How Nasty Was Nero, Really?

Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years. According to various Roman historians, he commissioned the assassination of Agrippina the Younger—his mother and sometime lover. He sought to poison her, then to have her crushed by a falling ceiling or drowned in a self-sinking boat, before ultimately having her murder disguised as a suicide. Nero was betrothed at eleven and married at fifteen, to his adoptive stepsister, Claudia Octavia, the daughter of the emperor Claudius. At the age of twenty-four, Nero divorced her, banished her, ordered her bound with her wrists slit, and had her suffocated in a steam bath. He received her decapitated head when it was delivered to his court. He also murdered his second wife, the noblewoman Poppaea Sabina, by kicking her in the belly while she was pregnant.

Nero’s profligacy went beyond slaughtering his nearest and dearest. He spent a fortune building an ornate palace, only to have it burn down, along with the rest of the city of Rome, in a conflagration that lasted for more than a week. Nero watched the destruction from a safe elevation, singing of the decimation of Troy. He was famous for never wearing the same garment twice. He sought out sexual thrills like a hog snuffling for truffles. He had a favored freedman, Sporus, castrated, then married him in a ceremony in which Sporus was dressed in the traditional garb of a bride and Nero played the groom. Later, Nero repeated the ceremony with another of his freedmen playing the groom while he adopted the role of bride, sans castration; the pseudo-nuptials were consummated on a couch in full view of guests at a banquet. He was attention-seeking, petulant, arbitrary. He had the senator Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus murdered on the ground that his expressions were overly melancholic.

No wonder Nero’s name became a byword for degeneracy. “Let not ever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom,” Hamlet reminds himself as he prepares to confront Gertrude over her marriage to Claudius, resolving to “speak daggers to her but use none.” In the twentieth century, Nero was memorialized by the lurid, Academy Award-nominated performance of Peter Ustinov in the 1951 Hollywood epic “Quo Vadis,” in which Ustinov wore purple robes, kicked servants at will, and plummily insisted that Seneca, his tutor turned adviser, acknowledge his omnipotence. In a more recent popular depiction, a TV movie directed by the late Paul Marcus, Nero is represented as a pretty-boy prince traumatized by having witnessed his father being murdered by the emperor Caligula; Nero starts his reign with good intentions before embarking upon his own program of Caligula-style excesses. His popular reputation even features in that comprehensive catalogue of humanity “The Simpsons,” in an episode in which Homer takes his evangelical neighbor, Ned Flanders, to Las Vegas for an experiment in depravity. After a night of boozing at the tables, they wake to find that each has married a cocktail waitress from the hotel casino where they are staying: Nero’s Palace.

All of this, according to some recent scholars, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a fabrication: a narrative derived from biased histories, written decades after Nero died, that relied on dubious sources. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and these posthumous accounts were calculated in part to denigrate this dynastic line and burnish the reputations of its successors. Depictions of Nero as notorious are “based on a source narrative that is partisan,” Thorsten Opper, a curator in the Greek and Roman division of the British Museum, told me recently. The museum has just opened an exhibition that, if not quite aiming to rehabilitate Nero, challenges his grotesque reputation. “Anything you think you know about Nero is based on manipulation and lies that are two thousand years old,” Opper, the show’s lead curator, said. Indeed, some of the stories told about Nero, such as the saying that he “fiddled while Rome burned,” are patently absurd: violins weren’t invented until the sixteenth century.

Most of what has been passed down about Nero comes from three historians: Tacitus, who portrays him as having “polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence”; Cassius Dio, who describes Nero skulking incognito through Rome at night while “insulting women,” “practicing lewdness on boys,” and “beating, wounding, and murdering” others; and Suetonius, who claims that Nero, having run through the usual roster of vices, invented a perversion of his own at public games that he hosted, in which he would put on an animal skin and “assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.”

Modern scholars have determined that many of the tropes used to characterize Nero’s depravities bear a remarkable similarity to literary accounts of mythical events. Opper said, “The whole thing is based on literary techniques that were taught in Roman rhetorical schools.” Tacitus’ and Dio’s accounts of the Great Fire of Rome, in 64 A.D., in their detailed evocations of citizens wailing and mothers grabbing their children, closely echo earlier accounts of attacks on cities, especially the siege of Troy. Nero wasn’t even in Rome when the fire started. Moreover, much of what was destroyed was slum housing constructed by exploitative landlords. During the fire, Nero “led the relief effort,” in Opper’s words, and afterward instituted a new building code.

Descriptions of Nero as unhinged and licentious belong to a rhetorical tradition of personal attack that flourished in the Roman courtroom. Opper told me, “They had a term for it—vituperatio, or ‘vituperation,’ which meant that you could say anything about your opponent. You can really invent all manner of things just to malign that character. And that is exactly the kind of language and stereotypes we find in the source accounts.” The scholar Kirk Freudenburg, writing in “The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero” (2017), argues that the lurid account of the collapsing ship—Nero is said to have sent Agrippina off with a grand display of affection, only to have his plot foiled when she swam to safety—“begs to be taken as apocryphal, a contraption of the historians’ own clever design.” Cassius Dio’s history of ancient Rome suggests that Nero was inspired to build a trick vessel after seeing a play in which a prop boat suddenly opened up, but Opper argues that the historian himself likely borrowed the idea from the play. Similarly, when Tacitus writes that Agrippina’s final gesture was to offer her womb up to an assassin’s blade, his words mirror a passage from Seneca’s “Oedipus” in which Jocasta seeks to be stabbed in the womb “which bore my husband and my sons.” Seneca wrote the play around the time of Nero’s rule, and it’s possible that his retelling of the mythic story was inspired by the actual manner of Agrippina’s death. But it’s more probable that Seneca engaged in a dramatic invention, and that, as Opper suggests, it colored Tacitus’ later account of how Agrippina died.

Some of the current revisionism can seem tendentious. In the 2019 book “Nero: Emperor and Court,” the British classicist John F. Drinkwater addresses the even more heinous death of Poppaea. He accepts the historical sources that describe an argument between Nero and his wife—Suetonius says that she was angry with him for coming home late from chariot racing—but proposes that the blow to Poppaea’s belly may have been merely the climax of a “matrimonial row that got out of hand,” adding, “If so Nero was at worst guilty of manslaughter.” Opper sees no need to downplay domestic abuse; rather, he contends that the over-all account of the marital argument conforms to an established pattern in earlier histories of powerful leaders. For a tyrant, “killing your pregnant wife is a topos,” he told me. “It’s applied in Roman and Greek history. It’s just such an evil deed—how much worse can someone be?” Opper said that Nero was deeply in love with Poppaea, and desperate for an heir; the couple’s only other child, a daughter, had died recently. In ancient Rome, pregnancy was a hazardous affair, and could prove fatal even without an assault. Opper told me, “You can’t prove it either way, but the evidence, I think, isn’t at all strong to say that he was to blame for it.”

The British Museum seeks to build a less sensationalist account of Nero through the placement and elucidation of objects: statues, busts, coins, inscriptions, graffiti. A portrait emerges of a young, untested leader at the helm of an unwieldy empire that is under enormous stress. The show’s tenor is established by the first object on display: a statue of Nero as a boy of twelve or thirteen. The statue, on loan from the Louvre, depicts Nero on the cusp of manhood, his status indicated by what would at the time have been legible symbols: a bulla, an amulet worn like a locket, confirms that he is a freeborn boy who has not yet come of age. The occasion for the statue’s manufacture might have been the marriage of Nero’s mother to his granduncle Claudius, then the emperor, in 49 A.D., eight years after the death of Nero’s father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. More likely, the object commemorates Claudius’ adoption of Nero as his heir in 50 A.D., the year Nero turned thirteen. The statue would originally have been displayed on a high plinth, but at the museum it is presented at ground level, so that the viewer is eye to eye with a child. The lighting design casts a long shadow: an imperial giant looms.

By the time Nero became emperor, in 54 A.D., the empire’s grip had long been weakening, and the senatorial and knightly classes of Rome often challenged the authority of the emperor, who was only the princeps—the leading member of their class—rather than a hereditary ruler. In this light, Nero’s construction of the Domus Aurea—a lavish palace that he built after the Great Fire, with three hundred rooms decorated with frescoes and gold leaf—can be seen less as the expression of a luxurious appetite than as a necessary investment in the perpetual entertainment of senators and knights. (That said, the Domus was a bit much; according to Suetonius, the building’s ceilings had secret compartments from which flower petals or drops of scented unguents were released onto guests’ heads.)

Material evidence in the exhibition indicates that when Nero ascended the throne he initially garnered the support of the Senate. Claudius had minted coins in which his portrait was paired with an image of the Praetorian Guard’s barracks—a daunting display of military domination. Nero asserted his legitimacy by inscribing the coins made for his accession with images of an oak wreath, which was traditionally bestowed as an honor by the Senate.

One of the most striking aspects of Nero’s early rule was the elevated role of his mother, Agrippina. Gold coins issued shortly after Nero became emperor show him in profile, nose to nose, with his mother, whose titles are given: “Wife of the Deified Claudius, Mother of Nero Caesar.” On a large marble relief that was created after Nero’s elevation, Agrippina is shown placing a crown on Nero’s head, as if she were responsible for his ascent. In the year after his accession, a gold coin was minted depicting mother and son in parallel. To the conservative historians who later gave accounts of this period, Agrippina’s prominence underscored the unnatural quality of Nero’s reign. Tacitus scorned Nero for being “ruled by a woman.” The alleged incest between mother and son was, in this telling, part of Agrippina’s desperate effort to retain power after her husband’s death. Tacitus writes that, when Nero was “flushed with wine and feasting,” Agrippina “presented herself attractively attired to her half intoxicated son and offered him her person.”

In the museum’s catalogue, Opper writes that “there seems little reason now to take any of this seriously, beyond what it reveals about the authors involved.” In the British Museum’s presentation, Agrippina’s securing of power is portrayed as evidence of her intelligence and her remarkable political abilities, particularly given the constraints of a patriarchal society. The coinage from Nero’s reign also documents her eclipse. A few years after his accession, Nero is depicted alone. By 59 A.D. Agrippina was dead, at the age of forty-three, and though her demise probably did not involve self-sinking vessels at sea, Nero does seem to have been responsible for having her stabbed to death. Opper suggests that Nero appears to have “sacrificed” her to appease Rome’s senatorial élite, who resented her interventions in public affairs. Although matricide was generally regarded as a terrible crime by the ancient Romans, Opper points out that other inconvenient women of the period also met harsh fates: Julia, the only child of the emperor Augustus, was banished by her father and died in exile. “Mothers obviously have a special status, but it is a mistake to look at Nero in isolation,” Opper told me. “You lose sight of the past patterns, and what they tell us about the values of this strange society.”

Nero’s demonic reputation also clashes with evidence that he was beloved by the Roman people. Alongside official portraits of the Emperor—the busts and statues—the British Museum includes a digitized reproduction of a graffito scratched into a building on the Palatine Hill. The image, which matches depictions of Nero on surviving coinage, shows him bearded and full-faced, with an ample double chin, and a hint of a smile on pursed lips. Opper takes the portrait to be admiring, rather than satirical, noting that no graffitied slogan suggests otherwise. Nero, he reports, was widely seen by the Roman public as youthful and vigorous. Suetonius notes that Nero, after becoming emperor, permitted members of the public to watch him exercise, demonstrating a physical prowess that was in marked contrast to Claudius, who had been ill and frail.

Nero enacted tax and currency reforms, steps that may have been unpopular with the wealthy but were welcomed by the broader public. The emperor Trajan, who came to power thirty years after Nero died, is said to have spoken of the “quinquennium Neronis”—the five good years of Nero’s fourteen-year rule. Trajan did not cite a specific period, but as emperor Nero took various measures that were approved of and, tellingly, retained or built on by later leaders. He erected a new marketplace and a spectacular complex of public baths, which allowed ordinary citizens to indulge ablutionary pleasures previously reserved for the wealthy. At the end of the first century, the satirical poet Martial quipped, “Who was ever worse than Nero? Yet what can be better than Nero’s warm baths?”

The Roman public also admired an aspect of Nero’s character that was much criticized by his later judges: his love of theatricality, the arts, and spectacle. Nero enjoyed singing, and Suetonius writes that he “frequently declaimed in public, and recited verses of his own composing, not only at home, but in the theatre.” These performances were “so much to the joy of all the people” that “the verses which had been publicly read, were, after being written in gold letters, consecrated to Jupiter Capitolinus.” Nero’s provision of public games and other entertainments further contributed to his popularity. The British Museum’s show features a terra-cotta figurine showing two gladiators in combat, of the sort that were mass-produced as souvenirs. At the contests, violence sometimes spilled out of the arena. During one gladiatorial match in Pompeii, in 59 A.D., fighting broke out among supporters of rival combatants, resulting in such a disturbance that the Roman Senate placed a ten-year ban on such events. Nero intervened to have the ban reduced, which surely added to his public support.

Nero’s championing of fun and games, however, was insufficient to secure his position at the top of Roman society, especially after the Great Fire. “Rome Is Burning,” a recent book by the classicist Anthony A. Barrett, argues that wealthy citizens were adversely affected by the inadequacy of fire services during the conflagration, and angered when Nero attempted to build his palatial grounds over the ruins of their ravaged properties. But Opper points out that members of the élite had already come to dislike Nero. An uprising in Britain so threatened Roman power that Nero had to reinforce troops in the province; though the insurrection was defeated, the tumult weakened his reputation. Aristocratic families who had for generations nurtured their own aspirations to imperial control maintained that Nero wasn’t up to the job, and tried to assassinate him. (When the plotters were caught, many were forced to commit suicide.)

The museum’s exhibit emphasizes that Nero was struggling to hold together an empire that extended from Britain to Armenia. Among the most arresting items in the exhibition is a bronze head of Nero, which was discovered in the River Alde, in Suffolk, England, just over a century ago. There is a dent on the left side of the figure’s neck, which some scholars have read as a gesture of contempt: someone apparently decided to batter the art work with a heavy implement. Nero clearly “needed to reach out” to constituents who came from the empire’s distant outposts, Opper suggests, but certain Roman senators behaved as if they were still running a city-state. A rebellion broke out in Gaul, followed by a more serious challenge to Nero’s power from Servius Sulpicius Galba, the Roman governor of Spain. The Senate turned against Nero, who fled to a country estate and killed himself, at the age of thirty. Galba was soon declared emperor.

Despite Nero’s downfall, not everyone was disenchanted with him. The show at the British Museum reminds visitors of occasional appearances, in the coming decades, of “false Neros” in the eastern part of the empire. These pretenders to the imperial throne—whose appeal must have depended on an enduring affection for Nero—included one who bore a remarkable physical resemblance to him, and even shared his predilection for music.

Mounting a museum show dedicated to revising the reputation of one of history’s most infamous rulers is a provocative gesture at a time when world leaders have been exhibiting Neronian gestures of their own. While the museum’s staff was installing the exhibition, the British newspapers were filled with accounts of the alleged profligacy of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in renovating the apartment that he shares with his wife, Carrie Symonds. The expenses reportedly soared to a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and a wealthy donor allegedly covered most of them. (Johnson insists that he has paid for the work himself.) According to a headline in the Daily Mail, the new décor includes “gold wallpaper,” suggesting a Domus Aurea on Downing Street. In the United States, the decadent tastes of former President Donald Trump and his family were on display for four years. He spent as much time as he could at his gilded private residences; on the rare occasions that Melania Trump wore the same outfit twice, it made headlines. Even before Trump’s Presidency began, the publication of the Steele dossier spread rumors of sexual behavior so theatrically perverse that Nero himself might have tipped his oak wreath in respect. Recent historical experience has reminded us that political popularity need not be at odds with ineffective or even criminally negligent leadership. In the spring of 2020, with the COVID-19 crisis igniting, Trump retweeted a photograph of himself playing the fiddle—an act of Neronian trolling.

Opper’s purpose is not to burnish Nero’s reputation but to show how it was constructed, and to what end. “Who controls the narrative?” he asked me. “It’s the people in power. If you only subscribe to one person, and read their tweets, you get a very one-sided story.” The story of Nero that emerges in the British Museum’s reconsideration is more complex and less salacious than the familiar narrative, though Opper acknowledged, “I don’t know if he was good. He certainly wasn’t bad in the ways that he was depicted. He was a spoiled young aristocrat. But he wasn’t a monster.”

It was almost inevitable that Nero’s reputation was crudely remade after his death, since those who replaced the Augustan line needed to secure their own claims to power. The exhibition includes a sculpture of a male figure that illustrates the ruthless logic of imperial succession. The sculpture, excavated in Carthage, Tunisia, evokes the graffitied sketch of Nero found on the Palatine Hill: the figure has the familiar contours of Nero’s jowly face and forward-brushed hair. But the man’s face has evidently been altered, with the addition of wrinkles and creases, to transform it into the face of a much older man: Vespasian, who came to power in 69 A.D., at the age of sixty. He established his own dynasty, the Flavians, who held power for the next three decades before themselves succumbing. Not for the last time, the celebration of a new emperor entailed the disfiguring of Nero. ♦