The Truth About Nero and Why Romans Loved Him

We've all heard of Rome's fifth emperor. His name was Nero, and he's infamous for being a monster and a madman. He murdered his mother, he killed several other members of his family, and some say he might have even set fire to Rome and watched it burn. But we don't need to run down the whole list of misdeeds and crimes that Nero committed while he was emperor. Except for the last one, arson, Nero was probably guilty of most of them anyway. But our real question today is why was Emperor Nero so popular in ancient Rome if he was a madman and a monster? And if he was such a popular guy in his own day, how did he come to be so hated and reviled now? Well, besides the murder and incest. Nero became emperor in 54 AD when he was just 16 years old, and he ruled until 68 AD when he died at his own hand after the Roman Senate declared him an enemy of the people. Now, we only have a handful of primary sources for Nero's reign, and none of them were actually Emperor Nero's contemporaries. And the problem is that while Nero was alive, Nero did a really good job of pissing off the two main groups responsible for writing most of Rome's history. Nero antagonized the Roman Senate and persecuted Christians. As one would expect, the Roman Senate was made up primarily of well-educated, high-born men who tended to do most of Rome's writing. To the Roman senators, Nero was the absolute embodiment of tyranny, and he made a mockery of Roman culture, traditions, and institutions. For the early Christians that Nero persecuted, and the later Christians who were writing about him, Emperor Nero was the Antichrist. But what about the average Roman? After he died, some decorated his grave and put fresh flowers on it every spring for decades after he died. And even years after Nero's death, everyone wanted him back. Everyone. We know that thanks to a Greek orator named Dio of Prusa. He lived during Nero's reign, and he both knew the man and disliked him greatly. But even so, Dio admitted that everyone wanted Nero back. And most of the Roman people, they believed, for decades after Nero died, that he was still alive, living in exile, biding his time, and waiting for the perfect time to come back and regain power. So what's going on here? How can these two groups of Romans have such different opinions of this madman and monster? How can one group hate him, revile him, despise him, hold him up as the embodiment of everything that's wrong? The other group, the 90%, the hoi polloi, they're waiting for him to come back. They miss him. We're going to unpack all of this in time. But first, three pieces of background info that I think are going to help you better understand Nero's time and Nero the man. The first thing to understand about Nero's Rome is that he was just the fifth emperor in Rome's history. And the track record for the emperors that preceded him was mixed. There weren't a whole lot of examples for Nero to look to to figure out how to rule and how an emperor of Rome should be. This was a new job, and he was trying to figure it out as he went along. And let's not forget that Nero was just 16 years old when he became one of the most powerful men in the ancient world. So in 54 AD, Rome was still getting used to the idea that it was no longer a republic. While the Senate's influence had declined since the days of the Roman Republic, it was still a pretty important position. And this was the class of people that most of the governors, generals, and other high-level government officials were drawn from. The second thing to understand about Nero's Rome is that compared to other cultures in the Mediterranean, Rome was the new kid on the block. Greece and Egypt were considered ancient to the Romans. Despite its military power and influence, Rome was still in many ways a provincial backwater. If there wasn't a long tradition of Roman emperors and kings, Nero looked to the cultures that did have those, Egypt and Greece. Especially Greece, which we're going to talk about more in just a moment. The last thing to keep in mind is that most scholars agree that the first few years of Nero's reign were actually pretty successful. He wasn't a bad emperor for the first few years. There's some debate over how much of that had to do with him and how much of that had to do with his advisor, Seneca, who was also his tutor when he was a younger man. But it's pretty well established that for the first few years at least, Nero was doing a good job by doing things like lowering taxes. He stopped holding secret trials. He cleaned out some of the corrupt bureaucrats that were infesting Roman government. That's pretty good for a 16-year-old. And we shouldn't be too surprised by that. Nero was very well educated for a young man. He was well-versed in the Greek classics. He had studied philosophy, literature, Greek myth. And his tutor, Seneca, is still famous today as one of the great Stoics, writers, and philosophers of ancient Rome. The thing to understand about Nero is that he was deeply under the spell of all things Greek. Nero loved the history, the literature, the art of ancient Greece. He loved the stories, the myths, Homer, the Odyssey, and the Iliad. And Nero wasn't the only one at the time who felt that way. The golden age of Greece and the great epics of Homer, they held a romantic place of significance in Roman culture. One way of understanding the complicated relationship between Rome and Greece is to take a look at the relationship between America and France. On the one hand, they acknowledge that France is probably superior in arts and literature and a certain amount of sophistication. And on the other hand, they look at it as this militarily inferior and kind of softer, weaker culture. This was a people that Rome had basically conquered and now held dominion over. So while Romans appreciated the myths and epics and literature of Greece, they also looked at this as a militarily inferior, softer, weaker, more effete culture. As you're about to see, this is all going to be really important to understanding Nero's reign and his relationship to the people and the Senate. So let's take a look at some of the reasons why Nero was beloved by the people and absolutely hated by the elites in the Senate in Rome. Number one, Nero had a flair for the theatrical. Nero grew up loving sports, arts, and theater above everything else. He was absolutely obsessed. After Nero killed his power-hungry, scheming mother Agrippina in 59 AD, Nero didn't even try to claim innocence. He embraced his guilt and he made a show of it. In a letter to the Senate, Nero explained that his mother had insulted the high office of the Senate and even worse, she was said to have attempted to have a slave kill the emperor in the night, which would have been just like her. She had murdered and schemed and seduced for years to get her son Nero into a position of power. After the murder, Nero claimed publicly and loudly that he had terrible nightmares and that he was haunted by his mother's ghost and that he was wracked with guilt. He was sick with it. But Nero wasn't a criminal. As he made it abundantly clear, he had killed Agrippina for the good of Rome. She was power-hungry. She was scheming. She was working against the Senate. She couldn't be allowed to live if Rome was going to thrive. But Nero went further. He performed on stage as the lead in productions of Orestes and Oedipus. These were popular Greek tragedies in which the protagonist wrestles with the guilt of either having killed his mother or having committed incest with her. And in both of those plays, the hero is not to be blamed. The hero is to be pitied because he's at the mercy of the fates and the gods and circumstance. These were Greek tragedies. And as Nero made clear, he wanted the Roman people to associate him with the characters he was playing. Back in those days, Roman actors wore masks of the characters they played. But several times, Nero just put on a mask of himself. It was abundantly clear what he was doing. He was creating in the mind of the Roman public a positive association even though he'd committed a heinous crime. And the Roman public absolutely ate it up because the tale of Orestes' return from the Trojan War and the tragic matricide that followed was a hugely popular tale in ancient Rome. Nero was no dummy. He leaned hard into these mythical allusions and associations. He knew that whatever the Roman public saw on stage, they would associate with reality in their minds. So Nero played Hercules, the great hero on stage. Hercules is driven mad and he kills his family. And only then does he wake up and realize after his divine madness has ended what horrible thing he's done. He's left with guilt and blood on his hands. But he's not to blame because the gods were working against him. And how can a man go against the gods? That's what Nero was saying to the audience when he was performing on stage. After Nero killed his wife, Nero complicated matters in the mind of the public. The crime he'd committed maybe was similar to Hercules in a way. Maybe Nero was actually a victim of divine madness. He's a tragic figure of sympathy, not to be reviled, but to be pitied. And the crazy thing is, from what little we can tell, Nero was actually a really good performer. He had a good singing voice and even writers who hated him admitted begrudgingly that he had some chops. He had some talent. He took it very seriously. He trained his vocal cords. He practiced constantly. He ate a special diet to ensure that his singing voice and his orations were clear and crisp and loud. Nero was doing this at a time when stage plays and productions were becoming a bigger and bigger part of Roman society. The problem is, besides the murders, is that Nero was doing this at a time when actors were some of the lowest of the low in Roman society. Nero made his entire life a performance and if the public didn't necessarily enjoy it, they at least couldn't look away. At one point, Nero supposedly hired a concubine who looked like his dead mother and he didn't discourage the comparisons to Oedipus at all. He actually played them up. Oedipus, after all, had been a tragic king and his story, again, was hugely popular in the ancient Roman world. For an upper class Roman, let alone the emperor, to get on stage and perform was absolutely unthinkable. It was deeply offensive to patrician Romans. And to make matters even worse, Nero had no qualms. He would take on any role. One of his most famous roles, he played a pregnant woman in the midst of childbirth. As you can imagine, that did not sit well with the Roman senators who expected the office of the emperor to be comported with dignity and gravitas. So the second thing that Nero did to endear himself to the people was he changed the games. Nero was a huge fan of spectacle and entertainment and he made sure that the people were plied with bread and circuses. Of course, even the way Nero did this offended the Roman elites and senators because Nero was determined to bring the Roman entertainment more in line with Greek entertainment and games. Nero founded new festivals and new competitions that looked a little bit more like Greek ones. Nero founded a new festival called the Neronia, which combined chariot racing, athletics, poetry, and music in honor of Apollo. The problem with all this is that the Greeks typically competed in the nude, which deeply offended some of the more patrician and stodgier Romans. And even worse than that is up until this time, Romans had generally considered that Somehow back then to some of the more stodgy Romans, boxing and wrestling were actually seen as soft sports. They were seen as softer than the traditional Roman exercise. That said, the average Roman saw no problems with this. More games, more competitions, more entertainments. They were thrilled. And even better, Nero built new gyms and new stadiums for these competitions. Huge, permanent structures that could fit thousands of people. And while you can talk about bread and circuses, it doesn't seem like Nero's passion for He genuinely loved athletics, and I think some of the people understood that, and they saw that. Before Nero, the emperors had gone to various competitions and games, but they'd sat there almost begrudgingly in the audience, whereas Nero threw himself into it. He was a super fan, and so were the people. They saw their emperor was one of them in many ways. He shared their passion for the same entertainments that they loved, like chariot racing. Nero thrilled the Roman public by not just watching the games, but by competing in them, whether it was chariot racing or wrestling. He was said to have opened up the doors to the palace so people could come and watch him do his wrestling practice. Nero even competed in the Olympics in Greece, which emperors were definitely not supposed to do for a whole host of reasons, the least of which is that how is anyone supposed to compete against the emperor himself, the most powerful man in the empire? It's almost an insult to the competition and the sanctity of the games. But Nero didn't care, and he even had the games postponed for a couple years to better suit his schedule. In 67 AD, Nero went over to Greece and competed not only in the Olympics, but he spent a whole year over there, competing in every poetry festival, every athletic competition, every wrestling contest. He won some 1,800 awards and prizes, we're told, which shouldn't be too surprising because who's not going to give a poetry award to the emperor? That said, the Greeks loved him. They embraced him. They couldn't get enough of Nero, and that probably has something to do with Nero abolished taxes for the Greeks. Now, naturally, while Nero was off in Greece competing in all these games and competitions, the Roman Senate was not amused. They were back home in Rome conspiring against him. How dare the Roman emperor perform on stage, wrestle with commoners, sing songs, and recite poetry when there was the business of the empire to be done? But even worse, Nero was doing all of this in Greece. Nero's Olympic year was the beginning of the end for his reign in Rome. By the time he got back to Rome, the conspiracy against him had grown, and he was unable to The third thing to understand about Nero's rule is that image was everything. He was a little bit like JFK in that he cultivated this image and aura of youth, beauty, and vitality. He contrasted himself with the more conservative Romans by wearing his hair long, and he sported a beard too. It was an influence from the Greeks. Nero also styled himself after popular Greek heroes and gods like Hercules and Apollo. In his fashion and dress, he tried to emulate them as much as he could. After 64 AD, Nero added a new image of him on the Roman coin. Back then, there wasn't much in the way of mass communication, but you could be sure that a Roman coin would be spread and shared all over the empire. Nero understood that using the coinage in this way could be a great way to project his image and an aura of power and invincibility across the entire empire to people who would never see him in person. On the new coins, Nero had his head wreathed in laurels. This was a powerful association, and sometimes he had his image portrayed with a brilliant crown. The association Nero was trying to sum up is obvious. He was trying to draw an allusion to the god Apollo, who was one of the most popular gods, and Nero also had some coins on which his gaze was directed toward the heavens, just like Alexander the Great. And again, that allusion that Nero is making is absolutely obvious and would not have been lost on the Roman public. Even though Nero never led troops into battle, he was no dummy and he made sure to add that military projection and allusion to his coins so people would give him some second-hand credit for Rome's military prowess. And we can't forget that Nero's statues were everywhere. When he built new gymnasiums and stadiums, he made sure that there was a statue of him there, and it was always in a prominent place. Nero's plans after the Great Fire of Rome, which we'll talk about more in a moment, included a hundred-foot statue of bronze of Nero himself in the center of Rome. That statue was going to be the crowning decoration of Nero's Golden House, a palace that he was building in the very center of Rome after the Great Fire, but we'll talk more about that in a moment. The next thing that made Nero so popular in ancient Rome was that he was a man of the people. Nero didn't have a lot of time for the so-called elites of his day. He wanted to be surrounded by people who were interesting to him. And for Nero, that meant artists, writers, athletes, and performers of all kinds. At various points during Nero's reign, he threw open the doors to the palace and invited the public to come in for huge, sumptuous banquets. And we know from even the ancient Roman writers who hated him that Nero was exceedingly generous and lavished gifts on all who came to his banquets. Oftentimes, he invited the public to the palace for a poetry recital or so they could watch him sing. And again, they loved that. This was very different from any of the predecessors. He ate dinner with his fellow theater performers, which as we talked about before, actors were not at the highest point in society back then. And this was problematic because a high-born Roman man, especially the emperor, was supposed to surround him with the best of Rome, with other people of his own class and station, and Nero wasn't interested in doing that. He invited his company not based on their wealth or high standing, but based on whether or not they were talented artists or writers or poets. By inviting these people to dinner, Nero was effectively saying that they were the equals not only of him, but also of other patrician-class Romans, and that was again deeply offensive to people whose status was dependent on birth and rank and social distinctions. The other problem is that by surrounding himself with commoners, Nero made it really hard on himself when it came time for public and government appointments. Where was he supposed to draw people who would have the skills and talent and experience to do the jobs of a governor or a Roman general? Nero still had to go to the Senate and ask them or appoint them to positions of power. And once they got into power, they were already predisposed to hate Nero. Throughout Nero's reign, there was a shortage of qualified personnel that he could appoint to these high-level government positions, who he could also trust. Anyways, back to Emperor Nero, man of the people. During Nero's reign, a number of his policies would have been hugely popular with the common Roman. Nero is well-known as a builder, but he's often criticized for his many construction projects. During his reign, Rome was constantly under construction. He was building new baths, new gyms, obviously his golden house palace, which we're going to get to. But what people forget is when the Roman writers are criticizing him for spending all that money on those building projects, what he was actually doing was creating tons of jobs for people. Nero's policies have actually been compared to FDR's New Deal, similar to the public works projects that Nero was doing to create jobs for unemployed Romans throughout his reign. And we can't forget that Nero made sure the soldiers got paid, and especially his praetorian guard, the palace guard who would have been closest to him. So no video about Emperor Nero would be complete if we didn't talk about the Great Fire of Rome. It happened in 64 AD, it burned for over a week, and it destroyed as much as two-thirds of the city of Rome. It left a good portion of Rome's million inhabitants homeless, and it also destroyed the homes of most of the aristocracy who kept homes at the center of Rome near the Roman Forum. So the real question is, did Nero do it? And it doesn't seem like he did, or at least there's no concrete evidence saying that he started the fire, or that even his agents started the fire. We know that he was at his villa in Antium, far away from the city when the blaze got started. And we also know that in addition to burning the houses of many of the average Romans and many of the aristocracy, the fire also destroyed Nero's original palace called the Domus Transitoria. It seems like the idea of Nero starting the fire or fiddling while it burned was all the invention of later writers who were trying to further disparage and discredit the emperor. At the time in Rome, there were minor fires almost every day. Sometimes there might be as many as a hundred fires, and any number of those small fires could have easily have turned into a bigger blaze if it wasn't kept under control. Now, just having such a horrible cataclysm happen during your reign as emperor would be enough to make you less popular, or you would think at least dent your popularity. Nero's response to the great fire of Rome probably actually contributed to his popularity with the average people in some way. Soon as Nero was told about the fire at his villa in Antium, he rushed back to the city. And some accounts even say that he might have personally joined in to the fire brigades that were trying to put out the fire. In the wake of the blaze, Nero's government distributed free food to all who needed it in Rome. Once the blaze was extinguished, Nero made a big show of appeasing the gods, and Nero was not about to be blamed for the fire, although even back then there were rumors circulating that he had something to do with it. So in order to avoid being blamed himself, Nero made sure to scapegoat a group of the population that had very little power and that Romans were already suspicious of. It was a small mysterious religious cult called Christianity, and Nero scapegoated them for starting the fire. Now at the time, there were accounts of Christian proselytizers going around Rome and spreading stories about the possibility of a great fire destroying the city, so it kind of made sense that Nero singled them out. Obviously, years after this happened, it made Nero horribly unpopular because Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, and so many of our later Roman writers were also Christians. So naturally, they were going to look back at this time and portray Nero as, well, the Antichrist, like we said before. Because make no mistake, the persecutions of the Christians that followed the great fire of Rome were absolutely brutal. Some Christians were crucified, others were burned alive, and still others were thrown to wild beasts. And again, all of this was done as mass public spectacle. At the time, this probably wouldn't have been seen as an unpopular measure. If anything, it might have even been the opposite to some extent. Romans probably would have seen this as punishment fitting the crime. Now, after the fire, Nero really turned up the sun god Act. He was trying to create in the minds of Romans this idea that a new golden age was dawning in Rome, that the fire was just a rebirth, a beginning, almost kind of like a phoenix rising from the ashes, that a new and better Rome would be built on top of what was now gone. And part of that plan for Nero was he replaced his old palace with an even greater one, the Golden House, the Domus Aurea. And not only that, it was absolutely lavish and luxurious, and he started building it immediately after the fire, which probably rubbed some people the wrong way and contributed to rumors about Nero starting the fire so he could kind of be an opportunist and build his new palace. Now, even though Nero is heavily criticized by the later Roman historians and writers for building this Golden House right in the wake of this horrible catastrophe, there's a little bit more going on here. The Golden House was huge. It was gigantic. It might have been as many as 200 acres right in the center of Rome. It had at least 150 rooms. It was made of marble. The decorations were lavish. There were beautiful frescoes and paintings and statues everywhere. But it wasn't just for him. There's some evidence that leads scholars to believe that the parks and gardens would have been open to the public, that average Romans could have visited the gardens and the grounds at different times. One of the criticisms leveled at Nero that is absolutely true, though, is he heavily depleted the treasury in the wake of the fire, rebuilding a new Rome. The beautiful, well-organized stone and marble Rome that most of us picture in our heads, it actually got its start after the Great Fire and under Nero's government during the rebuild and reconstruction after that fire. For the average Roman, after enough time went by from the fire and they saw this new, even more spectacular Rome going up, new amphitheaters, a new seaport, the marshes being drained, they saw all these new buildings and construction projects, the free food distribution, I think it's easy to see how Nero's response to the fire might have even made him more popular than he was before. So just four years later, though, Nero was dead by his own hand, as we said before, victim of a conspiracy and his own excesses and spending a year away in Greece competing in various contests. When news of the emperor's death spread, the aristocracy was overjoyed, but the rest of the empire, the average people, most of them refused to even believe the news. They didn't believe that the emperor was dead. We know that he continued to be spoken about pretty highly outside those narrow circles of elites. Nero's behavior at times was wild, erratic, and violent, but at every turn, he courted public opinion and the approval of the masses. He cared, or at least he seemed to care, about those who were outside that narrow cadre of Roman elites. And he treated the average Roman as more than a source of taxable revenue. And on top of all that, he was hugely entertaining. I think as we've seen, it makes a certain amount of sense that even centuries after Nero's death, he was still spoken of very highly in most circles, as long as they weren't members of the aristocracy. Now, unfortunately for Nero and his legacy, most of the people who thought highly of him were probably illiterate. What followed Nero's death was a period of instability. There were four emperors in a single year. And the Roman elites and aristocracy and senators who Nero had been pissing off for almost 15 years, they tried to erase all memory of the emperor. And while they might not have succeeded in their own day, because the memory of Nero was kept alive, and there were stories, almost kind of like Elvis sightings, that people would tell. Nero was seen in Spain. Nero was seen in Greece. He's living in exile. He's waiting to come back. He'll be the emperor again someday and put things right to order. In their own day, the Roman elites didn't succeed. But given the popular understanding and portrayals of Emperor Nero today, it kind of seems like those Roman senators and aristocrats had the last laugh. So this turned into a huge topic, and I really appreciate you sticking around. And hopefully you've come away with a little bit different understanding of Emperor Nero, his reign, and how the people of Rome saw him, at least during his own day. So my name is Jay. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you feel like liking or subscribing, that'd be great. And I'll see you next time.