NERO

Nero came to the throne by poisoning.

On 13 October 54 AD, the emperor Claudius died after eating a dish of mushrooms prepared, it was widely said then and believed universally now, under the direction of his wife Agrippina. She was Nero's mother. Her son, sixteen years old, was proclaimed emperor that same afternoon by the Praetorian Guard and the Senate. Claudius's own son Britannicus, younger than Nero and with a stronger claim by blood, was sidelined.

The early years belonged effectively to Agrippina and to the tutor she had installed years before, the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, joined by the Praetorian Prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus. For five years, the quinquennium Neronis, Rome was governed by these three with a light touch. Taxes were reduced. Courts were reformed. The new emperor himself was celebrated as a second Augustus, a boy of promise raised to rule by Providence.

In 55 AD, Britannicus collapsed at dinner and was dead by morning. The official cause was epilepsy. Everyone understood.

Nero's empire stretched from Britain to the Euphrates. In the East, the general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo waged a long and successful war against Parthia over the throne of Armenia, settled in 63 AD with a compromise that held for fifty years. In the West, the Iceni under Boudicca rose against Roman rule in Britain in 60 AD and burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium before being crushed by the governor Suetonius Paulinus at an unknown battlefield in the Midlands. Tens of thousands died.

In Rome, the great fire of July 64 AD destroyed ten of the city's fourteen districts. Nero was at Antium when it began. He returned to the city, opened his gardens to refugees, imported grain, and personally led relief efforts. None of this prevented the rumor that he had started the fire himself, or that he had stood on the Palatine and sung the fall of Troy while the city burned.

To deflect the rumor, Nero blamed the Christians, a small Jewish sect then unknown to most Romans. The persecutions that followed, recorded with grim precision by Tacitus, were the first state action against Christianity and set a template for three centuries of Roman policy.

Culturally, Nero's reign was a peak of Roman literature and a low for Roman seriousness. Seneca wrote his tragedies and his Stoic letters. Lucan composed the Pharsalia. Petronius, Nero's "arbiter of elegance," wrote the Satyricon. The emperor himself sang on stage, competed in chariot races, and entered Greek poetry contests. No previous Roman emperor had done these things; several subsequent emperors would be condemned for imitating him.

Nero killed his mother in 59 AD. The first attempt, a collapsing boat designed to drown her, failed when Agrippina swam to shore. He sent soldiers to her villa that night to finish the work. She is said to have bared her abdomen and told them to strike there, where she had borne him.

He killed his first wife Octavia in 62 AD to marry Poppaea Sabina, and then killed Poppaea by kicking her while she was pregnant. He forced Seneca to commit suicide in 65 AD after the Pisonian conspiracy was uncovered. He forced Lucan, Petronius, and dozens of senators to follow. The conspiracy had been real; the proscription that followed consumed many who had not been part of it.

He built the Domus Aurea, the Golden House, on land cleared by the Great Fire. A palace complex so vast that its dining hall rotated on a mechanism to mimic the movement of the heavens, its grounds included an artificial lake where the Colosseum now stands. When it was complete, Nero is said to have surveyed it and announced, at last, that he could begin to live like a human being.

In 68 AD, Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rose in revolt. Galba in Hispania joined him. The Praetorian Prefect Nymphidius Sabinus switched sides. The Senate declared Nero a public enemy. He fled to a freedman's villa outside Rome. As the horsemen sent to arrest him approached, he stabbed himself in the throat, assisted by his secretary Epaphroditus. He was thirty years old.

His last words, according to Suetonius, were Qualis artifex pereo.

The Senate declared damnatio memoriae, the official condemnation of his memory, and ordered his statues thrown down. His death ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty, a hundred years after Augustus had begun it. The Year of the Four Emperors followed immediately. The Flavians who eventually restored order built the Colosseum on the drained lake of Nero's Golden House, a deliberate repurposing of imperial excess into public spectacle.

The historical sources are uniformly hostile. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, writing in the following century under emperors who needed to distinguish themselves from Julio-Claudian tyranny, constructed between them the Nero we know: the matricide, the arsonist, the singer, the persecutor of Christians, the man who murdered his pregnant wife. The Christian tradition amplified this further. In the Book of Revelation, the number 666 is widely understood by modern scholars as a numerical cipher for "Nero Caesar" in Hebrew letters. For fifteen hundred years, Nero was the imperial monster against which all other tyrants were measured.

And yet. The provinces, where the senatorial sources held less sway, preserved something different. For decades after his death, peasants in the Eastern empire reported that Nero had not died at all, that he had escaped to Parthia and would return to reclaim his throne. At least three pretenders arose claiming to be him. The Nero Redivivus legend persisted into the second century. Among the common people of Rome, flowers were placed on his grave for generations.

Modern historians have partially rehabilitated him. His tax reforms were genuine. His diplomatic settlement with Parthia was a lasting achievement. The Greek cities remembered him as a patron of the arts. But the portrait drawn by Tacitus is too powerful to dissolve, and too close to what actually happened. Nero remains what the Senate declared him: the tyrant who made the Julio-Claudian inheritance unsurvivable, and whose death the empire needed to move forward.

He is the emperor whose name, two thousand years later, still means what it meant in 68 AD.