Emperor Nero

In the year 54 AD, a sixteen-year-old boy became master of the Roman world. His name was Nero, and he had not won his crown — his mother had won it for him. Agrippina was one of the most formidable women of the age: ambitious, brilliant and ruthless. She had married the emperor Claudius, persuaded him to adopt her son ahead of his own, and pushed Nero to the front of the line. When Claudius conveniently died, the teenager inherited an empire that stretched from Britain to the deserts of the east.

At first, Agrippina intended to be the power behind the throne, ruling Rome through her son. But Nero was not alone. He had a remarkable tutor, the philosopher Seneca, and a tough, loyal guard commander named Burrus. Between them, these two older men managed for several years to restrain the young emperor and keep him attending to the business of government. Historians often call these early years the "good" years of Nero's reign — a time of fair courts, careful spending and respect for the Senate.

But power inside the imperial palace was a deadly game, and mother and son were soon locked in a struggle for control. In 59 AD it ended in horror: Nero had his own mother killed. With Agrippina gone, the last real check on him began to weaken. Seneca and Burrus could only do so much. Slowly, the talented, well-tutored young ruler started to become something far darker.

In July of 64 AD, a fire broke out among the wooden shops near Rome's great racecourse and raced through the crowded city for days. Whole districts were reduced to ash. And here we meet the most famous story ever told about Nero: that he "fiddled while Rome burned" — that he stood by, playing music, enjoying the spectacle. It is a wonderful image, and it is almost certainly false. The fiddle had not even been invented yet. More tellingly, the best evidence suggests Nero was not even in the city when the fire began; he was at his villa down the coast, and hurried back to organise relief and open his gardens to the homeless.

So why the story? Partly because of what Nero did next. As the city was rebuilt, he seized a huge area of the ruins to build himself a vast pleasure-palace, the Domus Aurea or "Golden House" — with gardens, an artificial lake, and walls that glittered with gold and jewels. To ordinary Romans who had lost everything, this looked like an emperor profiting from their misery. And to deflect the rumours that he himself had started the fire, Nero needed a scapegoat. He chose the Christians, then a small and unpopular sect, and had them punished with terrible cruelty.

There was another reason Nero scandalised respectable Rome: he genuinely wanted to be an artist. He sang, played the lyre, wrote poetry and raced chariots — and, astonishingly for an emperor, he performed these things in public, before audiences. To us this might sound harmless, even charming. To the Roman elite it was shameful: emperors were meant to command armies, not chase applause on a stage like a common entertainer. The man who ruled the world seemed to care more about being loved as a performer.

In the end, Rome turned on him. Taxes, extravagance, the killing of senators, and the sheer embarrassment of an emperor on a stage all wore away his support. In 68 AD a revolt spread through the provinces; one governor after another declared against him, and finally the Senate condemned Nero as an enemy of the state. Abandoned even by his own guard, and facing arrest and execution, he fled to a villa outside the city and took his own life. According to legend his last words were, "What an artist dies in me!" — vain and theatrical to the very end, though we can't be sure he ever truly said them.

He was just thirty. After his death the Senate carried out what the Romans called damnatio memoriae: his statues were torn down and his name chiselled off monuments, an official attempt to erase him from history. And yet, strikingly, ordinary people scrawled graffiti in his favour — for some Romans, the showman emperor had been a friend of the common people.

Here is the catch that historians keep returning to. Almost everything we know about Nero comes from writers like Tacitus and Suetonius — members of the senatorial class he had bullied, who wrote decades later and were deeply hostile to him. They gave us the monster: the mother-killer, the fire-starter, the fiddling tyrant. Some of it is surely true. But a good deal is rumour, exaggeration and the revenge of his enemies, dressed up as history. Nero may well have been a bad ruler. He was also, perhaps, the first famous victim of a hostile press.