The Rest Is History - 56. Nero

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

He remains one of the great characters in all history. But was he depraved, corrupt and evil? Or an artist much maligned by elitist historians? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss Nero. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello. In today's podcast, we're talking about a man who saw himself as an artist, but has gone down as one of the great monsters in history. A politician, a populist, and a performer. But enough of Tom Holland. Let's talk about... Oh, Dominic, so predictable. Yeah, but so satisfying.

Yeah, so satisfying yeah so satisfying i suppose i mean what you have a nero is you yeah i mean the man who played nero for me most compellingly was christopher biggins and i think he would do a brilliant tom holland well i'm a bit thinner than christopher biggins you are you are you'd have to lose a bit of weight anyway um so tom nero i mean this is a gift to you. This is one of the great characters. Yeah, I'm really grateful to you for allowing us to do this. In all history. I mean, he really is one of the absolute emblematic characters.

Children have heard of Nero. He is the paradigmatic, sort of depraved, corrupt, evil Roman emperor. He is, you know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And yet, to me, what's fascinating about him, i don't know how far you go along with this is that he like all characters in history has now been revised and now historians say well maybe nero has been introduced by the sources maybe nero is actually a jolly good fellow who's been maligned by suetonius and tacitus and these other sort of snobby you know elit elitist historians. What do you think? Well, I've actually just come back from looking at a new exhibition

that's opening at the British Museum on Nero. And it's very good, all kinds of fantastic stuff, wonderful detail, beautifully laid out, highly recommended. But you're right, the theme of it is essentially that Nero wasn't as bad as people made him out to be. And I guess the argument for Nero not having been as bad as people say is that you've got to look at the people who wrote about him. And there were basically two groups of people who wrote about him. group were senators, elite members of the upper classes, who Nero pretty systematically trampled on an awful lot of what they held sacred. And so in a sense, it was inevitable that they were not

going to like him. They're sort of Remainers writing the life of Boris Johnson. Is that basically what the story is? Yeah, it's the New York Times on Trump. Right. Yeah. the story is yeah it's it's the new york times on trump right yeah um we don't have the equivalent of fox news would yeah would perhaps be the the analogy um and the other group of people of course are christians um right nero is the beast but they must be writing much much later i suppose are they well the book of revelation which portrays nero as one of the two beasts um and and essentially the the portrait that the book of revelation gives of rome as the whore of babylon as this great sump of depravity and wealth and horror um that's a portrayal of nero's rome and it's because nero uh puts to death

large numbers of christians after the fire and accuses them of having started this Great Fire of London. Great Fire of London? What am I saying? Great Fire of Rain. That's surely beyond even Nero's powers. Of course, that was the French, wasn't it? Yeah, of course. All right.

Well, I think you should give us a sort of two-minute overview of Nero's life and reign for those people who are not as familiar with the early days of the Roman Empire as you are. So he's what, the fourth emperor? Is he? He's the fifth emperor. Fifth emperor. So we've had Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. Yeah, Nero is the great, great grandson of Augustus, the first emperor who's planted an autocracy amid the rubble of what had been Rome's traditional republican

system. So Nero's line of descent from Augustus is absolutely crucial to his status. He has the blood of a god because Augustus has been deified in his veins. He has been adopted by Claudius, the previous emperor, as his son. And in Rome, to be adopted essentially means you you become his son claudius has married nero's mother who is also his niece because claudius is not descended from augustus agrippina his niece and wife is and so that's that's the kind of crucial channel nero comes to power at the age of 16. He's very much under the thumb of his mother, Agrippina, and of his tutor, Seneca, high-ranking intellectual,

but also incredibly wealthy and influential. He's a Stoic, isn't he? He's a Stoic, yes. So for the first years of his period in power, Nero is under their thumb and people kind of look back on this as being a period where he ruled quite well. But increasingly, he gets fed up with Seneca, but also particularly with his mother. And he ends up doing what any pissed off teenager would do with his mother. He ends up having her murdered. As you would and from that point on um essentially uh nero takes i mean literally takes the stage he uses um rome and

the roman empire as a kind of stage for his incredibly um potent uh alarming, menacing, artistic temperament. But he also literally takes to the stage. I wish the listeners could see this because you're sort of writhing with enthusiasm. With excitement and enthusiasm. Well, I really think he's astonishing because he clearly does have this kind of incredible artistic sensibility. And because he has all these incredible resources, he's able to make it manifest in a way that probably no one else in the entire history of art has ever managed to do. He reminds me, is it James Franco, that American sort of actor, director who makes terrible films and is always really being indulged by the sort of new york critics and stuff isn't he a bit like that no because i think he's i think he's actually quite good and he's also he's he's not he's not he's not a kind of um art house he's

right hugely populist and that's precisely why he kind of gets resented by the elite he's tom cruise well dominic you'd like him i mean he him. I mean, he's against the sneery metropolitan Remainer elites. And he's one for the people. Right. He's like you. Is he? Yeah. I never thought of myself as like Nero.

I always thought of myself as Trajan. So essentially, so just to continue very quickly through the run of his life. Yeah. He is essentially very popular with the masses, very unpopular with the elites. Things are snarled up for him in AD 64 when about, well, two thirds of Rome gets incinerated in a fire. Nero deals with this quite effectively. Lots of poor relief. He puts people

up in shanty towns, in public places, starts a huge rebuilding program, rebuilds much of Rome in a much better way, but aggressively appropriates quite a large chunk of it for his own estate, what comes to be called the Golden House. Also commissions

a giant statue of the sun, which will go up and give its name to the Colosseum in due course. He then goes on a tour of Greece. While he's in Greece, news comes through that conspirators are moving against him. He comes back. Conspirators move. Everything falls to pieces he flees Rome takes refuge in an out of town villa

the Senate proclaim him a public enemy he commits suicide when he hears the horse beats of coming to arrest him commits suicide his reputation is blackened by subsequent generations but But there are very

clearly traditions as well, which commemorate him in a much more positive light. And because basically, it's the it's the senatorial elite, and then the Christians who write the history. It's the it's the black reputation that wins out. Wow. Okay. So that's a great overview. Let me rewind right to the beginning, the thing that slightly puzzles me about this story. So Nero is 16. He's never wielded political authority. He hasn't been in the army. He's not a soldier. The Republic is not that long ago. And Rome has had, obviously, Augustus, who was the sort of autocrat who created the Roman Empire.

It had Tiberius, who'd been a commander. And then it had Curigula, who was a disaster. Claudius, you know, not much of an anything. Why is it that the idea of the sort of next person in line in the family taking power, how has that become so ingrained so quickly that the Senate and all the military commanders and all these other people just automatically think, oh yeah, well, Nero will make a great emperor, let's have him. I mean, why doesn't somebody more experienced or more powerful

take over instead of Nero when Claudius dies? Because Nero has the blood of Augustus in his veins. And there is a sense that an heir of Augustus should rule. And one of the things that complicates this is that Claudius is actually a usurper. So when Caligula gets murdered, and Caligula is descended from Augustus, so in that sense, he's seen as legitimate. There is actually a move on the part of the Senate to get rid of the principate, the rule by the princeps, the first man, or perhaps to appoint someone as emperor who is not descended from Augustus. But Claudius, who has been brought up in the Augustan house,

he is the grandson of Livia, who has married to Augustus and who viewers of I, Claudius will remember is kind of cast as the murderous matriarch. So Claudius kind of rushes off and grabs the Praetorian guard, who are kind of the military presence in Rome. Praetorian Guard, who are the kind of the military presence in Rome. He basically bribes them to support him. And then there's nothing that the Senate can do.

And the people want an emperor, but essentially because the emperor guarantees them bread and circuses. Right. The famous comment by Juvenal writing a few decades later. But essentially, it does sum it up. The role of the emperor is to ensure that this vast, teeming city of a million people gets fed. And they're able to do that because they have control of Egypt, the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world and of North Africa. And Claudius and then Nero build a massive deep sea

port in the mouth of the Tiber at Ostia. And they build huge granaries that line the 16 miles of the river Tiber from Ostia up to central Rome. And they essentially ensure that people don't starve. And that's the basis of the Praetorians, the bread ration, and then the ability of emperors to entertain the masses as well. And there are huge numbers of entertainments. Yeah. All of these things mean that, you know, the rule of the Caesars is vastly more popular than having a load of, you know, virtue signaling senators doing it.

Okay. But so has Nero been trained for this? I mean, has he, 16 years old, has anybody? So he's not Claudius. Claudius has a son, Britannicus, right? Now, how can Britannicus, I know Britannicus is younger, but how come people don't say, well, Britannicus is obviously, you know, he may be younger, but he's, is it because Nero's mum, and here I may be either betraying my own sort of prejudice or the influence of the

sources, is it because Nero's mum Agrippina is this sort of Lady Macbeth figure who has prepared the ground for her son or is it that just Nero is older or more talented or Agrippina is the daughter of Germanicus who is the kind of the the great lost hero the great lost idol of the Roman people a a dashing general who dies early in the reign of Tiberius. And it's widely thought that he's been murdered. And he's commemorated as the kind of, you know, the sweetheart of the Roman masses, this man of great charisma and potential.

Agrippina is his daughter. She's Caligula's sister. Caligula's sister, yeah. And she's been exiled by Caligula for being part of a conspiracy against him, gets brought back under Claudius who marries her. Because she has this blood relationship to Germanicus, she's cherished by the Roman people, but she's also more saliently cherished by the Roman army, by the military. And so that makes her a very potent player in her own right. Women are not supposed to exercise political power in Rome, but Agrippina is a significant player. And she is able to provide Claudius, who is quite elderly, because her son is that much older than Britannicus, Claudius' son by a previous wife, Nero essentially kind of provides a guarantee

that if Claudius dies, there'll be someone old enough to step into his shoes. But isn't Claudius smart enough to see that that poses a threat to his own son? I mean, you would think that would occur to him. Well, that's very much the sense you get from my Claudius. But I think that, you know, Claudius adopts Nero, and so Nero therefore becomes his son.

And I think... Yeah, strange. Yeah, I mean, it does seem strange, but Claudius is anxious to establish the succession. And that's why he's married Agrippina. Now, the brilliant thing about the way that this gets presented is that subsequent historians of whom Suetonius, the biographer, is by far the biggest bitch. So he reports that Nero was always going to turn out bad,

both because Agrippina is a kind of terrible shrew and harridan. She's a woman who wants to exercise power. So of course she's monstrous. I mean, what could be more appalling than that? But also because Nero's father, who is a descendant of the Henobarbi, kind of ancient family,

is absolutely an appalling man. And Suetonius says of him that he's a man detestable in every way it was possible to be detestable so it's very good at this sort of stuff so in modern terms according to satonius nero's father basically kind of kills a waiter during a bullingdon club style drinking game we've all done that he knocks down a child while driving a sports car okay that's bad um he is um he maims a businessman in a pub brawl he defrauds a bank he cheats a sports star and then as minister of sport he legislates against cheating sports stars so that's what he would be in a kind of modern modern situation so he's seen as a kind of monstrous appalling person yeah um how far back you know to what extent this is kind of backdated because people want to blacken Nero's reputation, we don't really know.

But there is a sense that the Ahenobabi, the family that Nero is descended from, are seen as kind of arrogant and aggressive. And that then fuses with Agrippina's perceived kind of virago-esque qualities means that people are able to cast Nero as someone who was kind of rotten right from the beginning. Let me just interrupt you here, because obviously Nero and his mother, now I had Suetonius, I think, when I was about 11 or 12, and I can remember reading it in my grandparents' house and thinking-

Lots of asterisks. And thinking, well, I'm getting away with- Lots of it's blacked out. I'm getting away with this. But if this was anything but a Penguin classic, it would be in the bin and I'd be thrown out in the cold in deep disgrace. Because aren't the scenes, I'm trying to remember this,

but aren't the scenes where he and his mum are in a litter and he gets out and there's kind of semen stains all over his clothes because he and his mum have been up to no good. So this stuff is all, I mean, this is all just totally invented, right? This is just the formula of a kind of Roman invective. You're having incest and because it's almost sort of the kind of thing that Ptolemies would have done, I suppose. Well, essentially Nero, when he becomes emperor and there is, of course, inevitably a rumor that Claudius is poisoned.

He's supposed to have been poisoned with mushrooms. And it's absolutely the convention that powerful women go around poisoning people. So this is the stuff that's told about Livia, Augustus's wife, and it's told about Agrippina as well. But they probably didn't. Is that your claim, basically? We don't know. I mean, how do we know? We can't know. There are certain things we just have to accept we don't know. You've written books about this. If you don't know, nobody does. What I know is that we don't know. We don't know. But what i know is that we don't know we don't know but what i also know is that these rumors were believed and they were believed because the power politics in the in the augustan house was incredibly carnivorous um and and perhaps you know if

you wanted to argue that agrippina had poisoned claudius it's because young britannicus is about to come of age and so therefore if nero is going to become emperor, she needs to get him in position very quickly. And it's possible that Nero is aware of the debt that he owes his mother, that without her, he simply wouldn't be in the position that he is. And to begin with, there are all kinds of coins, all kinds of statues, all kinds of propaganda,

proclaiming the amity between mother and son. As the years go by, so Agrippina starts to vanish from the coins and from the statues until by the end, Nero is incredibly keen to get rid of her. And I think that there is one of the things that runs throughout the stories that are told about Nero, and I think must kind of be true to his character, is a fondness for shocking, a kind of fondness for pushing things to the extreme. And so there's a kind of cross between Trump and Chris Morris. Right.

Okay. So he'd be on his own Channel 4 kind of semi-satirical show he he enjoys shocking people and and kind of trampling on the expectations of and his little elites but at the same time he's very shrewd and and the kind of cruel quality to his his very sharp intelligent satirical mind and so one of the things that he does is, I think he's supposed to have kept a woman who looks like his mother. And he kind of fondles her and caresses her. And obviously this is intended to be completely shocking.

And then in due course, he murders her. And the stories that are told about the process of murder are very, very kind of flamboyant and baroque. So he's meant to have arranged for for her bedroom to fall in on her he kind of sets in a roof that you pull a lever and it falls down and crushes her that doesn't work that's very bond villain it's very very bond villain and even more bond villain he gives her a yacht that goes out into the bay of naples again they pull a lever it disintegrates but agrippina can swim so she comes to to the shore. And so Nero, fed up by this

point, just sends a posse of guards who kind of stab her to death. Now, it's not, I think, shocking that a member of the Augustan house would kill another member of his house. There's quite a lot of this going on, but it's done discreetly. Yeah, this is so theatrical, isn't it? This is so theatrical. It's so kind of public. And when Nero has finished it, she's murdered on the Bay of Naples. He returns to Rome and it's like he's celebrating a triumph when he goes into Rome.

And when in due course, he takes to the stage, which is again, kind of shocking thing for a Roman to do, let alone an emperor, because actors, the Romans regard actors as being absolutely kind of the

lowest of the low. They're on a level with prostitutes and madams and all kinds of things like that. So for Nero to do that is very shocking. But among the roles that he plays are figures from Greek tragedy who are famous for having killed their mothers. And I suppose the most famous is Orestes, who is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, the returning king from the Trojan War. And Orestes is then told by the Delphic Oracle to kill his mother. And so he's torn between his natural love as a son and the dictates of the god and goes ahead and does it and gets pursued by the furies of these kind of terrifying gods. But he's done it essentially because the gods called him to do it. And so Nero is casting his murder of his mother in that kind of way. And basically what Nero is doing is he is casting himself as the equivalent of a hero

from Greek tragedy. So a hero, it's not quite the meaning that it has for us. A hero is someone who stands between humans and gods and who perform outsized deeds and do terrible things and terrible things are done to them. And Nero basically is using all the resources of drama and of song and of his own life to portray himself as someone sprung from the ancient world of Greek tragedy. And that is what makes him so disorienting and destabilizing, I think, is because we talk about him being, what's the reality behind the myth? Well, the reality behind the myth is he's creating the myth. But okay, Tom, I mean, all of this raises so many interesting questions because obviously he's a performer, he's a populist and all this stuff.

But the one thing that interests me as somebody who does more modern history is you and people who write about Nero are basing this on, I mean, how many written sources are there? Three, four, five? No, it's more than that. And you've got the evidence of coins

and of archaeology. Yeah, but put the coins on one side. I mean, the you something but some of the stories for example the death of agrippina and the yacht you know the yacht falling apart or his carry-on with eunuchs or kicking his wife to death or the other sort of canonical things that we know about him they are often based on on a couple of sources aren't they at heart and how far do you when you're writing this because you've obviously written about Nero I mean you love Nero and you've written about it with such sort of enthusiasm and and and brio but how much when you're writing it do you think to yourself well yeah this could well be bollocks yeah I'm gonna write but i'm gonna tell the story anyway well i it's it's a constant challenge and the more grotesque the stories the more the challenge is there but

i think that that with nero um there is extraneous evidence that um in a sense Nero is kind of writing scripts for himself and creating stage sets for himself that mean that in a sense a lot of the kind of more hostile stories that are told about him are distorted refractions of things that he himself was trying to do. So essentially what you have to do is to look at the entire mass of the evidence, and that goes beyond the simply textual evidence, and essentially try and work out, well, are these stories simply fantasy? Or are they true? And was he mad? Or are they refractions of something that might conceivably

come from Nero himself? And if we can understand what it is that he's doing, perhaps we can then get a sense of what he's all about. And was he mad, Tom? No, he's not mad. He's a man of ferocious creative ability and talent. Yeah, he reminds me of the Joker, the Joker in the Heath Ledger iteration. Well, when I was translating The Life of Suetonius,

he describes how Nero as a young man would go out into the streets and he'd kind of disguise himself as a slave and just go out and kind of beat people up and enjoy it. And I did kind of have this image of perhaps of casting Seneca as a Batman figure roaming the streets of Rome, fighting. But yes, I think that the Joker would be the closest analogy in contemporary culture to kind of what Nero is doing. He is malevolent, I think, and sinister, but also incredibly charismatic and incredibly creative. And the thing that, you know, the Christopher Biggins portrayal of him in I, Claudius,

and indeed in the Heineken advert, if you, I don't know if you remember. I don't remember. I kind of look that up. It's really, you know, Christopher Biggins as Nero is, he's sentenced so many gladiators to death that he can't move his thumb.

So they bring on a glass of Heineken and he drinks it and then he's able to start sentencing gladiators to death that he can't move his thumb so they bring on a glass of wine and he drinks it and then he he's able to start sentencing gladiators to death again but also with peter ustinov in cuivades that that he's this kind of fat comic he's well he's kind of murderous billy bunter right you know yeah great love um that's untrue i think i think nero is not a kind of ridiculous figure and i think also that the the stories that get told about him, that he was a terrible singer, that he was a terrible actor, that he was a terrible charioteer. These are not true either. He was clearly very proficient at all of them. Because to do all of them required an absolute kind of baseline of talent. And so the parallel would be, imagine a world leader today, starring in, you know, an Oscar winning Hollywood film, headlining at Glastonbury, competing in Formula

One. Even the most kind of brutal autocrat to do that, you'd have to have a certain baseline of talent to get away with it. Because we know that although there were people who did kind of sneer at this there were also people who regarded Nero with great admiration for what he had done and when Nero dies and kind of you know Elvis style impersonators pop up all over the place after he's dead which in itself is an indication that he you know there was kind of huge degree of popularity um what marks them out is that they have immense musical proficiency so he's a he's he's i think a very very talented talented man and that's kind of what makes him frightening brilliant well let's take a break here and then we can come back we can set rome on fire talk about the christians and do lots of questions

because we have tons of questions to get through. All right, see you in a second. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history tom holland is pronouncing on nero one of his favorite subjects and i am just really along for the ride. We have got lots of questions, Tom, and I think we should just go straight in, because that way we can cover the subjects we haven't already done. So Ben Crowden, he says, what happened to Britannicus? So this is Claudius's son, who you might say ought to have been emperor. Maybe you can say whether

you think Britannicus was robbed or whatever, but what happened to him? Did Nero kill him? And how different might things have been if he descended to the throne? And that raises an interesting question about how much Nero's bad behaviour is actually a consequence of the role

rather than the man, whether it was the nature of the princeps meant that young men behaved badly when they had that sort of authority. Anyway, go ahead, Britannicus. So Britannicus, after Nero has become emperor, he dies supposedly of food poisoning at a banquet. And inevitably anyone in the Julia-Claudia family who dies of food poisoning at a banquet,

you know, there are suspicions that the poison has operated and um there's there's no question the relations between nero and britannicus don't seem to have been great britannicus kept calling nero um uh ahenobarbus after his um which was no longer his name because he'd been adopted by claudius so nero took that as a slight um there's a very unpleasant story that um nero sodomizes him not not not because he he particularly wanted to but as a way of kind of establishing his dominance and humiliating britannicus so that's the kind of unpleasant story and then the story about the poisoning is that um he employs this specialist called Lucaster who brews up poison. And it's kind of too slow operating. And Nero says, you know, make it more powerful. And they try it out on a pig and the pig immediately dies. And so Nero says, that's great. And Britannicus dies

and gets burned the next day on a pyre and gets kind of rushed off to, you know, gets buried very fast. And Nero is so thrilled that he basically sets Lucasterre and gets kind of rushed off to, you know, gets buried very fast. And Nero's so thrilled that he basically sets Lucaster up as a kind of poisoning tutor. So, you know, he supposedly sends people off to study with Lucaster. I mean, all of this is, I mean, you know, this is all, this is all bad. But, you know, Britannicus is in the way he yeah he dies i

you know i would i would say that there was motive and opportunity there so you could argue couldn't you i mean going back to my point about the nature of the role you could argue that nero would have been mad to allow britannicus to live that actually absolutely it's sort of bad luck you know but britannicus has to go it's kind of in the way. Also, a wonderful detail in the Septimius, that Nero kills Britannicus less because he's a threat, actually, than because he has a better singing voice than Nero. So, again, that's kind of a classic example of the way that, you know... It's very Noel and Liam Gallagher, that particular dynamic, isn't it?

Yes, yeah. All right, so that's Britannicus. Now let's move on to a crucial question. David Banks, was Nero the most powerful ginger of all time? I think ginger, I'm assuming that's not a misprint and he hasn't written Singer. No, I think it's ginger. It is ginger.

We've got one from Lizzie Harrington, haven't we? Oh, yes. Is the hair colour based on evidence of statues or descriptions in documents or merely because prejudice that people assume that this kind of bad behaviour could only come from a ginger? I don't know, Tom, was Nero definitely ginger haired? Well, so it comes from, again, his family name, Henabarbus, which basically means bronze beard. And this is an ancient legend that the ancestor of the Henabarbi, he's coming back from, he's riding to Rome while a great battle is being fought. He doesn't know what the result of the henna barbie is uh he's he's coming back from um he's riding to rome while a great battle

is being fought he doesn't know what the result of the battle is castor and pollux um the uh the divine twins gemini appear to him and say that the romans have won the battle and then they stroke his beard which turns bronze so a kind of gingery and so supposedly um all the henna barbie from that point on have a ginger beard and so that's presumably why nero is portrayed as having a ginger beard although actually satonia says that his hair was was light blonde so all right yeah a bit of you know we don't know we don't yeah so he's more like the we were doing the game of thrones podcast we talked about jack gleason who was joffrey he's more joffrey isn't he i mean that's kind of the that's how i imagine him because

joffrey in game of thrones is this very sort of yeah and just his general demeanor he's more Joffrey isn't he I mean that's kind of the that's how I imagine him because Joffrey in Game of Thrones is this very sort of yeah and just his general demeanor he's a sort of willful child who is cruel and capricious and all that sort of stuff I mean that's kind of what Nero is on the Joffrey level you don't think he's as bad as that well I'll tell you so one of the things one of the things about Nero is that um he's actually very uxorious so Joffrey of course I mean he you know he goes around killing everyone yeah but but i mean you say he's luxurious but i mean i mean i imagine you're very luxurious but you've never kicked your wife to death which we don't know that nero did so nero marries claudius his daughter so effectively he's marrying his sister you didn't with your ptolemies you didn't

you'd enjoy that yeah he doesn't he doesn't like octavia um his first great love is a Syrian freedwoman called Actae, who he's passionately devoted to. Agrippina, one of the things that comes between him and Agrippina is Agrippina doesn't approve of this, doesn't want a freedwoman as a daughter-in-law. So an ex-slave, freedwoman. An ex-slave, yeah. So Nero basically kind of splits up with her, but is always fond of her. And when Nero dies, it's Actae who buries him. He then falls in love with Poppaea Sabina, who we've talked about already in the Eunuch episode. But she's the most fashionable woman in Rome.

She bathes in asses milk. She has her own cosmetics range. She says, I hope I die before I get old. Years before Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend did. And her wish comes true because she dies in childbirth. And the story is that Nero kicked her to death. But we don't know that. We don't know that. How can we know that? Again, it's the kind of malevolent story that would be told about him by his enemies. But we know that Nero was devoted to her because he deifies her he lavishes um a year's worth of of incense from Arabia at her funeral and of course he um he

constructs a kind of um sterile maimed living model of her in the form of this freedman this this boy who looks exactly like her. This is Sporus, right? Yes. And we haven't had any genital mutilation in this episode yet. So here it comes. So the genitals and penis get removed and Nero offers money for someone who could make him a real woman, so properly make him a woman, implant a uterus and so on. Can't do that.

But to the degree that he can, he recreates Poppaea. He does this clearly because he, you know, he's... That's a very strange... Tom, I think this is a pretty strange definition of auxorious behaviour. I mean, it's unusual behaviour even for a Roman emperor, right? It's a Neronian form of displaying his passion for his dead wife. Yes. And then he marries another woman, Statilia Messalina, who is like papaya witty sophisticated aristocratic

clearly very much um nero's type and you know he's he stays true to her even though he's also simultaneously married this this kind of um her sats papaya um yeah so he's married to this eunuch i mean that's that's staying true. It's a very loose description of staying true. I know, I know. This may be South London morality, Tom, but you wouldn't get away with this and chipping Norton. It's a Neronian form of being faithful to these three women. So Actae, Poppea and Sotilia Messalina.

He's essentially devoted to the three of them. I can't quite remember how we got onto that. But anyway, basically I'm saying he's not as bad as he seemed but the way in which he shows good behavior is still terrifying conventional conventional loving husband i think that's we've got him nailed down all right let's move on stephen clark a friend of the show has a question uh who or what caused the great fire of rome whom did nero blame for it? And if I can add a twist, how is it that Nero himself came to be blamed for it and everybody thinks he fiddled

while Rome burned? Obviously, they didn't even have fiddles. No, he's a liar. So he's talking about the lie. But that's all rubbish, isn't it? He didn't play while Rome burned. Well, so the stories are that Nero sets fire to Rome

basically because he's a kind of pyromaniacal Le Corbusier. He doesn't like Rome's architecture. He finds its kind of narrow, winding streets upsetting. He wants something more modern and clean. So he's a kind of murderous 1950s town planner. Yes, he's the man who made Brasil 1950s town planner yes he's the man who made brazilia yes um so so that's the story uh and the further story is that he treats burning rome as a kind of backdrop to sing about the fall of troy um is this true or probably not i mean i'd say kind of 80 percent no rome is a tinderbox it's largely made of wood um there are all kinds

of flammable materials stored everywhere it it rages for nine days it incinerates much of the city um nero is not there when when it burns down um he comes rushing back uh as i've said he's he you know he's he's very proficient at trying to fight it. He basically behaves responsibly and well. And he does indeed rebuild Rome. I guess Le Corbusier would be the way. I mean, perhaps the kind of parallel. And so traditionists blame him, do they? Is that how it works?

Well, he then goes on to build this kind of golden house, which is this huge, it's not just the house itself, which is stunning, but he builds essentially the equivalent of a country state in the middle of Rome. So again, there's a kind of hint there as to Nero's character that he loves paradox and shock. Nothing could be more paradoxical, nothing could be more shocking than to create a country estate in the middle of the most crowded city in the world. And of course, this infuriates people whose property has been lost. You know, senators have lost property. Large numbers of the poor have lost their property. And to see Nero building this estate is, you know, I mean, of course, it kind of provokes resentment. So pretty much all our sources apart from Tacitus says that Nero did start the fire.

Um, they essentially say he starts the fire, you know, Suetonius says, because he wants to make Rome look more beautiful, others because he wants to, to, to, to build the house. Um, is it credible? I, again, I said, I, I think not, but I think there is, you know, it's what I would say about Nero's character is that it's not entirely proven that he didn't start it. So he could have done it. He could have done. Yeah.

It's not, it's kind of within the bounds, I think, of the kind of personality that Nero seems to have had. Yeah, the sort of Joker style. You might conceivably have done it. But of course, the fire is also notorious because it's the first entry of Christians. Right. So is that him? He blames the Christians

or is that just generally in the air and he picks up on it? Or he reflects it or whatever. So the story of Nero blaming the Christians and having them arrested and then having them put to death in very, very kind of typically neronian manner they are um soaked in pitch they are crucified then they're set on fire so that they serve as

torches um nero uh kind of wanders around dressed as a charioteer looking at them so it's kind of he's playing the role of the sun um he's visiting on them a kind of, you know, the punishment that is appropriate to arsonists. There's a huge amount about this passage that is unclear. It's unclear why the Christians are being accused of it. It's unclear exactly how it is that Nero has even become aware of their existence. Because they must be so tiny at this point. Are they in Rome?

Yeah, and also it can't be many of them. It is the only mention of Christians being blamed for this that we get in any of the sources. And well, I mean, overtly. And so there has a guy called Brent Shaw, has a scholar called Brent Shaw, has posited that perhaps it didn't even happen. I mean, I think that that really requires you to manipulate the evidence severely.

But there are kind of mysterious qualities to it. And it's because of that. I mean, I think that clearly Nero did target Christians, I guess, because they were kind of weird, sinister cultists. Nobody knew anything about them, but they were convenient. Presumably they had a kind of apocalyptic element. They were subversives. They were to hand.

And so he blames them. And then that gets reflected in the Book of Revelation, doesn't it? So this is Luke Wilson's question. Do you think his name fits the number of a man 666 in the Book of Revelation 1318 when written in the Hebrew form Neron Kezar. I don't know if I'm saying that right. So what's going on there, Tom? I don't understand any of this.

I'm out of my depth here. So the number of the beast is 666. Yeah. And applying the prism of Hebrew numerology, that transliterates into Neron Caesar. And so... Does it really? Or is this Dan Brown talking?

No, absolutely it does. This has been recognised right from the beginning. Okay. So essentially Nero is the beast. And it's not just in the book of Revelation that Nero appears. So there's a late first century text called the ascension of isaiah um which has a kind of wonderful description of nero as um as beliar and it goes beliar the great ruler the king of this world will descend who has ruled it since

it came into being yea he will descend from his firmament in the likeness of a man, a lawless king, the slayer of his mother. So that's casting Nero as a literally cosmic figure of evil. And that again, in a way, is a kind of tribute to Nero's charisma. You have to be a figure of incredible potency, I think, to convincingly be cast as the beast or the devil or the great ruler the king of this world in contrast to you know god who i mean i don't want to i don't want to prejudge anybody but i don't think kirsten is ever going to be described as the beast is he no no but i mean even you know even putin or trump i mean you know they're just not on that level they're not they're not able to correspond to

that. Although there is a kind of interesting, again, a kind of counterpoint to this, because wherever you get people saying Nero is a monster, you also get other people who kind of love him. And a very unexpected group of people who really do like Nero, are the second, third, fourth century rabbis, who claim that Nero didn't commit suicide, that he faked his own death, that he went to Judea and he converted to Judaism, and he fathered a long line of rabbis whose writings are part of the Talmud. So that's a kind of counterpoint to the Christian perspective. I would love it if that were true, Tom. It's a great story, isn't it? And again, kind of so brilliantly unexpected.

And the thing is that, of course, the first century AD, you've got this incredible swirl of prophetic stuff. You've got the death of Jesus. You've got the burning of the temple in the Judean revolt, which breaks out under Nero. And you've got all these prophecies that talk about how a king is going to rule the world coming out of Judea, which obviously feeds into Christianity. Jews are obsessed by it. It helps to inspire the Jewish revolt, but it does also feed into the posthumous reputation of Nero and he gets bundled into these prophecies. And there are lots and lots of people who say that like you know just as Christians say that Jesus will come again there are lots of people who say that Nero will come

again um and and lots say that he will come rather in the form of the devil that he will bring chaos and disaster to the world but there are also those who say that he will come and he will bring a an age of justice and peace. Let's get on to Nero's exit. So we had a good question from Jeff Costello about that. But it's for last words, which I'll ask in a second. But just before that, you know, you've presented a vision, a version of Nero that I think a lot of historians would probably go along with. That, you know, he's the showman and the performer and a populist and all these things, and that he's obviously not a madman

and he's not just a completely deranged sadist. And it's easy to see why the crowds, who are probably sick of senators talking about probity and Roman rigor and stuff, they're probably sick of all that and they you know, probity and Roman rigor and stuff. They're probably sick of all that. And they love a bit of gladiatorial action and watching people being set alight and free bread from Egypt or whatever. Well, actually, interesting.

I mean, Tacitus does say that the sufferings of the Christians are so great that people do slightly turn against him. Okay. Well, that's interesting. But my question is, what goes wrong? Why does anyone turn against him? Why does it all, you you know why do people um what when the julio claudians have been there now for five emperors what is it that nero does that is sufficiently shocking to turn senatorial opinion

so dramatically against the entire dynasty because he is the end of the whole dynasty isn't he i mean it's not just his reign it's the whole story comes to a crushing conclusion in that year of what is it year four emperors when he gets kicked out yeah well so there have been escalating conspiracies against him the most notorious is one that revolved around a guy called piso um and this is the one that drags down seneca so seneca gets implicated in that and essentially gets told to commit suicide, which he dutifully does. Nero then goes on this tour of Greece where he races in the Olympic Games

with his 10 horse chariot. Most people only have two or four. And people always laugh at this because he crashes and has to be given a new chariot and he doesn't complete the race, but he still wins first prize. But the thing is, I mean,

it takes courage to do that. It would take courage to compete in, you know, if someone who isn't a professional Formula One driver to compete at Monaco or whatever. So while Nero's away, further rumours of conspiracy start to brew. The following year, news comes of of a open rebellion in gaul um then another open rebellion in spain led by the 70 year old martinet called galba um and nero there are all kinds of stories that he says that he's he's going to go and uh play the liar to the rebellious soldiers

and they will burst into tears and then they'll you know that's how he's going to fight them but again this is counterpointed to he's actually clearly um quite energetic in his response he musters what troops he can he sends them north to combat the revolt in gaul um and then all kind of rumors reach him but um that basically these troops are turning against him, that the whole thing is falling to pieces. And the commander of the Praetorians, who's an absolute shit, even by Nero's standards, basically turns on Nero, I think because he sees a kind of outside chance that he might be able to grab the um uh the the empire for himself so nero suddenly finds that he doesn't have any troops in rome and he is intending to flee to alexandria where he'd

be very popular um muster muster troops there um but then he changes his mind um he he flees rome he ends up in a um a villa on the outskirts of Rome. And the news is brought to him that the Senate has declared him a public enemy and that he's going to be sentenced to a horrible death when he gets found. And so he commits suicide. But what has he done to provoke these conspiracies, Tom? I mean, why does the guy in Gaul, or Spain rather, Galba, why are they not being paid?

Is there some policy that's outweighed them or I think I think it's you know it's Nero enjoys shock and his entire reign has has been a kind of riff on offending the sensibilities of the very powerful

he's just pushed them too far I think he's pushed them too far it on offending the sensibilities of the very powerful. He's just pushed them too far. I think he's pushed them too far. It coincides with a period of famine in Rome, so that's bad luck for him. Yeah. And so the sense that both senatorial and popular support for him is wobbling give people, you know, people are always predatory, the chance to strike.

Yeah. And now that brings us to Jeff's question, finally. Were his last words really, a great artist dies with me, or variation thereof? Well, that's what Suetonius says. Well, Suetonius says that his last words are qualis artefacts perio. And so that's traditionally translated as what an artist dies with me. But there's, I think, very convincingly, a scholar called Edward Champlin, who's written the best book on Nero, argues, I think, very convincingly that artefacts

actually means a kind of artisan, a workman who's employed to do building work. And essentially, that's what Nero is doing in the kind of this rubble-strewn house, is that he's been reduced to this level that's what he's saying he's saying you know he was a great artist but now look at me i've just become a stage hand so it's almost the opposite of of what people traditionally think he said um and you know in a sense that that is the kind of i guess for Nero it's it's the horror is that in the end he doesn't have a death that he feels would be appropriate to him. He doesn't go out in the kind of blaze of tragic glory.

It's rather pathetic, even bathetic. And there's a horrible description in Suetonius' account that after he's committed suicide, he gets a free man to help him slit his own throat. The blood pumps out. Centurion comes galloping in, tries to staunch the flow with a towel. But it's too late. And we're told that his eyes bulged horribly. Oh, God, that's no way to go, is it? So two last questions.

One is about succession. So Nero's dead. Why is it such a shambles to sort out who comes next? Why is nobody agreed? Because you have Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. Yeah. And why is that such a kind of mess? Why haven't all the opposition agreed on,

I mean, why have they got no candidates? Because people have assumed that a descendant of Augustus should rule. And when Nero dies, and effectively he's the last of the descendants of Augustus, all the others have been killed or died. All kinds of portents are seen, you know, trees planted by Livio wither and perish. There's a cypress tree in the forum, its roots spread all the way to, you know, across the forum and that dies as well.

So all these kind of portents are seeing that something terrible has happened. And so the question is, can you have rule by a Caesar if there are no longer any Caesars? And in a way, Claudius has blazed the trail because he wasn't a Caesar, but he's been voted the name of Caesar as a kind of title by the Senate. And so effectively, this is where the idea that the name Caesar is shorthand for an emperor rather than a family name comes in. But obviously, if you don't have to have a descendant of Augustus ruling the world, then basically anyone can become Caesar. And that's the great discovery. And that's why Nero dies in 68. And the year 69 is known as the year of the four emperors, because you have four people all kind of scrambling after it.

It's very Game of Thrones. Why don't they ever, why don't they just restore the Republic? Or is that just not possible now that they're running a big empire? You know, it's kind of like, you know, why don't we go back to the political system of Queen Victoria? I mean, it's just, you know, it's just impossible. So effectively, you need an emperor at the head. And, you know, what's interesting about the year of the four emperors,

so there are those four emperors, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian. Two of those emperors are close associates of Nero. Otho, although he'd been exiled effectively to go and rule Portugal, he'd been kind of Nero's chief friend in the equivalent of the Bullingdon Club. Right. And had actually at one point been married to Papaya. So he's George Osborne to Nero's David Cameron. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. And so when he comes back, he plays the Nero card. He puts up Nero statues. He pays for the Golden House to continue to be developed. Vitellius also is uh he's very fat isn't he he's very fat but he's he's he's very you know he's he he likes nero he he casts himself as the heir of nero and it's only because ultimately the guy who wins vespasian is um you know a rough hewn well kind of like you dominic he's he's a a true born son of the soil

my camera analogy he's kind of middle middle italy he's kind of eric pickles eric pickles guy yes and the joke is always that he looks like he's straining to have a shit which is very not near a perfect perfect um analogy then isn't it um so and so basically he he succeeds in establishing a dynasty so for the first time um an emperor gets succeeded not by one but by two sons, tied to the commission. And this dynasty, the Flavians, after Vespasian's family name,

their legitimacy depends on blackening Nero's name. And so that ensures that basically Nero will be regarded as a monster. But there is evidence from across the empire, not just in the immediate aftermath of Nero will be regarded as a monster. But there is evidence from across the empire, not just in the immediate aftermath of Nero's death, but for centuries after that Nero is remembered

in various communities across the empire very positively. And so is it because of Christianity then that Nero becomes, I mean, he's probably the one emperor that most people, if you stop them in the street and said, name a Roman emperor, I'm guessing, apart from Julius Caesar, obviously wasn't a Roman emperor, Nero is probably the one that would get name-checked the most. Is that because of Christianity, do you think,

because he's the beast and all this stuff? I think it fuses with the legacy of the two great accounts of Nero's reign that survives tacitus and satonius both of whom um they they often give kind of different accounts of what you can see is basically the same kind of incidents but they're clearly coming from the same page and so that there's a to that extent there's a kind of coherent image of nero which then fuses with with the christian portrayal of him as literally diabolical to create an image of him as the ultimate Roman emperor. And so there's a fantastic line in the Marquis de Sade's horrible novel, Juliet.

Juliet's this kind of terrifying murderess. And her tutor in evil is this woman called Cleo. And she says of Nero, Oh, Nero, I will always honour your memory. Were you still alive, I would worship you. You will be forever my ideal and my God. And so the Marquis de Sade is in charge of Nero as the kind of great idol.

But as I've said throughout, I think that to have that kind of notoriety, you have to have a kind of charisma. There have been lots of kind of terrible kings and emperors who've done terrible things, but they don't have this kind of – it is a kind of glamour. I mean, his notoriety is glamorous. It's the glamour of evil, though, isn't it?

I mean, isn't that basically why people – and of performance, I suppose. It's a perform of glamour i mean his notoriety is glamorous the glamour of evil though isn't it i mean isn't that basically why people and a performance i suppose it is that it's a formative evil yeah yeah yeah yeah but but i think you know i i i can't think of a major ruler whose artistic sensibility was more creative than nero's. You love Nero. I think in a way. It's unbelievable. That's why his reputation blazes in the way that it does. Yeah. 2,000 years after his death.

Well, you think he's uxorious. So I think. I think he is. Your standards are. The most charismatic uxorious ruler. Well, there you go. The great man has spoken. Tom Holland has proclaimed his verdict and um

that's nero so tom we'll be back later in the week with with the history of france oh yeah so we mentioned we mentioned nero as as a houseman but we will actually be talking about the real houseman yeah very good uh paris with agnes parier that's right and uh the world cup and the world cup of Gods. So this, so yes, you'll be listening to this if you get it immediately

on Monday and the World Cup of Gods will be going on today and tomorrow and all the way up to Thursday. Tom and I don't know, we don't know who will be knocked out.

That's, I mean. Yeah, we don't even know what the draw is at this point. No, it's that excitement, isn't it? Before the narrative is set in stone. So dramatic. That's what sport's all about. Yeah, it is. I should say, if you've got absolutely no idea this point no it's that excitement isn't it before the narrative is set in stone so dramatic

that's what sport's all about yeah it is so excited i should say if you've got absolutely no idea what we're talking about and and fair enough um if you go to our twitter twitter accounts or at the rest history uh online then you'll find out all about the world cup of gods and how you can vote and on that bombshell's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from him. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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