Rise of Nero

Before he became one of Rome’s most infamous tyrants, Nero was a golden boy - young, talented, and full of promise. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by bestselling author Conn Iggulden to explore Nero’s early years, from his powerful mother Agrippina and his philosopher tutor Seneca, to the poisonous politics of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Was Nero always doomed to fall? Or could the seeds of infamy have been planted in his troubled rise to power? Join us to dive into the drama of Rome’s blood-soaked game of succession. MORE Divorced, Murdered, Survived: Nero's Wives https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TVHRVEvZYvCIdSdqqEylP Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:44Tristan Hughes?

  Hey, everyone. Another Ancients episode for you today on the rise of Nero. Nero, of course, one of the most infamous names from ancient history today. But it's boring the rise really wanted to do this because it feels lesser talked about than the big events of Nero's reign, such as the Great Fire of Rome or the persecution of Christians. So it will be interesting to hear in the comments whether you Whether your thoughts about Nero have changed at all after listening to the story of his earlier years. Now, our guest today, very excited about this one, is the acclaimed historical fiction author Con Iggolden. Now, we were very excited to get Con on.

• 2:26Tristan Hughes?

  I've been reading his books since I was very, very young, for instance, his series on Genghis Khan. So it was a pleasure to meet him in person. We did this interview in person a couple of weeks back. He was delightful. And, as you're about to hear, he knows a lot about the Emperor Nero, about early Imperial Rome, because his newest book is all about the rise and early reign of Nero. So without further ado, let's get into it.

• 3:13Tristan Hughes?

  In fifty-four AD, a sixteen-year-old Nero became the new ruler of Rome. The ailing Emperor Claudius, his stepfather, had died in suspicious circumstances, but the succession plan was clear. Rather than his own son, Britannicus, Claudius had decided that Nero, his adopted son, would be the next emperor. All thanks to the conviction of Nero's cunning mother, Agrippina the Younger. Having Agrippina by his side, alongside high-standing tutors like the famous philosopher Seneca, there was great hope for the teenage Nero. With family links stretching back to Augustus and Julius Caesar, here was a young, energetic

• 3:56Tristan Hughes?

  emperor to rejuvenate the Julio-Claudian dynasty after years of scandal and murder.

• 4:03Tristan Hughes?

  But that's not what's happened. Within fifteen years of his accession, Nero was dead. The Julio-Claudian dynasty ended, civil war erupted, and Nero would forever be remembered as one of Rome's worst and most evil emperors. From the great fire of Rome to his persecution of Christians, there are so many infamous episodes in Nero's story that have come down to us today. But what do we know about his earlier years? What was it like growing up as part of this dysfunctional imperial family where betrayal and murder was rife? And just how prominent a role did his mother play in his rise to the empresship? This is a story

• 4:45Tristan Hughes?

  of betrayals, of scandals, and poisonings that have come to define the Julio-Claudian dynasty. This is The Rise of Nero, with today's guest, Con Iggolden.

• 4:59Tristan Hughes?

  Con, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 5:03Tristan Hughes?

  And this period in Roman history, it feels almost like a soap opera. You've got the stories of poisonings, of backstabings, of members of the imperial family falling left, right, and centre. It's another of those kind of Game of Thrones-esque moments in ancient history, full of these incredible stories.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, I think in some ways it's the origin of an awful lot of the family dispute, quarrel fiction that has, you know, taken so many fantasy authors and historians, you know, to transports of delight in the 2000 year since. This is the original. This is the motherlode.

• 5:35Tristan Hughes?

  And what makes the Julio-Claudian dynasty, of all Roman dynasties, what makes them so uniquely dysfunctional at this time?

• 5:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't think they were uniquely dysfunctional. It's just that because they influenced us in so many ways, right up to the Americas still having a senate, for example. So we don't really take into account other dynasties that had similar levels of dysfunction. For example, the Egyptians with Cleopatra and married to her own brother and so on. So, or, you know, the Persian Achaemenid, you know, where one brother hired Spartans to come and fight for him against his other, you know, his brother. Brother who was going to be king and tried to kill him with a single blow on a single morning and failed. I mean, that kind of thing doesn't influence as many modern societies. So we don't sort of see it as our origin tales. And there is an element of that.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  And it's partly because, of course, unlike Genghis and to some extent, unlike including Nero, the Romans wrote their own history. And so you can read the letters of Seneca, you can read the histories of the time and very, you know, personalized, personal records. And that makes them real in a way that some other cultures are not as real to, and there is real, but they're not as personally important to us.

• 6:49Tristan Hughes?

  I did sort of regret saying uniquely dysfunctional as soon as you mentioned that. But I guess, as I said, it's the, is it the level, the detail, the depth of our surviving sources for this particular period and the richness in the stories that they have that makes this episode stand out a bit more compared to others?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, first of all, the big first engine of it is Julius Caesar. Because, you know, we know there's a Roman society for centuries before, but for some reason, we're not as interested in that. And then you get Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar turning a republic into effectively a one man state and he becomes dictator for life and has the right to wear red shoes, which the last pope wouldn't do, by the way, even though he was pontifex maximus. And the new pope is apparently going to wear the red shoes. I don't know. I love that because it's 2000 years old. But that's the first big change when one man of extraordinary charisma and ability and let's face it, battle talent, because he never lost a battle. He turned a functioning society into something else. And the next few generations are echoes

• 7:49Speaker 04

  of him to a degree, in the sense that they didn't do, they didn't achieve as great a change by any means. But then they also have this extraordinary thing, which we, we don't exactly admire, but we can be awed by the level of wealth that is accumulated by one man if he's sitting at the very top. When you hear of someone like Nero getting a statue 110 to 120 feet high of Apollo, but it had Nero's face with gold rays and, you know, it, it set in a garden where rose mist sprayed at you as you walk down the alleys. I mean, this sort of thing is, is All inspiring and it might be appalling and irritating when you think of poverty at the same time and all the rest of it. But my goodness, it does make a good story.

• 8:30Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. And with the surviving sources that you have, I mean, what types of sources survive from the period of Nero and just before him? That allow writers like yourself to go into such depth, so much colourful detail with the story of Nero.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  I mean, the the first tragedy is what's missing, first of all, because there are entire key works missing. Nero's mother Agrippina wrote an autobiography that hasn't survived, it hasn't reached us. The end of Tacitus, Nero's death, that's missing as well. So when you're reading a historian like Tacitus, and he's very good, he's exactly the one I wanted, he was alive during Nero's. Life, his uncle, I think Agrippola was in Britain at the time. So he was a a good source for the Boudicca or Baudicia, however you want to pronounce it. And so you've got this wonderful, almost first person accounts of some of the key issues. And then you've got a gap because the end of Nero's life is just missing. So suddenly I'm forced to go to Suetonius.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Who is a a late, well, I mean, he's he's most famous for being sort of the the Sunday sport version of history and loving. Every scurrilous, nine in a bed romp, um, sort of sexualized story. He loved all of that and he loved that much more than the details. So he hardly mentions Boudicca, for example, but he will mention the fact that Tiberia scrubbed a man's face with a lobster. I mean, thi- this is the kind of detail that he loved. So it was very irritating to have to go to Suetonius for that. Because his end of Nero had Nero running through, uh, you know, nightfall, running through Rome, knocking on doors, trying to get anyone to help him. In a Macbeth sense, having been abandoned by all of his friends and and colleagues and no one answered the knock. And you know with near certainty that that is a fictional made up scene.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  But it's it's a cracking sort of bit of drama. I just wish there were a couple of alternatives and I like alternatives because then I can pick the best one.

• 10:16Tristan Hughes?

  Because you have a very interesting approach to this as a historical fiction writer, as in understanding the sources that have survived from this time. Deciding what to trust, what information to embellish, what information to reinterpret as well. I guess all those things must go through your mind when looking at the likes of Tacitus and Suetonius, Seneca you mentioned earlier, surviving inscriptions and creating a story from it.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there are, bias is absolutely a key part of interpreting the sources. You get somebody, for example, well, after the death of Nero, you've got four people taking over the famous sort of year of four emperors that lasted about three years. And the first one is Galba, who had no right whatsoever to, to take over the, you know, the power of Rome. He was about seventy odd or seventy-eight, I forget. And he was already dying and he was a placeholder, but he had legions. So he was someone that, you know, he had physical force behind him. And then after him, Otho, Nero's childhood friend, who had, again, no right to sit the throne of Rome at all, but he had some support. And of course, those

• 11:18Speaker 04

  two, when it came to writing Nero's story, when it came to revising the histories or seeing how, what his legacy was going to be, I wouldn't trust Otho in charge of those records. Otho's wife was once seduced and then married by Nero, for example. So would you trust a man you cuckolded, you know, with the personal record of your life? I don't think you would. And that's the, you do get a sort of a split there because after Nero's death, there were three fake Neros who turned up claiming to be him. And they were welcomed by crowds in Rome because he was a popular leader with the crowds. But the story was already diverging. And the further you get away, when you get to Josephus or Josephus, he was made a slave by Rome and then he was freed by Vespasian, who was the last in the

• 12:02Speaker 04

  year of the four emperors. So you, you're already into the narrative that has been established then. He's a regime historian to some extent, as is Cassius Dio. And you get, the story has been set up. We all know how bad Tiberius was, and he does appear to have been an absolute monster. And then, of course, you get Caligula, who was so horrific that four years went by before they sort of, his own people stabbed him to death with no plan, which goes to show that it was an extraordinary act of sudden violence rather than something they planned for. And then you get Nero slotting into that sort of route fairly easily. And I, I, I think I do believe that it's, it's not completely an unfair portrayal. I think that's, that would be wrong to say that. But I am more aware of him as a tragic

• 12:47Speaker 04

  figure because he was sixteen when he became emperor. Because his mother pushed him into being emperor at sixteen and because his uncle was Caligula, his other uncles were, two of them were murdered, his mother was married at thirteen to a man of thirty in a brutal marriage, his grandmother was exiled, blinded, died in exile, his grandfather was murdered, Germanicus. I mean, he was surrounded, I mean, in terms of psychological damage, and I try not to get too wrapped up in this kind of thing because it's a different society with different rules and different ideas of damage, actually. But in terms of psychological damage, Nero had almost no chance at all at a normal life. And I think that's an important part of the story, and that should be the way I try and tell the story, because it's the only way to understand what happened to him.

• 13:32Tristan Hughes?

  And it's similar with Caligula before him as well, has also that very traumatic childhood, so.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Caligula, dear God, I mean, he, he, obviously, he spent time, I've stood on Capri on, in the ruins of Tiberius's palaces, and I've looked down to where he threw people off and all the rest of it, and, you know, and some of the horrors that I won't repeat on radio, because honestly, they are unrepeatable horror. I think, I think Tom Holland said in his recent translation, that was the worst sentence he'd ever sort of read in, you know, you go and find it if you want to, but it's, yeah, he was a sort of, let's say, a Jimmy Saville of ancient Rome with ultimate power. And he had in his power, from the age of, I think about eighteen to twenty-four, something like that, this young man, Gaius Caesar, who was known as Caligula because he dressed in a, you know, a set of armour, little boot, but his damage was profound. Of course it was, what he saw, what he took part in, what

• 14:20Speaker 04

  happened to him, it's horrific. And the extraordinary thing about Caligula, also about Nero, and it applies, is that both of them tried very hard to walk the straight and narrow. Caligula was doing reasonably well. He got married, his wife got pregnant, he was showing no real sign of the dangerous psychopath he was about to become, until his wife died in childbirth. And he lost the child, and he lost his wife, and then the, the first one of his early stories is that he called her father in Solanus, the senator, and said, I want you to take a message to her and cut the old man's throat, so that he whispered the message and killed him, so that he would take the message across the veil to his.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  His daughter, and that's the Caligula we all know and, you know, fear and the man who held Rome in abject terror for the next, give or take about three years. Uh, before they went to his own Praetorian stabbed him to death. So these are appalling stories, but it's interesting that there is a story arc. They're not just men who started bad, stayed bad and died bad. That, to be honest, as a writer, would not be that interesting to me. There is always an interesting arc when someone tries very hard, like Macbeth again, he's not just a monster. He's a man who tries to uh do something and then get away with it and and and his guilt destroys them both. That is true for Caligula and Nero as well as Macbeth.

• 15:40Tristan Hughes?

  And I feel this is the right topic to really explore that, covering the early story of Nero, where that becomes more clear to see, even in the surviving sources. Who are his mum and dad? Do we know much about their characters?

• 15:52Speaker 04

  We know a fair bit. Some things are absent and missing, as I've said, but I mean, you know, it depends which one. I'll start with his mother, Agrippina. I mean, she had a fairly happy childhood. Her father was the general Germanicus. Her mother was also called Agrippina and she and her. Let's get it right, three brothers, two sisters and herself, so there's what, there's six of them. And they had a sort of idyllic Roman childhood. Her mother was a descendant of Augustus's sister, if I've got that right. So there was a blood line. So and Germanicus, I think, was adopted by Tiberius. Was it? There was a chance that they were the imperial family. In fact, they were too obviously the imperial family because someone decided to take them out of the running.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  And so the the violence began with the death of the father and we know Germanicus was murdered, not because it was obvious in any way. But because his wife, the Agrippina the elder, believed he was murdered and unfortunately accused people of being involved in it and picked Tiberius as one of the people to name. And that was a, you know, really awful error. It would be the equivalent of naming Henry the Eighth publicly and expecting to get away with it. So of course she was picked up and the the story is she was beaten so badly, she was blinded in one eye. And then exiled to an island and she never came back. It's one of the first things that when her son Caligula became emperor, one of the first things he did was go with his sister Agrippina to that island and bring the ashes back.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Because this kind of thing mattered. But having lost, having lost first Germanicus and then Agrippina the Elder, the children were vulnerable. And they were still in the bloodline that could put one of them on the throne. So they were the most vulnerable children in creation. And two of them died in fairly horrific ways, the the older brothers, you know, they they were the most vulnerable, the the daughters less so. I mean, all three daughters survived. But the oldest two sons, one of them, I think, was starved to death. And we know he was starved to death. Because although it was claimed as a natural death, when they opened his stomach, it had straw inside it, where he'd been trying to eat his mattress. So we know it wasn't a deliberate, you know, Romans have a funny attitude to suicide, as you, I'm sure you

• 17:58Speaker 04

  know, it's, it was much more acceptable. It's impossible to oppress a man if you tell him to do something and he doesn't want to, he can step out. And it's considered a completely honorable thing to do, and therefore it's extremely common. But the forced suicide, where you are effectively given the knife and or even have it have it held for you, you know, is also a key part of politics at the time. And I try not to judge that kind of thing, by the way, because, I mean, I have pretty strong views on suicide, and whether it's, you know, ever acceptable or not. And for me, it isn't. But I understand completely that I can't judge their society by my views. And I don't, you know, Seneca was forced to commit suicide, you know, Socrates and so on, you have, this is a common part of

• 18:38Speaker 04

  the stories of it's amazing how many lives it ends. And for me, it's not my place to judge.

• 18:44Tristan Hughes?

  And in regards, so that's Agrippina the Younger, so the mother of Nero, who has all of this heritage, this link to Augustus, and then I guess through that to Julius Caesar. So the real pedigree on that side of the family. Nero's father, Lucius Ahenobarbus, is he slightly different?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  I mean, it's funny, in terms of the bloodline, he's descended from both Mark Antony.

• 19:06Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  And also a another, I think, I think he had the same name, Ahenobarbus means bronze beard. So the chances are, one of their relatives had a big, buffy, red beard. Nero is still sometimes shown with red hair. And it is a possibility, you know, that the way these nicknames, I mean, Plato, after all, means broad-shouldered. It wasn't his name. We don't know what his name actually was. There were lots of little moments like that in Roman history, where someone's given a name. That has to do with their physical characteristics, but the Ahenobarbus that was his ancestor was the admiral for Mark Antony. During the wars with Octavian and Cleopatra and so on. So, you know, he came from sort of fairly good stock. He was, you know, uh. Of a fairly decent family. I don't think they had a lot of money, you know, to some extent, he was marrying up when he married Agrippina.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  But it is worth pointing out that it was an unhappy marriage. He was, Ahenobarbus was thirty when he married Agrippina at thirteen. Wow. And I assume she was premenstrual because they didn't have children. Uh, as presumably everyone hoped for, and I think Nero, Nero was certainly the only one born, but I think that happened about seven years into the marriage. So. You know, theirs was not a happy union and he died fairly early on. We don't know how it's one of the, it's one, when I. Talk about historical fiction as crime fiction, there's an awful lot of deaths that you don't know exactly how, and it's partly because if it's an emperor. You never say, oh, I was in the room, I, I was involved in strangling Tiberius or something like that. You know, no one is stupid enough to ever put their name to that.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  But there's an awful lot of, uh, it's also pre, mostly pre, post-mortem, sometimes, you know, little rudimentary one goes on, but. We don't know why someone died and also. In those days, people just died sometimes. So it's very difficult to know whether it was a wound that went septic or sudden septic shock or. Some disease that they couldn't handle, some viral load, goodness knows what. So, um, Nero's father, Hina Barbas died when Nero was, I think, about three. Wow, okay, very early. And it, very early, and it is one of those interesting things, just again, to get on to modern psychological take, and I, I. I shouldn't, I should avoid it, but it's hard to, it's hard to ignore these patterns that when I look at. Let's say ruthless high achievers, usually they've lost their father at a key age. Usually, by the way, it's between eleven and fifteen.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  It's not as young as three, young as three can leave you, uh, you know, they have no concept of what a father is. Whereas eleven to fifteen, they have a concept and they can never again feel the pat on the shoulder that says, well done, son, and they can never therefore feel approved of. And that means they often overachieve. It's, it's a surprisingly common pattern throughout history. Now, whether this affected Nero or not, I don't know. He had a, a second father who also died. Was Agrippina involved in his death or not? It's very hard to say. Claudius was his third father and Claudius died suddenly when it looked as if he was about to disinherit Nero as heir. So I would say that one is as near certain as humanly possible.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  And after all, Agrippina didn't muck about. On the night Claudius died, Nero was emperor the following morning announced. The motive is so clear there that I'm pretty, I'm comfortable saying that she definitely did away with Claudius, but whether she did away with the others, I don't know. In terms of being a black widow, however, who whose husbands kept dying, yes, but she was the sister of Caligula, for goodness sake, from that awful damaged family. How could she not be completely ruthless and a Roman operator at the highest level with no moral qualms whatsoever?

• 22:28Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Con, we've got a few years to cover before we get to the end of Claudius and the accession of Nero, but still very good taste of what's to come. You mentioned there how it was several years into the marriage of Aenobarbus and Agrippina the younger before Nero is born. I mean, can you let us know a bit about when Nero is born and the political context, the world to which he is born into? I mean, what date are we talking about? When are we talking about?

• 22:51Speaker 04

  It was AD thirty seven.

• 22:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  When he was born. By the way, I'm comfortable that we use AD and BC. Good, because I'm, the BCE, CE business drives me up the wall.

• 23:01Tristan Hughes?

  I don't mind people using on the podcast, but I prefer, I usually say AD.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Let's just get your own origin point. You know, it's unbelievable. I guess I'm enough of a lover of history to know that the French Revolution had their own dating system. The Chinese obviously do today. The Russians, you know, did. Just pick your own origin point. You can't have the same origin point where BCE turns to CE and then just claim it's especially common era. I mean, dear God, that's so Orwellian. You know, just in in language use, that offends me enormously. But yes, okay.

• 23:30Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, should we go back?

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Sorry, yes, back to the.

• 23:33Tristan Hughes?

  Thirty seven AD.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  AD, yeah, AD thirty seven. And he's, let me think, he's emperor at sixteen, which is what? Fifty four. Yeah, because he was born very late in the year. So AD thirty seven, Tiberius is still on the throne, but not an active participant. These are the years. When he's gone to Capri, he's lost in his own perverse pleasures, perverse orgies, God knows what you would call that, his, the sickness of it at the end of his life. And he's left a friend, a man called Sajanus, in control in Rome. And it's funny, as an example of power corrupting, Sajanus obviously starts to assume airs and graces that Tiberius certainly didn't intend.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  So he has statues made to himself and he has coins. Coins are an interesting record of the period, the way people's faces appear on them. Agrippina appears in the background of some and then facing Nero on one of the coins and it's, it's a sort of rise in power. And, uh, and Sajanus really made himself too obvious in his, uh, new exciting authority. And eventually Tiberius heard about it and came back and he, because he was still emperor, he was a vicious old spider at that point. But nonetheless, he was still capable of giving the order. He had Sajanus strangled and thrown down the Gemonian steps. If I remember rightly, where it was a fairly common sort of public, you know, the body would bounce down the steps and then the crowd would fall on them and, you know, beat them and tear them to pieces.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  And it was a pretty public way of disposing of an enemy and making it perfectly clear, this one would not be coming back or have anyone claim to be them. This one was definitely dead. You know, then you get the problem of what to do with, um, Tiberius's, uh, succession. But he didn't live very long after that. And we don't know exactly what happened to Tiberius. You know, he was, the, the rumor was, and this, the, these have to be rumors because no one is going to admit being in the same room as an emperor who went to sleep, uh, alive and doesn't wake up. So we think he was smothered in his bed and we think the head of the Praetorians, um, I think it was called Macro. Macro, yes. Was involved and we think Caligula was either present or for all we know, he was jumping up and down on him.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  It's not the kind of thing that you would be, uh, that he ever admitted to, but a, another violent event in his past that would be something to resurface and come back as trauma, yeah, very possibly. Um, certainly he was the obvious one who benefits. And whenever you get one obvious person who benefits, then you say, well, you know, there's your, there's your motive. So Caligula becomes emperor, I think aged about twenty four odd. And as I say, started off, you know, ve- very well, but that's the world into which Nero is born. Agrippina, at this point, is still married to Ahenobarbus. Yeah, first marriage.

• 26:14Tristan Hughes?

  And so infant Nero, I know Caligula doesn't last very long, but infant Nero, then his uncle. His uncle is on the throne. His uncle i- i- is Caligula. So

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:21Tristan Hughes?

  He's close to the royal family when he's an infant. But things, you mentioned already, Ahenobarbus dies when Nero is only three years old. And Agrippina as well, she doesn't fare so well?

• 26:31Speaker 04

  No, she doesn't. Well, she was banished and sent away by Tiberius. And then when Claudius, obviously her brother, becomes emperor, he brings her back from banishment. And her mother was banished and sent away to an island and never came home. So the idea of her being banished, that would have been an incredibly dark period for her. She would not have expected to come home. And then the impossible happens.

• 27:01Tristan Hughes?

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  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore. Feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:31Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 27:52Tristan Hughes?

  So Ahenobarbus, he dies when Nero is just three years old. And for Agrippina, the younger as well, I mean, with Caligula, it's not all good news for her either.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  No, I mean, the the point about this, at that point, Nero, her son, who was still then called Lucius, he hadn't had his sort of imperial name added. He was the only official blood heir of the Julian line, and therefore, Caligula, when he had his tragedy, when he gets married and has a child. I don't know if it was a son, because it died in childbirth. I'm not sure whether that's recorded, but when he lost his child and he suffered through this appalling bloody moment of savagery. Then he was very uncomfortable with his sister having the only male blood heir of the line, and that's where he ends up. Banishing her to an island, which was a horrific thing to do, because their mother had been banished and had never come back.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  So for Agrippina, it must have been the end of the world. She was separated from her son. He went to live with an aunt, I think it was called Demetia. And an aunt who lived in near poverty, because she'd had, the first thing Caligula did, he took the estates and money away. Partly because he was a profligate spender, but partly as a punishment. So he sent his sister away to an island. And he sent the little boy, who can only have been, let's say, three, three or four, to live with an aunt and a barber and a male ballet dancer. I mean, they, she had lodgers. This was, you know, Nero's years of poverty, and that should have been the end for Agrippina. That should have been the end of the line. I suppose in theory, Caligula could have married, you know, or had endless children at that point, and he would have established his line, and like his own mother.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Agrippina would have been a forgotten figure in history, but the extraordinary thing happened. That only four years into Caligula's reign, his Praetorians panicked, murdered him on the spot on the Palatine Hill. And with no plan whatsoever, and then they had to look around for anyone, and they found Claudius, his uncle, the. A character who had survived Caligula's court by allowing himself to be a figure of mockery. He was a sort of a buldrick of the court, if you like. And and in theory, a pathetic figure, but actually much brighter than he appeared, but he deliberately appeared unthreatening. And so they made him emperor, and one of the first things he did was forgive the Praetorians, very sensible man. He gave them an amnesty. After all, they had murdered an emperor, they could do it again. So that was pretty sensible.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  And then one of the next things he did was to bring Agrippina, his niece, back from exile. And she was restored to the the bosom of her child, and you can only imagine how relieved she must have been.

• 30:26Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, and it's so interesting that period with the killing of Caligula and then Claudius rising to the fore and Agrippina, she's back from being exiled. And then how long is it before she then takes another step to then actually marry the Emperor Claudius?

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, she's around Claudius for some time. He's already married at this point, I think, to Messalina.

• 30:44Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  And it, who knows, it might not have come to anything, but there was this extraordinary moment where, again, Nero was still the only surviving blood heir of the line and therefore he's both uniquely dangerous to those who would consider they want their own children to be, but and also uniquely vulnerable because he's still a very young child. And you get this extraordinary story of assassins sent to his home to kill him in his bed.

• 31:10Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  And does this ring true? It obviously, it reminds you of Hercules a little bit, the strangling snakes in the crib because, and there is that that snake is on the cover of Tyrant. The story goes that the assassins saw a snake on his bed, a large reptile, and they were so afraid that they daren't, didn't dare to approach and they retreated or were caught retreating because obviously their presence was noticed. So the alarm went up. And then they found, I think it was a snake's skin in the end, where a snake had shed its skin on, on it, on the child's bed. So that skin was then incorporated into a resin bracelet, which Nero wore for most of the rest of his life as a symbol of his extraordinary survival.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  But Agrippina appeared to believe that that was, the assassins had been sent by Messalina Claudius's wife. And that was why that from that moment on, I mean, Messalina had her card marked and, you know, their struggle for power involved Agrippina winning and Messalina dying. And that was, you know, part of her story because I think from the very beginning, Agrippina, after all, why wouldn't she look at the possibility of power? She wasn't too worried about a sexual relationship with her uncle. She hadn't grown up with him and I think was capable of manipulating any man regardless of what the social worries at the time would have been. But it was pretty acceptable as, you know, brother and sister know that would be the limit as it, brother and sister was acceptable in Egypt, but not in ancient Rome.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  But back to Nero, he survived the snake and kept the skin on its wrist for the rest of his life and Agrippina slowly got closer to Claudius. And her ability to manipulate Claudius is one of the most extraordinary parts of this story. And it's, I say, my, when I started out writing, I said to my mother, I want to be a writer. And she said, you can't be a writer. She said, you don't know enough about people. And at the time, I said, oh, rubbish, I'll write about dragons. But actually, she was obviously right. If it's something like Genghis Khan's wife is kidnapped and he goes after them and he murders the people who kidnapped. You need to believe that that is actually possible. Historical fiction is hugely useful in this way because the things we know really happened provide their own motive. You can say, well, that did happen. Therefore, it could happen.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  And it gives me a, it's a sort of virtuous circle in that sense. When you get someone like Agrippina working with Claudius and he does things that are beyond belief. He allows her to adopt the title of Empress, for example, which is impressive, but not as impressive as allowing her to call herself Augusta, which is a phenomenally high level, high status title.

• 33:37Tristan Hughes?

  That's following the footsteps of people like Livia, you know, decades before.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Exactly. And it establishes her as a major force in the empire. He allowed her to set up an awning in the Senate House on one of the side doors so that there was cloth. And that meant that she could be in there listening to any debate, but it also meant that they didn't know when she was in there and when she wasn't. So it meant she could overhear everything that went on in the most private sanctum of government in the whole empire. And that gave her an extraordinary power. Then you get this moment that is beyond belief. He had a son, Britannicus, named for the conquest of Britain. And he accepts reasoning by Agrippina that Lucius, her son, should be the official heir. And the moment he does that,

• 34:23Speaker 04

  poor Britannicus, his days are numbered. This was a man, remember, who was quivering behind a curtain while he heard Caligula being murdered. So why did he, a man who had grown up with all the same violence, that an understanding and witnessing it that Agrippina had, but he seemed completely oblivious to the danger he had just put himself in and his son Britannicus in, and that, if it wasn't true, it would completely defy belief.

• 34:50Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think from the beginning, it's one of those kind of big questions, that Agrippina, when she is getting closer to the Emperor Claudius, you know, she's won against Messalina, and Messalina's story is one for its own podcast episode in its own right. Do you think she has this idea from the start to secure her own position is to, as will ultimately happen, to move her son Lucius, who will be Nero, to become the heir of Claudius? Do you think she has that ambition from the off?

• 35:19Speaker 04

  My answer is yes. And I think that because of the fact that we know, what we know about her history, shows that if you ever needed someone to learn the lessons of how power works, this is a woman who learned those lessons. And she understood that, first of all, it's a lot easier to push down than it is to push up. It is easier to be in a position of power. It is less stressful. It is more enjoyable. Life is, you know, is better if you are the one on top. But also, you are the one who can choose to exile her mother or exile herself. You are the one who can choose to bring you back. And that is, her understanding of that is, I think, perfect. And therefore, it is her only possible solution is to get as much power as possible.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  And that means, yes, you know, they needed a male leader that is sort of understood in those old terribly sexist days of ancient Rome. She understood that, but she clearly intended to rule through her son with all of the titles that she had. And the way she appears on coins where she slowly becomes more and more prominent on those coins and the various titles and so on, the household that she runs, the way she interferes with lawmaking, the way she manipulates Claudius. This is a woman who wanted power. Nero was a pawn in this. And he was 16 years old. It is worth, any mother of a 16-year-old boy will know that you are at that crux period where he's both a little sweetie on any given day, and then he can be an absolute monster on the same afternoon and reduce you to tears.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  And my goodness, can you imagine if you gave that boy ultimate power over life and death, how badly that was going to go for Agrippina? I mean, when I was 16, from the age of 16 to 30, which is his reign. There were the normal checks and balances. Getting turned down by a girl is an obvious one. Getting turned down by a job. Um. I had one of the worst job interviews I've ever had. And at the end of it, he said that was one of the worst oh, job interviews I have ever witnessed. Would you like me to tell you what you did wrong? And I said, well, yes, please. And then he was kind enough to do that. And I got the next job interview. These are the experiences of a normal life, the, the checks and balances, the, the smack around the face, being punched in the face. I mean, you know, this, this sort of thing, that all happened between sixteen and thirty. I won't mention his name.

• 37:27Tristan Hughes?

  So life lessons.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But Nero had none of these because at the end of the day, he was both more protected than any sixteen year old has any right uh, to be with soldiers willing to step in and say, no, you won't be doing that. Also for the people who might have threatened him. But also he had uh, access to wealth, power, and an entire empire willing to do his bidding. And that is corrupting. Of course it is. It should be no surprise to us at all, but that it doesn't mean, again, I go back to my defence of him. I think that that is uh, seeing a, a very young man who could have walked a better path, being corrupted is a tragedy rather than another monster like Tiberius.

• 38:09Tristan Hughes?

  So, Con, if we go a few years before Nero becomes the new emperor, let's say he was around thirteen years old, so fifty A D, which I believe that's the setting of, of this new book or the beginning of it.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:19Tristan Hughes?

  At that time, Nero is a young teenager. Yes, okay, he's had this very difficult, albeit kind of protected upbringing, I guess you could say, right at the centre of the imperial family. But do we know much about the education? If Agrippina has these big plans for Nero, does she also ensure that Nero receives the best possible education because of that?

• 38:41Speaker 04

  She went to great lengths to give him the uh, the correct sort of education. I mean, the funny thing is, he did get away from her a bit because he ended up as, I think, what is it? What's the word? Philo Helene?

• 38:51Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, yes, Phil Helene.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, Phil Helene, a lover of Greek culture, for example, the plays and the, the poetry and so on. Um, much more than really, they were completely comfortable with, you know, the Romans had an idea of the Greeks as slightly effete. They were very impressed by them. They certainly pinched. All of their gods and architecture and an awful lot of their plays were performed in Rome. But on the whole, they saw themselves as a sort of more stoic, manlier version of the ancient world than the Greeks ponting about. They didn't manage to keep that under control with Nero because he ended up an extraordinary lover of Greece. And that will no doubt be down to his tutors. There were a couple of Greeks chosen. Seneca was the the main sort of architect of his education. He was the one put in charge and then he picked others.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  There was a librarian from Alexandria, I seem to remember, who was a. And then to some extent, we know not so much the details of what was taught, but from his later life, we know what he loved. And therefore that has to, this is where the interests started and he was given Seneca for the sort of classical education part. And Burus, who was the head of the Praetorian Guard at the time for moral education, physical education, you know, getting the kid fit. And the two of them together ran a sort of school for Nero and one or two of his close friends, Otho was there. I can't remember the other one, there was a third one who Seneca used to write letters worrying about him. So this is, you know, we know a fair bit about what went on and the sort of things that were taught.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  And it's partly because we know they were taught rhetoric, for example, because every young Roman of a certain social class was taught how to speak in public. Because it was considered absolutely vital to be able to make an argument and to know their classics, to know their Horus and all the rest of it and their Homer.

• 40:37Tristan Hughes?

  To Greek and Latin ethics, yes.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Yes, well, exactly. I mean, this is part of the education. As I say, they went a bit far with Nero because he ended up loving acting. Probably more than anything else. I mean, well, actually to the exclusion of proper ruling. I mean, he was at the end of the day, a bad ruler. Not because he was particularly monstrous, but because he was never interested. He never even wanted to be in Rome. And he spent more years out of Rome in Greece than just about anybody. And he would take, I mean, he won. Literally thousands of prizes in Greece for competitions for poetry, music. He was very good, as far as we can tell. A liar player. I mean, other liar players laid their liars at his feet. Including his own tutor, his lyotutor, I think it was called Terpness.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  And they did that to show that he was the master and they were no fools, you know, this was the the most powerful young man of the age. They were flattering him beyond belief. But that's what he loved to do and he went as far as employing large numbers of people to come and be his. Supporters in the theatre and they developed different types of clapping. I mean, famously, they tried the hollow handed clap, which I won't demonstrate, it's right next to a microphone. And then the flat handed clap, who are different sound. And also the third one was a buzzing of bees. It is always interesting to me when you hear audiences clapping that if the buzzing of bees had taken off, we might be doing that to this day. But, you know, the the clapping was what and then, you know, he because he was a.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  He was already a spoiled young man. He would look out for anyone not clapping with sufficient enthusiasm or anyone falling asleep. Vespasian, the later emperor, was one of those who I think he drifted off or he yawned or he did something along those lines.

• 42:16Tristan Hughes?

  Good idea.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  In a public performance and got really got strips torn off him. I think he was sent to Judea as a punishment. You know, that's what the reason he was out there dealing with the revolution out there is because he'd fallen asleep during one of Nero's recitals. But, I mean, the results for the Greeks, it was fantastic. Nero started the canal between the Isthmus. Iths, oh, it's a horrible word.

• 42:38Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, Corinth area, yes.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Yes, that bit, you know, between mainland Greece and the the Peloponnese. And he, I mean, it's a lot of people have started it before and failed and he did it with a golden shovel and it it also. It also failed because a philosopher at the time said he will never pass through it and he was very annoyed about this, but in fact he didn't, he did die before it. So yet again, it exists today, the Corinth Canal or whatever it's called. But he was not the one to do it. But the the result of all of his Greek adventures and he was there for years and attended the Olympics and race chariots and everything else. And yes, he fell off the chariot and had to finish the race on foot, but I believe that counted. They still gave him the prize. And he rewarded them with obscene amounts of money.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  And the result was eventually, just before he left, he said that he would excuse them from all future tax payments to Rome, the all of Greece. And he said, other men have freed cities, I have freed a nation. And that is, and it didn't last, unfortunately, because he was, I think he died a few years after that, it was about sixty. Sixty three, sixty four, something like that A D, and he died about sixty seven.

• 43:42Tristan Hughes?

  Sixty seven, yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  So it's uh, it was great for them for a short while. He excused all of Greece from paying taxes. So he had some good, uh, good motives.

• 43:50Tristan Hughes?

  You can imagine what Seneca would have been thinking at that time in his, in his grave, or I don't know if he dies just after that, or just before.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  I think it was before, yeah.

• 43:56Tristan Hughes?

  Just before, I mean, forgive my complete ignorance around this. So Seneca, I know he's a philosopher and you mentioned his letters there. Do you know much else about his character and what he would have relayed to the young Nero?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  We know, we know because his letters exist and they, again, these are extraordinarily intimate documents. Um, because Seneca was discussing various topics of the day. And as I say, he, he worried about one of Nero's friends and whether he was growing up properly. And we know he was asthmatic. So uh, as I'm asthmatic myself, I, I found him a, a character I cared about, I suppose. But he would, for example, discuss slavery, which I found interesting enough. It in, in fact, did inspire me to write a, a, a second book on, it's set roughly in the same period, but it deals with a freed slave. Because Seneca's point was that if you can be freed from slavery, you can buy yourself out. If you can be put back into slavery for debt or a, a particular crime, then they are not a subclass. They are us and therefore they should be treated with a certain respect.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  But two thousand years ago, that's an extraordinarily advanced comment on this social class of slaves in Rome. And I found him, yeah, as a result, an absolutely sort of fascinating man, way ahead, polymath, way ahead of his time. He also had an affair with, I think, one of Agrippina's sisters, and that's why he was banished for a short time. You know, I'm not saying he wasn't red and red blooded and all the rest of it, but he was an extraordinary, yeah, an extraordinary mind to be put in charge of uh, someone like Nero. And I guess over time, you have to say, well, he, he failed though, didn't he? Because, you know, Nero didn't turn out to be the great hope of, of the new century and all the rest of it. But he did his very best. And as I say, I think power corrupts to a degree that not even a man like Seneca could stop.

• 45:33Tristan Hughes?

  But it brings us back to the point you were mentioning earlier, like with Caligula, the early stories of Caligula, where actually there's the good side of it more, or the more kind of the looking, trying to find the silver lining. It always feels with Seneca being one of the tutors and one of the biggest named tutors of Nero. Into the early years of Nero's reign, his name is almost something that becomes associated with Nero by people trying to say, well, actually, there were these, you know, these early signs of potential promise on this figure before it all goes to part.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, that is what makes it a tragedy. As I say, if they'd started, if Nero and Caligula had started bad and ended up bad, there'd be no story for me to tell. It would be uninteresting and not a topic I would have picked to tell. And for years, I avoided Caligula, actually, in any sort of sense, because I thought it would be that. And that's what I think we all understand, who's the greatest monster of ancient Rome? Oh, that's easier. That's Caligula. Therefore, there's no real story to tell. Because human beings need, it's a story arc, and whether it ends in redemption or tragedy, you need change over time to be picked as an interesting story to tell. Luckily, and I've said this many times in, you know, public speeches, that for me, history is a collection of the stories that survive. And they are often the stories that teach us something, that have change inherent within them.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  And it's how human beings pass on our values. It's how we like to do it. So for me, the stories of Caligula and Nero are interesting because they had that potential and it was squandered.

• 46:56Tristan Hughes?

  Keeping on as tutors, if we go over to Burrus quickly, one of the heads of the Praetorian Guard, of course, seems to also have an influence on the teenage Nero before he becomes emperor. I mean, how do you portray Nero's relationship with Burrus in the book? What did you think about Burrus from the sources that survive and how he plays into this story?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  I mean, to some extent, and I'm not being funny now, you know, this is going to sound such a silly or trivial, but. Whenever you portray a relationship of any kind in a book, it is of course influenced by my understanding of the world. So if I've ever had male mentors, which I have, my father would be an obvious one, then I know what was important to me and I know, you know, his approval of me and how it was important, how I was, you know, rude to him and so on and so on. So, and like it or not, when you're dealing with history, you know, you have the bare bones of it laid out and you, you know, might say the Senate was banished and came back, or the Burrus was with him for these years and so on, and you know, what, how Burrus died and so on. But you are going to have

• 48:01Speaker 04

  to create scenes with conversations that are written nowhere. And it's going to have to be, I say in this case, a mentor of an older male with a younger male who has power. And that's always dangerous. There's any number of variations through history where, you know, the mentor has not been able to rein in the young man, because everyone knows that young man effectively is the final arbiter and has ultimate power. So the mentor fails. But it's an interesting relationship because it could go either way. So for me, when I'm reading about Burrus and I'm reading about his, you know, the relationship with Agrippina and how she saw him

• 48:40Speaker 04

  and, and how he presumably took the, the role seriously and wanted Nero to be a noble, decent young man, because, which makes Burrus a patriot, by the way, because therefore he cared about Rome. You know, I can draw conclusions from one aspect and the fact that Burrus took up the role in the first place, makes him someone who cared about the future of Rome. And that instantly starts to inform the way I create these scenes, because I have therefore not a toxic relationship. I have a supportive relationship of an older man who to be head of the Praetorians, a man, you know, given double pay for being an elite soldier. I mean, it's equivalent of head of the SAS, effectively. Some of the legions at the time would hate me to say that, but nonetheless,

• 49:22Speaker 04

  they thought the Praetorians were sort of, you know, ridiculously pompous forces. But nonetheless, they were meant to be elite forces and he was the number one. So think of him as a special forces guy. Who was given this task of raising an important young man in the absence of normal father figures is, yeah, the the relationship is related by me in those terms. And then it has to be, I think, internally consistent. And if that sounds ridiculously silly and overwrought and too detailed, that's how I think when I'm creating these characters, it has to work, it has to be internally consistent, it has to be characters that you and I will recognise, because they're as intelligent as us, they just happen to be 2000 years ago, but they cared about very often the same things.

• 50:16Tristan Hughes?

  Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Well, look no further than the award winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds, and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.

• 50:29Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:46Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 51:07Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess another relationship that you'd have to tackle, and I know that you you must tackle, is of course, the one between the young, the teenage Nero and Britannicus, before what you've already mentioned, Agrippina convinces Claudius to name her son Lucius, who will be Nero as heir, rather than Britannicus. But for those years previously, you know, as these two young boys are growing up in the palace, I mean, do we actually have any information from the sources?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Very, very little.

• 51:32Tristan Hughes?

  About that actually their relationship?

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Very little. It's one of the things I did have to invent an entire scene for this in the book, because you had a situation where Claudius has a son and heir, Britannicus. And Agrippina is trying to persuade him to make Lucius her son, the heir. And he does so, and we've talked about how extraordinary that moment is. But then, all the history records is that Claudius was thinking about undoing that and making Britannicus the heir as well. Now, I, we don't know why. So for that to happen, I had to manufacture a scene. And I did it with Nero injuring Britannicus, causing him to be injured on a racetrack. And because I needed Claudius to lose patience with Nero and with Agrippina's protection of him.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  And I needed him to say, you know what, I'm not going to make him my heir anymore. I'm going to make Britannicus my heir because that's the night then where Claudius is, well, is killed. And that's, and Nero becomes emperor. And I needed a sort of climactic scene to move those relationships on because uh, the information isn't there. It's just one of the gaps I have to fill. There are always gaps and gaps to fill. Um, I mean, I wrote a scene, I, you know, every, well, we all know that Claudius visited Britain when, in the invasion of Britain. He didn't go across with the first troops, but he went across, I think, a few weeks later and he was there for about two weeks.

• 52:50Tristan Hughes?

  With his elephants, yep, yep.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly with the four wonderful elephants. So, and the point is, he was there and there's no record of everyone else who was there with him. So, I mean, that we know the names of the legions that were there, but not, you know, the, the hangers on and all the rest of it. Or how many of his Praetorians he talk, or whether there are, you know, any members of the court whatsoever. So I thought, well, okay, I need to carry on conversations with Agrippina and the boy Nero here. And if she goes, then he would go. So I'm going to put them in. And that's for me perfectly acceptable because it doesn't change history. It's the kind of thing that might have happened but wouldn't have been recorded. And it allows me to move the plot on to the point where he asks her to marry him. And that, that's a key sort of plot point because you have to tell it in, in some way. I mean, this is, you know, this is the, the joy of historical fiction, but it's also occasionally the, the sort of thing that gets people writing emails to me.

• 53:37Tristan Hughes?

  And is chariot racing is because of course that becomes big in the story of Nero, especially when he goes to Greece all those years later. But do we think chariot racing is a big part of Nero's story, even in these early years? I read somewhere that actually his dad, Lucius Ahenobarbus, was a chariot racer.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, I remember hearing that as well. And obviously, it's a big part of Nero's life. And he used to, he raced various ones from the sort of four horse chariots to the extraordinary ten horse chariot. But yes, in terms of the amount of weight ten horses would feel, the answer is, well, none at all, really. So the it's the Formula One of ancient Rome. Nothing would have moved faster than that. And genuinely, to race ten horses on a tiny lightweight chariot was to put your life at risk, which is important because it's all right, it's a Playboy sort of activity. It's like racing Ferraris. But it is still physically testing himself in a way that frankly, playing the lute does not. It's important because, you know, he was a young man taught by

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Burus, and he was a young man who had a physical side to him. He wasn't an, although he loved Greece, he wasn't an effete sort of scholar alone. He had this physical aspect to him. And, and, you know, from his father, it was a huge gambling thing in Rome. They had the four teams, the the greens and the whites and so on. And it was, you know, the Circus Maximus was filled to capacity on certain days. And it's a huge part of Roman life. And he would have been part of that. So it explains perhaps one of the reasons why he was so popular, why he was missed after his death, because he wasn't just a distant scholar like Claudius would have been. He was a man who actually, you know, put himself at risk for fun. That's worth noticing.

• 55:14Tristan Hughes?

  I guess you could also imagine, though, with perhaps the more loicy kind of conservative senators, I know they don't have as much power as they used to. Wasn't there this idea that sometimes that the competitors, the sportsmen, the celebrity sportsmen of the time, although they had a lot of following, like the gladiators, they were still seen as actually being beneath them in a sort of way.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  See, that's that's one of the things I remember from Burus, that this was their big problem with Nero, because everything he liked to do was considered low class. And that doesn't come through in the modern world, particularly chariot racing is one of them. Not considered, it was all very well to bet on it, that's fine, and to own teams, that's perfectly fine. But not to race the blooming horses yourself, that's considered to be sort of a a common man's pursuit and beneath, certainly beneath the airs and graces of an emperor. But oddly, the the truth is, I say oddly, but I suppose we're not too surprised to hear acting is also considered a a low pursuit, but also music, poetry, everything he loved to do was considered beneath him. And that meant that, um, you know, Burus was constantly struggling with the fact that everything Nero wanted to do and had the power to do

• 56:19Speaker 04

  and the influence and the people who would support him to do was were not what he should be doing if he was to be a proper, decent restrained stoic Roman leader. So that was part of their sort of, um, you know, struggle between the two of them. So, yeah. There's a lot of low status stuff that Nero loved.

• 56:35Tristan Hughes?

  In regards to marriage, when a young teenage Nero, you mentioned earlier in the chat how his mother is married when she's just thirteen years old. Is it a similar age that Nero is first married?

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Well, the first marriage is to his technically sister Octavia, who was not a blood relative. It was, she was, but you know, she wasn't his actual sister. It wasn't, as I said, you don't marry brother and sister. And that was obviously a political thing arranged by Agrippina. Uh, she managed to break off the engagement with another Solanus. Uh, son and damaging that family and setting off a sort of tricky chain of events. So she had to then keep doing damage limitation for some time. But Nero didn't want to be married to Octavia, didn't love her, didn't want to be around her. And then he he does act in a, in a pretty awful cowardly way. I mean, it is one of the least likeable aspects of his character that he wouldn't just do something.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  He would say, if he wanted someone killed, for example, he would banish them first, always banish them first, and then out of sight. He would wait for a period of time and he would send someone to finish them off. And, you know, it it's it's cowardly at at the end of the day. It's not the way a leader is meant to be. And it allows him a little bit of deniability. So, I mean, he just did this over and over. I mean, Seneca was killed at a distance. Octavia was killed at a distance. It's very rare actually with Britannicus that Britannicus died in front of Nero. So it's, it makes me wonder whether that wasn't, you know, whether that was Nero because Britannicus suddenly chokes. I mean, the story about Britannicus is that everyone knew about poisons. And he had, you know, so therefore they had tasters, but he, he was given food that was extremely hot. I think it was soup or something. And then the poison was in the cold water.

• 58:18Tristan Hughes?

  That was it, yes.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  But whether that was Nero or not, it would, if that was Nero, it would be a little bit surprising because usually he did things at one remove. He would move you away first and he did that with Octavia. He sent her into exile. And then had somebody to go and, you know, and finish her off. And if I remember rightly, her head was delivered back to Nero. It's, it's pretty, pretty horrific.

• 58:38Tristan Hughes?

  Especially if he's still a teenager at this point or.

• 58:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I can't, I can't remember exactly when that was. But, yes.

• 58:45Tristan Hughes?

  It would be in the fifties, it would be in the fifties.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, he wanted to move on. He wanted, at that point, I think he wanted Otto's wife, Papaya. He rather fancied her.

• 58:53Tristan Hughes?

  Well, shall we keep on this idea then of poisonings and get to when Nero actually does become the emperor? Because what are the stories, these extraordinary stories behind the death of Emperor Claudius?

• 59:06Speaker 04

  Well, again, you don't know how completely true some of this is, but there was a doctor called La Costa, a woman, a Gaulish woman, if I remember rightly. The story is that, if I've got the details right, that Claudius was poisoned, it was something in his food. And as I said, right just before the interview started, people die in Italy every year from eating the wrong mushrooms. So there are some very powerful mushrooms out there and we've had Augustus die with his favourite mushrooms. It's a fairly common way of dispatching your enemy. But they have a good knowledge of poisons, you know, they would have been available to them. But the idea was that he was poisoned in his food and then began to sick it up. And La Costa, his doctor, was summoned and she gave him a feather to put down his throat to make him vomit, but there was more poison on the feather.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  So that as she poked it down his throat, you know, he was dosed higher and higher. And he had, therefore, I mean, he had no chance whatsoever. Boorus wasn't there, by the way, because he came later. This was very much Agrippina acting to secure her son. And that was because Claudius, you know, was saying, stuff it, I'm going to make Britannicus my heir. So he, he made himself a threat to Agrippina and a threat to Lucius in that moment. And therefore he had to go.

• 1:00:18Tristan Hughes?

  And that context, the fact that Claudius was dabbling, according to the sources of renaming Britannicus, his actual son as his heir. Is that why you think that there is the most plausibility of all like kind of the stories of of doing away with people by Agrippina? Around this time that the her involvement in the death of Claudius could well have a strong historical reality.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  It's the one I believe more than any other. I mean, even Tiberius even was an old man and old men die. Especially in Rome when a single tooth abscess can can carry you away. So but this is the one Claudius was not particularly old. He was in relatively good physical health. He was, uh, you know, uh, hadn't suffered in any way that we've had revealed to us. And yet he's suddenly dead at the most extraordinarily useful moment where Nero is just sixteen and can be announced that day as Rome wakes up at dawn. The following morning as the new emperor and, you know, if I remember rightly, they didn't they get the Praetorians in as well to surround the uh, or to out on the streets because they didn't want any riots or any unrest or anyone saying, you know, the the emperor's been murdered or anything like that.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Like they got the clamp on to Rome very early on, and that suggests a fair element of planning. And the fact that they were so successful, yes, it's who benefits. Is it cui bono? You always look for the person who benefits the most, and that was clearly Agrippina and Nero.

• 1:01:39Tristan Hughes?

  And Nero swiftly becomes the new emperor. It's quite a, is it quite a straightforward succession? There's no Britannicus shouting from the rooftop saying, ah, you should be the next emperor instead.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Britannic, this is the tragedy of Britannica, because he doesn't seem to have been a threat at all. He may have been, he may have become a threat because so many, we've had so many families split down two lines. And again, you go back to the the Persian kings, was it Cyrus? I forget the other one, you know, brothers killing brothers. Actually, it's one of the, it's the historical context that is important because uh, it's like Richard the Third and the and the princes. Once you have seen, let's say, a dozen of these stories, you realise it is so completely ordinary to do away with the people who might rise up and kill you that you need to almost establish a new moral um, a sort of a structure. So, okay, the the son of Julius Caesar with Cleopatra, he was killed by. Was it Octavian?

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  He was about seventeen years old and he he might he would he was called Ptolemy Caesarian. So he was he had Caesar and he had Ptolemy in his name. He could have grown to rule a a an empire that included Rome and Egypt and all the rest of it. But they they clobbered him. Was it Augustus who got it? Yes, it was Octavian Augustus who got him. And that's the point they this was ordinary behaviour. You do not allow someone called Ptolemy Caesarian, the incredibly dangerously named Ptolemy Caesarian, to survive. And that goes for all of Agrippina's brothers as well. They all had, if you look at their names, it's Caesar and Augustus. And they've all got names that frankly is shouting from the rooftops. This person is a potential danger to anyone else who might want to be ruling Rome. So I think, yes, it is ordinary behaviour to do it.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  And Nero, in fact, if Britannicus had said anything, he would have been making himself extremely vulnerable. So I think at the very beginning, anyway, he's completely quiet. And then he doesn't he doesn't live too long, but we don't know. We don't know who is responsible for Britannicus killed. I think I won't say how I went for it in the in the book, but it was, yeah, there are a few possible choices.

• 1:03:32Tristan Hughes?

  I don't want to give too much away from your book, of course, and we won't go any further in the story. But it's interesting when Nero becomes emperor and Britannicus dies soon after. As you've already highlighted earlier, as is already shown even in the forties. Nero is the clearest surviving male link to Augustus and thus Julius Caesar before him. So he is the one, you know, if you're looking at legitimacy in this still, it feels a bit experimental, kind of imperial, new imperial Roman world.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  He's the one. Experimental, because, I mean, Julius Caesar never called himself an emperor. He couldn't have done. Neither did Augustus. He called himself, was it Pring Keps or, you know, the the first.

• 1:04:13Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, first among.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, first among equals. And I think Tiberius was the first who actually called himself an emperor. So this is a very new institution in the world and it isn't bedded in. And to some extent, the bloodline is accepted that there can be adoptions because, I mean, Tiberius was Augustus's adopted son rather than his direct bloodline. But the bloodline is still important. And that's the extraordinary thing that happens after Nero and why I'm always interested. In the historical reliability of sources, because once he's gone, the first person was Galba, the second person was Otto, the third person was Vitellius. None of those have any real right to rule in Rome, so they have a very strong reason to rewrite the history, much as the Tudors rewrote Richard the Third and made him into more of a monster than he was. And then you get Vespasian and the Flavians, who actually turned out to be a pretty good emperor.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  And, you know, things are reset, but even he, he was the, you know, the sponsor of Josephus or Giuseppeus. And therefore you still have the implication that history is rewritten. In fact, Claudius was told by one of his wives, and it wasn't Agrippina, I'm trying to think, was it Messalina? That he shouldn't go back and interfere with the Roman archives because there were too many hands on it already. And it's just a little reminder that the things that survived two thousand years to us are to some extent the things they want us to know, not the things that actually went on. And you, you are always slightly hamstrung by this, this difficulty that, that history has to be seen through filters.

• 1:05:37Tristan Hughes?

  A nice way to end this one, Con, is, and I think it links into what you mentioned to me before we started recording, which is some extraordinary coinage from this time. I mean, what, right at the beginning of Nero's reign, given how important and integral Agrippina has been to his rise, does it feel like right at the beginning, you've got Seneca, you've got Burus, and Nero's got his mother right there. Is it a mother-son team at that time? Are they very much united? And is that shown in how they promote themselves?

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, I, I don't think it's really a world we can imagine. The fact that people didn't know what the emperor looked like, except through coins. Obviously, there were no images. Or very few paintings that anyone else would ever see. So you, you've got a sort of world where these people up on the Palatine Hill were distant and almost, you know, divine figures. So the best way to put that image out there was through coins. It's the one place where you could sit and stare at someone's face in, in profile. And Agrippina actually turns up on an early coin with two of her sisters, I think during the reign of Caligula.

• 1:06:37Tristan Hughes?

  It's Caligula, yes.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  And but she's a sort, they're all little spindly figures. I mean, they do the best they can, but there's no sense of the face. And then she turns up. Um, it was behind Claudius, so. She was on, it was one of the first coins that showed two people. So, you know, their actual faces. So the Claudius was there and then she was behind him, almost like a shadow. I mean, you know, predicting the future in that way. And then when Nero becomes emperor, she is facing him as an equal, which is extraordinary. And I seem to remember that coin also had Augusta on it, you know, as, as proof of her extraordinary status in the empire. And that, of course, was the thing that was too much, you know, she pushed too much. She thought of herself as, she clearly thought of herself as the equal, the visual representation, I think proves that.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  And that was too much for her son, who was actually in name and reality, the emperor.

• 1:07:25Tristan Hughes?

  It's fascinating. Also, I didn't realise that Agrippina is actually on three generations of coinage of three different emperors. Well, there you go. Con, we'll leave it there because that is also a lovely cliffhanger to kind of tee up what will happen over the next few years with Nero and his mother Agrippina, which forms a big part of your new book. Tell us a little bit about Tyrant.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  I've had people say to me on the first book, you called it Nero, but he's hardly in it, which is true to a degree. But to understand Nero, you had to understand his mother. So I sort of wrote the prequel first because as we've gone through in this, I mean, the, the background with Caligula and all the rest of it is vital to understanding. The whole family is vital to understanding the rule of Nero. But this is his actual story as he comes into being emperor and comes into, you know, the main part of his life. And then the third one, which is called Inferno, so you can probably guess, um, there's certain elements of truth in that.

• 1:08:16Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, yes, there might be some fire in there.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  There could be some fire in there. And that, that was one of the most joyous books I, you know, was able to write. This is honestly the best historical material I've ever come across in terms of sheer joy for me. And for example, I mean, I don't know, we haven't got a lot of time, but I mean, I'll just say, I, I got to deal with Saint Peter in one. And knowing that he was executed in Rome, made me think about the process of how people were accused of being Christian and how they were then taken out and executed and so on. And I suddenly realised that the most famous part of Peter's story is the fact that he denied Christ three times. And he was executed for being a Christian, which means that they asked him, are you a Christian?

• 1:08:57Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  And in an extraordinary redemptive moment, he must have said yes, because they executed him. And therefore, we have a moment that is not canon, is not part of Christian, you know, beliefs across the world, but my goodness, it must have happened. And that is the perfect joy of historical fiction, that sometimes you can see something that isn't common knowledge, but is true.

• 1:09:20Tristan Hughes?

  Con, this has been such a fantastic chat. Tyrant is out now, I believe?

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  It is, yes.

• 1:09:24Tristan Hughes?

  Brilliant, fantastic. And I look forward to the next one in the, to Inferno, coming out, I'm sure, in a year or two's time. Con, just go to me say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  My pleasure. Thank you very much.

• 1:09:40Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Con Iggolden talking through the rise of Nero. It was such a pleasure to interview him in person and to hear all about his upcoming historical fiction series, all about the rise and reign of Nero. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. Now, that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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