A history lesson on Roman Emperor Nero

let's get back to our story. If you missed any part of our story of Nero, go download the podcast of the show iHeart Spotify iTunes. It's free, you don't have to pay. You just go subscribe and download it automatically and go listen to the rest of it at your leisure. I'm not covering the entire backstory now. All you need to know in case you're just now joining us, is the young boy king Nero has just taken and

over his emperor. His conniving, intelligent, possibly evil mother Agrippina is the one largely responsible for getting him the throne. Nero takes over and he is a popular man very popular. He's cutting taxes, he's giving slaves rights, he's eliminating capital punishments, he's returning power to the Senate, he's attacking corruption. He is a populist by any sense of the word. At first, at least and then remember how young Nero is. Then Nero begins to change. And I don't know why. There

are books written about why what happened? Was he drugged? Did he have a medical episode? Was this just a growing up thing? Remember you take power when you're sixteen at the age of sixteen. Think about what you were like when you were sixteen. Think about how dumb you were. Think about how dumb. It might not be the right way to put it, but think about everything you didn't know at sixteen. Imagine being the most powerful person on the planet at the age of sixteen, essentially worshiped as

a god. Maybe it was just the power that wrecked him. But Nero begins to chafe. He begins to chafe against his mother. Nero starts to really like girls. Sixteen year old boy, sixteen year old, sixteen year old boy and the most powerful person on earth. Do you think maybe he got some female attention? But as teenage boys tend to do, and teenage girls didn't always go for the girls his mother wanted him to go for. Nero is chasing down slave girls. That is not something that was

done in Roman society. Was a bit of an odd duck. Anyway, we'll come back to that. But Nero's mother begins to voice her disapproval of his choices in life, and Nero, apparently, you know, eventually young boys, they don't. They don't cling to mommy like they used to, instead of bowing to her wishes like he always had before, starts to push her out, starts to phase her out. Remember I mentioned the coins where her face was printed on the same side as his face. Yeah, there were new coins minted.

It wasn't like that anymore. Agrippina is no longer allowed to live in the palace Nero has built. Agrippina. His mother has sent to a different palace. No, no, no, no, mom no, I still love you, just don't want you to live just if you could, if you wouldn't mind moving out. I got a slave girl I'm into. Agrippina gets moved out. Remember the influences in Nero's life that

were keeping him grounded. They're giving a lot of credit for his popular the reforms influences like Seneca, the popular philosopher, the Oprah in the day Seneca pushed out, Hey, Seneca, thanks for that advice. Anyway, got a date with a slave girl tonight. Not gonna be not gonna be making my philosopher appointment. Thanks too bad. So sad. The people who guided Nero are being pushed out by Nero. And when you're the freaking Roman emperor, you can push out

whoever you intend to push out. But you do have these norms. There's a there is a culture in Rome, and while the Romans would accept a lot of things, they shouldn't accept a lot of things you shouldn't accept. There is one thing that really really well, there are many things, but there's something that really really graded on the Romans. That was fratricide, the killing of a family member, especially your mother. You see, women weren't allowed to really

hold official political power in Rome. But like virtually every other society that sounds very patriarchal, the men ruled everything. That was obviously not totally the case. Women operate in a different way. They're more they would tend to maneuver behind the scenes, manipulate things. That's the women wield power differently than men wield power. Okay, so women were not, contrary to what your history book tells you, useless, worthless, second class citizens who were put upon in Rome. They

didn't have the rights men had. I'm not saying they did. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like they did. But they weren't. These stupid slaves kept in a closet until they were allowed let out to make dinner and make babies. It was not that way at all. The Romans revered their mothers. You don't harm your mother. Nero apparently Chafing was putting it nice. Decided he wanted his mother dead, but he didn't want to just murderer. Obviously, he could just show up at her house with his

praetorian guard stabber to death. He could do that, but that would look really bad. The Romans would look poorly on that. And even an emperor, it's not just a president or a senator. Even an emperor has to worry about public opinion. If the public turns against you, you probably won't be there long. So what do you do if you're Nero? Well, again, they could make a movie I don't know how this hasn't been made into a series on HBO or something. Nero decides he's going to

have his mother drown. If you will, how were you going to pull something like that off? He has engineers build for him a sizeable boat, a boat that is designed to fail and sink once it gets out onto the water. This true story. Nero has a little banquet, Mom is invited one night. Mom, after dark, decides she wants to go home, back to her separate place, and she has to cross the river, a very very large river.

This is not a creek. So Mom hops in this wonderful new boat her son purchased for what a good boy. And on this boat where a bunch of people men Nero had bought off to ensure his mother never made it to the shore. See what I did there, Chris, to ensure that his mother never made the shore alive. The boat begins to sail across the water. The boat does exactly as what it was designed to do, and the boat begins to sink beneath the waves. Agrippina, has she struck you so far as a moron? This is

a very cunning woman. Agrippina very quickly figures out in the middle of the night, in the middle of the river, the boat is sinking. This is on purpose. My son's trying to kill me. So Agrippina does the most Agrippina thing ever. She puts her clothes onto her personal attendant, her personal maid. I've heard the woman described as a slave. I don't know what she was, but she was someone there for Agrippina. Agrippina gives her her clothes and says, hey, I want you to live, so call out to the

guards and say you're me. The maid starts saying help me. I'm Agrippina, I'm drowning. Help me. Agrippina slips over the side of the boat and begins to swim. As her maid is saying help me, the guys who were on the boat come down and beat her to death. They think they've killed Agrippina, but they have not killed Agrippina. The boat goes under the water. Agrippina is very much alive. She is rescued by it. That's the true story. She's rescued by a fishing vessel. She gets over to the shore.

She gets home. I made it, but Nero's not gonna let that go. Remember what I just described about Roman mothers and women in society. Nero says, well, the boat thing didn't work, let's just go with the sword thing. Yes, a bunch of men with clubs and swords and spears show up at her home. After she lives, they beat her to death. Allegedly. You never know how much of this is Roman soap opera stuff and how much of

it is real. Allegedly, she told her attackers. As they were about to land their killing blows, she pointed to her womb and said, here, stabbed me. Here where the monster grew. Talking about Nero, she was well aware of why she was being beaten to death in the middle of the night in her home. Well, now Agrippina is gone now, as evil as she may have been, really, anybody holding Nero down to any sense of reality, now these people have been run out of his life by Nero.

I might want to point that out. And now the terrible stories about Nero, you've heard, many of them false, but many of them try true. Now those stories are going to play out. If you will, we will try to wrap up our Nero story and get back to do some politics in just a couple moments. Before we do that, let's do this. You tell you about Choctober, the greatest month of the year. You see Chalk. They sell the best herbal supplements. Everyone knows it by now,

everyone talks about it. By now. I have been talking about Chalk for years. They are one of the first partners of this show. When the show went national, they sought out this show because of how anti communists they are. You realize that they heard us and said, oh, that's the show we want. That's how hardcore Chalk is and it will change your life for the better. Man. Ladies, get a female vitality stack and take it for ninety days and tell me how you feel. Email me tell

me how you feel. Gentlemen, a male vitality stack from Chalk. Start your day with choc lit powder and save money on Choctober sales everything huge discount, biggest one. It's chucktober cchoq dot com promo code Jesse or you can call them, text them if you have questions. Whatever, five zero Chuck three thousand, five zero Choq three thousand, We'll be back. Bit is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Wednesday absolutely

drove the show right off a bridge. Today on a Wednesday, decided we were gonna do some history just because I felt like it. In case you're wondering why we're doing a long history episode today, I just felt like it. Sometimes I do. I've told you I'm gonna bring you whatever I can whenever I have time, whenever, whenever I feel like it. I like doing history stuff every now and then take a break from all this political stuff. So we're talking Nero. If you want to email the show,

love hey, death threats. Jesse at jesse kellyshow dot com is where you email. If you want to leave a voicemail, you can eight seven seven three seven seven four three seven three. Now let's try to finish up on Nero and do a little bit more politics before we wrap things up here. Nero's mother dies, tries to have her drowned. She manages to survive because she's a wily one. She ends up getting beaten and stabbed to death by Nero's people. Nero,

really it's got to be the power going to his head. Nero, understanding this wouldn't look good to the public, tried to call it a suicide. But look, we think ancient times, we think they were less informed than they actually were. How long do you think until the word got out of what actually happened. People figured out what happened to

Nero's mom. So remember that popularity Nero has or had, it tends to disappear very very quickly in Roman society when they find out you had your mother beaten to death. Now that brings us to the Great Fire of Rome old cities. I say, oh, this applies to Chicago when it burnt up. But older cities were They were tinder boxes made to burn, and it's not really the fault

of the people there. Think about this. We were used to living in a global economy where if I want to build a house, Let's say I have a bunch of money and I want to build a special house for myself. No I'm not building a house, but I want to build a house out of a certain a marble house. Maybe I want marble everywhere. Well there's no marble here, but I could do it. If I had the money to do it, I could bring in whatever

I wanted to bring in. For most of human history, the world wasn't as global as it is now, and you build your structures with what you have, what is around you. Rome, like virtually every other ancient city was made of wood. Yes, there was stone and brick and things like that in the Romans did that stuff very well. But for the most part it's a wooden city. When we picture ancient Rome, we all myself included picture white marble, don't we Everything was marble. It was probably all glistening

white and marble. This and marble that that is later later Rome, and even then even in later Rome that was only special parts of Rome. Rome was wood. If you got transported back in time, if I got transported back in time to the year zero, you know that the year Jesus was born, you'd probably be kind of disappointed with how ugly Rome was. I would, we we would. I want to tell you right now, I want to picture this glistening white city. It would not look like that.

It would be smelly, it would be dirty, it would be wooden. No one knows how the fire started. The truth is no one knows, and no one will ever know. We're dealing with forensics. Two thousand years ago. A fire starts. The city is not only made of wood, but the streets are extremely narrow, so fire jumps across the street. What you need to know is entire districts of Rome burnt. Now here's where we have to do a little history that might burst your bubble a little bit. On Nero.

Don't worry if you hate him and think he's the Antichrist, you'll go right back to hating him in a minute. And he really earned a lot of that title. But Nero did not play the fiddle while Rome burns. In fact, Nero couldn't play the fiddle. In fact, Nero wasn't even in Rome during the fire. Yeah, he was outside of the city. It wasn't. That was a myth, that was. It was propaganda that came after the fact to make

Nero even more hated than he already was. I'm not absolving Nero of anything, but it didn't play the fiddle while Rome burnt. But Rome did burn, and not a house or two districts, plural burnt. That is devastation, complete societal devastation. It would have been palpable everywhere in the city. The whole place would have smelled like smoke. That it would have been a discussion of Look right now, Helene,

Helene's going on people looking for relatives. I haven't seen my grandpa, I haven't heard from my son, so that it would have been exactly that, in a little bit of a different form in Rome, when that much of the city goes up. My sister was visiting that part. Has anyone heard from I haven't had a letter from my brother. It would have been a societal sadness and anger that would have been palpable. And when people get angry, when people have a tremendous loss, this is human nature.

It's your nature, it's my nature. It's oftentimes when we have to fight against but it is our nature. We need something or someone to blame. We will blame something or someone. You see in modern days, you see the communists take advantage of this all the time. When there's a school shooting, We're sad. Oh my gosh, the kids. I'm sad. I'm so sad. This is horrible. I'm sad, I'm angry. And that's why the communist has learned to run to the TV cameras and say, look, it's the guns.

Look at the gun, Republicans, it's guns. Republicans. Be mad. Here's where you focus your anger. Look at them. That's where your anger should go. It's a play on human nature. When we get sad, when we get angry. We want to blame someone or something here. You are, Nero. It wasn't your fault. You weren't in the city, you weren't playing the fiddle. But the Romans are already angry at you for your mother dying. Now districts have burnt under your watch. If you're Nero, you have a problem. How

do you solve it? Next is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Wednesday, a hub day, doing a long history segment. I swear we are probably going to get back to politics. The history went a little bit longer than I wanted. You know what, I'm not sorry at all, not even a little bit. All right, let's try to finish up this story of Nero. Nero was already losing popularity. His mother died. Then Rome catches fire, Rome burns. He wasn't playing the fiddle, he wasn't even in Rome. But the

people were angry, The people were sad. Who is responsible for this? Nero? He tries to capitalize on something, but he blows it. He gives the people a patsy, He gives them someone to blame. He blames the Christians. Remember we already described Roman society how Christians were They were really out casts at this time. It was thought of as a cult. Their beliefs. They think, they think their God is above the emperor. So they were already kind

of second class citizens. People were more inclined to believe bad things about Christians in Jews in Roman society back then, because they had separated themselves. Nero smartly, this is one of the smart things he didn't even though was freaking evil and wrong. Nero smartly said, Uh, it's the Christians who set the fire. That weird call, always talking about this Jesus guy, That's who did it. That was no,

we'll come back to the persecution in a moment. That was the smart side of it, the bad side of it, or the dumb side of It's this. He actually starts to do a good job rebuilding the city, and he rebuilds Rome in a pretty wonderful way. The parts he rebuilds. Remember the streets that were too narrow, He widens out the streets. He does, He does it right. He builds the districts back better. He builds back better. Hah it right though, He does it right, except he can't help himself.

He does all this and then he builds for himself a massive palace and puts a huge statue of himself on top of the palace. You had the people's goodwill, you were getting it back, and you had to do something else for yourself. At the same time, people were happy to go along with the blaming of the Christians, but I don't know that they really truly understood what they were signing up for. They used to feed Christians

to the wild animals. Nero used to throw these massive garden parties the senators and wives and high society types. He threw garden parties after this, and he had Christians burnt alive to light up the garden parties. Burning Christians served as lamps for the garden parties. Even if you're a Roman senator who hates Christians, maybe you think they're horrible, they're terrible. Maybe you even believe him and you blame

them for the fire. Even if all those things are true, when you find yourself in a garden party trying to eat or dervs right next to a Christians who's burning alive and screaming, you tend to look around and ask yourself if you're on the right side of things. Nero, he takes it way too far. He starts to have political opponents who are raising their objections to him and his ways. He starts to have them arrested. He starts to have show trials, secret trials. Corruption comes right back

as Nero goes on to execute his enemies. He puts them on trial. And now once you start doing that, plots begin to form to assassinate him. He then takes This was probably the final step that finished him off. He had a wife. She was pregnant again in Roman society, that's a sacred good thing. He kicks her to death, loses her in the baby. The dude is a psychopath and a demon and a monster. He not only kicks her to death to just give you some window into

his mind. He has her stuffed embalmed like she's a deer, and he goes and visits her. He then has a boy. Uh, I don't know how I can describe this, but there are children listening. He has a boy. He misses his wife, so he finds a boy and has some surgery performed on the boy. Anyway, the boy had to pretend to be his wife for a while. Yeah, this guy's not doing well at all. He is now reviled at home, and so tell me if any of this sounds familiar.

The people domestically hate his guts so badly for the things that he's done and the things he's done to them. He chooses to go on foreign trips, and he's beloved overseas. Of course, he goes overseas. He puts on games and banquets for them. He hands out money, tremendous amounts of money from the Roman treasury, money's stolen from the Roman citizen, and he lavishes it on foreign countries. And he's beloved overseas, except he's not minding the store back home. Eventually, a

rebellion begins in the provinces. Rome had different provinces governor. One governor starts rebelling, another governor starts rebelling, and soon Nero begins to sniff way too many plots against him. He feels like his end might be near, but at least he has the Petorian Guard, right, It's tough to kill an emperor when the emperor is surrounded by men with shields and spears and armor, and when they're the only ones with that stuff, the emperor awfully safe. So

picture this one of the great moments in history. When you picture it, you're an emperor, you're Nero. You're in a palace. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, there are people there to wait on you and protect you hand and foot. If you're a Nero and you get up in the middle of the night and you f to pe, there will be a slave and probably a servant, and probably a guard in the bathroom with you. Hey, you want some olives with that?

That's the way your life is. Everywhere, there's security everywhere. There are slaves everywhere, there are servants. There are people surrounding you all times. After all, your thought of as a god made man. Nero wakes up. The palace is empty. This is a human being who's used to people around him all the time. Where are the servants? Where are the guards? He starts to call out to people. The entire palace is empty. There's no one there. Everyone left

when he went to sleep. There's no one there but Nero. Nero begins to whine, that's what the rumors say. Wh beg cry. Where is everyone? Nero figures out, I'm going to die tonight. There's only one reason they would have emptied out the palace. It's because they're going to kill me. Nero hops on a horse I assume may have been a carriage, hops on something with four legs, and takes off ends up in a tiny villa. The Romans are

now hunting him to finish him off. Nero fancied himself a musician, and so the rumor is that he said something along the lines of what an artist is about to die about himself, what an artist is about to die. Here's the Roman soldiers. They finally track him down. They start to close in on him. He looks at the slaves he brought with him, begs them, begs them to finish him off. None of them will do so they're all too afraid. As the soldiers are kicking down the door,

Nero takes a dag stabs himself in the throat. The soldiers come in to see Nero bleeding to death, and he allegedly again allegedly you never know, looks at them and says, you're too late, and he bleeds out and dies on the ground. That is the story of Nero, and that is an excellent example of how badly power screws you up, how bad politics can truly get even

in a civilized country. Remember, for hundreds and hundreds of years before this, the Romans had convinced themselves that they were above all those barbarians, with all their political violence and death and murder and all the intrigue. They were above all those things. And then as their leaders rotted above them, they saw what happens to a society when it rocks too much. Brow is a wonderful example for a lot of different reasons. You can use his mother,

you can use Roman society. I just think it's an incredible story and one that probably should be known by a lot of people. And that is a little history for you. Now, let's do a little bit more politics and then we'll check out it here until tomorrow. Don't forget. There's a chance we're gonna take actual phone calls tomorrow. I believe it's been a couple months since we've taken a single call. We might end up doing that tomorrow.

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Doug m Hoff, this is from Red State. Told former girlfriend he'd paid eighty thousand dollars in hush money to a nanny he impregnated, and he made her sign an NDA. He knocked up his kid's tutor, got a divorce for it, paid her eighty g's and made her sign an NDA to not tell anyone that kid's his. And that's why he spends a lot of time on the news talking about what a champion of women he is. Ladies, gentlemen, you anti communists who are listening, and even you dirty

commis who hate listen all the time. Allow me to tell you one thing that is true about ninety nine point nine to nine percent of the time. If there is a male feminist who gets a little too loud about what a male feminist he is, that is a male feminist who's done some dark things to women in his past. That is true almost every time. Just like the Mark Cubans of the world who get a little too I love democrats have something dark in there for

some reason. Same thing with male feminists. That's how that works exclusive. Kamala Harris' husband, Doug M. Hoff, faces explosive new allegations from his time at a top LA law firm. Now, I'm not going to go through all the specific allegations. There's a lot of stuff in here that honestly just sounds like dudes at work. There are accusations like, quote, he yelled expletives. That's part of it. Okay, there are you guys, a bunch of children. I hear that stuff

all the time. Another allegation is he held a men only cocktail hour. But how else are you supposed to have a conversation? You have to have a male only Again, so a lot of these things are this. But he also revoked work perks from women who didn't flirt with him. He took only young attractive associates in a limousine to a ball. Apparently there's a lawsuit claiming discrimination, harassment, all

kinds of things. Once again, a reminder to everyone, the second you hear a man in any setting talking like this, your red flags should be waving so fast you can't see anything.

The communist he wants control of everything. He doesn't want control of most things. When he looks at the public school system, he sees a couple islands that are still unconquered. You look at the public school system and you're mortified by how much of it is under communists control. He's mortified that any of it has escaped his control. Just go, Floridians told to get moving as Hurricane Milton closes in. Obviously that is something happening as we speak, say a

prayer for the people of Florida. If you were listening to the Santami, we are praying for you. We are rooting for you. You are going to be fine. Don't panic. Use your head all right. Report government sends electric chainsaws to Appalachian town without power. Look, I'm all on board with some modern technology, and I'm okay with some electric tools. I actually have a battery powered driver and a couple battery powered things at home. Battery powered chainsaw that just

doesn't sound right at all. If I'm gonna cut my leg off, I want to do it with fuel. Major US water company hit by a cyber attack. I do the best I can to not think about all the parts, the critical parts of our society that are tied to the Internet and tied to computers, because there are some very dangerous hackers out there who can do some very dangerous things. Stolen Vienna sausages lead a Georgia nursing home resident being to being stabbed in the chest. Look you

take my Vienna sausages, it's on pal. I will stab you in the chest. California faces waves of lawsuits over gender identity notification in schools. I love that we're being more litigious. What Chris voter registration group giving away Taylor Swift tickets is led by Eric Adams operative who was convicted of voter fraud. Just half of the Democrat efforts in this country are various ways they can just do things against the law in order to electioneer and win elections.

They just it really is this all encompassing crime empire they have. It's amazing. Resistance has justified. Columbia students celebrate October seventh as pro Hamas demonstration turns violent in New York City. No way Hamas violent. That's crazy.