In part two of our three-part series on "Tyrants of the Roman Empire", we dive into the notorious life of Nero. Known for his brutal and depraved reputation, Nero's rule began with promise but quickly descended into chaos.
But we'll ask ourselves, was he truly the villain history remembers, or a product of biased accounts?
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “Tyrants Of The Roman Empire”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about Caligula. Next time, in part three, we’ll talk about Commodus.
[00:00:37] And today it’s Nero, a man who has been called the antichrist, remembered by history for brutality, depravity and almost unmatched sadism.
[00:00:50] You don’t have to have listened to part one, on Caligula, to enjoy this one, but it will make more sense if you have, and rather than go over stuff again, I’ll assume that you’ve listened to part one. So now is the time to press pause and go and listen to that one, in case you haven’t done so already.
[00:01:08] Alright then, let’s not waste a minute, especially as this is going to be quite a long one, and find out about Emperor Nero.
[00:01:17] As you may know, there is the stereotype of the Italian “mother’s boy”, a boy, a man even, who has a particularly close bond with his mother, perhaps even living with her until well into his adult years.
[00:01:34] There’s a word for this, “mammone”, and, like many stereotypes, it has some basis in fact.
[00:01:43] I did an ERASMUS exchange at the University of Naples, and can certainly say that my male Italian friends would be constantly calling their mothers, updating them on where they were going that evening or what they had had for lunch.
[00:01:58] Occasionally, the intensity of this mother-son relationship did drive something of a wedge between these young men and their girlfriends.
[00:02:09] And even going back to Ancient Rome, we can see that this is not a modern phenomenon.
[00:02:17] In AD 58, a young man was taunted by his new lover over his relationship with his mother.
[00:02:25] The man invited his mother to a feast at Baiae, an ancient Roman town just across the bay of Naples.
[00:02:34] The mother came to the feast, and on her return her son offered her his boat, as hers had been damaged on the journey over.
[00:02:45] This wasn’t a kindly gesture, and the mother knew it.
[00:02:50] The son, the then 21-year-old Emperor Nero, had ordered for a specially modified boat to be built that would sink at a predetermined time, killing everyone onboard.
[00:03:06] His mother, Aggripina the Younger, had got wind of the plan, but she had little choice but to go ahead with it.
[00:03:15] She boarded the ship, knowing her only son was sending her to her death.
[00:03:22] Sure enough, as the ship sailed across the bay, it started to disintegrate.
[00:03:28] Pieces of wood broke off, and the vessel started to sink.
[00:03:34] What Nero hadn’t bargained for was that his mother was a strong swimmer.
[00:03:41] She managed to swim to shore, and she was met by cheers and well-wishers, rejoicing with relief that the emperor’s mother had survived this "tragic accident".
[00:03:54] This relief wouldn’t last for long.
[00:03:57] When Nero got wind that his plot had failed, he hatched another.
[00:04:03] He sent armed men to his mother’s villa, instructing them to dispatch her, once and for all.
[00:04:12] They surrounded her bed, and when she realised that her fate was inevitable, she pointed at her womb, her belly, telling the men to “strike here, because that is where the monster came from”.
[00:04:27] It is an impressive story, and has gone down in the history books as just one example of the callous brutality of Nero, a man whose very name has become a byword for cruelty.
[00:04:43] It is also, perhaps, not true.
[00:04:47] Several modern historians have tried to revisit the myth and reputation of Nero, with some concluding that he was probably not quite as bad as most people think, and others simply pointing out that the accounts we have of his life and his actions, like those of Caligula are highly biased, so we should not blindly accept everything that is written about him as true, but rather as the historical record of men with an agenda.
[00:05:20] Now, to understand Nero, like we did last episode, we must start before his birth.
[00:05:28] Caligula, as you’ll remember from last time, had no surviving children of his own.
[00:05:35] When he was stabbed to death in that theatre corridor in AD 41, the title of emperor passed to his uncle Claudius, a man whom almost nobody expected to become emperor.
[00:05:49] Claudius had been hidden away for much of his life. He walked with a limp, spoke with a stammer, and had been dismissed as weak-minded by his own family. Yet the Praetorian Guard, who were keen to have someone malleable on the throne, found him cowering behind a curtain in the palace and declared him emperor.
[00:06:14] And Claudius actually turned out to be a more competent emperor than many expected.
[00:06:20] He expanded the empire into Britain, reformed aspects of the legal system, and generally kept the machine of empire ticking over.
[00:06:31] But for today’s episode, and the story of Nero, Claudius matters not so much for his conquests as for his marriages.
[00:06:41] In particular, his final one.
[00:06:44] And it’s here that we need to re-introduce Agrippina the Younger.
[00:06:49] She was the sister of Caligula, and was also the great-granddaughter of the first emperor, Augustus.
[00:06:57] She was the Roman equivalent of royalty, and she married a high-ranking Roman politician.
[00:07:05] They had one biological child, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but his chances at becoming emperor looked slim at best, as he wasn’t directly in the line of succession.
[00:07:19] What’s more, a couple of years into his reign as emperor, Caligula had discovered that his sister was plotting to have him killed.
[00:07:28] He sent her into exile on a remote Mediterranean island. And a couple of years later, her husband died.
[00:07:37] When Caligula was deposed and Claudius made emperor, the new emperor recalled Agrippina from exile.
[00:07:45] She re-emerged in public life, back in Rome, but she was a widow with no connections.
[00:07:54] She was, however, ruthlessly ambitious, and incredibly capable.
[00:08:00] To cut a long story short, through a series of marriages, alliances, and deaths that some have claimed were murder, Agrippina ended up married to her uncle, emperor Claudius.
[00:08:15] Claudius had another son from his previous marriage, Britannicus, but the boy was a few years younger than Agrippina’s son, Lucius.
[00:08:26] Agrippina managed to persuade Claudius to officially adopt Lucius, making the two boys the ageing Claudius’s heirs.
[00:08:37] And to cement his position, she arranged for Lucius, at the age of sixteen, to marry Claudius’ daughter, Octavia.
[00:08:47] It was an extraordinary piece of dynastic chess, 10 out of 10 political manoeuvring.
[00:08:54] In less than ten years, Agrippina had gone from outcast to the very centre of Roman power, and had placed her son in the best possible position.
[00:09:07] This son, Lucius, would later be known as Nero.
[00:09:12] And then, in AD 54, after one of his famous banquets, Claudius died.
[00:09:19] Poisoned mushrooms, according to one story, although whether Agrippina had a hand in that, or they were simply bad mushrooms, we can’t be sure.
[00:09:30] What we do know is that the timing was perfect for Nero.
[00:09:35] Britannicus, Claudius’ biological son, was still too young to rule.
[00:09:41] Nero, by contrast, was seventeen, married to Claudius’ daughter, and already adopted as his heir.
[00:09:51] Agrippina had the Praetorian Guard on side, and the Senate fell quickly into line.
[00:09:58] At just seventeen years old, the boy Lucius became emperor Nero of Rome.
[00:10:05] Now, a seventeen-year-old emperor with no military experience and no political record might sound like a recipe for disaster.
[00:10:14] And in the long run, it was. But at the very beginning, things looked more promising.
[00:10:21] Nero’s accession was greeted with widespread joy.
[00:10:25] The memory of Caligula’s madness was still fresh, and Claudius, though perfectly competent, had been seen as dull and dominated by his wives and freedmen.
[00:10:37] Nero, by contrast, was young, handsome, descended from Augustus, and backed by a powerful group of well-known advisers.
[00:10:49] On one side was his mother, Agrippina, who had schemed and fought her way to this moment, and who seems to have intended to rule through her son.
[00:11:01] On the other side were two men who would become household names in Roman history: Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, and Burrus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard.
[00:11:14] And for the first few years of Nero’s reign this trio effectively governed the empire.
[00:11:22] And they did it…pretty well. This was a period that later writers would nostalgically call the quinquennium Neronis, the “five good years of Nero”.
[00:11:35] Nero cut taxes, eased the financial burdens on the provinces, and even banned secret trials, a clear rejection of the paranoia that had characterised the rule of Tiberius and, of course, his own uncle Caligula.
[00:11:51] He insisted that no one could be condemned without the Senate’s approval, and he declared that he wanted to end the practice of capital punishment.
[00:12:01] This sounded almost like the voice of a philosopher-king, and that wasn’t far off.
[00:12:09] His tutor, Seneca, had filled his head with Stoic ideals, lofty talk about clemency, virtue, and good governance.
[00:12:19] And it seemed that Nero was putting them into practice. Things were looking up.
[00:12:26] And he wasn’t only popular with the elite; the Roman people also adored him.
[00:12:33] He gave them games and spectacles, but also a sense of relief. After years of instability, they had a young emperor who appeared gentle, approachable, even merciful.
[00:12:48] Statues of him went up all across the empire, coins bore his handsome young face, and poets praised him as the dawn of a new golden age.
[00:13:00] But even in these golden years, there were hints of what was to come.
[00:13:06] Nero’s true passions were not in the Senate chamber or on the battlefield, but on the stage and in the circus.
[00:13:15] He wrote poetry, practised singing and acting, and even took lessons in chariot racing. By all accounts, he was quite good at these pursuits, and took them pretty seriously.
[00:13:29] But to Rome’s elite, this was scandalous; emperors were supposed to command armies, not play music or rehearse tragedies. Actors and musicians, after all, were at the bottom of society, in the same category as gladiators and prostitutes.
[00:13:50] Still, the public lapped it up.
[00:13:53] Here was an emperor who mingled with the people, who enjoyed the same entertainments they did, who seemed almost one of them.
[00:14:03] And what’s more, one who seemed to be running Rome pretty effectively.
[00:14:08] But behind the scenes, things were not so calm.
[00:14:12] His mother, Agrippina, was growing restless. She believed Nero owed everything to her: his throne, his marriage, his very survival.
[00:14:22] She expected to share power, to be listened to, to be obeyed.
[00:14:28] But she found herself increasingly sidelined by the men in Nero’s life: Seneca and Burrus. She pushed back, demanding more influence, reminding Nero of everything that she had done for him.
[00:14:44] And this tension between mother and son soon escalated.
[00:14:48] A particular flashpoint came over a love affair.
[00:14:52] Nero was married at the time, but shortly after he became emperor, he became infatuated with a former slave named Claudia Acte.
[00:15:03] Agrippina was horrified.
[00:15:06] To her, it was not just a disgrace, the emperor of Rome lowering himself to consort with a freedwoman, but a threat to her own position.
[00:15:18] If Acte gained influence, Agrippina’s grip on her son would weaken even further.
[00:15:25] According to the historian Tacitus, Agrippina’s fury was such that she even tried to intimidate Nero by reminding him that Britannicus, the biological son of Claudius, was still alive, was soon coming of age, and might one day stake his claim.
[00:15:44] That was a dangerous card to play.
[00:15:47] Dangerous for Britannicus, at least.
[00:15:50] In AD 55, the young boy was at a banquet with the imperial family when he suddenly collapsed, gasping for air.
[00:15:59] He died on the spot.
[00:16:03] Tacitus says he was poisoned on Nero’s orders, just days before he was due to put on the toga virilis and formally become an adult in the eyes of Rome.
[00:16:15] Now, whether Britannicus truly posed a threat or not, he was gone.
[00:16:21] And with his death, one more rival was removed.
[00:16:26] Whether it was because he now felt more secure in his position and didn’t need her anymore, or whether it was because he felt she had overstepped the mark, we can only hypothesise, but Agrippina’s influence over her son continued to decline.
[00:16:43] She no longer sat beside him at public ceremonies. Her face was removed from the front of Roman coins and relegated to the back, then it was removed altogether.
[00:16:56] And she was banished from the palace. Her power was ebbing away, and she knew it.
[00:17:04] Tacitus paints a vivid picture of her trying to do everything she could to claw it back, from scolding her son, attempting to win over the Praetorian Guard, even, at one point, hinting that she might champion someone else.
[00:17:20] But each move only pushed Nero further away.
[00:17:25] By the time we reach the year AD 58, Nero was openly defying her.
[00:17:32] He was emperor in his own right now, and the struggle between mother and son was heading towards its bloody conclusion, the one we began this episode with, in Baiae, with sinking boats, daggers, and a mother urging her assassins to stab her in the womb.
[00:17:51] After Agrippina’s death, Nero was finally free of his mother’s shadow.
[00:17:57] But if he thought this would win him peace of mind, and room to breathe, he was mistaken.
[00:18:05] His mother’s death was publicly reported as suicide, self-destruction after the discovery of her supposed plot to overthrow her son.
[00:18:15] But few in Rome bought this story.
[00:18:19] It was widely accepted that she had been killed on the emperor’s orders.
[00:18:25] Now, this wouldn’t of course have been the first time an emperor had killed someone who was inconvenient; Ancient Rome was all about knocking off your political rivals, current, past or future, and it wasn’t particularly frowned upon.
[00:18:41] But the difference was that killing your own mother was a step too far, even for the sometimes bloodthirsty ancient Romans.
[00:18:51] The Senate congratulated him, of course.
[00:18:54] The Praetorian Guard swore their loyalty. Flattery was part of the job description when dealing with emperors. Yet whispers spread across Rome: the young emperor had crossed a line.
[00:19:10] And after Agrippina’s murder, something flipped in Nero, or at least his behaviour became even more erratic and unusual.
[00:19:22] He became even more obsessed with performance.
[00:19:26] He had always been a keen singer, actor, and poet, but became utterly addicted to the crowd.
[00:19:34] At first, he confined himself to small audiences, singing or reciting verses at private gatherings. But soon he wanted more. He wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be cheered by the people.
[00:19:51] The historian Suetonius tells us he would lock audiences in the theatre until he had finished his performances, no matter how long they dragged on.
[00:20:02] For Rome’s elite, this was humiliating.
[00:20:05] To perform on stage was the lowest of the low, an activity for slaves and actors, not emperors.
[00:20:14] And while this was all going on, costs of his various extravagances continued to mount.
[00:20:21] Nero lavished money on games, spectacles, and extensive building projects.
[00:20:28] He built a new wooden amphitheatre for shows, and he spent huge sums on plays, music, and chariot races. The treasury, which had been healthy under the fiscally conservative Claudius, began to creak under the weight of his successor’s indulgence.
[00:20:48] And in July of AD 64, the city–and the empire–would face disaster.
[00:20:57] 10 years into his rule, a huge fire broke out in the city of Rome.
[00:21:04] Fires were not uncommon in the crowded, wooden tenements of the capital, but this one was different. It raged for six days and seven nights, destroying vast swathes of the city.
[00:21:19] When at last it seemed to be under control, it flared up again, lasting another three days.
[00:21:26] There is no reliable record of how many people died, but what is certain is that by the end, most of Rome lay in ruins. Entire districts were gone, temples and public buildings reduced to ash, and thousands of people left homeless.
[00:21:47] And where was Nero during all of this?
[00:21:50] Well, there is this popular idea that he was in Rome, looking over his burning capital, playing the fiddle, the violin.
[00:22:00] It might fit the characterisation of Nero, but it isn’t true.
[00:22:05] For starters, the fiddle wasn’t invented for another 1,500 years. If he did anything, it would have been to play the lute or to sing, but there is no evidence that he did this.
[00:22:19] According to Tacitus, he was at his villa in Antium, by the coast, when the fire began.
[00:22:26] He rushed back to the city, opening up the Campus Martius, the imperial gardens, and even his own palace to shelter those who had lost their homes.
[00:22:37] He also arranged for food supplies to be brought in to prevent famine.
[00:22:43] But this was not the story that spread.
[00:22:46] Suetonius and later sources tell us that Nero stood on a tower, lyre in hand, watching Rome burn while singing about the fall of Troy.
[00:22:57] Tacitus, who wrote closer to the time, is more careful: he says only that there were rumours, and that people believed them.
[00:23:07] What does seem clear is that suspicion quickly turned on Nero.
[00:23:13] Some claimed he had ordered the fire to clear space for an ambitious new building project, the Domus Aurea, or “Golden House”, an enormous palace complex that would rise in the very heart of the destroyed city.
[00:23:28] This project did go ahead and it was breathtaking: artificial lakes, porticos stretching for hundreds of meters, halls glittering with gold and jewels, and a colossal statue of Nero. more than 30 metres high, standing like a god at the entrance.
[00:23:49] But as to whether the fire was started on Nero’s orders, most historians are pretty skeptical.
[00:23:57] Perhaps the fire was an unfortunate accident. Perhaps it was spread by looters.
[00:24:03] Or perhaps Nero’s men did set it, whether on his orders or not.
[00:24:09] What mattered was that people believed he was responsible.
[00:24:14] To deflect suspicion, Nero looked for scapegoats.
[00:24:18] He turned to a small and obscure sect in Rome: the Christians.
[00:24:24] They were accused of starting the fire, and subjected to brutal punishments.
[00:24:30] Some were torn apart by dogs, others were crucified, others burned alive to light Nero’s gardens at night.
[00:24:39] Grisly stuff indeed, especially because there is no evidence that Christians had anything to do with it.
[00:24:47] Unfortunately, this scapegoating seemed to work, at least temporarily. The public had been given a scalp, and this had satisfied their immediate thirst for a culprit.
[00:25:01] But still, Nero’s authority was far from stable.
[00:25:06] And in the years after the Great Fire, his private life became just as notorious as his public one.
[00:25:14] He had been married, since the age of sixteen, to Octavia, the daughter of Claudius. She was popular with the Roman people: modest, dutiful, the very picture of the traditional Roman matron.
[00:25:29] But Nero despised her. He accused her of infertility, neglected her, and eventually, in AD 62, divorced her.
[00:25:42] Only days later, he married his mistress, Poppaea Sabina.
[00:25:47] She was ambitious, glamorous, and had previously been married to Otho, a friend of Nero’s who would later, briefly, be emperor himself.
[00:25:59] The Roman people did not take kindly to Octavia’s dismissal.
[00:26:04] There were public protests demanding her return, and statues of her were paraded through the streets.
[00:26:12] Nero’s response was ruthless: he charged her with adultery, which she was almost certainly not guilty of, and had her executed in exile. There is even an account that her head was brought to Poppea, Nero’s new wife, as proof.
[00:26:32] And if Poppea thought that Nero would be nicer to her, she would be sorely mistaken.
[00:26:39] According to Tacitus, in AD 65, while she was pregnant, Nero grew so angry with her that he kicked her to death, reportedly aiming his blows at her stomach to ensure he also killed their unborn child.
[00:26:57] And I’m sorry to say that it gets, if it can do, even worse. Or at least, no better.
[00:27:05] After Poppaea’s death, Nero spotted a young boy, Sporus, in the streets of Rome. He decided that the young boy was the spitting image of his dead, murdered, wife. He ordered for the boy to be brought to his palace, castrated, dressed up as his dead wife, and then married to Nero.
[00:27:29] Seriously grisly stuff indeed.
[00:27:33] By this time, there was widespread consensus that Nero was unfit to rule.
[00:27:39] The same year, AD 65, there was a plot to assassinate him, a plot involving an influential senator called Piso and even, reportedly, Nero’s close advisor, Seneca.
[00:27:53] But the conspiracy was betrayed before it could be put into action. And the repression that followed was brutal. Dozens were executed or forced to commit suicide.
[00:28:07] Piso took his own life, and Seneca was ordered to open his veins, dying in a bath while dictating calm philosophical reflections to his students, the very image of Stoic resignation.
[00:28:21] The conspiracy and its bloody suppression marked a turning point. Nero no longer pretended to govern with restraint.
[00:28:30] He ruled through fear, with spies and informers everywhere, and trials for treason filling the Senate’s time.
[00:28:38] And at the same time, he leaned further into his passions: performance, theatre, and spectacle.
[00:28:45] In AD 66 he travelled to Greece, competing in chariot races, singing, and acting in public contests. The judges, of course, awarded him victory in every event, but the sight of the emperor of Rome prancing on stage further enraged the aristocracy.
[00:29:06] And when Nero returned from Greece, crowned with laurels and declaring he had won over 1,800 prizes, his popularity in Rome was lower than ever.
[00:29:18] By the late 60s AD, Nero’s grip on power was crumbling.
[00:29:23] The provinces were restless.
[00:29:26] The final blow came in AD 68.
[00:29:29] Nero ordered one of his governors, Gaius Julius Vindex, to raise taxes.
[00:29:36] Vindex, the governor of Gaul, not only refused, but rose up in revolt, declaring Nero unfit to rule.
[00:29:45] He was soon joined by Servius Sulpicius Galba, a governor in Spain, who positioned himself as a defender of Rome’s liberty.
[00:29:55] At first, Nero tried to rally support.
[00:29:59] He even talked of leading an army himself.
[00:30:02] But when news reached Rome that even the Praetorian Guard had deserted him, he panicked. The Senate declared him a public enemy, and orders were given for his arrest.
[00:30:16] Nero fled the city with a small group of freedmen.
[00:30:21] According to Suetonius, he wandered aimlessly, begging one of them to find a quiet place where he could hide. At last he took refuge in a villa outside Rome.
[00:30:33] There, hearing the sound of horsemen approaching, he realised it was over.
[00:30:40] Suetonius tells us he hesitated, begging his slaves to kill him. They refused. Finally, realising that there was no escape from here, he drove a dagger into his own throat.
[00:30:55] His last words, supposedly, were “Qualis artifex pereo” — “What an artist dies in me.”
[00:31:03] It was June AD 68. Nero was thirty years old, and with his death the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the line of Augustus, ended.
[00:31:16] As for his legacy, Nero has become a byword for excess and cruelty: the emperor who killed his mother, murdered his wife, persecuted Christians, and played music while Rome burned.
[00:31:30] But as with Caligula, so much of what we “know” about him comes from hostile sources, written years after his death.
[00:31:40] Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, they all had their own agendas, and wanted to present Nero in the worst possible way, so as to present the emperors that came after him in a more positive light.
[00:31:55] So, Nero, was he Rome’s ultimate villain, or a young man who was never fit for power?
[00:32:03] It seems that the answer is “a bit of both”. If the ancient historians are to be taken at face value, he did monstrous things, but we must remember that it was very convenient for him to be cast as a monster and a tyrant.
[00:32:20] And, he was hardly the first.
[00:32:23] In Caligula we saw how rumour, scandal, and fear turned an emperor into a monster in the public imagination.
[00:32:31] With Nero, we saw it again: a young man who began his reign with promises of clemency and good government, yet is remembered forever as a sadistic tyrant.
[00:32:43] In our next and final episode in this mini-series, we will turn to Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:32:51] Unlike Caligula or Nero, he inherited a stable empire, ruled by his philosopher-emperor father.
[00:32:58] But Commodus would squander that legacy, descending into megalomania, gladiatorial fantasies, and a cruelty that shocked even a jaded Roman world.
[00:33:10] And that, my friends, is what we have waiting for us next time.
[00:33:16] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Nero.
[00:33:20] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:33:24] As a final reminder in case it hadn’t sunk in yet, this was part two of a three-part mini-series.
[00:33:30] The first one was on Caligula, and next up we are going to meet an emperor with even fewer redeeming qualities, Commodus.
[00:33:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:33:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “Tyrants Of The Roman Empire”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about Caligula. Next time, in part three, we’ll talk about Commodus.
[00:00:37] And today it’s Nero, a man who has been called the antichrist, remembered by history for brutality, depravity and almost unmatched sadism.
[00:00:50] You don’t have to have listened to part one, on Caligula, to enjoy this one, but it will make more sense if you have, and rather than go over stuff again, I’ll assume that you’ve listened to part one. So now is the time to press pause and go and listen to that one, in case you haven’t done so already.
[00:01:08] Alright then, let’s not waste a minute, especially as this is going to be quite a long one, and find out about Emperor Nero.
[00:01:17] As you may know, there is the stereotype of the Italian “mother’s boy”, a boy, a man even, who has a particularly close bond with his mother, perhaps even living with her until well into his adult years.
[00:01:34] There’s a word for this, “mammone”, and, like many stereotypes, it has some basis in fact.
[00:01:43] I did an ERASMUS exchange at the University of Naples, and can certainly say that my male Italian friends would be constantly calling their mothers, updating them on where they were going that evening or what they had had for lunch.
[00:01:58] Occasionally, the intensity of this mother-son relationship did drive something of a wedge between these young men and their girlfriends.
[00:02:09] And even going back to Ancient Rome, we can see that this is not a modern phenomenon.
[00:02:17] In AD 58, a young man was taunted by his new lover over his relationship with his mother.
[00:02:25] The man invited his mother to a feast at Baiae, an ancient Roman town just across the bay of Naples.
[00:02:34] The mother came to the feast, and on her return her son offered her his boat, as hers had been damaged on the journey over.
[00:02:45] This wasn’t a kindly gesture, and the mother knew it.
[00:02:50] The son, the then 21-year-old Emperor Nero, had ordered for a specially modified boat to be built that would sink at a predetermined time, killing everyone onboard.
[00:03:06] His mother, Aggripina the Younger, had got wind of the plan, but she had little choice but to go ahead with it.
[00:03:15] She boarded the ship, knowing her only son was sending her to her death.
[00:03:22] Sure enough, as the ship sailed across the bay, it started to disintegrate.
[00:03:28] Pieces of wood broke off, and the vessel started to sink.
[00:03:34] What Nero hadn’t bargained for was that his mother was a strong swimmer.
[00:03:41] She managed to swim to shore, and she was met by cheers and well-wishers, rejoicing with relief that the emperor’s mother had survived this "tragic accident".
[00:03:54] This relief wouldn’t last for long.
[00:03:57] When Nero got wind that his plot had failed, he hatched another.
[00:04:03] He sent armed men to his mother’s villa, instructing them to dispatch her, once and for all.
[00:04:12] They surrounded her bed, and when she realised that her fate was inevitable, she pointed at her womb, her belly, telling the men to “strike here, because that is where the monster came from”.
[00:04:27] It is an impressive story, and has gone down in the history books as just one example of the callous brutality of Nero, a man whose very name has become a byword for cruelty.
[00:04:43] It is also, perhaps, not true.
[00:04:47] Several modern historians have tried to revisit the myth and reputation of Nero, with some concluding that he was probably not quite as bad as most people think, and others simply pointing out that the accounts we have of his life and his actions, like those of Caligula are highly biased, so we should not blindly accept everything that is written about him as true, but rather as the historical record of men with an agenda.
[00:05:20] Now, to understand Nero, like we did last episode, we must start before his birth.
[00:05:28] Caligula, as you’ll remember from last time, had no surviving children of his own.
[00:05:35] When he was stabbed to death in that theatre corridor in AD 41, the title of emperor passed to his uncle Claudius, a man whom almost nobody expected to become emperor.
[00:05:49] Claudius had been hidden away for much of his life. He walked with a limp, spoke with a stammer, and had been dismissed as weak-minded by his own family. Yet the Praetorian Guard, who were keen to have someone malleable on the throne, found him cowering behind a curtain in the palace and declared him emperor.
[00:06:14] And Claudius actually turned out to be a more competent emperor than many expected.
[00:06:20] He expanded the empire into Britain, reformed aspects of the legal system, and generally kept the machine of empire ticking over.
[00:06:31] But for today’s episode, and the story of Nero, Claudius matters not so much for his conquests as for his marriages.
[00:06:41] In particular, his final one.
[00:06:44] And it’s here that we need to re-introduce Agrippina the Younger.
[00:06:49] She was the sister of Caligula, and was also the great-granddaughter of the first emperor, Augustus.
[00:06:57] She was the Roman equivalent of royalty, and she married a high-ranking Roman politician.
[00:07:05] They had one biological child, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but his chances at becoming emperor looked slim at best, as he wasn’t directly in the line of succession.
[00:07:19] What’s more, a couple of years into his reign as emperor, Caligula had discovered that his sister was plotting to have him killed.
[00:07:28] He sent her into exile on a remote Mediterranean island. And a couple of years later, her husband died.
[00:07:37] When Caligula was deposed and Claudius made emperor, the new emperor recalled Agrippina from exile.
[00:07:45] She re-emerged in public life, back in Rome, but she was a widow with no connections.
[00:07:54] She was, however, ruthlessly ambitious, and incredibly capable.
[00:08:00] To cut a long story short, through a series of marriages, alliances, and deaths that some have claimed were murder, Agrippina ended up married to her uncle, emperor Claudius.
[00:08:15] Claudius had another son from his previous marriage, Britannicus, but the boy was a few years younger than Agrippina’s son, Lucius.
[00:08:26] Agrippina managed to persuade Claudius to officially adopt Lucius, making the two boys the ageing Claudius’s heirs.
[00:08:37] And to cement his position, she arranged for Lucius, at the age of sixteen, to marry Claudius’ daughter, Octavia.
[00:08:47] It was an extraordinary piece of dynastic chess, 10 out of 10 political manoeuvring.
[00:08:54] In less than ten years, Agrippina had gone from outcast to the very centre of Roman power, and had placed her son in the best possible position.
[00:09:07] This son, Lucius, would later be known as Nero.
[00:09:12] And then, in AD 54, after one of his famous banquets, Claudius died.
[00:09:19] Poisoned mushrooms, according to one story, although whether Agrippina had a hand in that, or they were simply bad mushrooms, we can’t be sure.
[00:09:30] What we do know is that the timing was perfect for Nero.
[00:09:35] Britannicus, Claudius’ biological son, was still too young to rule.
[00:09:41] Nero, by contrast, was seventeen, married to Claudius’ daughter, and already adopted as his heir.
[00:09:51] Agrippina had the Praetorian Guard on side, and the Senate fell quickly into line.
[00:09:58] At just seventeen years old, the boy Lucius became emperor Nero of Rome.
[00:10:05] Now, a seventeen-year-old emperor with no military experience and no political record might sound like a recipe for disaster.
[00:10:14] And in the long run, it was. But at the very beginning, things looked more promising.
[00:10:21] Nero’s accession was greeted with widespread joy.
[00:10:25] The memory of Caligula’s madness was still fresh, and Claudius, though perfectly competent, had been seen as dull and dominated by his wives and freedmen.
[00:10:37] Nero, by contrast, was young, handsome, descended from Augustus, and backed by a powerful group of well-known advisers.
[00:10:49] On one side was his mother, Agrippina, who had schemed and fought her way to this moment, and who seems to have intended to rule through her son.
[00:11:01] On the other side were two men who would become household names in Roman history: Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, and Burrus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard.
[00:11:14] And for the first few years of Nero’s reign this trio effectively governed the empire.
[00:11:22] And they did it…pretty well. This was a period that later writers would nostalgically call the quinquennium Neronis, the “five good years of Nero”.
[00:11:35] Nero cut taxes, eased the financial burdens on the provinces, and even banned secret trials, a clear rejection of the paranoia that had characterised the rule of Tiberius and, of course, his own uncle Caligula.
[00:11:51] He insisted that no one could be condemned without the Senate’s approval, and he declared that he wanted to end the practice of capital punishment.
[00:12:01] This sounded almost like the voice of a philosopher-king, and that wasn’t far off.
[00:12:09] His tutor, Seneca, had filled his head with Stoic ideals, lofty talk about clemency, virtue, and good governance.
[00:12:19] And it seemed that Nero was putting them into practice. Things were looking up.
[00:12:26] And he wasn’t only popular with the elite; the Roman people also adored him.
[00:12:33] He gave them games and spectacles, but also a sense of relief. After years of instability, they had a young emperor who appeared gentle, approachable, even merciful.
[00:12:48] Statues of him went up all across the empire, coins bore his handsome young face, and poets praised him as the dawn of a new golden age.
[00:13:00] But even in these golden years, there were hints of what was to come.
[00:13:06] Nero’s true passions were not in the Senate chamber or on the battlefield, but on the stage and in the circus.
[00:13:15] He wrote poetry, practised singing and acting, and even took lessons in chariot racing. By all accounts, he was quite good at these pursuits, and took them pretty seriously.
[00:13:29] But to Rome’s elite, this was scandalous; emperors were supposed to command armies, not play music or rehearse tragedies. Actors and musicians, after all, were at the bottom of society, in the same category as gladiators and prostitutes.
[00:13:50] Still, the public lapped it up.
[00:13:53] Here was an emperor who mingled with the people, who enjoyed the same entertainments they did, who seemed almost one of them.
[00:14:03] And what’s more, one who seemed to be running Rome pretty effectively.
[00:14:08] But behind the scenes, things were not so calm.
[00:14:12] His mother, Agrippina, was growing restless. She believed Nero owed everything to her: his throne, his marriage, his very survival.
[00:14:22] She expected to share power, to be listened to, to be obeyed.
[00:14:28] But she found herself increasingly sidelined by the men in Nero’s life: Seneca and Burrus. She pushed back, demanding more influence, reminding Nero of everything that she had done for him.
[00:14:44] And this tension between mother and son soon escalated.
[00:14:48] A particular flashpoint came over a love affair.
[00:14:52] Nero was married at the time, but shortly after he became emperor, he became infatuated with a former slave named Claudia Acte.
[00:15:03] Agrippina was horrified.
[00:15:06] To her, it was not just a disgrace, the emperor of Rome lowering himself to consort with a freedwoman, but a threat to her own position.
[00:15:18] If Acte gained influence, Agrippina’s grip on her son would weaken even further.
[00:15:25] According to the historian Tacitus, Agrippina’s fury was such that she even tried to intimidate Nero by reminding him that Britannicus, the biological son of Claudius, was still alive, was soon coming of age, and might one day stake his claim.
[00:15:44] That was a dangerous card to play.
[00:15:47] Dangerous for Britannicus, at least.
[00:15:50] In AD 55, the young boy was at a banquet with the imperial family when he suddenly collapsed, gasping for air.
[00:15:59] He died on the spot.
[00:16:03] Tacitus says he was poisoned on Nero’s orders, just days before he was due to put on the toga virilis and formally become an adult in the eyes of Rome.
[00:16:15] Now, whether Britannicus truly posed a threat or not, he was gone.
[00:16:21] And with his death, one more rival was removed.
[00:16:26] Whether it was because he now felt more secure in his position and didn’t need her anymore, or whether it was because he felt she had overstepped the mark, we can only hypothesise, but Agrippina’s influence over her son continued to decline.
[00:16:43] She no longer sat beside him at public ceremonies. Her face was removed from the front of Roman coins and relegated to the back, then it was removed altogether.
[00:16:56] And she was banished from the palace. Her power was ebbing away, and she knew it.
[00:17:04] Tacitus paints a vivid picture of her trying to do everything she could to claw it back, from scolding her son, attempting to win over the Praetorian Guard, even, at one point, hinting that she might champion someone else.
[00:17:20] But each move only pushed Nero further away.
[00:17:25] By the time we reach the year AD 58, Nero was openly defying her.
[00:17:32] He was emperor in his own right now, and the struggle between mother and son was heading towards its bloody conclusion, the one we began this episode with, in Baiae, with sinking boats, daggers, and a mother urging her assassins to stab her in the womb.
[00:17:51] After Agrippina’s death, Nero was finally free of his mother’s shadow.
[00:17:57] But if he thought this would win him peace of mind, and room to breathe, he was mistaken.
[00:18:05] His mother’s death was publicly reported as suicide, self-destruction after the discovery of her supposed plot to overthrow her son.
[00:18:15] But few in Rome bought this story.
[00:18:19] It was widely accepted that she had been killed on the emperor’s orders.
[00:18:25] Now, this wouldn’t of course have been the first time an emperor had killed someone who was inconvenient; Ancient Rome was all about knocking off your political rivals, current, past or future, and it wasn’t particularly frowned upon.
[00:18:41] But the difference was that killing your own mother was a step too far, even for the sometimes bloodthirsty ancient Romans.
[00:18:51] The Senate congratulated him, of course.
[00:18:54] The Praetorian Guard swore their loyalty. Flattery was part of the job description when dealing with emperors. Yet whispers spread across Rome: the young emperor had crossed a line.
[00:19:10] And after Agrippina’s murder, something flipped in Nero, or at least his behaviour became even more erratic and unusual.
[00:19:22] He became even more obsessed with performance.
[00:19:26] He had always been a keen singer, actor, and poet, but became utterly addicted to the crowd.
[00:19:34] At first, he confined himself to small audiences, singing or reciting verses at private gatherings. But soon he wanted more. He wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be cheered by the people.
[00:19:51] The historian Suetonius tells us he would lock audiences in the theatre until he had finished his performances, no matter how long they dragged on.
[00:20:02] For Rome’s elite, this was humiliating.
[00:20:05] To perform on stage was the lowest of the low, an activity for slaves and actors, not emperors.
[00:20:14] And while this was all going on, costs of his various extravagances continued to mount.
[00:20:21] Nero lavished money on games, spectacles, and extensive building projects.
[00:20:28] He built a new wooden amphitheatre for shows, and he spent huge sums on plays, music, and chariot races. The treasury, which had been healthy under the fiscally conservative Claudius, began to creak under the weight of his successor’s indulgence.
[00:20:48] And in July of AD 64, the city–and the empire–would face disaster.
[00:20:57] 10 years into his rule, a huge fire broke out in the city of Rome.
[00:21:04] Fires were not uncommon in the crowded, wooden tenements of the capital, but this one was different. It raged for six days and seven nights, destroying vast swathes of the city.
[00:21:19] When at last it seemed to be under control, it flared up again, lasting another three days.
[00:21:26] There is no reliable record of how many people died, but what is certain is that by the end, most of Rome lay in ruins. Entire districts were gone, temples and public buildings reduced to ash, and thousands of people left homeless.
[00:21:47] And where was Nero during all of this?
[00:21:50] Well, there is this popular idea that he was in Rome, looking over his burning capital, playing the fiddle, the violin.
[00:22:00] It might fit the characterisation of Nero, but it isn’t true.
[00:22:05] For starters, the fiddle wasn’t invented for another 1,500 years. If he did anything, it would have been to play the lute or to sing, but there is no evidence that he did this.
[00:22:19] According to Tacitus, he was at his villa in Antium, by the coast, when the fire began.
[00:22:26] He rushed back to the city, opening up the Campus Martius, the imperial gardens, and even his own palace to shelter those who had lost their homes.
[00:22:37] He also arranged for food supplies to be brought in to prevent famine.
[00:22:43] But this was not the story that spread.
[00:22:46] Suetonius and later sources tell us that Nero stood on a tower, lyre in hand, watching Rome burn while singing about the fall of Troy.
[00:22:57] Tacitus, who wrote closer to the time, is more careful: he says only that there were rumours, and that people believed them.
[00:23:07] What does seem clear is that suspicion quickly turned on Nero.
[00:23:13] Some claimed he had ordered the fire to clear space for an ambitious new building project, the Domus Aurea, or “Golden House”, an enormous palace complex that would rise in the very heart of the destroyed city.
[00:23:28] This project did go ahead and it was breathtaking: artificial lakes, porticos stretching for hundreds of meters, halls glittering with gold and jewels, and a colossal statue of Nero. more than 30 metres high, standing like a god at the entrance.
[00:23:49] But as to whether the fire was started on Nero’s orders, most historians are pretty skeptical.
[00:23:57] Perhaps the fire was an unfortunate accident. Perhaps it was spread by looters.
[00:24:03] Or perhaps Nero’s men did set it, whether on his orders or not.
[00:24:09] What mattered was that people believed he was responsible.
[00:24:14] To deflect suspicion, Nero looked for scapegoats.
[00:24:18] He turned to a small and obscure sect in Rome: the Christians.
[00:24:24] They were accused of starting the fire, and subjected to brutal punishments.
[00:24:30] Some were torn apart by dogs, others were crucified, others burned alive to light Nero’s gardens at night.
[00:24:39] Grisly stuff indeed, especially because there is no evidence that Christians had anything to do with it.
[00:24:47] Unfortunately, this scapegoating seemed to work, at least temporarily. The public had been given a scalp, and this had satisfied their immediate thirst for a culprit.
[00:25:01] But still, Nero’s authority was far from stable.
[00:25:06] And in the years after the Great Fire, his private life became just as notorious as his public one.
[00:25:14] He had been married, since the age of sixteen, to Octavia, the daughter of Claudius. She was popular with the Roman people: modest, dutiful, the very picture of the traditional Roman matron.
[00:25:29] But Nero despised her. He accused her of infertility, neglected her, and eventually, in AD 62, divorced her.
[00:25:42] Only days later, he married his mistress, Poppaea Sabina.
[00:25:47] She was ambitious, glamorous, and had previously been married to Otho, a friend of Nero’s who would later, briefly, be emperor himself.
[00:25:59] The Roman people did not take kindly to Octavia’s dismissal.
[00:26:04] There were public protests demanding her return, and statues of her were paraded through the streets.
[00:26:12] Nero’s response was ruthless: he charged her with adultery, which she was almost certainly not guilty of, and had her executed in exile. There is even an account that her head was brought to Poppea, Nero’s new wife, as proof.
[00:26:32] And if Poppea thought that Nero would be nicer to her, she would be sorely mistaken.
[00:26:39] According to Tacitus, in AD 65, while she was pregnant, Nero grew so angry with her that he kicked her to death, reportedly aiming his blows at her stomach to ensure he also killed their unborn child.
[00:26:57] And I’m sorry to say that it gets, if it can do, even worse. Or at least, no better.
[00:27:05] After Poppaea’s death, Nero spotted a young boy, Sporus, in the streets of Rome. He decided that the young boy was the spitting image of his dead, murdered, wife. He ordered for the boy to be brought to his palace, castrated, dressed up as his dead wife, and then married to Nero.
[00:27:29] Seriously grisly stuff indeed.
[00:27:33] By this time, there was widespread consensus that Nero was unfit to rule.
[00:27:39] The same year, AD 65, there was a plot to assassinate him, a plot involving an influential senator called Piso and even, reportedly, Nero’s close advisor, Seneca.
[00:27:53] But the conspiracy was betrayed before it could be put into action. And the repression that followed was brutal. Dozens were executed or forced to commit suicide.
[00:28:07] Piso took his own life, and Seneca was ordered to open his veins, dying in a bath while dictating calm philosophical reflections to his students, the very image of Stoic resignation.
[00:28:21] The conspiracy and its bloody suppression marked a turning point. Nero no longer pretended to govern with restraint.
[00:28:30] He ruled through fear, with spies and informers everywhere, and trials for treason filling the Senate’s time.
[00:28:38] And at the same time, he leaned further into his passions: performance, theatre, and spectacle.
[00:28:45] In AD 66 he travelled to Greece, competing in chariot races, singing, and acting in public contests. The judges, of course, awarded him victory in every event, but the sight of the emperor of Rome prancing on stage further enraged the aristocracy.
[00:29:06] And when Nero returned from Greece, crowned with laurels and declaring he had won over 1,800 prizes, his popularity in Rome was lower than ever.
[00:29:18] By the late 60s AD, Nero’s grip on power was crumbling.
[00:29:23] The provinces were restless.
[00:29:26] The final blow came in AD 68.
[00:29:29] Nero ordered one of his governors, Gaius Julius Vindex, to raise taxes.
[00:29:36] Vindex, the governor of Gaul, not only refused, but rose up in revolt, declaring Nero unfit to rule.
[00:29:45] He was soon joined by Servius Sulpicius Galba, a governor in Spain, who positioned himself as a defender of Rome’s liberty.
[00:29:55] At first, Nero tried to rally support.
[00:29:59] He even talked of leading an army himself.
[00:30:02] But when news reached Rome that even the Praetorian Guard had deserted him, he panicked. The Senate declared him a public enemy, and orders were given for his arrest.
[00:30:16] Nero fled the city with a small group of freedmen.
[00:30:21] According to Suetonius, he wandered aimlessly, begging one of them to find a quiet place where he could hide. At last he took refuge in a villa outside Rome.
[00:30:33] There, hearing the sound of horsemen approaching, he realised it was over.
[00:30:40] Suetonius tells us he hesitated, begging his slaves to kill him. They refused. Finally, realising that there was no escape from here, he drove a dagger into his own throat.
[00:30:55] His last words, supposedly, were “Qualis artifex pereo” — “What an artist dies in me.”
[00:31:03] It was June AD 68. Nero was thirty years old, and with his death the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the line of Augustus, ended.
[00:31:16] As for his legacy, Nero has become a byword for excess and cruelty: the emperor who killed his mother, murdered his wife, persecuted Christians, and played music while Rome burned.
[00:31:30] But as with Caligula, so much of what we “know” about him comes from hostile sources, written years after his death.
[00:31:40] Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, they all had their own agendas, and wanted to present Nero in the worst possible way, so as to present the emperors that came after him in a more positive light.
[00:31:55] So, Nero, was he Rome’s ultimate villain, or a young man who was never fit for power?
[00:32:03] It seems that the answer is “a bit of both”. If the ancient historians are to be taken at face value, he did monstrous things, but we must remember that it was very convenient for him to be cast as a monster and a tyrant.
[00:32:20] And, he was hardly the first.
[00:32:23] In Caligula we saw how rumour, scandal, and fear turned an emperor into a monster in the public imagination.
[00:32:31] With Nero, we saw it again: a young man who began his reign with promises of clemency and good government, yet is remembered forever as a sadistic tyrant.
[00:32:43] In our next and final episode in this mini-series, we will turn to Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:32:51] Unlike Caligula or Nero, he inherited a stable empire, ruled by his philosopher-emperor father.
[00:32:58] But Commodus would squander that legacy, descending into megalomania, gladiatorial fantasies, and a cruelty that shocked even a jaded Roman world.
[00:33:10] And that, my friends, is what we have waiting for us next time.
[00:33:16] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Nero.
[00:33:20] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:33:24] As a final reminder in case it hadn’t sunk in yet, this was part two of a three-part mini-series.
[00:33:30] The first one was on Caligula, and next up we are going to meet an emperor with even fewer redeeming qualities, Commodus.
[00:33:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:33:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “Tyrants Of The Roman Empire”.
[00:00:29] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about Caligula. Next time, in part three, we’ll talk about Commodus.
[00:00:37] And today it’s Nero, a man who has been called the antichrist, remembered by history for brutality, depravity and almost unmatched sadism.
[00:00:50] You don’t have to have listened to part one, on Caligula, to enjoy this one, but it will make more sense if you have, and rather than go over stuff again, I’ll assume that you’ve listened to part one. So now is the time to press pause and go and listen to that one, in case you haven’t done so already.
[00:01:08] Alright then, let’s not waste a minute, especially as this is going to be quite a long one, and find out about Emperor Nero.
[00:01:17] As you may know, there is the stereotype of the Italian “mother’s boy”, a boy, a man even, who has a particularly close bond with his mother, perhaps even living with her until well into his adult years.
[00:01:34] There’s a word for this, “mammone”, and, like many stereotypes, it has some basis in fact.
[00:01:43] I did an ERASMUS exchange at the University of Naples, and can certainly say that my male Italian friends would be constantly calling their mothers, updating them on where they were going that evening or what they had had for lunch.
[00:01:58] Occasionally, the intensity of this mother-son relationship did drive something of a wedge between these young men and their girlfriends.
[00:02:09] And even going back to Ancient Rome, we can see that this is not a modern phenomenon.
[00:02:17] In AD 58, a young man was taunted by his new lover over his relationship with his mother.
[00:02:25] The man invited his mother to a feast at Baiae, an ancient Roman town just across the bay of Naples.
[00:02:34] The mother came to the feast, and on her return her son offered her his boat, as hers had been damaged on the journey over.
[00:02:45] This wasn’t a kindly gesture, and the mother knew it.
[00:02:50] The son, the then 21-year-old Emperor Nero, had ordered for a specially modified boat to be built that would sink at a predetermined time, killing everyone onboard.
[00:03:06] His mother, Aggripina the Younger, had got wind of the plan, but she had little choice but to go ahead with it.
[00:03:15] She boarded the ship, knowing her only son was sending her to her death.
[00:03:22] Sure enough, as the ship sailed across the bay, it started to disintegrate.
[00:03:28] Pieces of wood broke off, and the vessel started to sink.
[00:03:34] What Nero hadn’t bargained for was that his mother was a strong swimmer.
[00:03:41] She managed to swim to shore, and she was met by cheers and well-wishers, rejoicing with relief that the emperor’s mother had survived this "tragic accident".
[00:03:54] This relief wouldn’t last for long.
[00:03:57] When Nero got wind that his plot had failed, he hatched another.
[00:04:03] He sent armed men to his mother’s villa, instructing them to dispatch her, once and for all.
[00:04:12] They surrounded her bed, and when she realised that her fate was inevitable, she pointed at her womb, her belly, telling the men to “strike here, because that is where the monster came from”.
[00:04:27] It is an impressive story, and has gone down in the history books as just one example of the callous brutality of Nero, a man whose very name has become a byword for cruelty.
[00:04:43] It is also, perhaps, not true.
[00:04:47] Several modern historians have tried to revisit the myth and reputation of Nero, with some concluding that he was probably not quite as bad as most people think, and others simply pointing out that the accounts we have of his life and his actions, like those of Caligula are highly biased, so we should not blindly accept everything that is written about him as true, but rather as the historical record of men with an agenda.
[00:05:20] Now, to understand Nero, like we did last episode, we must start before his birth.
[00:05:28] Caligula, as you’ll remember from last time, had no surviving children of his own.
[00:05:35] When he was stabbed to death in that theatre corridor in AD 41, the title of emperor passed to his uncle Claudius, a man whom almost nobody expected to become emperor.
[00:05:49] Claudius had been hidden away for much of his life. He walked with a limp, spoke with a stammer, and had been dismissed as weak-minded by his own family. Yet the Praetorian Guard, who were keen to have someone malleable on the throne, found him cowering behind a curtain in the palace and declared him emperor.
[00:06:14] And Claudius actually turned out to be a more competent emperor than many expected.
[00:06:20] He expanded the empire into Britain, reformed aspects of the legal system, and generally kept the machine of empire ticking over.
[00:06:31] But for today’s episode, and the story of Nero, Claudius matters not so much for his conquests as for his marriages.
[00:06:41] In particular, his final one.
[00:06:44] And it’s here that we need to re-introduce Agrippina the Younger.
[00:06:49] She was the sister of Caligula, and was also the great-granddaughter of the first emperor, Augustus.
[00:06:57] She was the Roman equivalent of royalty, and she married a high-ranking Roman politician.
[00:07:05] They had one biological child, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but his chances at becoming emperor looked slim at best, as he wasn’t directly in the line of succession.
[00:07:19] What’s more, a couple of years into his reign as emperor, Caligula had discovered that his sister was plotting to have him killed.
[00:07:28] He sent her into exile on a remote Mediterranean island. And a couple of years later, her husband died.
[00:07:37] When Caligula was deposed and Claudius made emperor, the new emperor recalled Agrippina from exile.
[00:07:45] She re-emerged in public life, back in Rome, but she was a widow with no connections.
[00:07:54] She was, however, ruthlessly ambitious, and incredibly capable.
[00:08:00] To cut a long story short, through a series of marriages, alliances, and deaths that some have claimed were murder, Agrippina ended up married to her uncle, emperor Claudius.
[00:08:15] Claudius had another son from his previous marriage, Britannicus, but the boy was a few years younger than Agrippina’s son, Lucius.
[00:08:26] Agrippina managed to persuade Claudius to officially adopt Lucius, making the two boys the ageing Claudius’s heirs.
[00:08:37] And to cement his position, she arranged for Lucius, at the age of sixteen, to marry Claudius’ daughter, Octavia.
[00:08:47] It was an extraordinary piece of dynastic chess, 10 out of 10 political manoeuvring.
[00:08:54] In less than ten years, Agrippina had gone from outcast to the very centre of Roman power, and had placed her son in the best possible position.
[00:09:07] This son, Lucius, would later be known as Nero.
[00:09:12] And then, in AD 54, after one of his famous banquets, Claudius died.
[00:09:19] Poisoned mushrooms, according to one story, although whether Agrippina had a hand in that, or they were simply bad mushrooms, we can’t be sure.
[00:09:30] What we do know is that the timing was perfect for Nero.
[00:09:35] Britannicus, Claudius’ biological son, was still too young to rule.
[00:09:41] Nero, by contrast, was seventeen, married to Claudius’ daughter, and already adopted as his heir.
[00:09:51] Agrippina had the Praetorian Guard on side, and the Senate fell quickly into line.
[00:09:58] At just seventeen years old, the boy Lucius became emperor Nero of Rome.
[00:10:05] Now, a seventeen-year-old emperor with no military experience and no political record might sound like a recipe for disaster.
[00:10:14] And in the long run, it was. But at the very beginning, things looked more promising.
[00:10:21] Nero’s accession was greeted with widespread joy.
[00:10:25] The memory of Caligula’s madness was still fresh, and Claudius, though perfectly competent, had been seen as dull and dominated by his wives and freedmen.
[00:10:37] Nero, by contrast, was young, handsome, descended from Augustus, and backed by a powerful group of well-known advisers.
[00:10:49] On one side was his mother, Agrippina, who had schemed and fought her way to this moment, and who seems to have intended to rule through her son.
[00:11:01] On the other side were two men who would become household names in Roman history: Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, and Burrus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard.
[00:11:14] And for the first few years of Nero’s reign this trio effectively governed the empire.
[00:11:22] And they did it…pretty well. This was a period that later writers would nostalgically call the quinquennium Neronis, the “five good years of Nero”.
[00:11:35] Nero cut taxes, eased the financial burdens on the provinces, and even banned secret trials, a clear rejection of the paranoia that had characterised the rule of Tiberius and, of course, his own uncle Caligula.
[00:11:51] He insisted that no one could be condemned without the Senate’s approval, and he declared that he wanted to end the practice of capital punishment.
[00:12:01] This sounded almost like the voice of a philosopher-king, and that wasn’t far off.
[00:12:09] His tutor, Seneca, had filled his head with Stoic ideals, lofty talk about clemency, virtue, and good governance.
[00:12:19] And it seemed that Nero was putting them into practice. Things were looking up.
[00:12:26] And he wasn’t only popular with the elite; the Roman people also adored him.
[00:12:33] He gave them games and spectacles, but also a sense of relief. After years of instability, they had a young emperor who appeared gentle, approachable, even merciful.
[00:12:48] Statues of him went up all across the empire, coins bore his handsome young face, and poets praised him as the dawn of a new golden age.
[00:13:00] But even in these golden years, there were hints of what was to come.
[00:13:06] Nero’s true passions were not in the Senate chamber or on the battlefield, but on the stage and in the circus.
[00:13:15] He wrote poetry, practised singing and acting, and even took lessons in chariot racing. By all accounts, he was quite good at these pursuits, and took them pretty seriously.
[00:13:29] But to Rome’s elite, this was scandalous; emperors were supposed to command armies, not play music or rehearse tragedies. Actors and musicians, after all, were at the bottom of society, in the same category as gladiators and prostitutes.
[00:13:50] Still, the public lapped it up.
[00:13:53] Here was an emperor who mingled with the people, who enjoyed the same entertainments they did, who seemed almost one of them.
[00:14:03] And what’s more, one who seemed to be running Rome pretty effectively.
[00:14:08] But behind the scenes, things were not so calm.
[00:14:12] His mother, Agrippina, was growing restless. She believed Nero owed everything to her: his throne, his marriage, his very survival.
[00:14:22] She expected to share power, to be listened to, to be obeyed.
[00:14:28] But she found herself increasingly sidelined by the men in Nero’s life: Seneca and Burrus. She pushed back, demanding more influence, reminding Nero of everything that she had done for him.
[00:14:44] And this tension between mother and son soon escalated.
[00:14:48] A particular flashpoint came over a love affair.
[00:14:52] Nero was married at the time, but shortly after he became emperor, he became infatuated with a former slave named Claudia Acte.
[00:15:03] Agrippina was horrified.
[00:15:06] To her, it was not just a disgrace, the emperor of Rome lowering himself to consort with a freedwoman, but a threat to her own position.
[00:15:18] If Acte gained influence, Agrippina’s grip on her son would weaken even further.
[00:15:25] According to the historian Tacitus, Agrippina’s fury was such that she even tried to intimidate Nero by reminding him that Britannicus, the biological son of Claudius, was still alive, was soon coming of age, and might one day stake his claim.
[00:15:44] That was a dangerous card to play.
[00:15:47] Dangerous for Britannicus, at least.
[00:15:50] In AD 55, the young boy was at a banquet with the imperial family when he suddenly collapsed, gasping for air.
[00:15:59] He died on the spot.
[00:16:03] Tacitus says he was poisoned on Nero’s orders, just days before he was due to put on the toga virilis and formally become an adult in the eyes of Rome.
[00:16:15] Now, whether Britannicus truly posed a threat or not, he was gone.
[00:16:21] And with his death, one more rival was removed.
[00:16:26] Whether it was because he now felt more secure in his position and didn’t need her anymore, or whether it was because he felt she had overstepped the mark, we can only hypothesise, but Agrippina’s influence over her son continued to decline.
[00:16:43] She no longer sat beside him at public ceremonies. Her face was removed from the front of Roman coins and relegated to the back, then it was removed altogether.
[00:16:56] And she was banished from the palace. Her power was ebbing away, and she knew it.
[00:17:04] Tacitus paints a vivid picture of her trying to do everything she could to claw it back, from scolding her son, attempting to win over the Praetorian Guard, even, at one point, hinting that she might champion someone else.
[00:17:20] But each move only pushed Nero further away.
[00:17:25] By the time we reach the year AD 58, Nero was openly defying her.
[00:17:32] He was emperor in his own right now, and the struggle between mother and son was heading towards its bloody conclusion, the one we began this episode with, in Baiae, with sinking boats, daggers, and a mother urging her assassins to stab her in the womb.
[00:17:51] After Agrippina’s death, Nero was finally free of his mother’s shadow.
[00:17:57] But if he thought this would win him peace of mind, and room to breathe, he was mistaken.
[00:18:05] His mother’s death was publicly reported as suicide, self-destruction after the discovery of her supposed plot to overthrow her son.
[00:18:15] But few in Rome bought this story.
[00:18:19] It was widely accepted that she had been killed on the emperor’s orders.
[00:18:25] Now, this wouldn’t of course have been the first time an emperor had killed someone who was inconvenient; Ancient Rome was all about knocking off your political rivals, current, past or future, and it wasn’t particularly frowned upon.
[00:18:41] But the difference was that killing your own mother was a step too far, even for the sometimes bloodthirsty ancient Romans.
[00:18:51] The Senate congratulated him, of course.
[00:18:54] The Praetorian Guard swore their loyalty. Flattery was part of the job description when dealing with emperors. Yet whispers spread across Rome: the young emperor had crossed a line.
[00:19:10] And after Agrippina’s murder, something flipped in Nero, or at least his behaviour became even more erratic and unusual.
[00:19:22] He became even more obsessed with performance.
[00:19:26] He had always been a keen singer, actor, and poet, but became utterly addicted to the crowd.
[00:19:34] At first, he confined himself to small audiences, singing or reciting verses at private gatherings. But soon he wanted more. He wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be cheered by the people.
[00:19:51] The historian Suetonius tells us he would lock audiences in the theatre until he had finished his performances, no matter how long they dragged on.
[00:20:02] For Rome’s elite, this was humiliating.
[00:20:05] To perform on stage was the lowest of the low, an activity for slaves and actors, not emperors.
[00:20:14] And while this was all going on, costs of his various extravagances continued to mount.
[00:20:21] Nero lavished money on games, spectacles, and extensive building projects.
[00:20:28] He built a new wooden amphitheatre for shows, and he spent huge sums on plays, music, and chariot races. The treasury, which had been healthy under the fiscally conservative Claudius, began to creak under the weight of his successor’s indulgence.
[00:20:48] And in July of AD 64, the city–and the empire–would face disaster.
[00:20:57] 10 years into his rule, a huge fire broke out in the city of Rome.
[00:21:04] Fires were not uncommon in the crowded, wooden tenements of the capital, but this one was different. It raged for six days and seven nights, destroying vast swathes of the city.
[00:21:19] When at last it seemed to be under control, it flared up again, lasting another three days.
[00:21:26] There is no reliable record of how many people died, but what is certain is that by the end, most of Rome lay in ruins. Entire districts were gone, temples and public buildings reduced to ash, and thousands of people left homeless.
[00:21:47] And where was Nero during all of this?
[00:21:50] Well, there is this popular idea that he was in Rome, looking over his burning capital, playing the fiddle, the violin.
[00:22:00] It might fit the characterisation of Nero, but it isn’t true.
[00:22:05] For starters, the fiddle wasn’t invented for another 1,500 years. If he did anything, it would have been to play the lute or to sing, but there is no evidence that he did this.
[00:22:19] According to Tacitus, he was at his villa in Antium, by the coast, when the fire began.
[00:22:26] He rushed back to the city, opening up the Campus Martius, the imperial gardens, and even his own palace to shelter those who had lost their homes.
[00:22:37] He also arranged for food supplies to be brought in to prevent famine.
[00:22:43] But this was not the story that spread.
[00:22:46] Suetonius and later sources tell us that Nero stood on a tower, lyre in hand, watching Rome burn while singing about the fall of Troy.
[00:22:57] Tacitus, who wrote closer to the time, is more careful: he says only that there were rumours, and that people believed them.
[00:23:07] What does seem clear is that suspicion quickly turned on Nero.
[00:23:13] Some claimed he had ordered the fire to clear space for an ambitious new building project, the Domus Aurea, or “Golden House”, an enormous palace complex that would rise in the very heart of the destroyed city.
[00:23:28] This project did go ahead and it was breathtaking: artificial lakes, porticos stretching for hundreds of meters, halls glittering with gold and jewels, and a colossal statue of Nero. more than 30 metres high, standing like a god at the entrance.
[00:23:49] But as to whether the fire was started on Nero’s orders, most historians are pretty skeptical.
[00:23:57] Perhaps the fire was an unfortunate accident. Perhaps it was spread by looters.
[00:24:03] Or perhaps Nero’s men did set it, whether on his orders or not.
[00:24:09] What mattered was that people believed he was responsible.
[00:24:14] To deflect suspicion, Nero looked for scapegoats.
[00:24:18] He turned to a small and obscure sect in Rome: the Christians.
[00:24:24] They were accused of starting the fire, and subjected to brutal punishments.
[00:24:30] Some were torn apart by dogs, others were crucified, others burned alive to light Nero’s gardens at night.
[00:24:39] Grisly stuff indeed, especially because there is no evidence that Christians had anything to do with it.
[00:24:47] Unfortunately, this scapegoating seemed to work, at least temporarily. The public had been given a scalp, and this had satisfied their immediate thirst for a culprit.
[00:25:01] But still, Nero’s authority was far from stable.
[00:25:06] And in the years after the Great Fire, his private life became just as notorious as his public one.
[00:25:14] He had been married, since the age of sixteen, to Octavia, the daughter of Claudius. She was popular with the Roman people: modest, dutiful, the very picture of the traditional Roman matron.
[00:25:29] But Nero despised her. He accused her of infertility, neglected her, and eventually, in AD 62, divorced her.
[00:25:42] Only days later, he married his mistress, Poppaea Sabina.
[00:25:47] She was ambitious, glamorous, and had previously been married to Otho, a friend of Nero’s who would later, briefly, be emperor himself.
[00:25:59] The Roman people did not take kindly to Octavia’s dismissal.
[00:26:04] There were public protests demanding her return, and statues of her were paraded through the streets.
[00:26:12] Nero’s response was ruthless: he charged her with adultery, which she was almost certainly not guilty of, and had her executed in exile. There is even an account that her head was brought to Poppea, Nero’s new wife, as proof.
[00:26:32] And if Poppea thought that Nero would be nicer to her, she would be sorely mistaken.
[00:26:39] According to Tacitus, in AD 65, while she was pregnant, Nero grew so angry with her that he kicked her to death, reportedly aiming his blows at her stomach to ensure he also killed their unborn child.
[00:26:57] And I’m sorry to say that it gets, if it can do, even worse. Or at least, no better.
[00:27:05] After Poppaea’s death, Nero spotted a young boy, Sporus, in the streets of Rome. He decided that the young boy was the spitting image of his dead, murdered, wife. He ordered for the boy to be brought to his palace, castrated, dressed up as his dead wife, and then married to Nero.
[00:27:29] Seriously grisly stuff indeed.
[00:27:33] By this time, there was widespread consensus that Nero was unfit to rule.
[00:27:39] The same year, AD 65, there was a plot to assassinate him, a plot involving an influential senator called Piso and even, reportedly, Nero’s close advisor, Seneca.
[00:27:53] But the conspiracy was betrayed before it could be put into action. And the repression that followed was brutal. Dozens were executed or forced to commit suicide.
[00:28:07] Piso took his own life, and Seneca was ordered to open his veins, dying in a bath while dictating calm philosophical reflections to his students, the very image of Stoic resignation.
[00:28:21] The conspiracy and its bloody suppression marked a turning point. Nero no longer pretended to govern with restraint.
[00:28:30] He ruled through fear, with spies and informers everywhere, and trials for treason filling the Senate’s time.
[00:28:38] And at the same time, he leaned further into his passions: performance, theatre, and spectacle.
[00:28:45] In AD 66 he travelled to Greece, competing in chariot races, singing, and acting in public contests. The judges, of course, awarded him victory in every event, but the sight of the emperor of Rome prancing on stage further enraged the aristocracy.
[00:29:06] And when Nero returned from Greece, crowned with laurels and declaring he had won over 1,800 prizes, his popularity in Rome was lower than ever.
[00:29:18] By the late 60s AD, Nero’s grip on power was crumbling.
[00:29:23] The provinces were restless.
[00:29:26] The final blow came in AD 68.
[00:29:29] Nero ordered one of his governors, Gaius Julius Vindex, to raise taxes.
[00:29:36] Vindex, the governor of Gaul, not only refused, but rose up in revolt, declaring Nero unfit to rule.
[00:29:45] He was soon joined by Servius Sulpicius Galba, a governor in Spain, who positioned himself as a defender of Rome’s liberty.
[00:29:55] At first, Nero tried to rally support.
[00:29:59] He even talked of leading an army himself.
[00:30:02] But when news reached Rome that even the Praetorian Guard had deserted him, he panicked. The Senate declared him a public enemy, and orders were given for his arrest.
[00:30:16] Nero fled the city with a small group of freedmen.
[00:30:21] According to Suetonius, he wandered aimlessly, begging one of them to find a quiet place where he could hide. At last he took refuge in a villa outside Rome.
[00:30:33] There, hearing the sound of horsemen approaching, he realised it was over.
[00:30:40] Suetonius tells us he hesitated, begging his slaves to kill him. They refused. Finally, realising that there was no escape from here, he drove a dagger into his own throat.
[00:30:55] His last words, supposedly, were “Qualis artifex pereo” — “What an artist dies in me.”
[00:31:03] It was June AD 68. Nero was thirty years old, and with his death the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the line of Augustus, ended.
[00:31:16] As for his legacy, Nero has become a byword for excess and cruelty: the emperor who killed his mother, murdered his wife, persecuted Christians, and played music while Rome burned.
[00:31:30] But as with Caligula, so much of what we “know” about him comes from hostile sources, written years after his death.
[00:31:40] Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, they all had their own agendas, and wanted to present Nero in the worst possible way, so as to present the emperors that came after him in a more positive light.
[00:31:55] So, Nero, was he Rome’s ultimate villain, or a young man who was never fit for power?
[00:32:03] It seems that the answer is “a bit of both”. If the ancient historians are to be taken at face value, he did monstrous things, but we must remember that it was very convenient for him to be cast as a monster and a tyrant.
[00:32:20] And, he was hardly the first.
[00:32:23] In Caligula we saw how rumour, scandal, and fear turned an emperor into a monster in the public imagination.
[00:32:31] With Nero, we saw it again: a young man who began his reign with promises of clemency and good government, yet is remembered forever as a sadistic tyrant.
[00:32:43] In our next and final episode in this mini-series, we will turn to Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius.
[00:32:51] Unlike Caligula or Nero, he inherited a stable empire, ruled by his philosopher-emperor father.
[00:32:58] But Commodus would squander that legacy, descending into megalomania, gladiatorial fantasies, and a cruelty that shocked even a jaded Roman world.
[00:33:10] And that, my friends, is what we have waiting for us next time.
[00:33:16] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Nero.
[00:33:20] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:33:24] As a final reminder in case it hadn’t sunk in yet, this was part two of a three-part mini-series.
[00:33:30] The first one was on Caligula, and next up we are going to meet an emperor with even fewer redeeming qualities, Commodus.
[00:33:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:33:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
