Nero – A Personal view

It is summer 68 AD and the thirty-year-old emperor, Nero, who has reigned since he was seventeen, is moments away from death. With him will perish the Julio-Claudian dynasty, as there are no surviving members left to take his place; they have all been murdered by Nero and his immediate predecessors. Despite Rome’s collective fear of renewed civil war, the surviving senate and military establishment have come to the end of their tether with Nero’s endless cruelty and corruption. Finally, after significant portions of the army had declared against the emperor, he was formally and legally declared an outlaw and enemy of the people. From this situation Nero has no way out; he knows it. He has fled to a small villa just outside Rome with a handful of loyal slaves. In floods of tears and with an execution team on its way, Nero bewails his fate, but still cannot bring himself to end his own life. “Dead! And so great an artist!” he laments, while asking one of his entourage to slit their own throat first to set him an example. With the sound of beating hooves of the fast-approaching kill team ringing in his ears, and horrified at the knowledge that his killing would be a public and fatal flogging, with moments to spare, Nero finally plunges a dagger into his own throat. With him dies a dynasty and a system of government, gone is the unbroken peace issued in by Augustus, and the Roman world is condemned once again to stare down the barrel of military despotism and civil war. 

Like that of Tiberius, the story of Nero—or at least his early reign—is inseparably mixed up with that of his mother. However, unlike Tiberius’s mother, Livia, who was a measured and calculated back-room political operator of the highest order, Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, was a brazen and unapologetic tyrant in her own right; nakedly ambitious for herself. 

Towards the top of Nero’s gigantic laundry list of crimes is the charge of matricide. He orchestrated the murder of his own mother. Despite the fact that killing members of your own family is, and has always been, among the most heinous crimes one can commit, in this particular instance it may well have been nothing short of prudent. 

Agrippina was the very definition of ruthless. She had grown up in a viper’s den of family intrigue and political murder, where no quarter was spared, where the constant threat of banishment and death cast a shadow over all proceedings; where a wrong word, or even a wrong glance, could spell doom. As might be expected, to survive such a household Agrippina grew into a formidable woman. A formidably violent and cruel woman. 

Having just about survived the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula, and after Messalina’s spectacular fall from grace, Agrippina was somehow able to convince her own uncle, Claudius, to marry her and take her son by a previous marriage under his wing. That son was the future Nero. A scandalous union even in first-century Rome. Agrippina’s political acumen and mercilessness can be deduced by the fact that in the next few short years she manoeuvred Nero to a position where he was openly favoured above Claudius’ biological son, Brittanicus, and that when that position began to look shaky, she poisoned old man Claudius; or, at least, those are the rumours. Nero, beginning as he meant to go on, is said to have repeatedly raped Brittanicus before concocting an especially strong toxin, and having him poisoned at a public banquet. He is said to have nonchalantly remarked that the poor boy had “long been subject to these epileptic seizures.”

It would have been an abomination even a single generation before that a child of seventeen should assume all the amassed honours and titles that Augustus and his heirs had accumulated. Such was the degeneration and subversion in Rome of this period, that the obsequious senate seemed to have not even seriously questioned this latest transition of power. All the lions among them who once upon a time might have offered resistance were all now cold and dead in the ground. So with Nero now the undisputed master of Rome, on paper, the only real, legitimate threat to his rule was Agrippina herself.

To begin with, in the first few years of Nero’s rule, his mother did indeed largely hold the reins. She sat firmly in the cockpit of power. It seems she could not help herself. Her ambition burnt too brightly and apparently knew few bounds. She even—horror of horrors—had herself depicted alongside her son on official coinage. The ancient historian Dio Cassius tells us that Agrippina began to “manage for Nero all the business of the empire.” She had many significant personages of Rome arrested and executed; for hers was a type of police state. She was feared and loathed by all around her, as her moods and machinations were capricious, her temper explosive, her capacity for clemency almost non-existent.

By 59 AD, about five years into Nero’s reign, both the emperor and his mother had distinct and rival factions built around themselves. At some unknown point, Nero’s deeply, profoundly unhealthy relationship with his ultra domineering mother turned so sour that thoughts of assassination entered his mind. How unhealthy? He is said to have slept with her multiple times, and when this particular scandal seemed set to damage his entire position as emperor, he resorted to merely taking to a prostitute whose appearance exactly mirrored his mother’s. Dysfunctional doesn’t really do it justice.

Finally, Nero seems to have made up his mind that Agrippina needed to be put in her grave without any further delay. Bizarrely, almost unbelievably, he ordered a special ship to be built which would, at the right moment, collapse upon his unsuspecting mother, crushing her and dragging her remains to the bottom. All did not go to plan, however, and after an evening of faux reconciliation and a loving embrace on the quayside, Agrippina set sail in her ship of death. The contraption failed to crush her in the night, and Agrippina was just about able to swim to safety.

Knowing that she had been set up by her monstrous son, she had no choice but to play along with the fiction that some kind of genuine accident had taken place. Nero was not to be denied, though, and promptly did away with any remaining vestiges of subterfuge, and simply ordered a cohort of soldiers to stab her forthwith. Agrippina, despite all her manifest shortcomings, was nothing if not bold and fearless. When her executioners arrived, she is supposed to have bore her lower abdomen and bade them strike her in the place from whence Nero was spawned.

Nero seems to have mourned her little; standing over her corpse and remarking upon the good and bad points of her physique. Unhinged behaviour. Another example of Nero’s idiosyncratic type of evil took place very soon after the killing of his mother. Suetonius tells us:

Having disposed of his mother, Nero proceeded to murder his aunt Domitia. He found her confined to bed with severe constipation. The old lady stroked his downy beard affectionately—he was already full-grown—murmuring, ‘Whenever you celebrate your coming of age and present me with this, I shall die happy’. Nero turned to his courtiers and said laughingly, ‘In that case I must shave at once’—which he did. Then he ordered the doctors to give her a laxative of fatal strength, seized her property before she was quite dead, and avoided all legal complications by tearing up the will.

Once Agrippina had been disposed of, there were few remaining checks or balances to Nero’s perversion and delinquency. One such force for moderation had been Nero’s erstwhile tutor and world-famous philosopher, Seneca. A man whom Nero had loved beyond all others in his youth, a man Nero had sworn would never suffer at his hand. Yet after a foiled coup plot against Nero, Seneca had been implicated in an extremely tangential manner, and was duly forced to take his own life.

Nero’s second wife, Poppaea Sabina, while heavily pregnant, was foolish enough to question Nero about the hours he kept at the circus, to which Nero kicked her to death. Peak Nero.

Nero was now entirely unfettered. Few monarchs or tyrants throughout all of recorded human history have enjoyed the levels of absolute power that Nero now wielded. He used that near limitless authority for completely selfish and narcissistic purposes.

The sexual degeneracy of Nero after Poppaea was gone seems to have had very few limits. Completely random street abductions and rapes were a favourite of his, along with the most extreme and violent cosplay you could imagine. He found an extraordinarily pretty male youth called Sporus who was said to be the spitting image of Poppaea; so he had him castrated and then married the boy, treating him in all ways as though he were an empress.  

Equally as scandalous as all these crimes—and to some even more egregious—was Nero’s penchant for public singing and acting and chariot racing. All three of these things were activities which were considered far, far beneath the dignity of a patrician, let alone an emperor. The sort of thing only prostitutes and worthless vagabonds would lower themselves to. Yet Nero insisted. He insisted on singing in public, on stage, and insisted that his skill as a singer was second to none. He would even enter competitions to prove it. Sickening conduct.

Roughly four years before Nero’s deposition and suicide, the Great Fire of Rome ripped through the eternal city during the summer of 64 AD. The ancient sources disagree on exactly who was to blame for the blaze, and it simply isn’t known if it was a bonafide accident—fires in Rome were not uncommon—or whether it was set on purpose. Some say Nero wanted portions of the city cleared so he could extend his personal gardens and estates, others say it was the Christians getting revenge for their bloody persecutions, yet others say it was Nero’s party that just used Christians as a scapegoat after the fact. Either way, plenty of Christians were immolated as a reprisal.

One of the extravagances which Nero commissioned and had erected in the wake of the Great Fire was a colossal bronze statue in his own image. If anything could stand as a testament to Nero’s crimes and follies, it is this colossus. It speaks of a type of mania, a type of megalomania from which there could be no return. A loss of perspective so total that any attempt to curb or reform it would be sure to fail. Nero, although probably not clinically insane, had certainly lost the plot. By the end he was divorced from reality in nearly every metric in which it could be measured. Posterity almost delights in the memory of Nero as a paragon of how not to behave. He is the example par excellence of what can happen if a single, fallible person is allowed absolute power.