In Our Time - Nero

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life of Nero (37-68 AD) who became Emperor at the age of 16. At first he was largely praised for his generosity yet became known for his debauched lifestyle, with allegations he started the Fire of Rome, watching the flames as he played the lyre. Christians saw him as their persecutor, an anti-Christ, and the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation was thought to indicate Nero. He had confidence in his own artistry, took up acting (which then had a very low status) and, as revolts in the empire grew, killed himself after the Senate condemned him to die as a slave, on a cross. With Maria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College LondonMatthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John’s College, University of OxfordAnd Shushma Malik Lecturer in Classics at the University of RoehamptonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 54 AD, Nero became the ruler of the Roman Empire, age 16. He held power until he was 30, when the Senate declared him a public enemy and called for his death. It was claimed that Nero murdered his mother, his brother and his wife,

set fire to Rome, singing as it burned, and used Christians as human torches. He squandered fortunes on a palace. He married his eunuchs, Sporus and Pythagoras, and he called himself an artist. For early Christians, he became the Antichrist, and ever since he's been a byword for depravity in books and films. Yet during his lifetime, he was surprisingly popular across the empire. With me to discuss the life and reputation of Nero are Matthew Nichols, fellow and senior tutor at St. John's College, University of Oxford. Shushma Malik, lecturer in classics at the University of Roe Hampton, and Maria Weike, Professor of Latin at University College London. Maria, how stable was Rome in Nero's childhood?

Well, we're talking about the first century of the Christian era, the 40s A.D. And from at that point, the Roman Empire is vast. It extends from the west in Spain, up north into Britain, across the Rhine and the Danube, over around Greece down to Syria, and confronting the Parthian Empire. But the control of that empire was highly volatile. It was run by an autocrat in collaboration with the Senate.

Augustus, when he set up the system, called his role that of the preenkeps, which means the first among equals. And you can imagine that very much in quotation marks. And from the point of view of Nero as a child, he would have seen that the issue of the succession between those leaders was extremely disturbing and had a huge effect on him because the role which we would now call that of an emperor,

the role in principle died with each emperor and after one died, another one had to be selected. So Augustus, who set up the system, wanted preferably to keep those roles within his family, the Julio Claudians. And that meant power play and intrigues within that family. It meant marriages and adoptions, but it also meant divorces, banishments, exile and death.

So for Nero, under the second Emperor Tiberius, his grandmother was put in prison, his uncles were there with her and died. Under the third emperor Caligula, his mother was sent into exile for a while. He had to be brought up in Rome without his inheritance with a paternal aunt. Under Claudius, his mother returned, and she gradually managed to enter into that imperial family

by marrying Claudius and by getting her son to be entitled Claudius' son and successor. How did Nero come to power? Well, you could say first of all, mushrooms and second of all, his mother. We'll have to get the mushrooms out of the way first. Yes, we'll get the mushrooms out of the way

because the story goes in the sources that Claudius died after eating a plate of mushrooms and that he had been poisoned by his wife, Agrippina Nero's mother. Now, it's perfectly possible that Claudius was just eating poisonous mushrooms.

He was known to be a glutton. He suffered a lot from stomachaches. It becomes a regular insult, a critique of the imperial family to say that an imperial woman poisoned one of the members, because it's one of the unofficial ways that she can gain power in the family.

And so it is possible that Agrippina poisoned her husband, but how would we ever know that? I think the interesting thing about it is this sense that the stories are exposing to us the way in which she was so involved in organizing Nero's rise to power. So she got him to power, really? Yes, through marrying her uncle, Claudius, through pushing for Nero her son to become his heir,

despite the fact that Claudius already had a son. and then for Claudius to arrange the marriage of Nero to his daughter. So by now Nero was completely entrenched in the family and was able to, there was no doubt that he should succeed when Claudius died prematurely. So without being silly, there was very aggressive and fatal family politics going on all the time. And you've given us just a taste of it because it gets worse. It gets worse than there's a lot of it.

Shusper Malik, how did Nero's early days, how did it compare to the previous rule by Claudius? So Nero started off to some extent by showing that he was going to be more promising than Claudius had been in his later years. Claudius also ruled for quite a long time, 41 to 54, so he had a number of years as emperor as well. but he, particularly towards the end of his reign,

was seen as relying a lot on his wives, so the most recent one of those was Nero's mother, but also his freedmen, so these are members of... Wives, sir? Yes, wives. So before Agrippina, there was another very notorious woman in our literature named Messalina, who is said to have run rings to some extent around Claudius,

including having very public... affairs with a senator in particular, but also committing a number of sexual acts with people far beneath her. So she was quite a notorious woman in her own right, but someone that Claudius was unduly influenced by, according to our sources. So we've had Claudius there. Nero comes up. He's a boy, 17 now when he gets in the saddle, as it were, as the emperor. How does he compare with Claudius? What's good about him that was bad about Claudius or vice versa? What's going on? Nero has some good people around him. Seneca and a Praetorian prefect named Burris in particular.

So Seneca, we know, is a philosopher, a letter writer, a moral essayist. And he was also Nero's speechwriter in those early years. So what did he do? Nero in those first few years, we assured the Senate that he was going to rule in a proper way, that he was going to... Because Claudius had gone away from the Senate and employed three men and his wives and hangers-on of all sorts. He brought the Senate back into the play. Yes, that's one thing.

And he brought the Senate back into play and he also reassured the Praetorian Guard, so the army in Rome, that he was going to pay them properly and give them their due respect through wealth. And he also left to some extent the Senate to run things in Rome for those first few years. So he was able to demonstrate to them that he wasn't going to, for example, reinstate the treason trials where senators would. implicate each other and be put on trial and possibly exile. So he was making sure that the Senate in particular knew that he was going to be a good emperor for them. And you did things for the people, didn't he? You set up new entertainments, chariot racing and games, a vicious and sorts, and he built a massive market.

So the people, as it were, in those few years, four or five years, well, they were precisely there or near the beginning of his, let's call it rain, liked him, as well as the senators feeling. complicated and on side. Yes, precisely. So in 59 AD for example, he threw very spectacular games called the Juvenalia, which were to mark apparently the first shaving of his beard. So he threw spectacular games in the Greek style with lots of entertainment, circus races and events that the people loved. So he started off very well. That's what we're talking about, generally speaking. It's even being thought of later as a rather golden age. a golden time. Would you agree with that, Matthew? Matthew Nichols. There were sources a bit later on who told us that it was said, Trajan, for example, who posterity, I think, regards as the best Roman emperor, is supposed to have said

that Nero surpassed everybody for a quinquenium, a period of five years. And there's a lot to be said about that, for all the reasons that Shishma's given us, he actually won and in fact retained throughout his life quite a lot of popular acclaim, quite a lot of popular appeal to the lower orders at Rome. He never quite lost that. He took measures that was seen in retrospect as positive. I think we have to say also, though, that all of our sources love the idea of decline from early promise. And I think it's not just our Latin writers that do that.

I think we can think in modern terms of presidents and prime ministers who start off with the honeymoon period. We don't like to think in modern terms. I'll stick to what we've got is difficult enough. Well, it's a temptation to see rule as early promise snuffed out and leading on to decline. And I think our sources tend to do that. So they'd like to build up the beginning in order to run down the end a little bit perhaps. So what were the big challenges? He did, let's say, let's give him those five years,

except Britannicus was murdered, the proper son of Claudius, who could be seen as his rival, just a few years younger, and one of the other things were beginning to pestering gone that were on, unseemly, put it mildly. What larger challenges were there to the Emperor of Rome at that time? Nero came to power with a very full intray, and there were circumstances particular to his own times that were a challenge. He was the fifth, and as it turned out, the last of the Julia-Claudean emperors.

So he inherited a system that we've heard about from Maria and Shushma that in some ways is a stable system for transmitting powers, but in other ways has these huge tensions around the succession, around court dynamics and family politics. He had a lot of constituencies he had to appeal to implicate simultaneously. So the senatorial aristocracy, who maybe didn't want him there, thought they could do a better job.

From them, the provincial governors with their dangerous armies, who are his eventual undoing, the common citizenry of Rome with their appetite for games and for spectacle that we've heard, about the provincial citizens. He had to balance all of these interests out. But those whom he fed in the beginning, ate him in the end, didn't they? Yes. People have said in other context, it's like

holding a wolf by the ears. It's very difficult to do forever. And his appeal to the commons in the end undid him with the aristocracy. But by and large, to put this in context, the empire that he inherited, wasn't very different from the empire he left, that being the Baudeca in Britain easily put down, and riot in Judea, one or two other things. But there wasn't any disturbance. it was consolidation of expansion, but it wasn't declined as an empire. Yes, that's right, but that is a challenge,

because the ideology and the logic of the empire early on, on endless expansion, Imperium Sine Fini, and there's no longer conquest, there's no longer booty pouring in to enrich the coffers at Rome. So the consolidation is a challenge of its own sort. So this is a big strain. Where's the money coming from now? Yes, and he has buffer states on his eastern frontier

that he has to deal with as well, the Parthia that we talked about briefly. Is he any good at dealing with the lack of money? No. Well, he takes proactive steps that later come back and bite him, I would say. I think a lot of the criticism after the fire about the palace is because of misguided reconstruction. This is the great fire room after which he built this enormous, enormous palace on two hills or so, never finished, but so on. And he also tried to rebuild Rome, and the economic damage of that fire would have been enormous. We can tell, for example, that the coinage gets to base. There are real economic stresses in the system.

And in trying to tackle those with limited means at his disposal, he incurred a lot of unpopularity. But by and large, the ship of the empire was reasonably steady. And the further he went away from Rome, the more he was liked, as far as what can make out. And people are supposed to just those people in Rome behaving as they always did. Let them get on with it. Is this too flippers summary? Well, if you went east from Rome, people tended to like him. He was Philhele and he liked the Greeks and their games and their culture and their myths.

The Romans in the north didn't like him, the Budacan revolt. But generally, yes, the provincials, he did appear. to. Maria, can we talk about his mother, Agrippina the Younger, who got him there, who supported him there, who gave him good advice there, and whom he had killed? Yes, I think nowadays there's a tendency or a desire to psychoanalyze this particular episode in 59 when he kills, he has his mother killed. And what we look at is a psychopath who finally needs to get rid of his domineering mother supposed to have been so domineering that she even offered herself for sex with her son.

Is there any proof of that incest? No. But was it soundly rumoured or? Well, I think it just fits neatly as the sort of climactic moment of the difficulties in the relationship. And the story goes that he hypocritically invited her to a party by the sea and then even more hypocritically said a good. on goodbye to her when she sailed back to Rome on a ship that had been designed to fall apart

in order to kill her. And that when she survived, he then had to publicly accuse her of treason so that he could then arrange for an executioner to stab her to death. And she was said to have pointed at her belly and say, stab me there where the monster had been nurtured. First stab me in the womb. Yes. And so that is the story of the, of the birth of a monster who who kills the home that he was made in, if you like. But clearly there was a political dimension to the death of his mother, and it may well be that he had been advised by others and by her political enemies to have her killed at this point.

Why was she dangerous for him? And why did he think she was dangerous for him? Well, there's plenty of really clear evidence that she had the most extraordinary political role at the beginning of his reign, not just in getting him there, but even after the very beginning of his power. so that we see the most extraordinary coins where she is presented as facing him, mother and son, celebrating the beginning of his reign. Nothing like that had ever been done before.

We're told that the watchword that he used with the Praetorian Guard when he first became emperor was Optima Marta, the best of mothers. And so you get a sense that she did have what was then a hugely transgressive ambition. to exercise political power in Rome in ways that were unofficial. So we then sense that Nero may well have been happy to let others rule on his behalf, first his mother, then his other advisors.

But there were respects in which he wanted, as he was getting older, control over himself. And that meant when he fell in love with a freedwoman, Acte, he wanted to have a relationship with her. When he later fell in love with a noble Roman Poppaea, he wanted to have that relationship and get rid of his wife. Whereas Agrippina would have seen that as unacceptable. Sorry, Agrippina would have seen that as destroying the dynasty that she was trying to establish.

Well, while we down among the women, there was Octavia, his first wife, who was very well connected, whom he caused to, as it were, caused to be murdered by assassins. Or she took her own life as assassins were approaching her. That's what he says. Yes, she was banished first. Yes, and then the person he wanted to get rid of a four Poppeia went up going, and then he's supposed to have kicked it to death. What do we say about that?

Well, I think it's very interesting that some of the writers who now are looking to, I suppose, whitewash Nero to a degree, say there were political reasons for getting rid of his mother. But it's nonetheless the case, or at least the sources tell us, that he kicked his pregnant wife to death and killed, therefore, his unborn child. so he may not have been a psychopathic tyrant, but he was certainly a murderous wife abuser. I think we can have both of those. Shushma, Nero was blamed for what he did to the Christians

after the Great Fire in 64 AD, and he was accused of starting the fire. So can you unravel that, please? Yes, so in our sources, we have three main sources for Nero's life that are historical evidence. So Tacitus writing late 1st century, early 2nd century AD, Suetonius around the same sort of time, early 2nd century AD, and then Cassius Dio, who's writing sort of more towards the late 2nd century, perhaps early 3rd century. And in Suetonius and Cassius Dio, they are certain that Nero set the fire,

This wasn't just a rumor, but he actually set fire to Rome because he had designs on redesigning the city. He wanted to build his famous golden house and he wanted to reform Rome in his own way. Rome at that time was sort of almost a conglomeration of shacks, wasn't it, a little side street, built of wood, very shabby. Exactly. Nods all around the time.

That's the general idea. So I wanted to get rid of it. And the artist in him wanted to rebuild the whole thing. Precisely. But Tacitus, who is the source who says it was a rumour that Nero set fire to Rome, that it seems ridiculous that he would actually have done it, says that in rebuilding it he made Rome much, much better. So he used better materials, wider streets,

so that the fire can spread as easily. So one thing, is it rumour that he set fire to Rome? Because there's a lot of anecdotes, rumours, schoteneas liked a good story, breezed through, and so on. So it's rumour that he set fire to Rome. Yeah, according to... Nobody knows if the match was lit. Precisely.

Well, I mean, Nero himself was at Antium at the time. So no matter what, he did not like the match himself. But whether or not he sent the guard or some representatives to do it. But that was his merit to get other people to do the dirty work all the time, didn't it, really? Yes, that's what, and as Maria said with his mother and others, well, perhaps Poppe is the exception there. But there was that aspect to it. but Tacitus, who, to some extent, is one of our more reliable ancient sources, does say these are rumours.

And in order to avoid the rumours, that's where the Christians come in. Why did he turn on the Christians? Tastas says that they were a group in Rome, a small group in Rome, who were disliked generally by the mass population. So the people in Rome didn't really understand what Christian worship or Christianity as a group was. and because they were superstitious, according to Tacitus, he calls them a pernicious superstition, they made an easy target, one that the people would accept. And so they were good to blame.

And he blamed them. Can you give the list of some of the details of how he took revenge on these people who may or may not have had anything to do with the fire? It's likely not, isn't it? Yeah, I would have thought not. His revenge was flamboyant and theatrical and spectacularly horrid, as many of his deeds were, and we're told that he crucified them, he had wild beasts attack them, he lit them up as flaming torches to light up his gardens in the night,

and he invited people to come and look at this as a spectacle. Now there's some precedent for this in arena games and the punishment of criminals. It's not totally an invention of Nero's, if this is what he did. But Tacitus does tell us that even though in his Tacitus's view, the Christians were an awful sect who deserved to be persecuted, nonetheless, there was sympathy for them because Nero went, he overstepped the mark, he went too far with it. and he seemed to enjoy it, we're told. Yes, and he enjoyed a lot of other...

I mean, enjoy seeing people burn, taking people around and say, look at that one, taking longer than that one. Yes, he took a vicious delight in it, it seems. Yes, yes. Do we have any knowledge, do you have any real information about what other people in Rome thought about the Christians being thus abused? At this state, this is one of the very earliest testimonies we have a persecution of Christians, just a little bit later. We have letters from a baffled provincial governor to a later emperor saying, what shall I do with the Christians? and they have a little exchange of correspondence about, you have to punish him if they really, really won't give up their faith.

But this is very early in the story of Rome's interactions with the Christians. They're more used to persecuting Jews at this date. To come back to the sort of mad fringe of his behaviour, is there any evidence that he did sing while Rome burned or fiddled or sang or something? Well, fiddled is probably a 17th century invention, no fiddles in ancient Rome. What he would have done if he performed was to play the liar, and we know that he did do that.

This is one of his great passions in life, was putting on Kitheroad's costume, a liar-singer's costume, and singing tales from myth. He was reasonably good at it. He took his training very seriously, so it fits with his character. Two of our sources,

the two that Shushma mentioned, who said he set fire to Rome, also tell us as a matter of absolute fact he put on this costume and performed as Rome was in flames. It does fit with his character. I think he might have quoted a bit of Homer maybe. Other Romans did that.

Scipio did that, the great Roman at the sack of Carthage, quoted Homer in pity about a city in flames. So perhaps he made a remark that was interpreted in poor taste at the time and later turned into this myth of him performing and singing rather than taking action. But we know he did take action, as we were told a minute ago. His anti-fire measures and his reconstruction measures were actually quite positive, and it's later on that the story of him setting the fire and reveling in it came to be told.

Let's attack those sources again, please, Maria. Let's take the two main ones, are Suetonius and Tacitus, the others a little bit later, and those two very near the time, therefore very available to gossip and chat at the time and proper stories handed on and to monuments of the time, coinies and all the rest of it. You've got Chetonius and Tustis. Now, would you distinguish between them and tell them

and tell the listeners which one you rely on more? There we go. Well, I think there are this very different styles of telling accounts about Rome and Swaytonius is much more interested in sort of morality, anecdotes, events in the life of the emperor. it's a kind of biography, whereas Tacitus is interested more in the sort of systematic history of the government of Rome and the consequences to the damage that was done to the original Republican system by the efforts of the various emperors,

one more depraved than the next. And these sorts of stories, I think you mentioned them right at the start, these stories of parricide, fractricide, matricide, killing of several wives, sexual depravity, spendthriftness. I think the couple of things that we missed there were, particularly, for example, on this concerned Tacitus, is that he did not seem, Nera did not seem so interested in government

and did not seem interested in the army. Now, those are crucial ways of having authority and exercising control in the Roman state. And instead, he was interested in theatre. Now, that is to completely behave against the way that a leader of the Roman state should behave. And so those anecdotes become a way of criticizing the direction of travel of Roman history, the sense that not just Nero's reign is declining, but the whole of Rome is heading for disaster because of these kinds of behaviours.

And sorry? And you took a year after a go to... agrees to act in plays with his company to act in these competitions. Surprisingly he won every one of them, I'm told. He did, yes. And you can see that some of the most interesting information about

him on the, I suppose, the more pleasurable and creative side is about the extent to which he turned out to be rather a good charioteer and could ride ten horses at a time, which is apparently quite a difficult thing to do, that his voice was actually

quite reasonable that his poetry was not too bad, but of course, yes, he did win every victory in Greece. And the point partly of those stories in writers like Suetonis and Tacitus is to say these are activities of an artist, not the activities of an emperor. When he came back from his Greek tour, he engaged in a sort of pretend triumph, so a perversion of this military heroic return, which is maybe the third time he'd done that. There was another one after the death of his mother. So this inversion of great public norms

is something that he seems to revel in and later authors really detest him for. Well, we can also see some of the things that he did do, material things, this enormous palace built on two hills, this golden room with revolving tables and perfumes coming in from the walls and all that sort of thing as being obvious, given that things were a bit difficult economically,

ridiculous extravagance. Well, maybe it was not a bit of ridiculous development. tell me. Can we redeem the golden house? It's too big, it's too extravagant, it's made at the wrong time when Rome is reeling from the after effects of fire, and Nero gets too greedy for a resource to complete it, and that I think

contributes to his downfall. But can we recover any kind of practical purpose in this? I don't think it was necessarily a palace that shut the rest of Rome out. I mean, there was some reaction at the time. There's a famous Pasquenard, the Suetonius quotes, about runaway fellow citizens to Vey, because the palace is gobbling up the whole city. So there was some

resentment at the time. But I think there was also perhaps an intention to make this the equivalent of a rich man's country villa in the heart of the city and maybe for quite a share of Rem's population to partake in the banquets and the sports and the kind of glens and lakes and pleasure grounds of it all. Maria, I've talked or mentioned or you have some popular support still, particularly on the

eastern side of the empire. Can you just say this. a bit more about that. He seems to be doing, well, he is obviously doing. You all seem to be really agreed that he did most of the monstrous things he's accused of doing or asking other people to do them for him. No dissent? Okay, we can move on. And then, so, but the popular support seems to be quite steady. Am I, is that right? Well, I think there's clearly particular areas in which there is support for him, despite the fact that at his end of his reign, senators are saying that with his removal, there's a return to liberty.

So one key area of support is what the senatorial sources would describe, the pleasure of the plebsordida, the squalid masses, who in the course of his reign gained a great deal from the entertainments that he provided. In some of those entertainments, they were supposed to have been showered with vouchers to obtain luxury gifts afterwards that included jewelry and horses. So he provided for the people of Rome, but that is not something that is regarded as a positive step within the context of the sources.

I don't quite understand that remark. Why is it not a positive sector in the context of the sources? Well, because the sources would say this is about entertainment. It's about theatre. But why is entertainment not positive? Because it's about a lack of order and control over the rest of the state. It's about the fact that as time goes by, Nero actually finally performs himself on the stage in Rome.

And this is catastrophic for the senatorial perspective because to act on the stage is to debase yourself. It's the equivalent of being a prostitute, isn't it? Yes. Yes, exactly. But going back to your question about popular support, you can see another whole area region where he was supported was in the east.

You mentioned that his travels in Greece, he declares that Greece has been liberated in this case it would seem from having to pay taxes to Rome and there is coinage that celebrates him as a new sun shining on the Greeks and the extent to which you can see there is some support for him particularly in the in parts of Rome and in the East is that after he dies, flowers are still placed on his grave. There are cult statues carried around of him

and particularly I think what interests people is the fact that a number of false Neroes emerge in the East who are described as coming back, garnering support, which suggests that his name was something that could be used to attract people to you. Was it in Greece that he married his two eunuchs, Sporus and Pythagoras, one is the husband, the other is the wife, is that right? Did it happen now? Well, his ceremony with Sporus was definitely Greek in style,

and that particular story about the two stories of his men, marriages to his freedmen, one in which he played the husband and the other in which he played the wife, are clearly stories that can be used by the sources to demonstrate quite how appalling an emperor he was. Because if we take the case of Sporos, for example, we're told that he comes across a young freedman who looks a lot like his beloved wife, Poppaea, that he had killed, kicked to death. And he castrates the young man. and ceremoniously marries him. He then organizes for the eunuch to travel round Greece with him,

dressed in the clothes of an empress. Now, that story tells us that Nair is not a proper man because he is playing at marriage. The ceremony was supposed to have included prayers for children. He's completely subverting the whole need for reproduction in the Roman... values of marriage. And perhaps the worst thing of all is it's also Greek

because from the Roman perspective that is not a good thing. And it's theatre, it's all a drama, it's all dressing up, it's not the real behaviour of a proper man. It's performative and flamboyance and whenever he's playing a tragic herion on the stage, his mask is a mask of Popper.

It's all very strange and seems connected to guilt and grief over his wife's death, but also performing it and reminding people about it. Shushma, what brought him? him down. I mean, said enough to bring anybody down. Was there any particular piece of straw that broke the Senate's back? So there were a few events, I think, that we can kind of pull together to make a few different straws. The first would be 65 AD, so three years before his eventual downfall, but when there was a conspiracy in Rome to bring him down, this is known as the Piso

conspiracy. And this wasn't a conspiracy to restore the Republic or anything like that. In fact, it's named for Piso because he was envisaged to be the successor to Nero. There was talk that he would marry Claudius's eldest daughter, Antonia, to give him some legitimacy in a Julia Claudian context. But this was a conspiracy throughout Tastas tells us all sections of society. So it did include senators but also Friedman. There's a woman involved, at least one. He tells us about if not more. And they all had their different reasons for wanting, Nero.

So how did it fail? So one of the conspirators was given away by his freedman. So Friedman gave, who would have been working in his house, heard about the conspiracy and told Nero's Vittorian Guard. And so he got away with that. as it were. Yes. So I'm asking what nailed him.

That didn't. Right. Okay. So after the conspiracy, started to show weaknesses, I think, in the rain. As you said, he went off to Greece in 66

and returned in 68. And then in 68, shortly before he returned to Rome, there was a revolt in Gaul. So the person in charge of the army there, Vindex, was put, his troops wanted him to be the successor. So the Vindex Revolt was the beginning of the end.

That was the beginning of the end. In what way? What was the end? Did the Senate say you, this is it, you have to go now and you must go into the arena and be beaten to death? Was that the idea? Not quite. So the thing always was is there needed to be a credible alternative, I think. And when the downfall eventually did happen, the credible alternative. was the governor in Spain named Galba. So that's when the Senate felt that they had the authority of the army behind them in order to declare Nero a public enemy.

To be a public enemy meant that he could be killed in what was called the old style, which meant he could be stripped naked and beaten with rods if he were found. So Nero fled. Nero fled. Matthew, can you tell us about his end? Was that performative as well? Yes, and also the accounts, have of it are almost self-consciously theatrical.

I feel they're almost like film noir. He wakes up in a deserted palace. He flees to a suburban villa. He has to tunnel his way in. It's dark. His horse is startled by a corpse in the road. There are shouts and cries in the background. It's really gripping, staggy writing. If you step back from it for just a moment and you realize he's fled with four

low-ranking attendance to this deserted villa, where does the story come from, actually? How reliable can it be? Svaternius and I both tell it. They probably got it from a contemporary source called Cluvius Rufus. but he's lost. So a little pinch of salt. But if we enjoy relish that story a bit further, he makes these mordant, stagy remarks as he's dying. This is Nero's distilled water. He says he drinks from a stagnant pool. And famously, Qualis Artifex Perio, what an artist I am in my

death or what an artist dies with me or maybe I'm dying like a tradesman. Lots of different ways of passing that phrase. But it's the sort of thing, even if he didn't say it, he should have said it, I think. it sums up his performative, stagy, drama-obsessed, self-dramatizing approach to the last years of his reign. And he quotes Homer also, you know, his literature is there. But the actual death of Nero was by Nero? Yes, he asks for help from his freedman, and he eventually summons up the courage and runs a blade into himself, and then a military officer turns up just as he's dying, and Nero says you're late. So there's a kind of little bit of sarcasm as he dies as well.

But yes, he manages to contrive for his own end. in this rather ignominious way as the hoofbeats thunder outside. How did his reputation become so negative so soon enough for his death? Well, because you find that at the end of 69, we're starting a completely new dynasty, a completely new approach to the government of empire. And the new dynasty, the Flavians, they have nothing to do with the Julia Claudians

and every reason to present their authority, their justification for having taken over as a contrast to what has gone before. So again you're suggesting that Nero's name is blackened in order to keep their reputation white. Absolutely, yes. And that happens very quickly in the whole literature. How much do you go along with that? That he was blackened. Well, I think that from what we've been discussing today,

it's quite clear that he wasn't exactly a pure angel and that there are all sorts of respects in which she was a deeply disturbing, deeply disturbed figure. And therefore they had plenty of material to work with. I think that's the best way of putting it. Shushma, how did you become such a defining character for the Christians, such an Antichrist in the Book of Revelations, for instance? So the thing that we've not mentioned so far is that during Nero's reign, we also had, of course, that generation after the crucifixion of Christ,

which would have happened in the 30s A.D. So St Peter and St. Paul were thought to have been in Neronian Rome at some point, both of them dying during the Neronian period. So the Christian stories go that Peter was crucified during that persecution after the fire. Paul, because he was a Roman citizen, was beheaded perhaps a few years later for an unrelated reason, but for causing disturbances. So that became a very powerful part of the Christian story, of course, because these are two extremely important apostolic figures.

But also during this period, it was thought in antiquity that John was writing revelation, so this period, or perhaps shortly after, maybe in the decades following Nero's reign. So when we get to the start of, of Christians writing extremely prolifically in about the third century AD and the first text that are commentaries on what the apostles have wrote, they say, well, when John talks of the first beast in Revelation, clearly that's Nero.

When St. Paul talks about the man of lawlessness in his letter to the Thessalonians, clearly that's Nero. So Nero then gets cast onto this idea of an Antichrist figure. Recently, Matthew, there's been recently in the last 20 or so years, there's been strong attempts to revise this general viewer that's been put out on this programme so far about Nero.

What are the main points of it and what do you make of it? I think reading our sources with care, reading against the grain, as we might say, looking to escape from the kind of biographical prison that all of these sources want us to look at Nero through and to look instead structurally and systematically at the geopolitics of the Roman Empire, the dynastic politics, the economy of the Roman Empire.

If we zoom out from Nero a bit, we start to see that perhaps he was a prisoner of his times in some way, a prisoner of circumstance, and he was very, very young. I mean, he came to power in his teens. He doesn't really excuse it. If the monstrosities are correct, it doesn't excuse it. Of course not, but what it means is that all of his achievements were cut short too,

and we can't say, we can't put much positive in the balance against the crimes and the outrages, because he didn't achieve much in the years that he had. I don't know that we need to rehabilitate him fully. I don't know we need to claim he was a good man or a good thing for Rome, but I think we can do what we've been doing in this programme, and look critically and carefully at how our sources are shaping our picture of Nero, at least, and try and find in him some rationale, actually, some choice,

some positive choice of the way he behaved. And he chose a flamboyant, stagy, popular style of rule that later was very deeply out of fashion, but at the time did have some favour. It found some fans in his lifetime and straight after his death. Two of the four successors that dropped it for power in the year after his death styled themselves very closely after Nero, presumably trying to appeal to somebody. Maria, what do you make of the arguments in his favour

or to mitigate the damaging reputation he has? Those arguments over the last 25 years? I think one just has to be careful about how one approaches them because you can find writers, as I was mentioning earlier, talking about how he was no megalomaniac, he was no tyrant, but then trying systematically to diminish some of the clearly disturbing things that he did, burning Christians, kicking his life to death, these are not things that one should just wash away.

So I think we need to be careful about the kind of balancing of those issues and stepping back and looking at emperors within the broader, a context of what was going on in that world, makes it a little bit, perhaps a little fairer judgment on what actually happened. And Shishma, what's your view of the attempt to restore or to change or to whitewash or cleanse Nero? I think when you pick out some of the things that Nero did,

they sound horrific and yes, they were, but they have to be understood in the context of the games in terms of how he decided to punish Christians or in terms of his golden house, there are precedents for bigger and better palaces coming up under the Giulio Claudians anyway. And one of the things that the emperors would have thought a lot about and emperors did afterwards as well

is how to outdo your predecessor. And to some extent, some of the more flamboyant things that Nero did that we perhaps sometimes look at out of context, do you need to be understood in this context. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Shushma Malik. and Matthew Nichols. Next week, it's the anti-gatholic Gordon riots of 1780,

said to be the closest Britain came to a revolution and an inspiration to the French. Well, thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out that you'd like to have spoken about? There's something I'd like to mention, I think, because I think we can't really avoid Peter Eustanoff.

Or at least I can't avoid Peter Eustonoff. And this is because one of the aspects of, you know, one of the key things that has influenced our view of Nero over the years until we've started to try and revisit him is that he was turned into a kind of satanic demonic figure by the early church. That story of Nero as Antichrist was picked up in a hugely successful 19th century novel by the Polish Nobel laureate Henry Schenkevitz. and he constructs Nero as a kind of Antichrist figure. Peter is leaving Rome. He has a visitation from Christ. On the basis of that, he turns round and goes back to Rome to protect the flock from the Antichrist.

Now, for me, that novel has been hugely important. You can go now to the Via Appia. You can stand in front of the church built where Christ visited Peter. I'm an ex-Catholic. These things are big issues. You can go to the Vatican. This is supposed to be where Peter's buried,

even though there's no historical evidence for his martyrdom there. But it's a short step from that story that used to be a book given to Catholic children on their confirmation throughout the 20th century. It's a short step from that to the Hollywood Cold War blockbuster in which you find Peter Eustinoff playing his liar singing, O'Lambent Flame,

when a kind of glass-modal version of, Rome is being burnt. And I think that kind of dissemination of that kind of Christian version of Nero has been so strong that partly the scholarly approach now is a reaction to that. And there's such vivid and powerful images, aren't they? And it's quite hard to step back from them or unthink them. If we're thinking about portrayals of Nero, another thing that we might mention is his coin portraiture. I find that very interesting. So all his statues will pull down, his memory was condemned after his death. But we do have coins with him on. and if very broadly the story of Nero

is an arc of decline from promising young prince to corrupt and dissipate a tyrant. His coin portraits also show him kind of young and angular and promising and getting fat and jowling kind of Elvis-like as his reign declines. And it's very tempting just to read this biographically and say, well the money was making a portrait

in Nero is getting fat and dissipated so his coin shown fat and dissipated. But that can't be quite right. That can't be the whole story because of course Nero controlled his imperial image very closely. There must be some of the same. some sort of Henry VIII like appeal to solidity and royal splendor going on there that

to us just looks misplaced but he must have thought he was doing something positive. And that's quite a nice analogue for his whole self-presentation, I think. It just strikes for us the wrong note, for his immediate successes it strikes the wrong note. But he thought he was doing something clever there. Covardis was the first film I saw which had an interval. Went with my mother. I probably need it. I got an ice cream in the middle as well. And could I just say?

that at the time that the film was originally released, it was possible to go to the department stores and buy versions of Nero shorts in eight fiery colours. I've never found them. I really wanted to. The only thing, Pete Hustanov, yes, but I can't imagine him controlling ten horses from a chariot, for all these many skills.

I'm being frivolous, let's move on. What did we leave out? Well, on Kroyovadis, the Pete Yusinoff character is, I mean, it's just such a perfect representation to some extent of Nero for that time. But I always found it quite different from the Nero of the novel, in which the Polish author used the words Beast frequently, Antichrist and Beast frequently, referring back to Revelation

and using very close imagery to that book. In the film, it's a wonderful film, but he's a different sort of Nero, I think, in Peter Eustinov's version of Nero to the one that is in the novel which draws actually very closely on a predecessor called Darkness and Dawn or Scenes from the Days of Nero which was written in 1891

by Frederick William Farrer who was very high up in the Anglican church so just Maria's point about the Christian reception is a really, really good one but one thing I wanted to bring up was, again, with Matthew's material evidence, there's a wonderful graffito in Pompeii from the Noronian period

when we're talking about whether Nero really was a matricide or really did do all of these things. There's clearly people during his own time thought he did do these things because there's a graffito that says, Mr. Poison is Nero's financial secretary. So when he's running out, where did he get his money from?

when he's running out of money, he will use poison to kill particular senatorial, we think, families, or that sort of thing, to claim their money for the imperial or treasury. And the fact that that's memorialised in a graffito, I think, demonstrates that the rumours may be not spread through the empire, but certainly the fashionable day of Naples. They got there early, so we're not dealing with generations after Nero, but people who were alive in his lifetime. Temporary, yeah. I'd like to explore the Christian thing a bit more. I mean, how cohesive, how recognisably Christian.

Did he burn them because they were Christians or because they were a community creating that could easily be picked on? Well, I suppose one way of thinking about it is that the church wants to present him in the early period as the first persecutor of the faith. But the impression you get was

that they were just chosen as a community suspect for Romans themselves. as an opportunity to find a way out of the problem of the, you know, who had burnt Rome. And of course, they're tortured, they're torched because that is the punishment you give to arsonists. So it all rather bizarrely and horribly, you know, fits together. But I think the mistake is to think that there's this large community that they are martyred for faith, that it happens in the Coliseum. I mean, none of that is the case. I mean, the Coliseum wasn't built at the time, it was near his lake.

So there's some attempt made sometimes to link the sites of the martyrdoms to particular temples or gods who had been effaced in the fire and to make it all the very kind of programmatic set of executions. What do you three of your think about the fire finally? Do you think he did it? No. I don't think he set fire to Rome. His own palace, the Domus Transitoria, burned down.

Yes, exactly. And the immediate stuff he did in the aftermath was really positive, and it's a bit later on that the rumours of him starting it seemed to ossify and become taken as fact. And there are lots of fires frequently in Rome. What's different about this one is that it's more destructive, lasts longer. And that's the problem. It's the middle of the summer.

It's three nights after the full moon, so it was a bad night for us in any way. It would be creeping about in the streets. There'd be plenty of people would see you. But there's also a strand of quixing. literature that takes ownership for the Christians setting the fire that says, yes, the small community of Christians in Rome did do it because this was an apocalyptic time, because this was when the period when St Paul said the apocalypse would come about. So this is an apocalyptic event. This is what they were starting to, trying to start by setting the fire. That's a small strand

of literature. I would be clear, but there is one there. Our producer is aching in the slips. Simon. Not really. To your coffee. A cup of tea. Tea, coffee. Coffee, be lovely. Thank you. Tea, coffee, please. Thank you. Let's love it. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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