You know who’s had a bit of a comeback in recent years? It’s the guy who was, for centuries, the very embodiment of a megalomaniac monarch. A man who made the short list of every leader’s “who not to emulate” list. The ruler who best represented the stereotype of the Roman emperor — decadent, self-absorbed, incestuous, capricious.
That’s right, Nero is having a bit of a moment, almost 2,000 years after his reign.
Nero gets an incredibly bad rap in the ancient sources. The ancient historians tell us that he loved luxurious debauchery, as in this excerpt from Tacitus:
He constructed, then, a raft on the Pool of Agrippa, and superimposed a banquet, to be set in motion by other craft acting as tugs. The vessels were gay with gold and ivory, and the oarsmen were catamites marshalled according to their ages and their libidinous attainments. He had collected birds and wild beasts from the ends of the earth, and marine animals from the ocean itself. On the quays of the lake stood brothels, filled with women of high rank; and, opposite, naked harlots met the view. First came obscene gestures and dances; then, as darkness advanced, the whole of the neighbouring grove, together with the dwelling-houses around, began to echo with song and to glitter with lights.
He’s portrayed as unvirtuous, especially in terms of his sexual behavior, as in this passage from Suetonius:
Little by little, however, as his vices grew stronger, he dropped jesting and secrecy and with no attempt at disguise openly broke out into worse crime. He prolonged his revels from midday to midnight, often livening himself by a warm plunge, or, if it were summer, into water cooled with snow… Besides abusing freeborn boys and seducing married women, he debauched the vestal virgin Rubria. The freedwoman Acte he all but made his lawful wife, after bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves by swearing that she was of royal birth. He castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife.
Tacitus says that Nero was “defiled by every natural and unnatural lust [and] had left no abomination in reserve with which to crown his vicious existence.” Yikes!
He was so drunk with power and so insensate to the fate of ordinary people that he burned down the city of Rome just for fun, according to Cassius Dio:
Nero had the wish---or rather it had always been a fixed purpose of his---to make an end of the whole city in his lifetime. Priam he deemed wonderfully happy in that he had seen Troy perish at the same moment his authority over her ended.
The stories about Nero are ridiculous, and there are a million of them: He entered the Olympics and then made everyone lose to him! He made everyone listen to his musical performances! He dressed in animal skins and “attacked the private parts of men and women!” He slept with his mom! He kicked his pregnant wife to death! He fiddled while Rome burned! It’s a great narrative — a mad king, consumed by lust and ego, abusing his power in a million colorful ways.
But a lot of it may not be true. Historians have recently reimagined Nero as, if not quite a great leader, at least not the exaggerated joke of an emperor that we’ve come to know. They argue that many of the wildest tales about Nero were invented by chroniclers with axes to grind, and that Nero was actually quite popular among the working classes of Rome (he totally killed his mom, though).
Whatever the truth of the stories about him, the reputation of Nero as the very embodiment of a terrible emperor is woven through our culture. So let’s take a look at how Nero has been portrayed — both in ancient times and more recent ones.
A key part of the Nero story is his youth. Nero took over as emperor at the age of 16, maneuvered into power by his mother, Agrippina, who may have poisoned her husband, the emperor (and Nero’s stepfather) Claudius to put her boy on the throne.
This statue of him as a boy was probably made only a few years before he took over:
The relationship between mother and son was, well, complicated.
Rumors swirled about Nero’s relationship with his mother. Tacitus writes that Agrippina “presented herself on several occasions to her half-tipsy son, coquettishly dressed and prepared for incest.” Whether or not this is true, Nero’s own coins presented him as, well, very close to his mom, as in this coin from the year after he took over:
Here’s another coin, from the year of his accession, showing mother and son uncomfortably nose-to-nose:
The young emperor soon tired of his mother’s meddling and arranged to have her killed. He knew it would be unseemly to have his goons murder her outright, so he arranged to have her die in a “boating accident.” Her boat did collapse, as depicted in this nineteenth-century painting by Gustav Wertheimer:
Unfortunately for Nero, Agrippina survived the sinking. So then he had a soldier unceremoniously stab her to death.
There’s a whole genre of art that shows Nero viewing his mother’s dead body. Artists over the centuries have been fascinated with him at this moment, looking on as the enormity of his crime becomes clear.
Most of the medieval and early Renaissance versions of the story show him remorseless. In this illustration from the early 1400s, he indulges in a drink at his mother’s autopsy.
However, as time went on, artists began to introduce more regret into Nero’s countenance. In this Pietro Negri painting from the 1670s, Nero stands with his arms crossed, projecting an air of strength, but his face betrays his sadness:
By the nineteenth century, artists tended to show us an emperor wracked with regret. Here’s one by Antonio Rizzi:
And another by John William Waterhouse shows a boy emperor whose crimes are just beginning to weigh on his soul:
The thing Nero is most famous for is something that probably didn’t happen, at least not the way it’s often envisioned. In the year 64, a large portion of the city of Rome burned to the ground. It was likely an accident — Rome was a densely packed wooden city — but rumors spread that Nero had ordered arsonists to burn his own capital city to clear land for a palace, and that he had engaged in merriment while the city burned. As a result, we’ve often gotten an image of a mad emperor playing songs while the city burns below, as in the Oscar-nominated 1951 film Quo Vadis:
The film was actually the fourth attempt to film a novel by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. The second, a 1913 silent film, featured on its poster Nero playing while Rome burned:
In reality, it’s very unlikely that this ever happened. Nero was, by many accounts, quite responsive to the fire and introduced new regulations to prevent future disasters. This 1861 painting by Karl Piloty of a somber Nero navigating the charred ruins of Rome may be a more accurate depiction:
Despite its historical inaccuracy, the image of a ruler fiddling while Rome burned has been too delicious for satirists to pass up, whether it’s a 1770 cartoon mocking George III:
Or a million Donald Trump memes:
Nero was overthrown in the year 68 by a rebellious general; he killed himself rather than be captured by the rebels. After he died, Nero was criticized by the Senate, which issued a damnatio memoriae — a condemnation of his memory. Many of his coins were defaced:
Many of Nero’s portraits were re-carved to commemorate other emperors. Here’s one that was reconfigured to look like his stepfather, Claudius:
And another remade to look like one of his successors, Vespasian. We can tell it was originally Nero because they had to trim Nero’s long hair in the back, and Nero’s overbite still shows.
Have you noticed that we’ve gotten this far without much sense of what Nero actually looked like? Here’s the most famous portrait of the young emperor:
And here’s one of him at a slightly more advanced age (remember, he died at age 30), sporting an unfortunate neckbeard:
But, as the years went on, artists mostly imagined him as a fleshy, decadent glutton. This seventeenth-century portrait by Abraham Janssens depicts an emperor softened by his appetites:
To be fair to Janssens, many of Nero’s coins, especially the ones late in his reign, show a pretty chunky guy:
In Nero’s time, this may have been truth in advertising. Elite Romans often wanted their portraits to be “veristic,” reflecting their true physical appearance. In fact, he may have been exaggerating this aspect of his appearance, trying to convey “royal abundance and beneficence.”
But Nero was also known for decadence and gluttony, and, even if he never made the connection between his size and his habits, later artists certainly did.
There’s so much good stuff in the stories about Nero — debauchery, hubris, sex, and scandal. It’s no wonder that his life, even if many of the tales are exaggerated or just plain untrue, has been a magnet for artists over the centuries. In 2010, Nero’s hometown of Anzio (known to the Romans as Antium) tried to reclaim his image by erecting an impressive-looking statue of the man:
Honestly, it’s as good a guess as anyone’s as to what the real Nero was like.
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Fascinating thank you, it’s all lost in the mists of time isn’t it! It’s interesting how media shapes the image of a person and then it gets reinterpreted but we can’t really know can we!