Dan Snow's History Hit - Emperor Nero

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Emperor Nero has gone down in history as the archetypal bad ruler - cruel, decadent, and perhaps even responsible for setting Rome ablaze. But how much of this is fact, and how much is propaganda?Dr Shushma Malik from the University of Cambridge joins us to dive into Nero’s reign, from his early promise to his scandals, the Great Fire, and his bloody downfall.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello folks, Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's history. He was a man who ruled over the world's most powerful empire. It was handed to him on a plate by his mum, and yet he led it on the road to ruin. He was a performer. He entered sporting tournaments and curiously always won. He got very, very long-standing evasions for his turns on the stage.

He was needy. He was insecure. He was desperate for public acclaim. He was a tyrant. The political class cowered his feet. He built a staggering golden palace where he and his guests enjoyed astonishing luxuries surrounded by gaudy, erotic art. He was to pray.

His romantic, well really his family life, was a horror show. He ordered the deaths of his rivals, his own mother and his wives. If you hadn't guessed, I'm talking about the Roman Emperor Nero. The sign of the Julia Claudians, the emperor who died a fugitive, his mighty dynasty destroyed, the empire broken civil war on the horizon. His name has become almost a byword for useless, absurd tyrants. Yet does he deserve his reputation as, well, perhaps the worst of all the Roman emperors? I mean, that's up against some very, very stiff competition.

There was Comedus and Caracalla, who need no further introduction, thanks to Ridley Scott. There was the Emperor Valerian who allowed himself to get captured by the Persians and get used as a human footstool whenever the person. Persian king wanted to mount or dismount his horse, and apparently ended up being stuffed to serve that purpose for evermore. There was Valens, the idiot, who advanced to fight the barbarian horde without waiting for his fellow Roman emperor to join him, and thus suffered one of the most crushing defeats in Roman history. There was Maximus Thrax who bankrupted the Roman Empire, tried to fight everyone at the same time, and he was eventually murdered by his own troops

along with his sons, ushering in a period of catastrophic instability for the empire. But anyway, back to Nero. Was he the worst? Or was his name blackened by later emperors and their scribes to make themselves look better? To unravel the legacy of this most extraordinary man and emperor, we are going to get as close to the truth as we can. I'm joined by Dr. Shushma Malik, she's a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She's the author of The Nero Antichrist.

And she's got some pretty hot takes on whether Nero is really that bad. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift-off, and the shuttle has cleared the power.

Shushma, great to see you. Oh, I, Dan. Lovely to see you too. Last time we're hanging out was in the forum in Rome. It was. Gosh, that feels like such a long time ago now. This is no less beautiful in here. Let's talk about Nero. Give me the sort of view of him, the negative view of him.

What do people think about Nero? If you stop someone on the street, what would they tell you about Nero? So Nero is probably one of the few emperors. You could stop someone on the street and say, what do you think? And probably the fire of Rome is the one that comes up the most. Rome burns down. Rome burns down, 64 AD, under Nero. Okay, and we sort of blame him for that somehow?

We do. and because partly some ancient historians did as well it's not just us that he set the fires by design yes exactly yeah so some historians say that others are more ambiguous about it whether he did or didn't is a difficult question I personally think probably not but because Rome did burn down quite a lot there were lots of fires in Rome not on this scale necessarily this one was very big but Rome did have a problem with the weather and things catching on fire quite quickly but certainly that's

one of the big events that happens during his reign and during his period that was clearly, you know, very traumatic on lots of levels, but also had a lot of repercussions. So one of them was that he decided to scapegoat a group of Christians as a part of the story of getting a response to the fire, bringing people to justice, and the way in which he punished them was seen as particularly and deliberately cruel. So using his gardens to essentially sort of crucify people and also set them on fire, set them alight. And we get a really sub-harrowing account of this from one of our historians Tacitus. But also he used the opportunity of the fire to rebuild Rome, which of course he would do, but to rebuild it in quite a grand and lavish scale,

particularly in relation to his own house, which is the golden house. Massive palace. Yeah, exactly. But we also, he's become a sort of archetype for, you know, you're just common and garden, despot, kills his enemies, he's disgusting bonkers, enters the Olympics and makes sure he wins the medals and all that sort of your basic tyrannical stuff. Absolutely. I mean, Nero Fiddles while Rome Burns is a meme, right? It's such a well-known phrase that it has sort of become a meme.

So exactly that. Like there are so many different parts of the way that his story is told through our historians that characterize him as a tyrant. But there's a tyrant in so many different ways. It's not just about these sort of big acts or big events like the fire, but also about personal cruelties, so the death of his mother, the killing of two of his wives, Octavia and Poppaea. And then also cruelties in relation to the way that he likes to spend his time making senators do things that they don't want to do or the wives of senators do things that they don't

want to do, particularly in relation to the stage. So making people act on stage who shouldn't be wanting to act on stage or shouldn't be put in those situations. So there's all of these different ways of using Nero to describe someone who is so manipulative and so tyrannical in all of these different ways. We should also say one of the primary jobs of being an emperor ruler is the succession to pass that on to sort of, there's some sustainability there. He dies a fugitive and there's a civil war after he dies. So that's kind of a black mark.

That's true. But to be fair to him on that one, none of the Julia Claudians, which is the dynasty of emperors that he was the last of, did that with any. sort of ease, I think we might say. Yeah, and actually, you know, until Vespasian, who's the emperor who sort of wins out after that period of civil war, he has two children, Titus and demission. But then again, after demission, there's another period where this happened. So dynasties can be complex, I think. Roman dynasties are ridiculously. Everyone talks about these great dynasties. The father's son transmission in Roman history, four century, is like a handful of

occasions. It's ridiculous. Absolutely. Yeah. And one of those occasions, perhaps one of the most famous of those occasions is Marcus Aurelius Decommodus, which is seen as deliberately, or is sort of then framed as, you know, after we've had this period of adoptive emperors, it's seen as problematic. Yeah, well, it turns out to be problematic. So against a pretty stiff slate of competitors, people think that Nero's one of the worst, right? Yes, yeah.

Let's get on to that, but first, talk to me about Rome. When he takes power, Roman Empire's in pretty good shape? What's going on? Tell me. Yeah, so he comes to power in 15. AD and succession is complicated, but his mother is married to the previous Emperor Claudius. And he's also a little bit older than Claudius' own son, Britannicus. So he's a slightly more obvious choice. So he's adopted by Claudius and that's how he becomes emperor.

The empire is in a fairly good state. There has been a bit of expansion. So Britain becomes part of the Roman Empire under Claudius in 43 AD. But there are also some troubles, particularly in the eastern borders, with Parthia. So Armenia has been causing some problems under Claudius as well for a little while. Always a headache for the Romans. Yeah, well, in different ways. And sometimes I'm sure the Romans were, you could tell the story the other way around as well. The Romans were a headache for the Parthians. Exactly.

Constantly changing their minds about things. But one of the problems that sort of, you know, of this period that Nero has to pick up very quickly when he starts is that there has been a problem of who's going to be on the throne in Armenia. Is it going to be someone who, is appointed from a particular Parthian family or another family and who gets to decide, essentially, is it the Romans or is it the Parthians? But on the whole, you'd say the empire is in decent shape. It's sort of approaching its territorial maximum limit. People will know from that big map of North Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

And yet, just help me understand one thing, Shush, but this empire, pretty hard defeat on the battlefield. And yet, if you look at its politics in Rome, I mean, absolutely chaotic. The palace, coups, just crazy people. Cor is arguably poisoned, Caligula murdered, members of the royal family dropping like flies, Nero, doing all sorts of horrible things to his adopted brother, Britannicus and taking the throne. How do you get such a sort of powerful empire with such a chaotically dysfunctional core? Yeah, that does make you think. And there are lots of other time periods in history we could look to for this kind of thing as well,

about the relationship between the imperial family, the imperial centre, and actually the administration of an empire, right? And whether or not we see those as two things that are fundamentally connected or something where actually an empire is diverse enough, strong enough, whatever, to be able to withstand lots of different kinds of emperors, maybe not every kind of emperor, but lots of different kinds of emperors, certainly seems to be something that we see again and again with the Roman Empire. So by that I mean, yes, you've got this imperial centre.

And the emperor is very important, clearly, to the administration of empire. You can petition the emperor. You can write the emperor about problems. We've got some great stories in Cassius Dio, for example. There's one where the emperor Hadrian, who visits a lot of provinces, is stopped by a woman who says, I just need to talk to you about something. And he says, well, not right now. I'm a bit busy.

And she says, well, stop being the emperor then. So those kinds of stories, whether it happens or not, really in the minds of this historian, and kind of characterize part of what an emperor is. You're supposed to be there to help with the administration. But you also have the Senate, and the Senate is still very important in the imperial period. And under Nero, actually, the Senate, Tastas says the Senate do a lot. Actually, he lets them because he's so busy doing other things.

They can still have quite a big role. But the role of the Senate and the administration of empire is still very important. Most of the provinces, not all, but most of the provinces of the Roman Empire are still governed by senators. So there is an ability, I think probably inbuilt in the system, that means that you can withstand, an empire can withstand, a bad emperor. So the Senate is dealing with laws and sort of sorting out, you know, dredging a river over here and moving troops about over there and sort of building better harbour defences over there. And meanwhile, the imperial palace, they can just be going off on one.

And it's not the end of the world, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. It's not the end of the world. And yes, you know, the emperor is important in lots of ways. And different emperors will have different roles, of course. So Nero is someone who, for a while, at least, wasn't particularly interested in having a very hands-on role. Other emperors will be different. Trajan, for example, we have some great correspondence between him and one of his provincial governors, which is Pliny the Younger. And you can see the process working, which is really fascinating to have these letters and to have that sort of record.

But it doesn't necessarily mean because an emperor is unwilling to take a great responsibility in the running of empire that that empire then draws to a hold. Okay, well that's lucky for Rome when Nero and others were in charge So that's the Empire Let's talk a little bit about that imperial family then Because that was pretty turbulent During Nero's reign It starts with this fascinated relationship with his mum

Doesn't it? Tell me about her Yeah, so his mother is extraordinary Agrippina the Younger She wrote memoirs She's such a fascinating, brilliant character They don't survive They don't survive unfortunately no But one of our historians mentions them

So Tacitus says she wrote these memoirs And they're a source for what's happening in sort of the imperial family in this period. So she is such an incredible character from history, an incredible character from this period of history. She's sort of at the centre of the imperial family. I mean, she's related to Augustus. She's the great-granddaughter of Augustus. She's the sister of Caligula. She's the niece and then wife of Claudius. She's the daughter of another big sort of imperial figure, Germanicus, who doesn't become emperor, but is a very successful military general and was sort of destined to become emperor. So she is really at the

center of this. And one of the things that Tacitus says about Agrippina, when Messalina dies, whose Claudius's previous wife, Agrippina then is someone that has to be integrated back into the imperial family because the person that she marries could be a potential successor or threat to Claudius, could threaten Claudius's throne because she's so well connected in the imperial family. So she's an extraordinary figure. But because of her, sort of Nero's legitimacy is fundamentally tied to her. So as an hero is Agrippina's child, so is his claim to the throne. And the historians really play with that then. So that Agrippina is ruling through him is of course one of the things that will come up, even that they might have had an incestuous relationship.

One of our historians wants to run with that idea. But really what we have is this character who is phenomenally sort of larger than life as an imperial woman, a kind of imperial woman we haven't seen before, someone having that sort of status and that sort of power. So it is quite a long and big lineage that Nero is coming into. Claudius, the former emperor. Unexpectedly and unfortunately accidentally dies after eating some food in the Imperial Palace, some mushrooms, which could have been an accident. Could have been an accident, could maybe not, but... And I'm always a bit sad about, he had his son Britannicus named to celebrate the conquest of Britain, which I think would have been quite cool to have a Roman Emperor called Britannicus.

But he is bundled out of the line of succession, presumably by Nero and his mum. Nero treats him appallingly, we hear, and he will eventually be killed. Yeah, so this happens just a year after Nero becomes Emperor, so in 55. And the sort of story goes that they're at dinner, and there are slightly different various versions of the story, but one goes that Britannicus had recited a poem,

and there were two problems with this. One, he did it very well, and sort of poetry in the arts of Nero's domain, and Nero got jealous. But the other is that it was a poem about how someone had been disenfranchised from having their parent killed, which is a direct sort of, you know, too close to home reference to what was happening. So Nero decides that he is going to kill him, or so the story goes.

And he has a court poisoner, Lecuster, and has her make up a poison that they can give to Britannicus. The official version of the story is that he has an epileptic fit. So there are two different versions, but that happens quite quickly into Nero. And then I've seen a coin where you get Nero and his mother on the same side of the coin. Yeah, on the obverse of the coin. Yeah. The head side of the coin. So they're almost like sort of joint rulers. Yeah, which is maybe not particularly surprising because, I mean, she's been on coins with Claudius before when she's married to him. But also it's a question of her being the person who really is, like I say, at the centre of this sort of imperial dynasty. So to have that kind of

way of framing your rule in relation to the great granddaughter of Augustus, in relation to the relation to all of these people. Yeah, it makes a sort of sense, I think. And yet, the relationship goes south. Yes, yes, it does. You try to have a kill, what, a few times? Yeah. Well, a few times all on the same night, apparently. But certainly, the sort of ways that the historians explain or rationalise this is that Nero was sort of getting a bit older. He's 17 when he becomes Emperor 16, 17. So about five years in, we're now in 59 AD, he's, you know, that little bit older and he's wanting some independence. He's having an affair with one of his freed women, Acti, which Agrippina doesn't approve of, but also he's sort of starting a relationship with another woman named Popaya. So he's wanting to go down these sorts of, particularly in relation to the women that he's engaged with, routes that Agrippina doesn't approve of.

So this is seen as one of the motivations or one of the reasons behind what happens. which is that he decides he's going to have Agrippina killed. They go for dinner by age of the Bay of Naples and he organises a boat for her to return home. But he engineers the boat to collapse. The boat does collapse. And Agrippina manages, though, to swim to shore. So she survives this wreck.

And she's clever. So she goes in and says, Nero, you'll never guess what happened, even though she knows clearly that he's done this. But she pretends that she doesn't know anything and he pretends also that he's very glad that his mother's still alive and then eventually goes and sends someone to stab her essentially and that's how she meets her end.

He admits in the public version of this as well that she has been killed but says it's because she was conspiring against him so he was stopping a conspiracy. As a sailor, I've always been fascinated by what a collapsible boat. How do you get a boat, sail it out and then at a certain point just collapses and it just sinks? I'm always been fascinated by that. Yeah, that is.

It's a really good question. I mean, your knowledge of boats, I think, is probably far better than mine. I spend too much time thinking about that, Shushman, to be honest, a bit of a boat that feels a bit leaky, I think. I hope that I'm not about to do an Agrippina here. Okay, so then he takes over, he's emperor in his own right, and his relationship with women doesn't get better from there, does it? Because the story is that he's responsible for the death of wives.

Yes, yeah. So, Nero's relationship with women, which is true for lots of the members of the imperial family, but certainly his relationship with women is particularly difficult and a particularly terrible subject. Obviously his mother, but then his first wife was actually the daughter of Claudius, so his step-sister, as we would think of it, Octavia. And he decides he's fallen in love with another woman named Poppaia. He doesn't want to be tied to Octavia anymore.

But this is a bit of a problem because Octavia is the daughter of the previous emperor. She's quite popular in her own right in Rome. So he has to be quite careful about it. And first of all, he accuses her of not being able to have children. So that is grounds for divorce. So he tries to use that as grounds to divorce her. But the people are really unhappy with that. And, you know, the idea of this mode of divorce.

Remember, Augustus and Livia never had any children either of their own. They had children with other people, but not together. So that was a little bit of a difficult one. He then decides to claim that actually she's having all of these affairs or that maybe she was pregnant by someone else. And so there's a lot of confusion there. It's the classic Henry the 8th. I mean, you know, this is...

Yeah, exactly. It's Anne Berlin, isn't it, as well? So a lot of those sorts of accusations. And eventually he exiles her, has her exiled and sends off, as she was expecting some members of the guard to have her killed. And she decides to take her own life in anticipation of that. And then he marries Poppeia and she becomes the next empress. And what's her fate?

Oh, Popaya also meets a very difficult death in 65. A.D. She is kicked in the stomach while pregnant by Nero, and that causes her death, according to our sources. Was Nero really the worst emperor? More after this. You can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

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Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits. There are new episodes every week. Okay, so possibly complicit in the death of his predecessor, Claudius, possibly responsible death of his stepbrother, responsible the death of his wife and step-sister, and mother, okay, right. Possibly. So I guess, interestingly, we can never answer this question, mostly the worst, because we don't really know. But if he is guilty of the things that some people say he else,

then he's pretty bad. It's quite a rap sheet, isn't it? But should we do something crazy and talk about what nearer? opinion, Nero gets right during his reign. So this might be a shorter answer. No, no. I think actually there's a lot of things you can talk about here. So one of the things that our sources, or one of our sources in particular, Tacitus, does pick up on is the fact that actually he says at one point that Nero was quite a good legislator. By that, mainly what he seems to mean is that he let the Senate go and legislate.

Exactly, let them do what they do. But also there are points in the history as you read through where you can see he's taking quite an interest and he is thinking about things and not just early on actually, later on as well in the history of his life by Tacitus, you see these events where there'll be a problem. The Senate think about it, the Nero thinks about this and sometimes it will be used if Nero's in sort of tyrannical mode to say that he does something that's probably not the best judgment, but quite a few times he goes along with the sort of opinion of the Senate or with something that Tacitus seems as perhaps one of the better ideas.

And Tastas is a sort of senatorial chukkah chap. So in his view, the highest praise could be, yes, he let the senators get on with it. Well, exactly. Yeah. So he doesn't. I mean, probably the highest praise from Tastas would be an emperor who was judiciously part of the Senate, I suppose, as well. So that kind of model. But certainly, you know, for someone like Nero who's very young and so forth,

letting the Senate get on with it is not a bad thing. It also sort of depends on how you want to. understand these periods of history because one of the invective motifs, so one of the things that's used to vilify Nero is the fact that he wanted to act on stage. And now we wouldn't necessarily, exactly, see that as a problem. I'm not going to start to make royal parallels with the modern day, but sometimes it's a problem, but not as much for a problem as the historians made it back in antiquity. Yeah, so that was one of the blackest bits of his reputation was that he went on stage. Yeah, but he acted on stage, in public, sorry, I should say in public as well,

because he acted in private, that wasn't great, but it was okay. Other emperors have done that, but in public, he went on stage and acted in public. Yeah, I think we can possibly take that one out of the debit column. It's not the end of the world, that one, is it? It's not the end of, but what perhaps is the end of the world is that most actors in this period were enslaved people, so he's really kind of playing around with those status hierarchies and questions of what people should be doing. So within the Roman social order of things, you can see why it's a problem. But now we might want to sort of, because we live in a differently minded society, step back and think, well, the murder, you know, is still plainly and simply terrible and

easy to understand. This is perhaps less easy to understand. And is the flip side of that, he patronised the arts and culture? Yes, absolutely. The Greeks appear quite like him. Exactly. Yeah. So certainly he's very popular in Greece. He freed the province of Achaea, which is, roughly speaking, what we think of now is Greece from taxation. It was quite symbolic, but that symbolism was very important. So he was, yeah, very popular. And you can see that in sort of the coinage that was minted in the different places he went when he was in Greece.

I mean, he went to Greece as well. He spent about a year going around different parts of Greece. And that's one of the longest times an emperor spent out of Rome, which, of course, is difficult for Rome and seen as difficult for Rome, but it's quite good for that part of the empire. Do we see famously Hadrian, but other emperors that becomes more peripatetic? They're going to be seen by their people. They're heading all over the empire.

They're addressing grievance. Is that something the first Julia-Claudeans hadn't really done? They've been stuck in Rome? Perhaps it's a good thing that Nera is beginning this tradition of getting out there. That's certainly one way to see it. I mean, I don't think the sort of model that Hadrian sets up, we don't see very often. And that's partly because of the military requirements that start to happen when we get to sort of Marcus Aurelius onwards. If you think of Marcus Aurelius, he's very rarely in Rome, but it's because he's on the border fighting, defending Rome, the borders, particularly in the north.

And also Parthia as well. That's where Lucius Ferris, who was Marcus Aurelius's co-ruler for a while, was stationed primarily. So the sort of hadrianic, peripatetic model is, I think, actually a really interesting one for thinking about what a Roman emperor could do. And Nero starts that, always does something with that. But it's not something that becomes really doable. because of the state of the Roman Empire, I think, as we get into the later second century and third century. So Nero is actually quite lucky in terms of... There's a bit of breathing space for the empire. There is, yeah.

There's no peer competitors. I mean, there's Budikas revolt in Britain, which is a nightmare, but doesn't require an impersonal imperial intervention. No, no. There's something going on Armenia that you mentioned. Yes, yeah, which, again, he's got a very good general corbilo to deal with,

and that goes through better and worse stages, but towards the end of his reign, by about 66, They've come to a diplomatic solution. A king has been crowned, come to Rome and been crowned, in fact. So that's seen as a sort of victory for Nero. But there's no, to use the phrase, apologies. Barbarian hordes crossing the Rhine or the Danube. No.

So there's no existential crows. So is it Nero can afford to get a Greece to hang out and do some acting? I mean, again, we might say in the centre of Rome things. We just had the fire, right, in 64. So there might be things he should be doing back in Rome in relation to that. But again, I mean, the story goes that he leads to one of his. freed people, Helius, in charge. And that's terrible because you've got... Right, a formally enslaved person. Exactly. In charge of things in Rome. Yeah, exactly.

That's going to enrage everyone. Exactly. For all of those reasons, it does enrage our historians in particular. But you also still, of course, have the Senate in Rome. There are the wider Imperial Court as well, sort of overseeing things. So he could. And it is an adjustment because Claudius goes to Britain very briefly. Augustus is away, consolidating areas in Spain and in other places during his reign as well. But largely speaking, generally speaking, the emperors have been in Rome. The other example, of course,

is Tiberius going off to Capri. And that's sort of at the end of his reign and that's not a good thing either. It's Pleasure Island. Exactly. So if you're going away for pleasure, not so good. And Nero is going away for pleasure.

He's going away to act on stage. Exactly. And take part in the games and all sorts of things. But to go away for military activity is slightly different, even if you're not leading an army. And again, so future historians are really going to judge that pretty harshly.

To go away, leave Rome, the wonderful city, why do you have one to leave? To go and act on the stage in Greece or wrestle in the games or drive chariots, that's seen as sort of degenerate. Yeah, well, and irresponsible in all sorts of ways. Okay, let's talk about this. So we've mentioned a few things you did well. I said that would be short. Yeah. Okay, so you could argue that leaving Rome and then leaving it in the hands of people

and really upsetting the elites and that's going to build and a bit of dysfunction. They come on to Rome burning I mean we should say if he does set the fire If he burns down in Rome person Then he is definitely That's a terrible thing to do to personally burn your own capital city down We don't know that But let's just talk about the fire

Even it had been an act of God His response, good, bad I mean his response is good it seems And again Tacitus is our main source for this So he actually doesn't think Nero set the fire But also he's a bit more cagey on the fact That it seems to be dying out And then starts again

And the place where it starts is very nice near to some of the properties of Nero's Praetorian prefect to Julinus, who's also seen as a sort of shady character in the history. So there's a bit more ambiguity with that bit. But he does say, look, Nero was in Antium when the fire was started. He comes back to Rome. He opens his palace and his gardens for people to take refuge. And he sort of immediately starts to think about strategic ways to rebuild.

So we need to use better building materials that are less flammable. We need to think about kind of spacing on the streets. and spaces between houses and different parts of the streets and those sorts of things. And so he is thinking about ways to stop this happening in the future. It, of course, does happen again. We have fires. Another big one happens in the Flavian period, but he is thinking about that. But he does also do a big land grab.

Yeah, for his own palace, yes. And that's where the story becomes, you've got the good bit and then the bad bit. And the bad bit is the Domesaleo, and that's the golden palace. A monstrous golden house. Exactly, yeah, a huge palace that spans at least two. hills of Rome. And again, I mean, this is a little bit difficult because, yes, I mean, it's a huge palace and clearly Nero was making a very strong imperial and monarchical statement with it. But probably parts of it would have been open to the public. But also part of the problem is

he's taking land that probably would have been quite high-priced real estate. So, senatorial land and appropriating it for himself. Anything else we can say is bad about Nero. For example, why does he fall? Other people must have thought he was particularly bad as well, because he faced a challenge. In fact, he was kicked out. Yeah, so at the end of his reign 68, as it became, what we essentially have is Nero having been out of Rome for a while. So he goes to Greece in 66, he comes back in 67, but then he doesn't come back to Rome straight away. He goes to Naples for a while and then eventually has to be brought back. And what we see is just the frustration. So actually being away from Rome seems to be a bit of a catalyst here. And there's a revolt by a general

named Vindex. It doesn't work. Eventually, Nero does manage to, once he's back in Rome, quash that revolt. But then there's another one very quickly after, which is by Galba. And the Senate seemed to back Galba. He's sort of the antithesis to Nero in lots of ways. He's a lot older. He's a seasoned military general and so forth. And so he's seen as a safe pair of hands. And why are they revolting? Because they do think Nero is dysfunctional? Is there economic and demographic problems or anything like that? Yeah. So probably the economic of this is important. Clearly there is a problem at this point because of the fire and the spending that happens after the fire. Nero has had to go through a process called the debasement

of the coinage. So essentially he's devalued the amount of precious metal in the coinage and that happens in his period. I mean, that's a fairly well-understood economic measure and it's something that is going to continue in the imperial period for lots of different reasons. But that is one of the things that's talked about as signifying some economic problems. So the economy, the state of the imperial finances, I think is clearly a point. I do think Nero having been away from Rome and then the repercussions of that because of the idea of the emperor losing an interest in even the basics of running an empire, which I think, you know, up until that point he probably had been fairly involved in. One of the things that Astor says is for the first time an emperor is made outside of Rome. So Galba is not in Rome.

He's in Spain. So there also seems to be this slight shift of what's possible. when thinking about who can be an emperor and where they are and who they are. The way outside of Rome. And obviously not part of the Giulio-Claudean families, not descended from Augustus. No, exactly. Yeah, no, not part of the Julius. That's revolutionary stuff.

Well, it is and it isn't, because, I mean, on the one hand, what is the Julio-Claudian family other than one of the leading elite families in Rome? And of course, it's significant. It's Augustus, of course, it's dynastic and so forth. But what we have also seen in Nero's reign is a conspiracy, so the Pizzo conspiracy. which happens again just sort of after the fire and it involves all sorts of people but it's not a conspiracy to restore the Republic

we're not at that point anymore when Caligula dies there's a question do we restore the Republic or do we go with another emperor and the Praetorian Guard answer that question very quickly with Claudius but at this point there isn't even a question Piso is going to become the next emperor he is going to be the person who takes over

and then that becomes the imperial dynasty so the idea that you can move this away from the Julio Claudian seems to have been something that people were thinking about. But yeah, also that actually it is possible to have a different emperor from these different circumstances. And just to, I guess, reinforce it, that we think that by the end of his rule, the senators had been up close to Nero and they just, they didn't like him. It wasn't necessarily massive policy failures.

They just objected to him. Yeah, I think it's probably a bit of both. I mean, if we were to go with sort of the Taciti and Cassius Dio, the sort of historiographical view, none of them have ever particularly liked him except for, I should be clear about this, the sycophantic senators because not all senators are the same, of course. There are different senators, some are, you know, stalwarts of tradition.

I've heard about these sycophants in the Senate. Well, exactly. Others are much more willing to go along with anything Nero says. So to think about the senatorial elite as one unified body is probably also a little bit misleading. There are lots of different factions within the Senate, of course, and some of whom would be very close to the Julio Claudians and others of whom less so.

And Tastus likes to pick out key people who he sees as principal dissenters. So, for say, Apaitis is one of these figures that stands up to Nero and isn't a sycophant and says what needs to be says and ultimately is essentially put on trial for it and takes his own life. But what we do then see is,

as we're getting towards the end of Nero's reign, is the long term playing out of that. Nero is emperor for 13, 14 years, so 54 to 68. So we have had this sort of play out. in a long-form way that we don't get with someone like Caligula. So it's sort of that, combined probably with the economic problems, combined with the idea of Nero being away from Rome,

so removing the emperor from the centre and everything's still getting on fine, right? Oh, actually, so you prove that you're not essential to the running of the empire? Well, he clearly wasn't by that point. Yeah, if you're on holiday. Exactly, but also that an emperor can exist outside of Rome. And that's not necessarily something that carries on or is seen as, something that should be copied by someone like Galba, but Galba isn't in Rome and then he comes, well, he actually, then we get a period of civil war, but these are becoming questions, I think.

These things are being opened up. There is more of a way of understanding different spaces in which the emperor can exist, I suppose. So interesting, so Nero's unwittingly making all sorts of suggestions to other powerful people and groups around the empire. I think that's right. And I think there are a few different things about that. I think on the one hand, someone like Nero and also Caligula are playing with the limits of autocracy, right? So what is it that we can do? What can we get away with? How can we understand being an emperor? It's not Augustus anymore. It's not first among equals. It's about I am emperor. What can I do? And how can I articulate my power? And a lot of the things that we see with Nero are playing around with ways of articulating

power and using that power. Right. What? Making everyone applaud him for being. So you kind of that power corrupting. But also thinking about, well, where do I need to be? be? Where does my attention need to focus? How much can I rely on my advisors? Maybe I've gone holiday. Yeah, exactly. What can I do? What can't I do? And actually, a lot of the things that Nero does will become fairly standard for emperors later on, that they will be more autocratic, that you can leave Rome, that you can do all of these things. It's just he was playing around with it at a fairly early point. Was Nero really the worst emperor? More after this.

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They say you can tell a lot about a regime by its demise. How does Nero go? So Nero's death is particularly emblematic, we might say, of the regime as a whole, of his reign as emperor. he realizes that there was a revolt by Vindex and now there's this revolt by Galba and that the Senate have essentially sort of decided that Galba should be the next emperor and he panics really. He tries to find one of his favourite gladiators to kill him but can't find him and the gladiator won't. He tries to find some poison but can't find any. He then thinks well maybe the Senate might just let me go to Alexandria and essentially sort of have a job, have a administrative job there and they can do whatever they want to in Rome but also realizes that that's probably

not going to happen. So eventually he is taken, escorted and then calling through brambles actually, according to Suetonius, one of our sources, to the villa of one of his freedmen way out of Rome on one of the roads that go out of Rome. And there he realizes that the Senate have declared him a public enemy, which means a particularly brutal death and public death. So decides that he's going to take his own life, but still struggles to do so, and one of his freedmen helps him or stabs him. And he says, what an artist dies with me. He does, not quite his last words, a little bit before his last words. But when he's in that villa, he does say the famous line of what an artist dies with me, yeah.

And then we should say, as you've mentioned, there's a civil war after he is chased out of Rome and forced to commit suicide. Yes, absolutely. What we then get is because there is supposed to be a straightforward succession, it's supposed to be Galba. But again, Tacitus is our main source for this and it's a very interesting source of the way he talks about it. Galba manages to sort of restabilise things in the short term, but actually at the beginning of 69, he's overthrown because, according to Tacitus, he doesn't pay the troops enough. And he doesn't pay due attention to that kind of military side of things, which is surprising because he's a general. So that should be something that he's a bit more sort of attuned to. But on the other hand, the way Tastas talks about it, and I think this is fascinating,

is that by this point, the empire and the people of the Roman Empire have got used to a kind of gift-giving model of an emperor, right? So Nero is the absolute extreme of this. He is so luxurious. He throws money around. You know, people are used to that. They're used to an emperor throwing money around. And Galba is back to kind of the old parsimonious old guard. and he hasn't understood this shift.

And that means that fundamentally he misses part of the point. And there'll be four emperors that year. There will in 69, yeah. So Galba starts it, but then we have Otho, who incidentally used to be married to Poppeia that we talked about earlier, one of Nero's wives, and then another general named Vitellius, and then eventually Vespasian is going to win out.

And just on that, because I guess we think about Nero's legacy, how dangerous is that civil war? Again, is this sort of palace intrigue? Is this the imperial centre? is everything else getting on fine? Or is this a big civil war that really could threaten to destroy the empire? Yeah, so this is a really fundamentally important civil war in the problems it causes in Italy in particular. So not just in Rome, although Rome is affected as well, but in parts of Italy. The other thing I should mention at the same time is you have war going on in Judea and

that's where Vespasian is. Well, actually Titus, his son is there in person, but Vespasian has been heavily involved in that war as well. So there are different disputes going on in different parts of the empire. So this is the Jewish war that inevitably ends with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70C.E. under Vespasian. So there are things going on in other parts of the empire, but it's not necessarily, again, somehow, that we get a narrative that everything everywhere else is also falling apart. I mean, what you would have seen of the civil war or heard of the civil war in somewhere like Syria is perhaps a bit of a different question. Okay, so again, luckily for the Romans, no big outside groups there to take advantage

of Romans disunity at that point, unlike a bit later on in Roman history. That's not to say that, as I said, there's a war going on in Judea at this point as well, but Rome seems to have had the manpower and the infrastructure at this point to be able to deal with things on various fronts. So it could have a war going on in Judea and a civil war going on at home and cope, whereas later on these problems have become much worse. Is Nero as bad as the Roman historians portray him or as bad as the modern world has portrayed him? Well, how bad he is, I'm not sure we're ever really going to know.

And I don't think he was a good emperor. I think that's fairly uncontroversial to say. He seems to have misunderstood quite a lot of the fundamental aspect of what it is to be an emperor and a leader in the model that Augustus set up in any case. I think, though, what I find interesting, and this is something that, you know, you picked up on as well, and I think very rightly so, is that what we understand as the problems of the Imperial Centre and how that relates to the question of actually running the Roman Empire, a different thing. So what does Nero look like from Greece? What does Nero look like from Syria? What does Nero look like from Gaul? Does he really look that different from any other emperor? And in some places, I think probably the answer might be yes, and in other places not. In Greece, for example, he might be seen as a better emperor than some he go before or after. It sort of depends on where you are and what your position looking back in. If you're even focusing towards Rome at all, which he may

well very not be from various parts of the empire. So I think rather than thinking about whether or not he was as bad or the worst emperor, I think it's also worth thinking about, well, actually how much does the Roman Empire depend on the character of the emperor for understanding how it runs, and I think that's quite interesting as well. He's up against some extraordinarily stiff competition for worst emperor. I mean, do you want to throw a few other names out there? Yeah, so Caligula, of course. So again, but only four years, so we have less of, but the madness of Caligula, I think is

probably legendary, even as much, if not more so, than the madness of Nero. And then Domitian also, perhaps slightly less famous, but also seen as a very bad emperor and is also killed in a conspiracy like Caligula was at the end of his. rain. Yeah, demission was bad. Quickly, run us through why so bad? Yeah, so Domitian, again, a lot of the stories are fairly similar to Nero. He's seen as being treacherous and someone that you really can't trust. You never know what he's thinking. And again, with these tyrants, it's about them always putting on a facade. You can't tell what it is they're going to do next. They're sort of, you know, the madness. But also, he's seen as

someone who is particularly paranoid. So he's constantly worried about conspiracies. He's constantly punishing people. He's constantly looking around his back. There's a great story in one of our sources that says that essentially he had all of the walls in his palace scrubbed to the point that they were mirrors. So he could always see who was behind him. And in the end, that didn't work either. Again, Domitian is seen as someone who is far too interested in decadence and luxury. Another famous story is that he has a dinner party where all the food is black, all dyed black. It's all very dark and very sort of mysterious, but also, you know, the height of playing around with that sort of sensory luxury.

So, yeah, a bit like Nero in some of those ways. And like I say, is killed because of a conspiracy. Also, comidus. Yeah, people have heard of him. Exactly. The name, I think, is enough. And another one that people may or may not have heard of, elegabalus. So now we're in the third century and in the Severin period.

So sort of 218 to 222.C. He's emperor. And again, very short, he's very young. He's a teenager. when he becomes emperor. But he is absolutely vilified and run through by the sources for being completely inept from being from Syria, because he's related to Julia Domina, who was the wife of Septimius Severus and being someone who completely misunderstands all aspects of being Roman, actually, not just being a Roman emperor, being a Roman. So he's again, absolutely

run through by our sources when they talk about his reign. Well, Shushma, thanks for giving us some other names in the Rose Gallery as well. But that is Nero. Thank you very much for coming on and talking all about it. Oh, no, thank you very much for having me. Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before you go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube.

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