Dan Snow's History Hit - Nero

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Shusma Malik joined me on the podcast to discuss the infamous Emperor Nero. He ruled nearly 2000 years ago, after taking over from his stepfather Claudius. Nero was a despotic ruler, enamoured in his own talents. His reign was characterised by tyranny and debauchery. To what extent is the commonly-held perception that Nero should be understood as the Antichrist figure in the Bible accurate? Join us to learn more about Nero's rise and his eventual expulsion from office, leading up to his death as a friendless man. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today I'll be talking about a despotic ruler, enamoured of his own talents, certain in his brilliance, who emerged from a dynasty of deeply dysfunctional people, and who was eventually ousted from office where he died alone and friendless. I'm of course talking about the Emperor Nero. The Emperor Nero ruled nearly 2,000 years ago, having taken over from his stepfather, but probably some very contorted cousin as well, the Emperor Claudius. His rules become a sort of totemic one, kind of synonymous with just crazy despotism. I was

lucky enough to have Shushma Malik on my weekly YouTube History Hit Live. It goes on Timeline, which is YouTube's biggest history channel. It's our partner YouTube channel. And she talked me through Nero and why he continues to matter in the modern world. Please go and check out our new podcast we've launched. It's called The Ancients. It's with our in-house Tristorian,

the legendary classical historian, Tristan Hughes. He is doing this podcast, which is taking the world by storm. It's rampaging up the charts. So please go and check out The Ancients. He's got lots of material on there about the ancient classical world, not just the Mediterranean basin, but from all over the world. So please go and check that out. In the meantime, though, everyone, here's Shushma Malik. Enjoy. time though everyone here's Shushma Malik enjoy. Shushma Malik thank you very much for joining us. Hello thank you very much for having me it's great to be here. Well we had to have you on you appeared on the one of the history hit podcasts called the ancients and you were like

the star performer so the team said you've got to get her on. And so here we are. We're talking here. Center us here. When are we talking about? OK, so we're in the first century A.D. We're in Rome and we are specifically in the years between 54 and 68 A.D. So we are kind of mid first century. The emperors haven't have been the system of government since about 27 B.C. So we're we're firmly into the system of government of the emperors by now. But Nero is still part of the first dynasty of Rome's emperors, the Julio-Claudians. So there were still sort of experiments being done with the nature of being an emperor in Rome after the end of the Republic. Well, and definitely experiments being done around the succession, because what relationship, I mean, your head might explode

when you try and tell me this, but what relationship did he have with Claudius, the previous emperor? So he was Claudius's adopted son, and that's because Claudius was married to his mother, Agrippina. It does get more complicated, though, because Agrippina and Claudius were uncle and niece. So he also has a relationship with Claudius that's linked through his mother by blood as well. But the more straightforward answer is that when Agrippina and Claudius got married, which was controversial, there was some changing

of the laws that had to take place in order for that to happen. But when it did, Claudius eventually adopted Nero, so he became his adopted son and actually his heir as well. And then his mother may or may not have poisoned Claudius to make way for him. Where do you come down on that one? to make way for him is where do you come down on that one yes so I I'm quite a uh skeptic of the various crimes laid at the door of Agrippina many crimes which is his mother Agrippina the younger many crimes are laid at her door she is quite one of those women that gets tarred with quite a black brush um when it comes to her relationship with both her son and Claudius, her husband. I think probably Claudius ate a bad mushroom and things sort of went wrong from there.

Our sources certainly, well, a few sources in particular certainly suggest that she was involved. But even those sources don't necessarily implicate Nero in it, his own involvement. Agrippina may have committed murder, the murder of Claudius, but I'm sceptical. Well, Claire Whitbread agrees that he's such a classic trope, she says, to blame powerful women for all kinds of wrongdoing. Very good point, Claire. But Nero's reputation is as one of these kind of almost caricature, like, you know, Caligula, Nero, Caracalla, there's these lists of Roman emperors that we believe to be sort of you know uniquely depraved is that tell us a little bit about their reputation and is it is it fair? Yeah so exactly those so Caligula he's emperor

only for four years generally the story goes that he's quite good for the first two years then develop some sort of illness, perhaps he does get very ill. And that is sometimes said to contribute to his madness. But we've got to remember, we're dealing with sources here writing 150 years later. So trying to, you know, diagnose the psychology of someone based on those sorts of sources is, of course, you know, impossible, really virtually impossible. So Caligula is often seen as perhaps the maddest of the emperors if we want to give them categorize them Caligula is the mad one Nero is the most cruel according to tradition I guess Domitian is the most paranoid he's the next

sort of bad emperor who comes at the end of the Flavian dynasty which is the dynasty after the Julio-Claudians. Commodus, of course, of gladiator fame, is mad and cruel and dangerous all in one. And Caracalla as well. Caracalla is not at the end of a dynasty, like Nero, Commodus and Domitian were, but rather he is involved in the murder, well, I say involved, is accused of murdering his brother in order to gain sole power. So he has a very bad reputation based on on that as well.

So you do tend to get they do more or less come towards the end of a dynasty. Caracalla is perhaps an exception there. But it's quite striking that Nero and then Adomian and then Commodus, as a dynasty falls, the story told about them tends to be one of a decline, as we might expect. And certainly they become the mad, bad, dangerous to know emperors. And do you think, how sad is it that is with Nero? I mean, do we think he was, do we think he was pretty bad? I personally think he was not, he does not do everything that he's accused of. If you take the worst reading of Nero, if you think of him as a wife killer, someone who set fire to Rome, as someone who needlessly destroyed the city in order to build

his own golden palace, you know, with no regard for the people, no regard for anyone else. If you think of him as, you know, someone who does, kills his mother, does all of those things. Also, if you think of that in isolation, so not in the context of the Roman dynasties and the infighting that the families were going through as well, then yes, he's certainly very bad. But I don't see it personally like that. I think it's possible that he would have killed members of his family, because that happens on occasion in Roman politics. It's not unique to him, necessarily. It doesn't make it okay, of course. But I think the idea that he set fire to Rome isn't true. Our sources, you know, say that that's a rumour. I also think things like the Golden Palace can be understood in other ways.

He probably opened a lot of it up to the public, for example, and he was trying to demonstrate the spectacle of Rome. Perhaps he gets things a bit wrong, but I personally don't see him as an out-and-out tyrant that maybe sometimes he's portrayed as. We're going to watch a little bit more of the Tony Robinson talk now talk now uh in a second i just want to ask you a quick question question first you mentioned he killed his mum you've got to at least tell everyone that story whether it's true or not but it's an extraordinary story it is it is yes i i kind of you know throw away comment oh and he killed his mother this is 59 ad we're in so his mother agrippina um has been sort of in and out of favour with him she was very close obviously at the beginning of his reign but then fell out of favour perhaps and

Nero wanted to marry another woman he was he was at that point married to his stepsister Octavia who was the daughter of Claudia so giving him a stronger link to to the previous emperor and he decided that she was getting in his way, perhaps a little bit too much. He wants to make it though, look like an accident. So he invites her for dinner, just off the Bay of Naples. And in order to, he arranges in order for her to get back, to go back in a boat, but he arranges for the boat to sink. He arranges for the ceiling to collapse and for the boat to sink. He arranges for the ceiling to collapse and for the boat to sink. Unfortunately, he didn't quite reckon on his mother being as, you know, canny as she is

and as, you know, clever and clearly intuitive as she was. So she, when the boat collapsed, she realised what was going on. She managed to swim to safety. And instead of going, she's a shrewd woman, instead of going and confronting Nero and saying what on earth were you doing um she goes and she says I I the the boat collapsed um you know and and thankfully I'm okay praise that I'm I'm okay and um Nero has to keep up his pretense as well and um is oh thank god you're you're okay, mother, and then sends someone to kill her and to stab her, and that's how she meets her end. Right, but that is obviously, is that a story Suetonius tells us, and you're not certain

about that? It's a story Tacitus tells us as well, so maybe on slightly firmer ground but um well it's a it's a story that was circulating in Rome perhaps it's um certainly not what would have been known about him uh more widely necessarily the official version of it was that she was um he thought she was involved in a conspiracy against him and that's why he had to take that action that's the official version and that's what would have gone out but of of course, Rome, like other big cities, has a rumour mill. And that is perhaps a representation of the rumour mill as well as, you know, possibly, you know, a true story. Absolutely. We can't be sure about what's happening at the moment in our world,

let alone 2000 years ago. Isn't it possible that Nero was just someone thrust into a family business when all he wanted to be was an artist and that drove him mad Shushma was he just a frustrated artist I heard that argument used about other dictators uh perhaps in the 20th century it's a bit of a scary one what do you think yes well I mean one thing to mention about Nero that I haven't yet is that he was he was a teenager when he became emperor 16 and about to turn 17. And he is very, very young. And as Raven rightly says, part of his biography is that he wanted to act on stage. He was a performer, he was a singer, he was a chariot racer. He won awards for these. Our sources say he won awards because, you know, no one isn't going to give the top prize to the emperor. You'd be pretty silly if you didn't. But it was his

passion. And so certainly that idea of him having to go into a political environment, you know, become emperor, is not necessarily what he would have thought would happen. When he was very young, before his mother married Claudius, it would have been fairly unlikely that he would have been become emperor. So, you know, Claudius had his own children, Octavia and Britannicus. Britannicus being a boy would have succeeded if Claudius had died later, if he had died when Britannicus was of the right age. He was only 13, I think, when Claudius died. So he was younger than Nero.

And so certainly there's a sense there that perhaps he has become, you know, put in a position that he didn't want to be in. I want to talk about how Nero treated his little stepbrother Britannicus, because it's a family show. What about Nero's, first of all, the fire? I mean, did he set fire to Rome for his own purposes? First of all, the fire. I mean, did he set fire to Rome for his own purposes? I don't think so. I think it's very unlikely you're going to burn down a city that, you know, that is the most important city in the empire. He also, you know, was building a palace at the time. I know the Domus Aurea is famous, but he was building the Domus Transitoria, a palace that he wanted to live in before that. And that was destroyed in the fire as well. And also, you know, even the hostile accounts, so Tacitus, you know, is measured here.

He says, look, there are rumours that Nero started the fire, but in, you know, in reality, also those are, you know, it's not clear. He opened, as soon as he found out about it. He was in Antium at the time. He came back to Rome. He opened his palace gardens so that the people could come in and be safe. And he rebuilt Rome. The palace is famous, but he rebuilt other parts of Rome, the rest of Rome, in a very sensible way. He made the streets wider. He made the building materials less flammable.

And so there's a lot to be said of how he handled that crisis, I think. But of course, you know, the domicile raider then casts a shadow over all of that. As one of our great listeners, It Was a Good Idea at the Time, points out, he was alleged to have kicked his wife to death. There was violence. He was obviously wildly, it seems that there was a he was obviously wildly it seems that he was there was a there was a mania to him do you think that the just being given that amount of extraordinary power over that huge empire when he was that young sent him sent him in some way crazy yeah so so absolutely you're absolutely that's absolutely right one of the stories stories told about him is that in about AD 65, he murdered his wife by kicking her in her stomach when she was pregnant.

And it's a horrific story, a very, very difficult story to read about in the ancient sources. But certainly, you know, the power that he would have had, the control as an emperor, whether it sent him mad or not, I don't know. That sounds like the action of a madman. I grant you that. There are other stories in literature of tyrants killing their wives with kicks. Periander, a tyrant of Athens, has a similar story said about him. I don't want to explain this away as a literary idea of how you explain this type of sudden deaths of pregnant women. I'm not saying it's that, but there is, you know, elements of this that have, you know, other literary examples of these sorts of things that perhaps we can use to help. But I wouldn't like to diagnose him as mad,

but I mean, if someone gave me the Roman Empire when I was 17, I'm not sure what I would have done. I think I would have gone, I think I would have gone pretty wild but his death was a sad sort of sad and pathetic end wasn't it tell me about how he was removed from sort of ejected from office and then murdered. Yeah so this you're absolutely right it's a very sad story um we only have an account of this from Suetonius and one from a later historian named Cassius Dio um we don't have Tacitus because we've unfortunately lost the last two years of Nero's reign in Tacitus. It's not extant. But what Suetonius tells us is that he hears that the Senate have declared him a hostess, an enemy, a public enemy, and he tries to get some poison to commit suicide no one will give him poison he is running

around his palace trying to think of what to do he thinks maybe he can convince people to send him to give him a post in in in alexandria in egypt he can go there and and you know be happy happy somewhere in the east realizes that's a no-go. His freedmen then help him escape Rome. So this is sort of at night time, they have to escape Rome in a sort of stealthy way. He goes to the villa of his freedmen named Phaon on the outskirts of Rome. And the idea is that the Praetorian Guard are coming as he can hear sort of them approaching, he realises that either he has to commit suicide or they're going to do terrible things to him. And so he decides, well, he decides to commit suicide. He utters the lines, not quite his death lines, but not far off,

what an artist dies in me. And then he could, but he can't quite do the final act himself. So one of his freedmen, Epaphroditus, helps him, helps him do it. And he stabs himself. And that's how Nero meets his end. He does get a good funeral, though. They spend quite a lot of money on a nice funeral for him. So he gets buried with his father, the father's side of his family and uh with a lavish funeral so land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai

warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. 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. Well, you know, that makes up perhaps for some of the nasty way in which he met his end. What did the Roman people make of this death? And did it change given the kind of political instability that followed him, four emperors in the space of a year? Yeah, so the Civil War, the period of the year of the

four emperors, as it's called, AD 68, sort of mid AD 68 to AD 69, certainly was a horrific time in Rome. Tacitus talks about this and says it was one of the worst, you know, things that he'd heard about, seen, encountered in terms of the way that Rome was constantly in a state of fluctuation, constantly with battles and on fire, as it were so that was certainly a very traumatic period but it's interesting that actually two of those four emperors so the four emperors are Galba who is immediately after Nero Otho and then Vitellius and then Vespasian who eventually wins out and founds the new dynasty the Flavians two of those four Otho and Vitellius, both positioned themselves as successors of Nero. So the Golden Palace that I've been talking about, Nero never had a chance to finish. Otho was trying to finish the Golden Palace and he and both of them sort of positioned

themselves as supporters of Nero. Otho in fact had, had been married to Nero's second wife, Poppaea, before Nero was. So there is quite a close connection there. The other sort of story about his popular reception after his death is we have a source from the second century, late first century, late first century, early second century, from a Greek writer named Dyracus Ostum who says there are many people in the east who um who wished he was still alive because they quite liked him and he was quite popular he spent time in Greece so yeah it seems that he did have a semblance of of popularity after his death enough it seems for two of those four emperors to say, well, you know, we are the successors of Nero. And let's talk now about Christianity.

What was the state of this new young religion, creed, movement, when Nero was alive, when he was killed? Right, so this is a hotly debated topic in scholarship. How much Christianity had really made it to rome by this period so remember where ad 54 to 68 the critical years of ad 64 to 65 where christianity enters nero's story is still you know as you can tell just 60 60 something years after what 60 something years after the birth of christ only 30 something years after the birth of Christ, only 30 something years after the death of Christ. So we're in Christianity's extreme infancy here. And of course, Christianity began

in the East. It began in Judea. It began in where Christ was. So there are Christians in Rome at this point, it seems. St. Paul writes to the Romans in the New Testament, for example, the letter to the Romans. So there is, you know, there are there are Christians in Rome. But how many, what sort of take on the religion they had, what, how, you know, it certainly wasn't anything that we would recognise as an organised religion or anything like that. Where, you know, all of these are, you know, fairly difficult questions to answer just through lack of evidence. But certainly when the story of Nero and the Christians is linked to the fire. So after the fire, those rumours that were spreading around that Nero started it needed, you know, an answer from the administration,

as it were, from Nero, and and decided that or he and his advisors decided that in order to get rid of the rumors they would blame a group of Christians so a group that were unpopular in Rome I should say that the historian Tacitus tells us were Christians that's how he how he describes them the Christiani so it's it's sort of tied in with the story of the fire, but the real sort of crux of it is that the one source who tells us about this from the Roman perspective, the pagan perspective, as it were, Tacitus says, well, Nero killed them in such a horrific way that, you know, even people who, you know, citizens sort of said well they're being sacrificed to the cruelty of the emperor and it wasn't seen as a proportionate punishment so for example again

this is a bit of a harrowing story but the story goes that Nero put Christians up on crucifixes and which again was a common punishment in Rome but for slaves put Christians up on crucifixes and burned them alive at night to serve as torches, or had wild beasts come and eat at them, basically bite at them, until, you know, the inevitable happened in terms of death, and that Nero reveled in it so that he rode on his chariot in between these crucifixes as this was happening. So it's a horrific story, which we only have from one source. We only have it from Tacitus. Suetonius doesn't talk about it in those terms. He says Christians were punished under Nero, but doesn't link it to the fire or anything like that. I mean, it's just a couple of sentences. And Cassius D but doesn't link it to the fire or anything like that. I mean,

it's just a couple of sentences. And Cassius Dio doesn't mention it at all. But yeah, so that's the story that relates Nero to the Christians. And is that where this idea that Christians started to believe that he was the Antichrist came from? Yes. So this sort of started to become popular a bit later, so it wasn't immediate, it wasn't that we started to get literature of the first century talking about Nero as the Antichrist in explicit terms. We start to see it really kind of take off in the third century and about the mid-third century where we start to see Nero named as the Antichrist in the book of Revelation so the first beast in Revelation but also the man of lawlessness in

Paul's two Thessalonians or both of these are Antichrist figures that will bring about an apocalypse of some some description and so Nero starts to get associated with with those figures and that's how he he begins to be associated and talked about with the Antichrist. And it becomes very popular from the third century to about the early sixth century AD. So there's no evidence from the time that Christians saw him as this sort of unique existential threat? of unique existential threat? There's no evidence in terms of, there's no letters or imperial edicts and that sort of thing that would have gone out to the East

to suggest that Nero was starting a persecution or anything like that. No, this was, they were punished for the fire, you know, or arrested for the fire. Of course, they were singled out for being Christian as part of his reason for scapegoating them but there wouldn't have been an implication that that Christians further east or or in other parts of the empire would necessarily have felt like they

were under threat from Nero and certainly they weren't obviously for the rest of his reign he had another three years after that but the way that I guess he has been interpreted or the way that that Christian anxiety has been seen is by saying that when John and when Paul wrote Revelation wrote to Thessalonians they were thinking of Nero that's who they had in mind when they described the first beast when they described the man of lawlessness I find personally I'm skeptical about that I don't think that they would necessarily have had one figure in mind I think there's especially because Nero wasn't seen as a hate figure in the east he was quite popular in the east and their their audience was primarily if we remember where the Christians were in the East, Revelation is addressed to seven churches in Asia, in the province of Asia, modern day Turkey. So to paint, to kind of assume

that Nero is an Antichrist there, or would have been the tyrannical figure we think of him, or understood that way in the first century in the East, I think is difficult from a historical point of view. So I don't think that he was written into the Bible. I think some early Christians, particularly in the West, may well have associated Nero with those figures earlier than he's written in the third century, but in Christian literature, but explicitly written anyway. But yeah, I think that the idea that he was specifically written in is a bit difficult. What about we've got Anna Caloris asking who benefited from Nero getting this unbelievably evil reputation because it's one that has endured? Yeah so the immediate

answer I suppose would be the successive dynasties. So the Flavians, Nero ended a dynasty. He was the last emperor in the Julio-Claudians. When Cassius Dio describes it, he says that Nero was the last in the line of Aeneas. Those of you who are familiar with the Trojan War will know that Aeneas was the person, are familiar with the Trojan War will know that Aeneas was the person, the Trojan prince, who escaped Troy and went to found Rome, you know, back in the mythical times as it were, and Nero is described as the last of that line because Julius Caesar had associated himself with that line and then, you know, and then his successor was Augustus and Augustus was Nero's great, great grandfather, great, great, great grandfather. So, you know, we have that that line. And then we have then we get a new dynasty.

And the Flavians, on the one hand, held up or Vespasian held up Augustus as being great because he's the founder. But in order to justify creating a new dynasty dynasty breaking the line that started with Aeneas as it were you need to demonstrate severe trauma so lots of these writers are writing under the Flavians or under the dynasty even after that the under Trajan Nerva and Trajan or Hadrian so they are writing in a very difficult, different political scene. And an emperor who ends a dynasty is always going to be a problematic figure for the dynasty that succeeds, succeeds it. And yeah, so that that I think has has an impact. And that the way then that they characterize Nero and the immense cruelty with the murders of his wives and

those kinds of things, cruelty against the Christians, cruelty against nature even in the way that he dug lakes and that sort of thing, translates quite nicely into an apocalyptic figure like the Antichrist. Lots of the traits used to describe an Antichrist, the antithesis of Christ, come up with Nero because he is to some extent the antithesis of Augustus. We have lots of similar ideas, lots of similar motifs that transfer nicely from the Antichrist to Nero. And when you have a very large selection of people who are converting,

remember Christians were converts in this period. Some may have been born into Christian families, but many were converts from Judaism or from Greco-Roman religion. To have a way, a familiar way, we all know Nero is a tyrant. So to have him then as your analogy for the Antichrist in third, fourth and fifth centuries works very well, it seems, because it was very popular. So how should we think? Let's finish up by just saying, how should we think about Nero now? a lot of time thinking about Nero now so I think think about him a lot no I think Nero now he gets he's very popular in the imagination that's one of the things I find fascinating about him he comes up in the media in political culture in popular culture quite a lot and he tends to be held up as a you know a paradigm of the tyrant, which can be useful, you know, the understanding the way tyranny works, the way that we deconstruct,

you know, the features that we apply to tyrants then and now, and, you know, have continued to do so. But I think with Nero, it's worth, if you really are, you know, interested in just going back to some of the sources, having a read of some of what's said, because often there's nuance in the sources that gets missed, like Tacitus talking about the fire just being a rumour that he started it. Tacitus also talks about the laws that Nero put through or helped the Senate to put through that were very successful, that helped groups of people, that helped, you know, he made, before he even became emperor, he made speeches in the Senate in Greek to try and get, you know, a release from taxation of parts of Greece that had come under natural disasters. So there's more in him than perhaps the stories always tell. And I think it's just, I think no matter what person we're looking at, no matter what historical period,

to try and find out as much as you can and to try and think about characters as grey rather than black and white are useful for historical criticism. Wise words from one of our best historians. Thank you, Shushma Malik. Thank you very much for joining us, everyone. Shushma, that was great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful. And you are also on one of our History Hit podcasts, The Ancient, so please go and check

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