, Nero’s possible motives for having abducted Junia, none of which relates in any way to his being in love with her, but all of which can be subsumed under the general heading of wanting, in some sense, to possess himself of Junia, which is consistent with my contention. What is more than merely consistent with my contention, however, what offers compelling corroboration for it, is the “supreme cunning” (the expression I employed earlier in connection with Nero’s selection of Britannicus as the perfect victim to demonstrate the destructive aspect of omnipotence) with which he has selected Junia to appropriate, since, on close inspection, her most salient characteristics all bespeak an inaccessibility, an untouchability, that would make such a conquest a conspicuous triumph and most loudly proclaim his omnipotence.
Junia’s “qualifications,” those attributes and circumstances that render her such a clear first choice for the achievement of Nero’s ulterior objective, are not difficult to discern. Put in simplest terms, she is the most forbidden fruit, and withal, almost out of reach, one might say: she is not even at court, being in self-imposed exile, and so must be abducted from her retreat. And a retreat it is certainly is: she is there, “nursing in obscurity her woes” (II.iii.89), as she later tells Nero, those woes including, in addition to losing her parents, whom “she saw extinguished in her infancy” (II.iii.88), the suicide of her brother, Silanus, four years ago. Indeed, when Nero surmises (fantasizes, rather, I would say) that she “thinks I’m to blame for her poor brother’s fate” (II.ii.40), we can suspect that he finds in such a surmise an additional inducement to possess himself of her. (One is reminded of Richard of Gloucester’s grotesque wooing of Lady Anne as she stands mourning over the body, practically still warm, of her father-in-law, the late Henry VI, whom Richard, as she well knows, has recently slain. True, Nero has not murdered Silanus, nor is the latter so recently deceased, but there is the same malevolent covetousness underlying both men’s intrusions on a grieving relative, and if Nero has not yet murdered Junia’s fiancé, as Richard had recently slain Edward, Anne’s husband, he fully intends to do so.)
Then, as Racine takes care to have Nero point out, she is egregiously (in its literal sense of “standing out from the crowd”) virtuous — the only moral, incorruptible woman in all of Rome:
It’s just this virtue, not at all the fashion,
Whose perseverance stimulates my passion.
There’s not one Roman woman, I maintain,
Whom my attentions have not made more vain,
And who, embellished with alluring art,
Has not made an attempt on Caesar’s heart;
Junia alone, withdrawn, all modesty,
Regards such honors as ignominy.
(II.ii.45–52)
Next, Junia is practically engaged to Britannicus, having several years before been promised to him by Claudius (as Junia will aver and Nero himself acknowledge in their first, lengthy meeting), and Agrippina has taken it upon herself to reconfirm that promise, which Nero’s abduction of Junia has placed in jeopardy: “In vain I’ve named Britannicus my choice.... I gave him hope this marriage would take place” (I.ii.123, 125). Furthermore, Junia and Britannicus are in love with each other. Although Nero coyly asks Narcissus, “Tell me, Britannicus loves her as well?” (II.ii.55), Agrippina has already made clear that Nero “well knows — how could such love be ignored? — /
