How Nero Really Governed

NERO BURNED ROME. Nero murdered his mother. Nero fiddled while the city was on fire, except fiddles hadn't been invented yet and he was at a seaside resort sixty miles away when the fire started. The popular image of Nero as the archetypal monster emperor is one of history's most successful character assassinations, constructed largely by aristocratic writers who had every reason to hate him.

That doesn't mean Nero was a good person or a competent ruler. He almost certainly did order the deaths of several family members, and his behavior in the later years of his reign was genuinely erratic and often cruel. But the gap between the cartoon villain of popular culture and the historical Nero who actually governed Rome for fourteen years is wide enough to be interesting. Understanding how that gap formed tells you almost as much about how history gets written as it tells you about Nero himself.

The Sources Problem

Every account of Nero we have was written after his death, by writers who either lived under dynasties that had political reasons to blacken his memory or who drew on accounts from that era. The three main sources are Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio.

Tacitus was a senator and historian who wrote his "Annals" under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, roughly forty to sixty years after Nero's death. He was aristocratic, deeply traditional, and viewed the emperor's power as a constitutional problem that degraded the Senate's dignity. His portrait of Nero is vivid, detailed, and consistently hostile.

Suetonius was an imperial secretary who wrote biographies of the first twelve Caesars under Hadrian. His "Life of Nero" is full of colorful anecdotes about sexual perversions, murders, and bizarre behavior. He explicitly drew on sources he doesn't always name, and some of his stories are clearly borrowed from gossip and hostile political satire.

Cassius Dio wrote in Greek more than a century after Nero. His account of the reign is the most lurid of the three and the least reliable.

There is very little contemporary evidence for Nero's reign. Some papyri from Egypt, inscriptions from around the empire, and the coins he minted give a partial counter-picture. The coins show a young emperor presented in traditional Roman fashion, later coins with more grandiose imagery reflecting his self-presentation as an artist and divine figure. Provincial inscriptions suggest that his reign was, in many places, experienced as relatively ordinary.

The First Five Years

Nero became emperor in 54 CE at the age of sixteen, following the death (possibly by poisoning, possibly natural) of his adoptive father Claudius. His mother Agrippina the Younger had engineered his succession, sidelining Claudius's biological son Britannicus, and expected to rule through her son. She had already been the most politically powerful woman in Rome for a decade.

The first five years of Nero's reign, the "quinquennium Neronis," were praised even by later hostile sources as well-governed. Trajan reportedly called it the best period of any emperor. The credit is disputed: his advisor Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, and the praetorian prefect Burrus were widely credited with the actual governance. Nero was young and more interested in poetry, music, and chariot racing than administration, and his advisors largely ran the state.

Actual policy during this period was broadly sensible. Nero limited the tax burdens that could be imposed by provincial governors, reformed the accusation system that had been used to persecute wealthy citizens under Claudius, and made efforts to reduce the Senate's humiliation by giving that body more ceremonial respect, even if not more actual power. He reduced gladiatorial games and tried, briefly, to abolish them entirely before the crowd made clear they wouldn't accept it.

The Break with Agrippina

The relationship between Nero and his mother deteriorated rapidly after the quinquennium. Agrippina had expected to share power and found herself increasingly sidelined. The ancient sources, which are detailed and consistent on this point, describe escalating conflict culminating in Nero's decision to have her killed in 59 CE.

The killing of Agrippina is the most difficult episode to rehabilitate. The ancient accounts describe an initial failed attempt using a rigged boat designed to collapse and drown her, her swimming to shore and sending a messenger to report her survival, Nero panicking and sending assassins to her villa. Even if the specific details are exaggerated, something like this sequence of events appears to have happened. Nero reported to the Senate that his mother had been killed while plotting against him; the Senate accepted this explanation, as senates do when emperors have already done something irreversible.

The murder of Agrippina cannot be explained away. What can be said is that her political activity was real and threatening, that the elimination of powerful rivals was standard practice in the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Augustus had people killed, Claudius had people killed, Caligula had people killed), and that the particular horror attached to matricide in the sources reflects aristocratic Roman values about the sacred character of family bonds rather than a consistent standard applied to other emperors.

The Great Fire and the Christians

The fire that destroyed large parts of Rome in July 64 CE is the event most associated with Nero in popular memory. He did not fiddle during it. The fiddle didn't exist. He did not play the lyre on a tower while watching the city burn, as some accounts claim, because he was at Antium when the fire started. He returned to Rome, organized relief efforts, opened his own gardens to homeless citizens, and oversaw an import of grain from surrounding regions.

The ancient sources do raise the possibility that Nero ordered the fire set, partly to clear land for his massive building project, the Domus Aurea (Golden House), which was constructed on cleared land after the fire. Modern historians are divided. The case for arson is circumstantial at best. Ancient cities with wooden construction burned regularly; a major fire in Rome was not unusual. That the fire happened to benefit Nero's building plans doesn't prove he started it.

What is established from multiple sources, including the letter-writer Pliny and the historian Tacitus, is that Nero blamed the fire on Christians. This was the first Roman state persecution of Christians, and it was severe: Tacitus describes them being covered in animal skins and thrown to dogs, nailed to crosses, and set on fire as human torches to illuminate Nero's garden parties. The historical reality of this persecution is accepted by mainstream historians; it forms the background for the traditional date of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in Rome.

The Christian tradition subsequently made Nero the prototype of the Antichrist. The number 666 in the Book of Revelation, written in the 90s CE, is widely believed by scholars to encode "Neron Caesar" in Hebrew numerology (gematria). Nero became the symbolic embodiment of Roman persecution of Christianity, and that theological tradition has heavily colored how later Christian-influenced cultures remembered him.

Nero the Artist

One of the things that made Roman aristocrats most furious about Nero was his performance career. He sang, played the kithara (a type of lyre), competed in chariot races, and appeared on stage. He competed at the Greek-style games he himself established in Rome and won every competition he entered, not surprising given that nobody was going to beat the emperor.

He also toured Greece in 66-67 CE specifically to compete in Greek cultural festivals, including the Olympics. He won every event he entered there too, including a chariot race in which he fell out of his chariot and still won. The Greeks, characteristically, were happy to give the emperor whatever prizes he wanted.

From a modern perspective this seems relatively harmless, even charming. From the perspective of Roman aristocratic tradition, it was a scandalous debasement of imperial dignity. Performance was associated with low social status; actors and musicians were legally and socially inferior. An emperor who performed in public, who competed for prizes, was degrading the office. The senatorial class found this as offensive as his arbitrary executions, and their accounts treat both as equally disqualifying.

The End of the Reign

By 68 CE, Nero had lost the support of the military and the provincial governors. The immediate cause was a revolt by Gaius Julius Vindex, governor of Lugdunensis in Gaul, who declared against Nero and invited other governors to join him. Vindex was defeated by legions loyal to Nero, but the damage spread. Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, declared himself emperor. The praetorian guard, bought by Galba's promises of money, abandoned Nero. The Senate declared him a public enemy.

Nero fled Rome on horseback with a small group of attendants, reached a villa outside the city, and killed himself on June 9, 68 CE with help from his secretary, reportedly saying "Qualis artifex pereo" ("What an artist dies with me"). He was thirty years old and had governed Rome for fourteen years. His death ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty founded by Augustus.

The year after his death was the "Year of the Four Emperors," in which four different men held the imperial position in rapid succession. The chaos that followed Nero's fall suggests that, whatever his personal failures, his removal from power was not obviously an improvement. The winners write history, and the emperors who followed Nero had strong reasons to construct him as a monster whose fall was civilization's salvation. That construction, filtered through the aristocratic literary tradition that has survived, is most of what we have. The real Nero, the complex figure who was genuinely cruel in some moments and genuinely capable in others, is harder to see but worth looking for.