Emperor Nero

Emperor Nero has gone down in history as the archetypal bad ruler - cruel, decadent, and perhaps even responsible for setting Rome ablaze. But how much of this is fact, and how much is propaganda? Dr Shushma Malik from the University of Cambridge joins us to dive into Nero’s reign, from his early promise to his scandals, the Great Fire, and his bloody downfall. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:12Dan Snow?

  Welcome everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. He was a man who ruled over the world's most powerful empire. It was handed to him on a plate by his mum. And yet he led it on the road to ruin. He was a performer. He entered sporting tournaments and curiously always won. He got very, very longstanding evasions for his turns on the stage. He was needy. He was insecure. He was desperate for public acclaim. He was a tyrant. The political class cowed at his feet. He built a staggering golden palace where he and his guests enjoyed astonishing luxuries surrounded by gaudy erotic art. He was depraved.

• 2:57Dan Snow?

  His romantic, well, really his family life was a horror show. He ordered the deaths of his rivals, his own mother and his wives. If you hadn't guessed, I'm talking about the Roman Emperor Nero.

• 3:15Dan Snow?

  The son of the Julio Claudians, the emperor who died a fugitive. His mighty dynasty destroyed, the empire broken, civil war on the horizon. His name has become almost a byword for useless, absurd tyrants. Yet does he deserve his reputation as, well, perhaps the worst of all the Roman emperors? I mean, that's up against some very, very stiff competition. There was Commodus and Caracalla, who need no further introduction, thanks to Ridley Scott. There was the Emperor Valerian, who allowed himself to get captured by the Persians and get used as a human footstool whenever the Persian king wanted to mount or dismount

• 3:58Dan Snow?

  his horse and apparently ended up being stuffed to serve that purpose forevermore. There was Valens, the idiot who advanced to fight the barbarian horde without waiting for his fellow Roman emperor to join him and thus suffered one of the most crushing defeats in Roman history. There was Maximus Thrax, who bankrupted the Roman Empire, tried to fight everyone at the same time, and he was eventually murdered by his own troops along with his sons, ushering in a period of catastrophic instability for the empire. But anyway, back to Nero. Was he the worst, or was his name blackened by later emperors and their scribes

• 4:38Dan Snow?

  to make themselves look better? To unravel the legacy of this most extraordinary man and emperor, we are going to get as close to the truth as we can. I'm joined by Dr. Shushma Malik. She's a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She's the author of The Nero Antichrist, and she's got some pretty hot takes on whether Nero was really that bad. Enjoy.

• 5:19Dan Snow?

  Shushma, great to see you.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Hi, Dan. Lovely to see you too.

• 5:22Dan Snow?

  Last time we were hanging out was in the forum in Rome.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  It was. Gosh, that feels like such a long time ago now.

• 5:27Dan Snow?

  This is no less beautiful in here. Let's talk about Nero. Give me the sort of view of him, the negative view of him. What do people think about Nero? If you stopped someone on the street, what would they tell you about Nero?

• 5:37Speaker 05

  So Nero is probably one of the few emperors you could stop someone on the street and say, what do you think? And probably the fire of Rome is the one that comes up the most, so.

• 5:46Dan Snow?

  Rome burns down.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Rome burns down, 64 AD, under Nero.

• 5:49Dan Snow?

  Okay, and we sort of blame him for that somehow?

• 5:52Speaker 05

  We do. And because partly some ancient historians did as well, it's not just us.

• 5:57Dan Snow?

  But he set the fires by design?

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly, yeah. So some historians say that, others are more ambiguous about it. Whether he did or didn't is a difficult question. I personally think probably not, but because Rome did burn down quite a lot, there were lots of fires in Rome. Not on this scale necessarily, this one was very big, but Rome did have a problem with the weather and things catching on fire quite quickly. But certainly, that's one of the big events that happens during his reign. And during his period that was clearly, you know, very traumatic on lots of levels, but also had a lot of repercussions. So one of them was that he decided to scapegoat a group of Christians as a part of the story of getting a response to the fire,

• 6:41Speaker 05

  bringing people to justice. And the way in which he punished them was seen as particularly and deliberately cruel. So using his gardens to essentially sort of crucify people and also set them on fire, set them alight. And we get a really sort of harrowing account of this from one of our historians, Tacitus. But also, he used the opportunity of the fire to rebuild Rome, which of course he would do, but to rebuild it quite in quite a grand and lavish scale, particularly in relation to his own house, which is the Golden House.

• 7:12Dan Snow?

  Massive, massive palace.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:14Dan Snow?

  But we also, he's become a sort of archetype for, you know, you're just common and garden, despot, kills his enemies, disgusting, bonkers, enters the Olympics and makes sure he wins the medals and all that, that sort of basic tyrannical stuff.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, Nero fiddles while Rome burns is a meme, right? It's such a well-known phrase that it has sort of become a meme. So exactly that, like, there are so many different parts of the way that his story is told through our historians that characterize him as a tyrant. But there's a tyrant in so many different ways. It's not just about these sort of big acts or big events like the fire, but also about personal cruelties. So the death of his mother, the killing of two of his wives, Octavia and Papaya, and then also cruelties in relation to the way that he likes to spend his time making senators do things that they don't want to do, or the wives of senators do things that they don't want to do, particularly in relation to the stage. So making

• 8:12Speaker 05

  people act on stage who who shouldn't be wanting to act on stage or shouldn't be put in those situations. So there's all of these different ways of using Nero to describe someone who is.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  So manipulative and so tyrannical in all of these different ways.

• 8:30Dan Snow?

  We should also say, one of the primary jobs of being an emperor, ruler, is the succession to pass that on to sort of, there's some sustainability there. He dies a fugitive and there's a civil war after he dies. So that's kind of a black mark.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  That's true, but to be fair to him on that one, none of the Julio Claudians, which is the dynasty of emperors that he was the last of, did that with any sort of ease, I think we might say. Yeah, and actually, you know, until Vespasian, who's the emperor who sort of wins out after that period of civil war, he has two children, Titus and Domitian, but then again, after Domitian, there's another period where this happened. So dynasties can be complex, I think.

• 9:06Dan Snow?

  Roman dynasties are ridiculous. Everyone talks about these great dynasties. The father-son transmission in Roman history, fourth century, is like a handful of occasions. It's ridiculous.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah. And one of those occasions, perhaps one of the most famous of those occasions, is Marcus Aurelius de Commodus, which is seen as deliberately, or is sort of then framed as, you know, after you've had this period of adoptive emperors, is seen as problematic.

• 9:28Dan Snow?

  Yeah, well, it turns out to be problematic. So against a pretty stiff slate of competitors, people think that Nero's one of the worst, right?

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 9:38Dan Snow?

  Let's get on to that, but first, talk to me about Rome. When he takes power, Roman Empire's in pretty good shape. What's going on? Tell me.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so he comes to power in 54 AD and succession is complicated, but his mother is married to the previous emperor Claudius. And he's also a little bit older than Claudius's own son, Britannicus, so he's a slightly more obvious choice. So he's adopted by Claudius and that's how he becomes emperor. The empire is in a fairly good state. There has been a bit of expansion, so Britain becomes part of the Roman Empire under Claudius in 43 AD. But there are also some troubles, particularly in the eastern borders with Parthia. So Armenia has been causing some problems under Claudius as well for a little while.

• 10:24Dan Snow?

  Always a headache for the Romans.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, in different ways. And sometimes, I'm sure the Romans were, you could tell the story the other way around as well.

• 10:32Dan Snow?

  The Romans were a headache for the Parthians.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Exactly. Changing their minds about things. But one of the problems that sort of of this period that Nero has to pick up very quickly when he starts is that there has been a problem of who's going to be on the throne in Armenia. Is it going to be someone who is from appointed from a particular Parthian family or another family and who gets to decide essentially, is it the Romans or is it the Parthians?

• 10:56Dan Snow?

  But on the whole, you say the empire is in decent shape. It's sort of approaching its territorial maximum limit. People will know from that big map of North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. And yet, that just helped me understand one thing, Shishma. This empire, pretty hard defeat on the battlefield. And yet, if you look at its politics in Rome, I mean, absolutely chaotic, the palace coups, just crazy people. Cor is arguably poisoned, Caligula murdered, members of the royal family dropping like flies, Nero doing all sorts of horrible things to his adopted brother Britannicus and taking the throne. How do you get such a sort of powerful empire with such a chaotically dysfunctional core?

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that does make you think, and I there are lots of other time periods in history we could look to for this kind of thing as well, about the relationship between the imperial family, the imperial centre and actually the administration of an empire, right? And whether or not we see those as two things that are fundamentally connected or something where actually an empire is diverse enough, strong enough, whatever, to be able to withstand lots of different kinds of emperors, maybe not every kind of emperor, but lots of different kinds of emperors. Certainly seems to be something that we see again and again with the Roman Empire. So by that I mean, yes, you've got this imperial centre and the emperor is very important clearly to the administration of empire.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  You can petition the emperor, you can write to the emperor about problems. We've got some great stories in Cassius Dio, for example. There's one where the Emperor Hadrian, who visits a lot of provinces, is stopped by a woman who says, I just need to talk to you about something. And he says, well, you know, not right now, I'm a bit busy. And she says, well, stop being the emperor then. So those kinds of stories, whether it happens or not, really in the minds of this historian and kind of characterize part of what an emperor is, you're supposed to be there to help with the administration. But you also have the Senate, and the Senate is still very important in the Imperial Period. And under Nero, actually, the Senate, Tacitus says, the Senate do a lot, actually, he lets them because he's so busy doing other things, they can still have quite a big role.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  But the role of the Senate in the administration of empire is still very important. Most of the provinces, not all, but most of the provinces of the Roman Empire are still governed by senators. So there is an ability, I think probably inbuilt in the system, that means that you can withstand, an empire can withstand, a bad emperor.

• 13:19Dan Snow?

  So the Senate is dealing with laws and sorting out dredging a river over here and moving troops over there and building better harbour defences over there. And meanwhile, the Imperial Palace, they can just be going off on one, and it's not the end of the world, perhaps?

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. It's not the end of the world. And yes, you know, the emperor is important in lots of ways, and different emperors will have different roles, of course. So Nero is someone who, for a while at least, wasn't particularly interested in having a very hands-on role. Other emperors will be different. Trajan, for example, we have some great correspondence between him and one of his provincial governors, which is Pliny the Younger. And you can see the process working, which is really fascinating to have these letters and to have that sort of record. But it doesn't necessarily mean because an emperor is unwilling to take a great responsibility in the running of empire that that empire then draws to a halt.

• 14:11Dan Snow?

  Okay, well, that's lucky for Rome when Nero and others were in charge. So that's the empire. Let's talk a little bit about that imperial family then, because that was pretty turbulent during Nero's reign. It starts with this fascinating relationship with his mum, doesn't it? Tell me about her.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so his mother is extraordinary, Agrippina the Younger. She wrote memoirs. She's such a fascinating, brilliant character.

• 14:33Dan Snow?

  They don't survive?

• 14:34Speaker 05

  They don't survive, unfortunately, no. But one of our historians mentions them. So Tacitus says she wrote these memoirs and they're a source for what's happening in the imperial family. Family in this period. So she is such a, an incredible character from history, an incredible character from this period of history. She's sort of at the centre of the imperial family. I mean, she's related to Augustus. She's the great granddaughter of Augustus. She's the sister of Caligula. She's the niece and then wife of Claudius. She's the daughter of another big, um, sort of imperial figure, Germanicus, who doesn't become emperor, but is a very successful military general and was sort of destined to become emperor. So she is really at the centre of this. And one of the things that Tacitus says about Agrippina, when Messalina dies, who's Claudius's previous wife,

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Agrippina then is someone that has to be integrated back into the imperial family because the person that she marries could be a potential successor or threat to Claudius, could threaten Claudius's throne because she's so well connected in the imperial family. So she's an extraordinary figure, but because of her, sort of Nero's legitimacy is fundamentally tied to her. So as Nero is Agrippina's child, um, so is his claim to the throne. And the historians really play with that then. So that Agrippina is ruling through him is of course one of the things that will come up. Even that they might have had an incestuous relationship. One of our historians wants to run with that idea.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  But really what we have is this character who is phenomenally sort of larger than life as an imperial woman, a kind of imperial woman we haven't seen before, someone having that sort of status and that sort of power. So it is quite a long and big lineage that Nero is coming into.

• 16:14Dan Snow?

  Claudius, the former emperor, unexpectedly and unfortunately accidentally dies after eating, um, some food in the imperial palace. Some mushrooms, which could have been an accident.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  Could have been an accident, could maybe not, but.

• 16:25Dan Snow?

  And I'm always a bit sad about, he had a son Britannicus named to celebrate the conquest of Britain, which I think would have been quite cool to have a Roman emperor called Britannicus. But he is bundled out of the line of succession, presumably by Nero and his mum. Nero treats him appallingly, we hear, and he will eventually be killed.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this happens just a year after Nero becomes emperor, say in fifty five. And the sort of story goes that they're at dinner. And there are slightly different various versions of the story, but one goes that Britannicus had recited a poem. And there were two problems with this. One, he did it very well and sort of poetry in the arts are Nero's domain and Nero got jealous. But the other is that it was a poem about how someone had been disenfranchised from having their parent killed, which is a direct sort of, you know, too close to home reference to what was happening. So Nero decides that he is going to kill him, or so the story goes. And he has a court poisoner, La Costa, and has her make up a poison that they can give to Britannicus.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  The official version of the story is that he has an epileptic fit. So there are two different versions, but that happens quite quickly into Nero's reign.

• 17:32Dan Snow?

  And then I've seen a coin where you get Nero and his mother on the same side of the coin, look at each other.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, on the odd verse of the coin, yeah, the head side of the coin.

• 17:40Dan Snow?

  So they're almost like sort of joint rulers.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, which is maybe not particularly surprising because, I mean, she's been on coins with Claudius before when she's married to him. But also it's a question of her being the person who really is, like I say, at the centre of this sort of imperial dynasty. So to have that kind of way of framing your rule in relation to the great granddaughter of Augustus, in relation to all of these people. Yeah, it makes a sort of sense, I think.

• 18:07Dan Snow?

  And yet, the relationship goes south.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, it does.

• 18:11Dan Snow?

  He tries to have her killed, what, a few times?

• 18:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, a few times all on the same night, apparently. But certainly the sort of ways that the historians explain or rationalise this is that Nero was sort of getting a bit older. He's seventeen when he becomes emperor, sixteen seventeen. So about five years in, we're now in fifty nine A D. He's, you know, that little bit older and he's wanting some independence. He's having an affair with one of his freedwomen, Acti, which Agrippina doesn't approve of. But also he's sort of starting a relationship with another woman named Popaea. So he's wanting to go down these sorts of, particularly in relation to the women that he's engaged with.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Roots that Agrippina doesn't approve of. So this is seen as one of the motivations or one of the reasons behind what happens, which is that he decides he's going to have Agrippina killed. They go for dinner by the Bay of Naples and he organises a boat for her to return home. But he engineers the boat to collapse. The boat does collapse and Agrippina manages though to swim to shore. So she survives this wreck and she's clever. So she goes in and says Nero, you'll never guess what happens. Even though she knows clearly that he's done this, but she pretends that she doesn't know anything and he pretends also that, you know, he's very glad that his mother's still alive.

• 19:32Speaker 05

  And then eventually goes and sends someone to stab her essentially. And that's how she meets her end. He admits in the public version of this as well, that she has been killed, but says it's because she was conspiring against him. So he was stopping a conspiracy.

• 19:46Dan Snow?

  As a sailor, I've always been fascinated by what a collapsible boat. Like, how do you get a boat, sail it out and then at certain points it just collapses and it just sinks? I've always been fascinated by that.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is. It's a really good, really good question. I mean, your knowledge of boats, I think is probably far better than mine.

• 20:01Dan Snow?

  I spent a lot of time, I spent too much time thinking about that, Shushma, to be honest with you.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:04Dan Snow?

  To go out of a boat that feels a bit leaky, I think. I hope I'm not about to do an Agrippina here. Okay, so then he takes over, he's emperor in his own right and his relationship with women doesn't get better from there, does it? Because the story is that he's responsible for the death of wives.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah. So Nero's relationship with women, which is true of lots of the members of the imperial family, but certainly his relationship with women is particularly difficult and a particularly terrible subject. Obviously his mother, but then his first wife was actually the daughter of Claudius, so his stepsister, as we would think of it, Octavia. And he decides he's fallen in love with another woman named Papaya. He doesn't want to be tied to Octavia anymore. But this is a bit of a problem because Octavia is the daughter of the previous emperor. She's quite popular in her own right in Rome. So he has to be quite careful about it. And first of all, he accuses her of not being able to have children. So that is grounds for divorce. So he tries to use that as grounds to divorce her.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  But the people are really unhappy with that. And you know, the idea of this mode of divorce. Remember, Augustus and Livia never had any children either of their own. They had children with other people, but not together. So that was a little bit of a difficult one. He then decides to claim that actually she's having all of these affairs, or that maybe she was pregnant by someone else. And so there's a lot of confusion there.

• 21:23Dan Snow?

  It's the classic Henry VIII. I mean, this is

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, exactly. It's Anne Boleyn, isn't it, as well? So a lot of those sorts of accusations. And eventually, he exiles her, has her exiled and sends off, as she was expecting, some members of the guard to have her killed. And she decides to take her own life in anticipation of that. And then he marries Popaea, and she becomes the next empress.

• 21:46Dan Snow?

  And what's her fate?

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Oh, Popaea also meets a very difficult death. In 65 AD, she is kicked in the stomach while pregnant by Nero, and that causes her death, according to our sources.

• 22:02Dan Snow?

  Was Nero really the worst emperor? More after this.

• 22:12Dan Snow?

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• 22:53Dan Snow?

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• 25:15Dan Snow?

  Okay, so possibly complicit in the death of his predecessor Claudius, possibly responsible death of his stepbrother, responsible death of his wife and stepsister and mother. Possibly. So I guess, interestingly, we can never answer this question most of the worst because we don't really know. But if he is guilty of the things that some people said he was, then he's pretty bad.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  It's quite a rap sheet, isn't it?

• 25:38Dan Snow?

  But should we do something crazy and talk about what, in your opinion, Nero gets right during his reign?

• 25:43Speaker 05

  So this might be a shorter answer. No, I think actually there's a lot of things you can talk about here. So one of the things that our sources, or one of our sources in particular Tacitus, does pick up on is the fact that actually, he says at one point that Nero was quite a good legislator. By that mainly what he seems to mean is that he let the Senate go and legislate, exactly, let them do what they do. But also, there are points in the history as you read through where you can see he's taken quite an interest and he is thinking about things. And not just early on, actually, later on as well in the history of his life by Tacitus, you see these events where there'll be a problem, the Senate think about it, Nero thinks about this, and sometimes it will be used, if Nero's

• 26:24Speaker 05

  in sort of tyrannical mode, to say that he does something that's probably not the best judgment. But quite a few times, he goes along with the sort of opinion of the Senate or with something that Tacitus seems as perhaps one of the better ideas.

• 26:36Dan Snow?

  Yeah, Tacitus is a sort of senatorial chap, so in his view, the highest praise could be, yes, you let the senators get on with it. You can see Tacitus quite liking that.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  So he doesn't, I mean, probably the highest praise from Tacitus would be an emperor who was judiciously part of the Senate, I suppose, as well. So that kind of model. But certainly, you know, for someone like Nero, who's very young and so forth, letting the Senate get on with it is not a bad thing. It also sort of depends on how you want to understand these periods of history, because one of the invective motifs, so one of the things that's used to vilify Nero is the fact that he wanted to act on stage. And now, we wouldn't necessarily, exactly, see that as a problem. I'm not going to start to make rule parallels with the modern day, but sometimes it's a problem, but not as much of a problem as the historians made it back in antiquity.

• 27:31Dan Snow?

  Yes, that was one of the blackest bits of his reputation was that he went on stage.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, that he acted on stage in public, sorry, I should say in public as well because he acted in private, that wasn't great, but it was okay. Other emperors have done that. But in public, he went on stage and acted in public.

• 27:46Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I think we can possibly take that one out of the debit column. It's not the end of the world, that one, is it?

• 27:51Speaker 05

  It's not the end of it, but what perhaps is the end of the world is that most actors in this period were enslaved people. So he's really kind of playing around with those status hierarchies and and questions of what people should be doing. So within the Roman social order of things, you can see why it's a problem. But now we might want to sort of, because we live in a differently minded society, step back and think, well, the murder, you know, is still plainly and simply terrible and easy to understand. This is perhaps less easy to understand.

• 28:21Dan Snow?

  And is the flip side of that, that he patronized the arts and culture?

• 28:24Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely.

• 28:25Dan Snow?

  The Greeks appeared to quite like him.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. So certainly, he's very popular in Greece. He freed the province of Achaia, which is roughly speaking what we think of now as Greece, from taxation. It was quite symbolic, but that symbolism was very important. So he was, yeah, very popular. And you can see that in sort of the coinage that was minted in the different places he went when he was in Greece. I mean, he went to Greece as well. He spent about a year going around different parts of Greece. And that's one of the longest times an emperor spent out of Rome, which of course is difficult for Rome, and seen as difficult for Rome, but is quite good for that part of the empire.

• 29:00Dan Snow?

  Because we, do we see famously Hadrian, but other emperors, it becomes more peripatetic, they're going to be seen by their people, they're heading all over the empire, they're addressing grievance. Is that something the first Julius Gorgons hadn't really done? They've been stuck in Rome. Is it perhaps, is it a good thing that Nero is beginning this tradition of getting out there?

• 29:16Speaker 05

  That's certainly one way to see it. I mean, I don't think the sort of model that Hadrian sets up, we don't see very often. And that's partly because of the military requirements that start to happen when we get to sort of Marcus Aurelius onwards. If you think of Marcus Aurelius, he's very rarely in Rome, but it's because he's on the border fighting, defending Rome, the borders, particularly in the north, and also Parthia as well. That's where Lucius Verus, who was Marcus Aurelius's co-ruler for a while. Was stationed primarily. So the sort of Hadrianic peripatetic model is, I think, actually a really interesting one for thinking about what a Roman emperor could do. And Nero starts that, always does something with that, but it's not something that becomes really doable because of the state of the Roman Empire.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  I think as we get into the later second century and third century.

• 30:04Dan Snow?

  So Nero is actually quite lucky in terms, there's a bit of breathing space for the empire.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  There is, yeah.

• 30:08Dan Snow?

  Here competitors or, I mean, there's Boudicca's revolt in Britain, which is a nightmare, but doesn't require an impersonal imperial intervention.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  No.

• 30:16Dan Snow?

  There's something going on Armenia that you mentioned.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, which again, he's got a very good general Corbilo to deal with, and that goes through better and worse stages. But towards the end of his reign, by about sixty six, they've come to a diplomatic solution. A king has been crowned, come to Rome and been crowned, in fact, so that that's seen as a sort of victory for Nero.

• 30:36Dan Snow?

  But there's no, to use the phrase, apologies, barbarian hordes crossing the Rhine or the Danube. So there's no existential crisis. So Nero can afford to go to Greece and hang out and do some acting.

• 30:45Speaker 05

  I mean, again, we might say in the centre of Rome, things, we just had the fire, right, in sixty four. So there might be things he should be doing back in Rome in relation to that. But again, I mean, the story goes that he leads one of his freed people, Helius, in charge. And that's terrible because you've got.

• 31:01Dan Snow?

  Right, a formerly enslaved person in charge of things in Rome.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:05Dan Snow?

  That's going to enrage everyone.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Exactly. For all of those reasons, it does enrage our historians in particular. But you also still, of course, have the Senate in Rome, there are the wider imperial court as well, sort of overseeing things. So he could, and it is an adjustment because Claudius goes to Britain very briefly. Augustus is away consolidating areas in Spain and in other places during his reign as well. But largely speaking, generally speaking, the emperors have been in Rome. The other example, of course, is Tiberius going off to Capri.

• 31:37Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  And that's sort of at the end of his reign and that's not a good thing either.

• 31:40Dan Snow?

  It's pleasure island.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  Exactly. So if you're going away for pleasure, not so good. And Nero is going away for pleasure. He's going away to act on stage. Exactly, and take part in the game. And all sorts of things, but to go away for military activity is slightly different, even if you're not leading an army.

• 31:57Dan Snow?

  And again, so future historians are really going to judge that pretty harshly. To go away, leave Rome, the wonderful city, why would you ever want to leave? To go and act on the stage in Greece or wrestle in the games or drive chariots, that's seen as sort of degenerate.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and irresponsible in all sorts of ways.

• 32:13Dan Snow?

  Okay, let's talk about this. So we've mentioned a few things you did well.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  I said that would be short.

• 32:17Dan Snow?

  Okay, so you could argue that leaving Rome and then leaving it in the hands of people and really upsetting the elites and that's going to build a bit of dysfunction. They come on to Rome burning. I mean, we should say if he does set the fire, if he burns down Rome, then he is definitely, that's a terrible thing to do, to burn, to personally burn your own capital city down. We don't know that, but let's just talk about the fire, even if it had been an act of God. His response, good, bad?

• 32:40Speaker 05

  I mean, his response is good, it seems. And again, Tacitus is our main source for this. So he actually doesn't think Nero set the fire, but also he's a bit more cagey on the fact that it seems to be dying out and then starts again. And the place where it starts is very near to some of the properties of Nero's Praetorian prefect, Tijalinus, who's also seen as a sort of shady character in the histories. So there's a bit more ambiguity with that bit. But he does say, look, Nero was in Antium when the fire was started. He comes back to Rome, he opens his palace and his gardens for people to take refuge. And he sort of immediately starts to think about strategic ways to rebuild. So we need to use better building materials that are less flammable. We need to think about kind of

• 33:23Speaker 05

  spacing on the streets and spaces between houses and different parts of the streets and those sorts of things. And so he is thinking about ways to stop this happening in the future. It of course does happen again, we have fires, another big one happens in the Flavian period, but he is thinking about that.

• 33:38Dan Snow?

  But he does also do a big land grab.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, for his own palace, yes. And that's where the story becomes, you've got the good bit and then the bad bit. And the bad bit is the Domus Alreia, and that's the golden palace. He was-

• 33:49Dan Snow?

  A monstrous golden house.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. Huge palace that spans at least two hills of Rome. And again, I mean, this is a little bit difficult because, yes, I mean, it's a huge palace and clearly Nero was making a very strong imperial and monarchical statement with it. But probably parts of it would have been open to the public. But also, part of the problem is he's taking land that probably would have been quite high-priced real estate, so senatorial land and appropriating it for himself.

• 34:20Dan Snow?

  Anything else we can say is bad about Nero? For example, why did he fall? Other people must have thought he was particularly bad as well because he faced a challenge. In fact, he was kicked out.

• 34:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so at the end of his reign, sixty eight, as it became, what we essentially have is Nero having been out of Rome for a while. So he goes to Greece in sixty six. He comes back in sixty seven, but then he doesn't come back to Rome straight away. He goes to Naples for a while and then eventually has to be brought back. And what we see is just the frustration. So actually being away from Rome seems to be a bit of a catalyst here. And there's a revolt by a general named Vindex. It doesn't work. Eventually Nero does manage to, once he's back in Rome, quash that revolt. But then there's another one very quickly after, which is by Galba. And the Senate seemed to back Galba. He's sort of the antithesis to Nero in lots of ways. He's a lot older, he's a seasoned military general and so forth.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  And so he's seen as a safe pair of hands.

• 35:15Dan Snow?

  And why are they revolting? Because they do think Nero is dysfunctional? Have they got other, is there economic and demographic problems or anything like that?

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, so probably the economics of this is important. Clearly there is a problem at this point because of the fire and the spending that happens after the fire. Nero has had to go through a process called the debasement of the coinage. So essentially he's devalued the amount of precious metal in the coinage and that happens in his period. I mean, that's a fairly well understood economic measure and it's something that is going to continue in the imperial period for lots of different reasons. But that is one of the things that's talked about as signifying some economic problems. So the economy, the state of the imperial finances, I think is clearly a point. I do think Nero, having been away from Rome and then the repercussions of that

• 36:03Speaker 05

  because of the idea of the emperor losing an interest in even the basics of running an empire, which I think, you know, up until that point, he probably had been fairly involved in. One of the things that Tacitus says is for the first time, an emperor is made outside of Rome. So Galba is not in Rome, he's in Spain. So there also seems to be this slight shift of what's possible when thinking about who can be an emperor and where they are and who they are.

• 36:29Dan Snow?

  And also not part of the Juno Claudian family, he's not descended from Augustus.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  No, exactly. Yeah, no, not part of the.

• 36:34Dan Snow?

  That's revolutionary stuff.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  Well, it is and it isn't because, I mean, on the one hand, what is the Juno Claudian family other than one of the leading elite families in Rome? And of course, it's significant. It's Augustus, of course, it's dynastic and and so forth. But what we have also seen in Nero's reign is a conspiracy, so the Piso conspiracy, which happens, again, just sort of after the fire and it involves all sorts of people. But it's not a conspiracy to restore the Republic. We're not at that point anymore. When Caligula dies, there's a question, do we restore the Republic or do we go with another emperor? And the Praetorian Guard answered that question very quickly with Claudius. But at this point, there isn't even a question. Piso is going to become the next emperor. He is going to be the person who takes over and then that becomes the imperial dynasty.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  So the idea that you can move this away from the Juno Claudians seems to have been something that people were thinking about. But yeah, also that actually it is possible to have a different emperor from these different circumstances.

• 37:34Dan Snow?

  And just to, I guess, reinforce that we think that by the end of his rule, the senators had been up close to Nero and they just, they didn't like him. It wasn't necessarily massive policy failures, they just objected to him.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's probably a bit of both. I mean, if we were to go with sort of the Tacit and Cassius Dio, the sort of historiographical view, none of them have ever particularly liked him, except for, I should be clear about this, the sycophantic senators, because not all senators are the same, of course. There are different senators, some are, you know, stalwarts of tradition.

• 38:05Dan Snow?

  I've heard about these sycophants in the Senate, yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  Well, exactly. Others are much more willing to go along with anything Nero says. So to think about the senatorial elite as one unified body is probably also a little bit misleading. There are lots of different factions within the Senate, of course, and some of whom would be very close to the Juno Claudians and others of whom less so. And Tacitus likes to pick out key people who he sees as principled dissenters. So the seopitus is one of these figures that stands up to Nero and isn't a sycophant and says what needs to be said and ultimately is essentially sort of put on trial for it and takes his own life. But what we do then see is. As we're getting towards the end of Nero's reign, is the long term playing out of that? Nero was emperor for, you know, thirteen, fourteen years, so fifty-four to sixty-eight.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  So we have had this sort of play out in a long-form way that we don't get with someone like Caligula. So it's sort of that combined probably with the economic problems, combined with the idea of Nero being away from Rome, so removing the emperor from the centre and everything's still getting on fine, right?

• 39:08Dan Snow?

  Oh, actually, so you prove that you're not essential to the running of the empire.

• 39:11Speaker 05

  Well, he clearly wasn't by that point.

• 39:14Dan Snow?

  Yeah, if you're on holiday.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  Exactly, but also that an emperor can exist outside of Rome and that's not necessarily something that carries on or is seen as something that should be copied by someone like Galba. But Galba isn't in Rome and then he comes, well, he actually, then we get a period of civil war, but these are becoming questions, I think. These things are being opened up. There is more of a way of understanding different spaces in which the emperor can exist, I suppose.

• 39:39Dan Snow?

  So interesting. So Nero's unwittingly making all sorts of suggestions to other powerful people and groups around the empire.

• 39:46Speaker 05

  I think that's right, and I think there are a few different things about that. I think on the one hand, someone like Nero and also Caligula are playing with the limits of autocracy, right? So what is it that we can do? What can we get away with? How can we understand being an emperor? It's not Augustus anymore, it's not first among equals. It's about, I am emperor, what can I do? And how can I articulate my power? And a lot of the things that we see with Nero are playing around with ways of articulating power and and using that power.

• 40:15Dan Snow?

  Right, what, making everyone applaud him for being, so you kind of, that power corrupting?

• 40:20Speaker 05

  But also thinking about, well, where do I need to be? Where does my attention need to focus? How much can I rely on my advisers, you know?

• 40:26Dan Snow?

  They're all gone on holiday.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. What can I do? What can't I do? And actually, a lot of the things that Nero does will become fairly standard for emperors later on, that they will be more autocratic, that you can leave Rome, that you can do all of these things. It's just, he was playing around with it at a fairly early point.

• 40:46Dan Snow?

  Was Nero really the worst emperor? More after this.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up.

• 41:12Speaker 02

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• 41:28Speaker 04

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.

• 42:07Dan Snow?

  They say you can tell a lot about a regime by its demise. How does Nero go?

• 42:13Speaker 05

  So Nero's death is particularly emblematic, we might say, of the regime as a whole, of his reign as emperor. So he realizes that there was a revolt by Vindex and now there's this revolt by Galba and that the Senate have essentially sort of decided that Galba should be the next emperor. And he panics, really. He tries to find one of his favorite gladiators to kill him, but can't find him. The gladiator won't. He tries to find some poison, but can't find any. He then thinks, well, maybe the Senate might just let me go to Alexandria and essentially sort of, you know, have a job, have an administrative job there. And they can do whatever they want to in Rome, but also realizes that that's probably not going to happen.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  So eventually, he is taken, escorted, and then crawling through brambles, actually, according to Suetonius. One of our sources, to the villa of one of his freedmen way out of Rome or one of the roads that go out of Rome. And there he realises that the Senate have declared him a public enemy, which means a particularly brutal death and public death. So decides that he's going to take his own life and but still struggles to do so. And one of his freedmen helps him or stabs him.

• 43:27Dan Snow?

  And he says, what an artist dies with me.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  He does. Not quite his last words, a little bit before his last words. But when he's in that villa, he does say the the famous line of what an artist dies with me. Yep.

• 43:40Dan Snow?

  And then we should say, as you've mentioned, there's a civil war after he is chased out of Rome and forced to commit suicide.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. So what we then get is because there is supposed to be a straightforward succession, it's supposed to be Galba. But again, Tacitus is our main source for this and it's a very interesting source, the way he talks about it. Galba manages to sort of restabilise things in the short term. But actually, at the beginning of sixty nine, he's overthrown because, according to Tacitus, he doesn't pay the troops enough. And he doesn't pay due attention to that kind of military side of things, which is surprising because he's a general. So that should be something that he's a bit more sort of attuned to. But on the other hand, the way Tacitus talks about it, and I think this is fascinating, is that by this point, the empire and the people of the Roman Empire have got used to

• 44:29Speaker 05

  a kind of gift giving model of an emperor, right? So Nero is the absolute extreme of this. He is so luxurious, he throws money around, you know, people are used to that. They're used to an emperor throwing money around. And Galba is back to the kind of the old parsimonious old guard. And he hasn't understood this shift. And that means that fundamentally, he misses part of the point.

• 44:51Dan Snow?

  And there'll be four emperors that year.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  There will in sixty nine. Yeah. So Galba starts it. But then we have Otto, who incidentally used to be married to Popaea, that we talked about earlier, one of Nero's wives. And then another general named Vitellius, and then eventually Vespasian is going to win out.

• 45:06Dan Snow?

  And just on that, because I guess we think about Nero's legacy, how dangerous is that civil war? Again, is this sort of palace intrigue? Is this the imperial? Centers, everything else getting on fine, or is this a big civil war that really could threaten to destroy the empire?

• 45:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is a really fundamentally important civil war in the problems it causes in Italy in particular. So not just in Rome, although Rome is affected as well, but in parts of Italy. The other thing I should mention at the same time is you have war going on in Judea, and that's where Vespasian is. Well, actually Titus, his son, is there in person, but Vespasian has been heavily involved in that war as well. So there are different disputes going on in different parts of the empire. So this is the Jewish war that inevitably ends with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE under Vespasian. So there are things going on in other parts of the empire, but it's not necessarily, again, somehow, that we get a narrative that everything everywhere else is also falling apart.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  I mean, what you would have seen of the civil war or heard of the civil war in somewhere like Syria is perhaps a bit of a different question.

• 46:12Dan Snow?

  Okay, so again, luckily for the Romans, no big outside groups there to take advantage of Romans' disunity at that point, unlike a bit later on in Roman history.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  That's not to say that, as I said, there's a war going on in Judea at this point as well. But Rome seems to have had the manpower and the infrastructure at this point to be able to deal with things on various fronts. So it could have a war going on in Judea and a civil war going on at home and cope. Whereas later on, these problems have become much worse.

• 46:42Dan Snow?

  Is Nero as bad as the Roman historians portray him or as bad as the modern world has portrayed him?

• 46:50Speaker 05

  Well, how bad he is, I'm not sure we're ever really going to know.

• 46:55Dan Snow?

  Yes, we can't know.

• 46:55Speaker 05

  And I don't think he was a good emperor. I think that's fairly uncontroversial to say. He seems to have misunderstood quite a lot of the fundamental aspects of what it is to be an emperor and a leader in the model that Augustus set up in any case. I think, though, what I find interesting, and this is something that, you know, you picked up on as well, and I think very rightly so, is that what we understand as the problems of the imperial centre and how that relates to the question of actually running the Roman Empire, a different... Different things. So what does Nero look like from Greece? What does Nero look like from Syria? What does Nero look like from Gaul? Does he really look that different from any other emperor? And in some places, I think probably the answer might is yes, and in other places not.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  In Greece, for example, he might be seen as a better emperor than than some he go before or after. It sort of depends on where you are and what your position looking back in. If you're even focusing towards Rome at all, which you may well very not be from various parts of the empire. So I think rather than thinking about whether or not he was as bad or the worst emperor. I think it's also worth thinking about, well, actually, how much does the Roman Empire depend on the character of the emperor for understanding how it runs? And I think that's quite interesting as well.

• 48:09Dan Snow?

  He's up against some extraordinarily stiff competition for worst emperor. I mean, do you want to throw a few other names out there?

• 48:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So Caligula, of course. So again, but only four years, so we have less of. But the madness of Caligula, I think, is probably legendary, even as much, if not more so, than the madness of Nero. And then Domitian also, perhaps slightly less famous, but also seen as a very bad emperor and is also killed in a conspiracy like Caligula was at the end of his reign.

• 48:37Dan Snow?

  Yeah, Domitian was bad. Quickly run us through why he's so bad.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Domitian, again, a lot of the stories are fairly similar to Nero. He's seen as being treacherous and someone that you really can't trust. You never know what he's thinking. And again, with these tyrants, it's about them always putting on a facade. You can't tell what it is they're going to do next. There's sort of, you know, the madness. But also, he's seen as someone who is particularly paranoid. So he's constantly worried about conspiracies. He's constantly punishing people. He's constantly looking around his back. There's a great story in one of our sources that says that essentially he had all of the walls in his palace scrubbed to the point that they were mirrors. So he could always see who was behind him. And in the end, that didn't work either. Again, Domitian is seen as someone who is far too interested in decadence and luxury.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  Another famous story is that he has a dinner party where all the food is black, all dyed black. It's all very dark and very sort of mysterious, but also, you know, the height of. Playing around with that sort of sensory luxury. So yeah, a bit like Nero in some of those ways. And like I say, is killed because of a conspiracy. Also Commodus.

• 49:43Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  Uh, you know, exactly. Uh, the name, I think, is enough. And another one that people may or may not have heard of, Elagabalus. So now we're in the third century and in the Severan period. So sort of two one eight to two two two C E, he's emperor. And again, very short, he's very young. He's a teenager when he becomes emperor. But he is absolutely vilified and run through by the sources for being completely inept. From being from Syria, because he's related to Julia Domna, who was the wife of Septimius Severus. And being someone who completely misunderstands all aspects of being Roman, actually, not just being a Roman emperor,

• 50:25Speaker 05

  being a Roman. Um, so he's again absolutely run through by our sources when they talk about his reign.

• 50:32Dan Snow?

  Well, Shushma, thanksgiving. There's some other names in the rose gallery as well. But that is Nero. Thank you very much for coming on, talking all about it.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  Oh, no, thank you very much for having me.

• 50:45Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube. And you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

• 51:31Speaker 02

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• 51:44Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up.

• 51:45Speaker 02

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• 52:01Speaker 04

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Next.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.

• 52:33Dan Snow?

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