(2) WORST: NERO –

JULIO-CLAUDIAN DYNASTY

(54-68 AD: 13 YEARS 7 MONTHS 27 DAYS)

 

What can I say? You just can’t argue with the Gospel of Suetonius. Or the Book of Apocalypse, with Nero literally as the Beast of the Apocalypse – or as I like to quip, that sixy beast, given that the Number of the Beast was alphanumeric code for Nero Caesar.

Well, Nero or some weird revenant superpowered uber-Nero, with one of the heads of the beast having healed from a fatal wound, matching the so-called Nero Redivivus Legend, or the widespread belief that Nero was either not dead after his apparent suicide or somehow would return.

I mean, you can’t argue with legendary cruelty and depravity that is so legendary as to give rise to the further legend of coming back from the dead to keep doing it. After his death, at least three leaders of short-lived, failed rebellions presented themselves as “Nero reborn” – Pseudo-Nero, or is that pseudo-uber Nero?

In other words, you just can’t argue with the legend – legend that lends him notoriety as one of Rome’s two archetypes of evil emperor, even if that notoriety exceeds the historical reality and is likely exaggerated, by the Roman elites who hated him and wrote his histories, as well as the Christian writers who saw him as “one of their earliest and most infamous villains”.

I am inclined to accept that his legendary cruelty and depravity was exaggerated, particularly in its most lurid details. However, I just can’t go past that name recognition or iconic status…and I’m also inclined to accept that “he was really off his rocker”, albeit probably later in his reign.

Dare I say it – there’s just a little too much smoke for there not to have been fire (heh). Just perhaps not the Great Fire as it was attributed to him as arsonist – or that he fiddled while Rome burned as the saying goes, or that he sang or played the lyre as the legend went. However, it does seem plausible that he was tone deaf to placing too much priority on lavish palaces for himself in the reconstruction or used it as an opportunity to scapegoat Christians.

“Most Roman sources offer overwhelmingly negative assessments of his personality and reign. Most contemporary sources describe him as tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched”. Or as Suetonius wrote, in his chapter on Nero that is the second most entertaining chapter in The Twelve Caesars – “his acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice and cruelty”.

Unlike the empire breakers in this top ten, he did have some basic competence as emperor, notably with respect to wars and revolts, even if that was more his generals (and there was little that could realistically challenge an empire then at the top of its game) – the general Corbulo who fought the Roman–Parthian War of 58–63, and made peace with the hostile Parthian Empire and the general Suetonius Paulinus who quashed the famous revolt in Britain led by queen Boudica (even if he went so beserk on the Britons afterwards that Nero had to recall him). During his reign, the client Bosporan Kingdom was also annexed to the empire, and the First Jewish–Roman War began (albeit finished by the Flavian dynastic duo, Vespasian and Titus, that fought it for Nero).

But we are talking about someone who killed his own mother, even if that mother was the infamous Agrippina and she was scheming against him (as she had originally schemed for him and against his predecessor Claudius). It took him a few attempts too, which I like to think of as the original source of that legend of Nero being hard to kill permanently. Like mother, like son.

His early reign was decent enough – it seems modern scholars follow Roman historians in seeing his mother’s death as the point he lost the plot. Which is where those lurid details come in – “he started to become more preoccupied with leading a decadent life…drank and ate a lot, and immersed himself in perverted sexual behaviour, both with men and women”.

My favorite is the reference in Suetonius that forever burnt itself into my adolescent mind when I read it – that he “devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched”.

And there was his infamous persecution of the Christians, swallowing up even Saints Peter and Paul – including that he “had many of them tied up on poles next the road, then covered in tar and set on fire, so they could function as street lighting during parties.

He also “fancied himself a wonderful poet, singer and lyricist” – hence the last words attributed to him, “what an artist the world is losing!”.

Those last words came after the Senate had Nero declared a public enemy and condemned to death in absentia – his death at his own hand sparking Rome’s first succession crisis, which might be dubbed the crisis of the first century but for the empire being too stable and secure at that time, as well as a brief civil war between rival claimants known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

 

RATING: 1 STAR*

F-TIER (WORST-TIER – OR IS THAT BEAST TIER?)

EMPIRE-DEBAUCHER

 

MAXIMUS:

No victory titles as far as I’m aware.

DAMNED:

Not a formal damnatio memoriae but he was declared public enemy by the Senate.

SPECTRUM RANKING COMPARISON:

One of the biggest differences in our rankings – Spectrum noting (with some justice) that he wasn’t a bad emperor (but not a good one either) and ranking twenty-nine emperors as worse than Nero prior to 395 AD (with at least Honorius and Valentinian III also as worse afterwards)