The Roman Emperor Nero

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Today's subject is one of those characters like Benito Mussolini or even Genghis Khan that you don't expect someone to pick. And yet, here we are. Nero, fifth emperor of Rome, a man notorious for cruelty, debauchery and those perhaps dubious allegations about setting fire to Rome, then fiddling while it burned.

Peter Ustinov captured him brilliantly in the epic Quo Vadis, the film of 1951. Christopher Biggins also enjoyed dressing up in the imperial toga to hammy acclaim. But a great life... Perhaps there's more to Nero than we think. Nominating him in the studio today is the British writer Con Igledon, author with his brother of The Dangerous Book for Boys, as well as The Falcon of Sparta, and more recently, a bestseller on Nero himself. First question, Con.

Why did you decide to write about this man? I came across Nero, first of all, when I was researching Julius Caesar over 20 years ago. And, of course, I read Serotonius' The Twelve Caesars and lumped in Nero with Caligula and Tiberius. monster. And that was as simple as that. And then it was the fact that I went to the British Museum Nero exhibition and I was walking around that, seeing how popular he was.

I mean, Caligula, for example, terrified Rome. Nero was quite different. He was beloved of the people, and you could say he bribed them. I mean, he's famously threw tokens to them at public events, and you could win a chicken with one of the tokens, or you could win a public estate. So, yes, there was an element of... of vast generosity and bribing them, but they loved him to the point that even after he died, three different people turned up.

claiming to be Nero. And each time they were met by cheering crowds. And so he was, if you like, to use a modern term, he was a populist leader, beloved of the common classes of Rome. Not the Senate, not the patrician sort of levels of society, but the people themselves. And that was an interesting place to start. He was said to have killed his mother, killed his wives.

castrated and married one of his servants who possibly looked like one of his wives. He persecuted Christians. He had very bad body odour. Is there no truth in any of these allegations? No, there's certainly truth in some of it. But the interesting thing is how you take Suetonius. Suetonius wasn't a historian. He was a biographer. He was interested in the intensely...

personal. There are scenes in Serotonius that are the result of extreme bias. For example... Serotonius is one of his biographers, is that right? There are only three major sources. There's Cassius Dio, who was writing in what, sort of 165 AD. He was essential.

after Nero, Suetonius is decades after and the one I've used the most is Tacitus who was born during Nero's life and he wrote later on and he was a proper historian who gave a more measured approach so when it comes to something like the death of his mother Nero became emperor at 16, and his mother had already taken the title of Augusta. She had expected to rule through him, and any mother of a 16-year-old boy would know exactly how that was going to go, very badly indeed. Did he kill her?

Almost certainly, yes. That's not very nice, is it? But if it depends whether it's a matter of self-defense. I mean, that's the point. I think if had he not done that, then one of his cousins would have been raised up to be emperor and he would have been poisoned. I mean, if you put it in that context, then it becomes more... more understandable. So basically, you think he was just the victim of a nasty smear campaign? Not...

Completely, no. But there are interesting elements of bias. Suetonius, for example, I'll give you one example. When Nero is accused of poisoning his brother Britannicus, Suetonius writes this scene where there's a Gaulish poisoner called Lacusta and... she and Nero go back and forth, back and forth, and making the poison more

potent and he tests it on different animals and a boar dies in five hours and then another one dies in an hour until eventually it's so potent that he can give it to his brother and then the brother will drop dead but that is an intensely private conversation suetonius did not have access to that in any roman record it is completely made up which means suetonius was biased and that's why you're nominating him so we can

reconsider his reputation. Is that right? Yes. When I started writing, I asked friends and family what they knew and they said, the name Nero... and the fact that there was a great fire. And I think there is, because of that, a hunger to know the story behind those simple facts. I found the same thing with Genghis Khan. Everyone knew the name, but nothing about the man whatsoever. And I think people have a hunger for good stories.

They know Nero was somebody unusual, somebody extraordinary, who lived an extraordinary life at the height of the Roman Empire, and they want to know it, and we are not taught it anymore. So we should be. It's a good story. The exhibition that you're talking about at the British Museum, and I remember lots of people...

talking about it at the time, was called The Man Behind the Myth. Let's hear a clip of Torsten Opper, curator of the museum exhibition, talking a little bit about that. We have the advantage that we can tell the story through objects. And these objects, some of them were made by people who are not the ones who write history. So you get a much broader view. I think people have the evidence laid out for them.

a lot of that is quite intimate and you can engage with very closely. And it tells a much more rounded, contradictory, complex story. And I think people will discover a lot there. I myself have read these sources over years and not doubted them, not questioned them at all. You need to have your eyes opened and then you really make these discoveries and you see that the story may have been quite different from the one you know. Your thoughts?

We have to fill those gaps because there are huge gaps. Tacitus, for example, is missing all of Caligula's reign, and I think six years of Claudius, and the final two years of Nero's reign. One of the reasons we have to depend on Serotonius is because... There is no end to Tacitus.

Now, here's someone who knows more about the sources than me, and that's Shushma Malik from Cambridge University, Dr Shushma Malik, who's also worked extensively on Nero's portrayal in Christian literature as the anti-Christian. The Christians' hatred of Nero may have something to do with his modern-day reputation. So tell us, Shushma, why did the Christians hate him so much? So, Matthew, you've already sort of...

hinted at the reason for this. One of the things that happens through Nero's reign is that there's a fire in 64 CE and after that there's a sort of hunt for who could possibly be responsible for this. There were rumours going on that it was Nero. Nero wanted to...

to quash those rumours, according to Tacitus. Interestingly, they're not put on trial for being Christian per se, but rather for arson, for the arson attempt on Rome. Yes, they're made a scapegoat, basically. Exactly that, yeah. This then has a huge afterlife.

in Christian literature, Tacitus' account specifically. Hold on, what did he do to the Christians? Well, this is sort of part of the reason why. So Tacitus tells us that they were sort of slung up, put on crucifixes, so that's something that's punishment for enslaved people. set on fire and burnt his candles at night. What? How? So imagine sort of strung up then in flames and then Nero is said to have sort of driven around these spectacles in his chariot fully.

take them in. And this is a really big part of why Nero is seen as an Antichrist figure in later sources. One of the things I should say is that we have to rely on Tacitus for this. He is our only source for this episode. As Conn has already said, we have three main sources, a biographer called Suetonius, who's not a senator, he's an imperial archivist, so he's an equestrian.

Did you not become a senator later? He did not, no. Oh, good Lord, I apologize. And then Cassius Dio, who exactly is concerted, is later on, probably the end of the first century, early second century. So... What we then get is the proliferation of Tacitus' account of this in later Christian sources. We have, for example, in the 3rd century, the first piece of commentary on Revelation.

And one of the things that this commentator says is if we look at the character of the first beast in Revelation 666, all of those things that we're sort of familiar with, that's Nero. It's very clear that this took off as an idea in what we call late antiquity. And the mud sticks, so to speak. Exactly, yeah, precisely. I also heard there was a numerology thing that you can do with N-E-R-O and you can make it 666, and also Christ was meant to be 888.

But the trouble with the Christians is that... they needed an end of the world. And Rome was obviously the secular centre of the world. And there is the bit in the Gospels where Jesus said something along the lines of, some of you will still be alive when I come again. At the time, there were some who believed. I mean, he died in 33 AD.

They believed that before... The second coming, yes. Yeah, the end of the world would happen, and it would come with fire and flames, and Rome was a pretty good place for it to start. So they expected this to happen, and with Nero the head of the Roman state at that time, and...

a licentious and young, devil-may-care sort of young man. He was the obvious person to be that Antichrist. He would stand against Christian values. You did have Paul and Peter in Rome at this time. They were both preaching in Rome together as the centre of the world. The reason they went there was because it was the centre of the world. So it wasn't unreasonable. And then, of course, when the fire started, I mean, Suetonius says that Nero started it.

And that's as simple as that, the usual sort of spite that comes in. But Tacitus points out that he was in Antium, that he wasn't in Rome at all. He wasn't there. He wasn't there, but he could have had Agent Stewart, of course. Yeah, he said it was titulitis. Oh, yes. I mean, he came back and then was part of the fight.

fighting crews and they fought against the fire. They pulled down entire streets and all the rest of it to try and... Did he fiddle while Rome burned? Certainly not, because the fiddle wasn't invented yet. Whether or not he played the kithara, on the other hand, is a different question.

this is a rumour. So Tacitus actually says there's a rumour that he played the song of Troy while Rome burned. It is a perfect example of the fact that Nero didn't control his own story. I started with Julius Caesar who wrote his own... third-person record of events. So Julius Caesar was the hero. But Nero, who didn't, who never got around to writing his own histories or controlling the narrative... Really good...

lesson for politicians, isn't it? Take control of your own narrative. As much as you can though, because his mother did. Agrippina the Younger wrote her memoirs and we've lost them. So you can try sometimes as much as you like.

Whether or not they're going to make it through posterity is a different thing. Now, you mentioned his mother, Shushma. Let's just get back to his origins very briefly because we don't have a lot of time. Where was he born? What was his childhood like as a boy? So he had a very difficult childhood. He was born into the imperial family in Rome, which is a very difficult family, I think it's fair to say, to be born into. So a dynasty of emperors started by Augustus. This is around 27 BCE.

these emperors that made up the Judeo-Claudian dynasty had sons to succeed and this is part of the problem. Troubled childhood. Very troubled. Uncertainty about... The future and who is going to be emperor. Father dead at a young age. Father dead at a young age. Yes. Mother goes a bit strange. Well, she was a, let's be honest, she was a ruthless sort of sociopath and driven with ambition to either rule.

Rome through him or to rule it herself. So, yes, an extraordinary character. Now, without her, would Nero have become emperor? No, absolutely not. No, because the extraordinary thing is she married Claudius and then Claudius had a son, Britannicus, named after the successful invasion of Britain. And he would have been the heir. He also had a daughter, Octavia.

Once Agrippina had married Claudius, she persuades him not only to allow her certain powers and titles and so on, but to make her own son Nero the official heir. The moment she did that, both Claudius' life was quickly going... to come to an end, and to be honest, Britannicus, his life was marked as well because she wanted Nero to succeed, and it astonishes me that Claudius never saw that coming. She did or didn't murder Claudius, is that right? Famously, it's the plate of mushrooms.

die in Italy every year from eating mushrooms so it's difficult to know whether that goes on to this day. It is difficult to know. Nero said it was because he described mushrooms as the food of the gods making a joke about Claudius being divine.

and dying of eating mushrooms. So look, we'll never know for sure because unlike Sir Atonius, we were not in that room and nobody boasts about killing an emperor. I'm getting the picture. Now, to complete the picture, what did he look like? Was he more like Peter Ustinov or like Christopher? So when he's younger, he looks like a Julia Claudian prince. When he's older, he does make himself look much bigger. His face is much fuller, curly hair, all sorts of things. So in my mind, he's probably...

He's sort of, yeah, Peter Eustonoff works for me. Yes, in the coins with him, with his mother Agrippina, he does look like a sort of young Augustus. But he becomes a bull-necked... powerful, fat. I mean, he runs to fat. He liked wrestling. He liked chariot racing. He was a good, a really superb charioteer. And at the end of the day, he also had a charioteer's curls. That was a particular thing. And he liked acting, too.

He loved acting. I mean, the awful thing about Nero, honestly, his tragedy, and it is a tragedy, is that everything he liked to do was either considered un-Roman or too low class. Even chariot racing, which would be a pretty manly sort of behaviour, you could support a team, you could... fund a team, but you could not be part of a team. And he went to the Olympics and actually won.

with four and ten horse chariots. Might have been rigged. And it was considered rigged. Yeah, absolutely. Admittedly, he fell off. In the ten horse chariots, he fell off and had to cross the finish line, I think, on foot.

But yes, he was given the prize. And that worked out beautifully. He won 1,808 prizes in Greece. And the result of that was that he remitted Greece from paying all future taxes and tribute to Rome. It only lasted as long as... so it wasn't very long, but they knew how to flatter a young emperor.

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Now, comparing Yukon with your hero, Nero, where were you born? Did you ever want to be an emperor? If you had made me king of the world at 16, I think it would have turned out just about as badly as it did for Nero. I have a 16-year-old son. I don't think he'd be too upset if I said the same thing about him. Given power with no curb at all. all then it does tend to corrupt of course it does I was born in Middlesex you know I live in Hertfordshire I mean I've always sort of

South of England is my area. But I remember being involved with things when I was a kid that I wouldn't be proud of now. And I had curbs. I had all sorts of curbs on my behaviour. I think that's why I have some sympathy for Nero. Yes, you're just a constrained Nero, really. You're listening to The Great Life of Nero. Before we tuck into his time as emperor, perhaps we should pause and hear how he has been depicted.

on screen. You shall come with me to the funeral pile. This very night you shall hear my dirge of a burning room. Its flame shall carry me higher than the gods. That's Peter Ustinov in the MGM film Quo Vadis, directed by Mervyn Leroy. And here's Chris Biggins. He's been on this very programme, talking on this programme in 2010 about why he was so... "'to the roll.'

Well, I think Herbie Wise, who cast me in it, absolutely saw something of me. And I feel extremely comfortable in that period and being that particular man. We know that he had some extraordinary things. that he did to people, but he was very, very, somehow me, I really enjoyed that. Now, we've talked about whether Nero killed his mother.

There was also the rumour that he'd slept with his mother. Do we have any evidence of that? Yeah, that is also framed as a rumour in our sources. Again, only a couple of them mention it. Cassius Dio is particularly interested in this, writing slightly later.

it's sort of the thing that we see problematic emperors being labelled with the idea that you're far far too close to your mother or another female relative sometimes it could be an aunt so there is a sort of idea of when you construct a tyrant there are particular things that you key in and that is certainly one of them they're sort of

relationship with the mother is sexualised and polluted. Sleeping with your sister, sleeping with your mother, it was a taboo just as it was for Anne Boleyn centuries later. I mean, this is not too much of a shock. I'm always a little suspicious when you read classic taboo. booze being used to attack somebody written a century later because it's too obvious an attack. It means I can probably discount it. Now, tell us a little bit about the method by which he was said to have killed.

his mother, a collapsible boat comes into it. That seems to have been the plan, that he used this collapsible boat deck, sent her out, she goes into the water. Unfortunately, it all goes horribly wrong at that point because she swims. She can swim. So whether he knew that or not, I don't know. But she reaches the shore and then I think he had to send soldiers in the end to give her the chop. What happened? Yeah, so exactly that. So they're on the Bay of Naples and he arranges...

for his mother Agrippina to take a boat home, essentially. It collapses. She does swim. And yes, as Conn said, he sends one of his attendants to stab her with her knife. And there are all sorts of stories about this. And she says, well, OK, stab.

stab me where Nero came from. So stab me in my belly, stab the place that Nero emerged from. Yeah, exactly. Stab me in the womb. And that's part of the way that the historians characterise that event. But the official version is she was involved in a conspiracy.

against him and that's why he had to kill her. Now Shushma, we haven't given you the opportunity to answer the charge that all these nasty rumours were just made up against him. In the intro to the British Museum exhibition, the curator says... that the sources are uniformly biased against him. They're trying to assassinate Nero's character. Was he, as another commentator suggests,

the victim of excited gossip of a later hostile age. What do you think? Yeah, so I think there's certainly an element of that. We don't have, as Conor has said, any historical sources from Nero's reign. We do have other bits of evidence. and poetry and so forth, but we don't have any sort of historical narratives. And certainly these are being written in the Flavian period and the dynasty afterwards, the Nerva Antonine, so it's not particularly in the interest of a historian at that time.

time to make Nero a good guy. So there's part of that. There's also the fact that he is the end of a dynasty. Again, it's very difficult to make someone who is the end of a dynasty a good character. And it's... An interesting conundrum that we face because, as I think the British Museum exhibition shows quite nicely, if we want to put together a narrative, any sort of narrative, we do ultimately have to rely on those historical sources to some extent.

nuance them we can sort of think about ways to tackle them and we can read them in particular ways and as we were talking about with incest you know that is a trope that's something that keeps repetitively being brought up But does that mean it didn't happen necessarily? Can we rule it out? So you, as a historian, I think you have to be quite...

Careful with the sources, but willing to, well, first of all, absolutely willing to doubt them, but then also try to take it that step further and decide, well, how might we understand some of these stories? And in any age, if you want to get malicious gossip... going, it's a good idea if there's a nugget at the heart of it which has some truth in it about the person. Now the picture I have of Nero is a chap who loved acting, obviously.

bisexual at the very least, had some fairly strange tastes, rather extravagant, horse riding, all that kind of thing, but he wasn't really very interested in public administration. Do you think that's true? I think that's a fair characterisation.

I mean, the sexuality is an interesting one because Suetonius makes a point of saying about Claudius, he was only interested in women, as if that was slightly odd. So that's sort of another way to think about things. But I mean, the other way we could think of him, and this also goes...

back to his portraiture is that he's trying to figure out what monarchy is right so we've had these emperors but Augustus sort of goes into this saying I'm not an emperor I'm the first among equals and then as we go further and further through what is

becoming more and more a monarchical dynasty. These emperors are thinking about things in different ways, and part of what we might see Nero as doing is setting himself up as more of a Hellenistic type of king, the sort of thing that Alexander could have been had he lived. that can kind of give us a little bit of a way into understanding the sorts of accusations that are made about him on the subject of

The accusations that were made. I mean, the bisexual bit is very interesting because I'm sure you know that the Romans had a view of homosexuality, which was in two sort of main types. It's what my friend Clive describes as the difference between being a postman and being a letterbox.

I'm going to stop that metaphor, by the way, so don't worry. Active and passive is the other word. Thank you very much. I couldn't think of another way of saying it. And he did have two wives, didn't he? Yes, and a number of mistresses. I mean, Agta, his Greek freedwoman. Three wives. Sorry, three wives. Stotilia Messalina. Yes, of course.

Any advance on three, any of you? But he also had mistresses, and he didn't have to have those, if you like. It sounds like he had a lot of fun. Yes, exactly. Apart from having a lot of fun, was he a good emperor?

No, he was a terrible emperor. But compared to something like Caligula, where they were so terrified of him, they actually murdered him with no plan. Nero's problem was that he, as you say, he didn't govern at all. He left Rome for years at a time. He went to Greek festivals.

after Greek festival. He performed great musical and poetic odes to the public. He acted with masks on and would occasionally remove the mask to make sure the crowd knew who it was. He performed for the music masters in Turpness, the great... laid his lyre at Nero's feet. And as a result, by the time he got back to Rome, he had lost all of the support. He is, in the end, a figure like Macbeth. He is abandoned by everyone, all of his supporters.

If you rely on Suetonius, and you have to for the final thing, as you point out, there is no ending of Nero in Tacitus. But Cassius Dio is very good. Yes, that's a good point. The details, though, of him being abandoned and knocking on friends' doors and not being answered. lost absolutely everything, and it's because he wasn't there that Rome lost him. How did he die?

So as Conor was saying, he realised what was happening with the situation in Rome. The Senate had turned against him. They decided they wanted a military leader, who at that point was in Spain, to become the next emperor as a sort of older, safer pair of hands.

So he realised he had to leave Rome. This is what had brought him down. Exactly, yes. So we're in 68 CE now and he sort of thinks, well, shall I perhaps ask if I can go to Alexandria in Egypt? Maybe they could give me a post there and I could live. It's like Boris's visits towards the end to Ukraine. Couldn't possibly comment, Matthew. But that seems like a no-go. He then tries to get poison from some people. He tries to get a gladiator to...

help him and none of those things happen. So he's described as having to creep out of Rome under the cover of night with still some of his attendants, so his freedmen. And he goes to the villa of one of his freedmen, Phaeon. Essentially, the Praetorian Guard are coming and he kills himself, but with the aid of another of his freedmen named Epaphroditus. And Conn, did he say, what an artist dies with me?

We can never know something like that. I mean, all the famous last words. What was it? It was Nelson. It was something like rub, rub, fan, fan, because he was down in the depths of Earth. I thought it was kiss me. Well, yes, but after, unfortunately, you don't die at that perfect moment. You're still down in the very hot.

place and you're saying oh i've got a bullet in my back rub rub fan fan i mean you know did you know um augustus really say i found roaming clay i left her in marble i don't know is the simple answer it wouldn't surprise me nero was a flamboyant performer right to the very end and

It does have a touch of the wonderful amateur theatre, the sound of hooves outside and the soldiers coming for him and him choosing to die. And he said something like, oh, you're too late and how loyal you are. There was some wonder. He was doing quite a few final lines, actually, now I think about it. They all do.

though, don't they? Well, a good death is very important, isn't it? Yes, and his is the opposite of that, of course. Augustus's is the good death. He's told Tiberius what needs to happen with the administrative aspect. He's kissed his wife. He's said... Proper goodbye. He's old. He's 76. Nero is 31. Yes. Oh, poor Nero. Which brings me to not quite our last question, but we are running out of time. Can we find it in our hearts rather to like Nero, to feel a...

A little bit of sort of affection for this young man who probably should have been an actor and not an emperor. The answer for me is yes. I found him, I mean, for all his flaws, for all his stupidity and his ridiculous... Yes, of course I liked him. He was somebody who wanted...

to experience great art. And he was more of a musician than I'll ever be. And because he didn't write his own story, whether he stood on that stage and declared odes and while the place burned down around him, if Caesar had written that, it would have been the most magnificent moment of his history. It would have been standing against the fates. But because it was Nero, it becomes selfishness.

I will always be grateful to Nero because he gave me something to write about for a PhD. So I am endlessly, endlessly grateful for that. But I find Nero fascinating because with any figure from history, I think that we think we know, there's always going to be questions about.

well, how much can we know and what are ways that we can try and determine things about them that perhaps aren't quite as obvious. And one of the things about Nero, of course, is that what we've been talking about all through this programme is what's going on in Rome. If you're living in Asia Minor...

what do you know about the emperor really? Who is this character? Who are they? And basically, is your grain supply functioning? Can you get through the day? Can you carry on in whatever profession you're in? So these are very different questions depending on where you are.

And I think Nero and any emperor, it's really interesting to sort of widen out our perspective sometimes and get away from the rumour mill at Rome and think a bit more about the big picture. So I think Nero is a great example of that. My Nero, I think, is the Christopher Biggins. Nero. Christopher was lucky in that he realised that pantomime was his metier. Nero was unlucky in that imperial Rome was not his metier. My thanks to Con Igledon, nominator of Nero today.

Also to you, Shushma Malik, not forgetting the flamboyant, perhaps crazy, definitely debauched Nero himself. So thank you, Nero, and goodbye. When Vivint Smart Security gives you a smarter way to protect, and its smart thermostats give you a smarter way to save, well, that's a smarter way to live. Get the smarter home system that just gets you at Vivint.com.

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