Nero: The Emperor Rome Deserved
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled the Roman Empire for fourteen years, from 54 to 68 AD, and the historical record that survives was almost entirely written by men who despised him. Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio — the three primary ancient sources for his reign — were senators or wrote from senatorial perspectives, and Nero’s relationship with the Senate was sufficiently hostile that objectivity from that quarter was never likely. The result is an emperor whose actual governance has to be extracted from beneath layers of accumulated literary contempt, much of which is genuine but some of which is retrospective distortion by a class that had specific and personal grievances.
What is not distortion is the body count. Nero killed his mother, Agrippina the Younger, in 59 AD, sending assassins to her villa after a staged drowning in a collapsible boat failed. He killed his first wife, Octavia, in 62 AD, having her divorced, exiled, and then executed on false charges of adultery. He killed or drove to suicide a significant number of senators during his reign, most notably after the Pisonian conspiracy of 65 AD, when a broad assassination plot was uncovered and Nero used it to eliminate both the genuine conspirators and a considerable number of people he had reasons to distrust or dislike. The philosopher Seneca, Nero’s tutor and early advisor, was ordered to kill himself. The poet Lucan, a conspirator, did the same. The Praetorian prefect Burrus died under suspicious circumstances. The list extends well beyond what even the most creative apologetics can explain away.
The governance of the early part of his reign — the so-called quinquennium Neronis, the five good years — was managed substantially by Seneca and Burrus, who moderated Nero’s impulses and maintained competent administration. The relationship between Nero and the Senate during this period was tolerable by imperial standards; Nero made the right ceremonial gestures of respect, consulted on appropriate occasions, and avoided the more provocative forms of autocratic behavior. The ancient sources that praise the quinquennium are not being sentimental: there was a period when the empire under Nero functioned reasonably well.
The deterioration was progressive and multifactorial. The death of Burrus in 62 AD removed a moderating influence. Nero’s increasing investment in his artistic persona — his singing, his theatrical performances, his chariot racing — generated aristocratic contempt among a class that considered these activities beneath imperial dignity. His financial demands to fund building projects and personal extravagance, his construction of the Domus Aurea on land cleared by the Great Fire of 64 AD, his marriage to Poppaea Sabina (who died, according to some sources, when Nero kicked her while pregnant), his subsequent marriage to a boy he had castrated and dressed as a bride: all of these generated the kind of senatorial disgust that found its way into the historical record with particular vividness.
The Great Fire of 64 AD burned for nine days and destroyed or severely damaged ten of Rome’s fourteen administrative districts. The accusation that Nero started it deliberately to clear space for his palace complex rests on no contemporary evidence and is improbable on engineering grounds — the fire started downwind of the Domus Aurea site, which would have threatened rather than served his purposes. The accusation that he fiddled while Rome burned is anachronistic in the literal sense, since the fiddle had not been invented. What appears to be true is that Nero was at Antium when the fire started, returned to Rome to manage the disaster, and subsequently began construction of the Domus Aurea on the cleared land with an unseemly promptness that gave the arson story its lasting force.
His persecution of Christians as scapegoats for the fire is the most historically significant fact of his reign in terms of long-term consequences — it established the pattern of imperial anti-Christian action and killed, according to tradition, both Peter and Paul. Whether the persecution was as widespread as later Christian accounts suggest is uncertain, but that some Christians died under Nero in connection with the fire is attested in Tacitus, who is otherwise not particularly sympathetic to Christians.
Nero’s end came through a military revolt led by Galba in Spain that triggered a cascade of defections including, finally, the Praetorian Guard. Abandoned by virtually everyone, Nero fled Rome and killed himself in June 68 AD with the assistance of a freedman who had to help him work up the nerve. His last words, according to Suetonius, were qualis artifex pereo — what an artist dies with me — a sentiment so perfectly on brand that it is either authentic or a line too good for posterity to resist inventing. Either way, it captured something real about an emperor who cared more about his singing than his governance, and who left a Rome in better physical condition — his building program was considerable — than the historical reputation he left behind.