#250 Was Nero as bad as people say?

I learned this today. It is impossible to know if the emperor Nero was as bad as people say because all of the contemporary sources were destroyed.

Nero became emperor of the Roman Empire in 54 AD. He was the adopted son of Emperor Claudius and came to the throne on the death of Claudius. Nero was emperor for 14 years and ended up committing suicide in 68 AD, when he was only 30 years old. There was a revolt against Nero’s taxes and Nero was forced to flee. Realizing he had no supporters, and that enemy forces were closing in, Nero killed himself.

Almost 2000 years after Nero died, we have an image of him as a murderous tyrant. The famous image is of him playing his fiddle while the city of Rome burned. He is also supposed to have murdered his mother, Agrippina the Younger, who was also his lover. He killed both of his wives. The second wife was pregnant, and he supposedly killed her by kicking her in the stomach. He spent a lot of public money building palaces, and he had a love of fine clothes. He was sexually deviant with both sexes and he married a slave boy. He watched the city of Rome burn for a week from the safety of his palace. He had people executed for very little reason and he brought the empire to civil war on his death. We are even told that he was too much of a coward to take his own life and had to beg one of his servants to do it for him. This is the image we have when we think of Emperor Nero. But, is it true?

The main problem with the accounts of Nero are that they were all written long after he died. There were a few historians who wrote histories of Nero, but there are three main historians that people rely on when they write about Nero. Those are Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius. Tacitus and Suetonius both wrote their histories more than 50 years after Nero had died and Suetonius wrote his 150 years after the death of Nero.

All of the sources that they based their writings on were said to be fantastical and the three historians all had reasons to paint Nero in a negative light. Tacitus was a senator and he owed a lot of his success to Nero’s rivals. He had good reason to write badly of Nero.

Suetonius was slightly different in that he wasn’t so much a historian as a biographer. He wrote biographies of the emperors and he played up the sensational aspects. He was the Roman version of the tabloid press.

Cassius Dio wrote his history 150 words after the death of Nero. He wrote about the reign of Nero, but a lot of his work was lost. What was left was edited and altered by John Xiphilinius, a monk in the 11^th century. How much he changed is unknown.

So, was Nero as bad as he has been made out to be? The answer is he probably did some bad things, but nowhere near on the level he was made out to do. There are two main reasons for this.

The first reason is the type of stories that are told about him. The things he is said to have done are straight out of Roman folklore. The story of when Rome burned is taken from earlier accounts of attacks on cities, such as Troy. Tacitus describes “citizens wailing and mothers grabbing their children,” which is a common theme in old Roman stories. Nero certainly didn’t fiddle while it burned. He wasn’t even there at the start of the fire, and he spearheaded the relief effort when he did arrive. Most of the buildings that burned were slum housing.

The story of him killing his pregnant wife is also a common theme from Roman and Greek myths. It is an action used to show the ultimate evil of a character.

The second reason is that Nero was not despised by the common people in Rome, but he was hated by the aristocrats. He had a series of tax schemes that took money from the rich. He initiated currency reforms, improved Rome’s food supply and he organized public works projects. He built a marketplace and public baths for regular citizens.

In the end, Nero’s reputation probably comes down to other aristocrats disliking him and desiring the throne for themselves. After he died, the civil war and the Year of the Four Emperors. He may have been a victim of vituperation, which meant that it was permissible to say anything about an opponent, true or not. Except that the things said about Nero have increased over time.

So, Nero was undoubtedly not the nicest of people. It would be hard to stay emperor of an empire without having a few people killed. But it seems he was probably not as bad as he has been made out to be. And that is what I learned today.

Photo By cjh1452000 – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nero_1.JPG

Sources:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/how-nasty-was-nero-really

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/just-how-bad-was-nero-really-180977813/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Xiphilinus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero