The ancient historian Suetonius does not pull any punches in his pen portrait of the emperor Nero. A sustained character assassination opens with the observation that although ‘many of Nero’s vices were inherited… he made a ghastly caricature of his ancestors’ virtues’. Suetonius goes on to summarise Nero’s ‘less atrocious acts’, before devoting generous coverage to the emperor’s ‘follies and crimes’. Some of those follies read like a satirist’s flight of fancy. The emperor, we are told, possessed a passion for performance, but was hampered by a ‘feeble’ voice. Rather than letting this deter him, Nero tutored portions of the audience in how best to applaud him, while theatre doors were locked during his recitals, preventing anyone from leaving. Some of his more inventive critics feigned death in order to escape.
Of course, it is far from unique for a leader to harbour delusions about the true scope of his or her talents, but Suetonius does not stop there. Instead, he details a long and disturbing series of crimes, including rape and serial attempted or actual murder – involving poison, stabbings, strangulation, drowning, a self-scuttling ship, and kicking Poppaea, his pregnant wife, to death after she complained that he had returned home late. Nero had another wife executed for adultery, and ordered the killing of his own mother, Agrippina, which he then passed off as suicide. The cumulative effect of these charges is to evoke a figure steeped in unimaginable horror. And that is before we turn to perhaps the most notorious episode of his reign: the great fire of Rome in AD 64.
This inferno raged for nine days and gutted much of the urban area. Suetonius not only lays the blame for this squarely at Nero’s feet, stating that ‘he brazenly set fire to the city’, but also adds that the theatrical emperor could not resist performing The Fall of Ilium against the apocalyptic backdrop. Doing so drew attention to Nero’s own mythical lineage. As the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he claimed descent from Aeneas, who had escaped from Ilium, better known to us as Troy, when the city was destroyed. Indulging in such shameless antics as Rome succumbed to catastrophe seems to belong in that modern news category of ‘you couldn’t make it up’. But someone did. We know that Nero was not even in Rome at the time, making it impossible for him to have started the fire, or fiddled while the city burned. What is more, even Suetonius conceded that Nero set up a relief fund to aid survivors.
