Nero

• 1. Introduction

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  Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus died on the 9th of June AD 68 with a private secretary's hand helping him drive a blade home. His last words, according to Suetonius, were "Too late! This is fidelity!" It was, of all endings, an emperor's death attended by four freedmen and no one else. The Praetorian Guard had gone. His friends' palace chambers were empty. A gladiator he begged to kill him never came.

  He had been born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus on the 15th of December AD 37 in Antium, the son of a man his own biographer called "irascible and brutal." When friends congratulated his father Domitius on the birth, the father reportedly replied that any child born to him and Agrippina would have a detestable nature and become a public danger.

  Nero became Roman emperor in AD 54 at the age of sixteen. He would rule for nearly fourteen years, surviving a mother's bid to govern through him, a great fire that swallowed ten of Rome's fourteen districts, a conspiracy inside the Praetorian Guard, and the early deaths of nearly everyone who had once guided him. Then a provincial governor's tax revolt unraveled everything.

  The questions his story raises are not small ones. Was he Rome's most sadistic emperor or one of its most unfairly remembered? Did he burn his own city? Did he persecute Christians out of cruelty or political calculation? And why, for hundreds of years after his death, did so many people across the eastern empire refuse to believe he was really gone?

• 2. A Dynasty's Last Heir

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  Agrippina the Younger was exiled to a remote island in the Mediterranean Sea around AD 39, implicated in a plot targeting the reigning emperor, her own brother Caligula. Her son Lucius was then roughly two years old. His father Domitius died the following year, having accumulated a record of corruption and political scandals, and Caligula seized the boy's paternal inheritance outright.

  Lucius went to live with his paternal aunt Domitia Lepida. It was, by any account, an unstable childhood. His mother returned from exile only after Caligula's assassination, when a new emperor, Claudius, took power. Agrippina married Claudius in AD 49, becoming his fourth wife. On the 25th of February AD 50, Claudius was pressured to adopt Lucius, giving him the new name Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus.

  The adoption was announced with gold coins, and classics professor Josiah Osgood has written that "the coins, through their distribution and imagery alike, showed that a new Leader was in the making." But historian David Shotter noted that, despite events in Rome, Nero's stepbrother Britannicus remained more prominent in provincial coinages during the early AD 50s.

  Nero formally entered public life in AD 51, aged thirteen. Two years later he was giving speeches before various communities, including the Apameans, who were requesting a five-year tax reprieve after an earthquake, and the colony of Bologna, whose settlement had suffered a devastating fire. By sixteen he had married Claudius' daughter Claudia Octavia, his own stepsister. The dynasty was pulling itself tight around a single young man whose future, from his father's lips, had already been described as a public danger.

• 3. The Managed Emperor

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  Seneca wrote the first speech Nero delivered to the Senate in AD 54, and the words promised a clean break. H. H. Scullard summarizes what Nero pledged: to follow the Augustan model, to end secret trials, to rid the court of the influence of favorites and freedmen, and to respect the privileges of the Senate. By Scullard's account, this respect for Senatorial autonomy distinguished Nero from both Caligula and Claudius, and it was generally well received.

  Behind those pledges, Agrippina was already consolidating. She murdered Domitia Lepida the Younger, the aunt who had sheltered Nero during her own exile, along with Marcus Junius Silanus and Narcissus. One of the earliest coins Nero issued showed Agrippina on the obverse, the side normally reserved for the emperor's portrait. The Senate also granted her two lictors at public appearances, an honor usually reserved for magistrates and the Vestalis Maxima.

  The coalition guiding Nero in these years was Agrippina, Seneca, and the Praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus. Jürgen Malitz notes that ancient sources give no clear evidence of Nero's personal involvement in politics during these first years; he describes the policies explicitly attributed to Nero as "well-meant but incompetent," pointing to Nero's failed attempt to abolish all taxes in AD 58. Scholars credit Burrus and Seneca with the administrative successes of the period. Trajan, writing a generation later, would call those early years the Quinquennium Neronis, an exemplar of good and moderate government.

  Fiscal reforms that put tax collectors under stricter local oversight drew particular praise. After the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus by one of his slaves, Nero also allowed slaves to file complaints about their treatment with the authorities. It was not the profile of a tyrant. But in AD 55, Nero removed Agrippina's ally Marcus Antonius Pallas from his treasury position, and the drift toward independence had begun.

• 4. Murder Within the Palace

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  Britannicus was poisoned after Agrippina threatened to side with him against Nero. The sequence tightened: Nero was conducting an affair with a slave woman named Claudia Acte, which Agrippina saw as a dangerous sign of her son loosening himself from her influence. Nero exiled Agrippina from the palace when she began cultivating a relationship with his wife Octavia.

  The climax came in AD 59. According to Suetonius, Nero arranged for his former freedman Anicetus to stage a shipwreck to kill Agrippina. She survived, swam ashore, and was then executed by Anicetus, who reported her death as a suicide. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome notes carefully that Nero's reasons for killing his mother are "not fully understood."

  Tacitus traces the conflict to Nero's affair with Poppaea Sabina, though he contradicts himself between two works about when that affair began: in Histories he says Poppaea was still married to Rufrius Crispinus, while Annals has her married to Otho. Anthony A. Barrett writes that Tacitus' account in Annals "suggests that Poppaea's challenge drove Nero over the brink." Barrett also notes, though, that Nero did not marry Poppaea until AD 62, three years after his mother's death, which weakens the case for Poppaea as the direct motive. Barrett suggests Poppaea may function in Tacitus as a literary device, introduced because Tacitus could find no more plausible explanation for Nero's conduct.

  Miriam T. Griffin points out that Tacitus "makes explicit the significance of Agrippina's removal for Nero's conduct." After her death, Nero's behavior grew far more severe. Griffin suggests the decline may have begun as early as AD 55 with Britannicus' murder, but places the real rupture at the point where, in Griffin's reading, "Nero lost all sense of right and wrong and listened to flattery with total credulity."

• 5. Fire, Gold, and Scapegoats

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  The Great Fire of Rome began on the night of the 18th to the 19th of July AD 64, probably in merchant shops on the slope of the Aventine overlooking the Circus Maximus, or in the timber outer seating of the Circus itself. It burned for over seven days. Then it started again and burned for three more. Three of Rome's fourteen districts were destroyed; seven more were severely damaged.

  Tacitus found that Nero was in Antium when the fire began and returned to Rome to organize a relief effort, paying for the removal of bodies and debris from his own funds. He opened his palaces to shelter the homeless and arranged food supplies to prevent starvation. Tacitus suspends judgment on whether Nero caused the fire. Suetonius and Cassius Dio, however, suggest he started it to clear the site for the Domus Aurea, his planned new palace, which would include a 30-meter-tall statue of himself, the Colossus of Nero. They also claim he sang the "Sack of Ilium" in stage costume while the city burned. The popular image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned is, as Tacitus' evidence suggests, at least partly a Flavian propaganda construction.

  To remove suspicion from himself, Nero accused Christians of arson. According to Tacitus, many were arrested and executed by being thrown to beasts, crucified, or burned alive. Tacitus asserts that Nero's motivation was not a sense of public justice but personal cruelty.

  The reconstruction of Rome reshaped the city. New houses were spaced out, built in brick, and set behind porticos on wider roads. But the cost was immense. Nero's government imposed heavy tributes on the provinces and devalued the Roman currency, increasing inflationary pressure for the first time in the empire's history. The Domus Aurea rose from the cleared ground. When Nero also added several provincial villas to his estate, including a rebuilt complex at his birthplace Antium and a retreat at Subiaco with three artificial lakes, bridges, and waterfalls, ancient sources concluded that the cost had left Italy "thoroughly exhausted."

• 6. Arts, Games, and Ambition

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  Nero studied poetry, music, painting, and sculpture, and both sang and played the cithara, a type of lyre. Pliny described him as an "actor-emperor" (scaenici imperatoris). Suetonius wrote that Nero was "carried away by a craze for popularity," and that "since he was acclaimed as the equal of Apollo in music and of the Sun in driving a chariot, he had planned to emulate the exploits of Hercules as well."

  In AD 60 Nero established the Neronian games, modeled on Greek-style competition and including musical, gymnastic, and equestrian events. Suetonius records that the gymnastic contests were held in the Saepta area of the Campus Martius. His public performances as actor, poet, musician, and charioteer scandalized aristocratic contemporaries, since these occupations were considered the domain of slaves, public entertainers, and persons of low standing. Lower-class Romans, however, admired the spectacles, and the costs were borne by local elites who resented them.

  In AD 67, Nero went further. He had the Olympic Games postponed by a year, bribed the organizers to add artistic competitions, and then entered every event. He won every contest in which he competed. He even entered a ten-horse chariot race, was thrown from the chariot and did not finish, yet was crowned the winner on the grounds that he would have won had he completed the race. A year after his death, his name was removed from the list of Olympic winners. Edward Champlin writes that though Nero's participation "effectively stifled true competition, Nero seems to have been oblivious of reality."

  Nero also stayed at the Villa of Nero at Olympia during these games, and that same year he married Sporus, a young man said to greatly resemble Poppaea Sabina, in a ceremony complete with a dowry and a bridal veil. It is thought he did this out of grief for Poppaea, whose death in AD 65 he had gone into deep mourning over, burning a full year's importation of incense at her state funeral.

• 7. Fall, Flight, and Final Words

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  In AD 65, Gaius Calpurnius Piso organized a conspiracy against Nero with the help of Subrius Flavus, a tribune of the Praetorian Guard, and Sulpicius Asper, a centurion. Tacitus writes that many conspirators wished to "rescue the state" and restore the Republic. The plot was discovered by the freedman Milichus, who reported it to Nero's secretary Epaphroditus. The conspirators were executed, including the poet Lucan. Seneca, accused by a man named Natalis, was ordered to commit suicide.

  In March AD 68, Gaius Julius Vindex, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rebelled over Nero's tax policies. Vindex called upon Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, to declare himself emperor. At the Battle of Vesontio in May AD 68, Vindex's forces were defeated and he committed suicide. But Galba's opposition continued, and Gaius Nymphidius Sabinus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, switched his allegiance to Galba.

  Nero fled Rome. Suetonius records that when he proposed flight to Ostia to take a fleet east, some army officers refused, one of them quoting a line from Virgil's Aeneid: "Is it so dreadful a thing, then, to die?" Nero returned to the palace, slept, and woke at about midnight to find the guard had abandoned their posts. He ran to his friends' chambers and found them all empty. He cried, "Have I neither friend nor foe?"

  An imperial freedman named Phaon offered his villa, four miles outside the city. Nero traveled there in disguise with four companions: Epaphroditus, Phaon, Neophytus, and Sporus. He ordered them to dig his grave, and paced muttering the Latin phrase Qualis artifex pereo, "What an artist the world is losing." The Senate had declared him a public enemy. He died on the 9th of June AD 68, with Epaphroditus helping him, and was buried in the Mausoleum of the Domitii Ahenobarbi on what is now the Pincian Hill. His final words were "Too late! This is fidelity!" The day he died was the anniversary of the death of his first wife, Claudia Octavia.

• 8. The Persistent Legend

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  Tacitus describes a fractured reaction to Nero's death. The Senate, nobility, and upper class welcomed the news. Slaves, arena-goers, theater frequenters, and those who had lived on Nero's largesse were, by Tacitus' account, upset. Soldiers had mixed feelings, their loyalty complicated by the bribes they had accepted to overthrow him.

  In the eastern provinces the response was different again. Philostratus and Apollonius of Tyana record that Nero was mourned there because he "restored the liberties of Hellas with a wisdom and moderation quite alien to his character." Modern scholarship generally holds that the broader populace remained loyal, and that Otho and Vitellius, two of the four emperors of the civil war that followed, both judged it worthwhile to appeal to nostalgia for Nero.

  The Nero Redivivus legend held that Nero had not truly died and would return. At least three impostors led rebellions in his name. The first appeared in AD 69 during the reign of Vitellius; he sang and played the cithara and looked like the dead emperor, gathered followers, and was captured and executed. A second appeared during the reign of Titus in AD 79-81, also playing the lyre, and was also killed. A third appeared during the reign of Domitian, about twenty years after Nero's death; the Parthians supported him and only reluctantly surrendered him, nearly provoking a war. Augustine of Hippo was still writing about the legend as a popular belief in AD 422.

  Over fifty portraits of Nero were reworked after his death to represent other figures; many, identified by damaged faces bearing hammer blows, have been found across the empire's provinces, including three recently identified in Britain. The Mausoleum of the Domitii Ahenobarbi was destroyed by Pope Paschal II in the early twelfth century, and his ashes were scattered in the Tiber, driven by the belief that the Antichrist would be a reconstructed Nero. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo was built at the foot of the Pincian Hill, on what tradition held was the site of his burial. Historian Joseph Josephus, writing roughly a generation after Nero's death, warned that historians had written of him with equal extremes of favor and hatred, and that both distortions deserved condemnation.