Original subtitles

Rome. July, 64 CE.

The greatest city on Earth burns.

Rome burned for six days.

It was, all in all, absolutely disastrous.

Emperor Nero watches calmly,

reciting poetry as flames engulf everything below.

He recited a poem on the fall of Troy,

and this is where we get the myth of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

People start to become suspicious.

But did he really set fire to his own city?

Once that rumour starts, it's difficult to drop.

There is a clear motive there.

A rumour which is far from the worst thing Nero has done.

This is a cold-blooded, determined attempt

to kill his own mother.

Her severed head is brought to be viewed by Nero.

He was poisoned by mushrooms.

Nero's burning alive of Christians

was one of his most atrocious acts.

Was this emperor history's greatest scapegoat

or a ruthless, murderous tyrant?

Using groundbreaking AI imagery to show his world as never before,

we examine the myths that launched the mystery.

Can new evidence help re-evaluate Nero's brutal reputation?

He came to power very young.

To what extent was he being led by others?

Whether this is actually the case is debated by historians.

Our sources are very biased against Nero.

Rulers come and go

but what legacy will the sands of time leave behind?

Nero.

Was he truly a killer king?

The Roman Empire - the ancient world's superpower.

And at the centre, one family...

...the Julio-Claudian royal dynasty.

Rome at the start of Nero's rule

is what the Romans called a principate.

So, it's ruled by an emperor who is essentially a monarch.

This system was founded by Nero's great-great-grandfather, Augustus,

who had transformed Rome from a republican system of government

to essentially a monarchy.

Augustus was very keen that he wasn't seen as an absolute monarch.

He was very keen to maintain a republican atmosphere

to the Constitution.

Augustus's intention

was that the emperor would rule in concert with the Roman Senate.

But four generations after Augustus, the Senate is silent.

Rome is ruled by blood.

Nero is born into this royal bloodline,

Nephew of Caligula...

great-grandson of Augustus...

son of Agrippina.

Agrippina is a really interesting figure.

She's the granddaughter of the first Emperor, Augustus.

She commands a lot of prestige within the imperial family already,

being descended from the first emperor.

So, she was the sister of Caligula.

When Caligula came to power, he was very supportive.

He championed his family, he championed his sister, Agrippina,

but very quickly after that, he demonised her

and she was placed into exile.

She was forced to leave Rome.

Sent to live with his paternal aunt,

the young Nero spends his early years away from the heart of power.

He had quite a distracted upheaval in terms of his upbringing.

When Caligula was assassinated,

Agrippina was allowed back to Rome by the next emperor,

the Emperor Claudius.

From exile to the epicentre.

Nero - barely a teenager - enters the snake pit of Roman politics.

Her return to Rome became her attempt

to really sort of bring Nero into the fold

and sort of really try and promote his possible accession to power.

Now, at this stage, it's important to note

that Claudius was actually married to a woman called Messalina...

and he had a son called Britannicus.

And so, you would imagine that Britannicus would be the one

to be coming to the throne, the next heir.

But that's not what Agrippina wanted.

Agrippina, granddaughter, sister and niece of Rome's rulers,

begins a strategy to become the mother of an emperor.

Nero's relationship with his mother,

it's difficult to unpick,

not least because they both spent time in exile,

separated when he was very young.

But obviously, once they are both brought back

into the imperial family, and the imperial fold,

there is a real strength there in terms of they are together.

There are also several sources who suggest that Nero's path to power

was paved for him by his mother, Agrippina the Younger.

So desperate was Agrippina

to assert her own claims to the throne,

as well as her son's,

that she was even willing to marry her uncle, Emperor Claudius,

to do it.

After the execution of the Empress Messalina in 48 CE for treachery,

the path was clear for Agrippina

to manoeuvre herself and her teenage son into the Royal Palace.

The sources tell us that she kind of

manipulated Claudius into the adoption.

She arranged it so that Nero was married

to Claudius's daughter Octavia.

It's a union for political purposes only.

There's a long tradition in the early Roman principate

where emperors would have multiple nominees for the succession

and Nero and Britannicus are kind of set up as potential joint heirs.

Agrippina stands on the brink of power.

But in Rome, timing is everything.

Nero was slightly older than Britannicus.

He's about 16 years old. Britannicus is 13... 12 or 13.

Crucially, by this stage,

Nero had already, with Agrippina's help,

been sort of engineered into the limelight.

Nero was already engaged and then married to Octavia.

Being slightly older than Britannicus,

he was a potential candidate for the succession

if Claudius passed away before Britannicus -

his natural son - was of age.

When Emperor Claudius dies suddenly, rumours abound.

The rumour is that he was poisoned by mushrooms.

Agrippina, his fourth wife,

is accused of having poisoned Claudius

to make the path clear for her son, Nero.

Whether this is actually the case is debated by historians

because, of course, our sources are very biased against Nero

and against Claudius and Agrippina.

And Claudius was also in his 60s when he died,

so it's not beyond the realms of possibility

that he died of natural causes.

In 54 CE, aged just 16,

Nero becomes emperor of Rome.

A teenager in the palace.

A puppet in a crown.

When Nero does come to power, he is very young, he's 16.

He's the youngest emperor that has been in power so far.

Agrippina had this desire

to sort of act almost as a regent behind him.

Young, charming, full of promise,

Nero's ascension was welcomed by his people.

Nero was clever. He got the Praetorian Guard on side.

He got the Senate on side.

He said he wanted to work with the Senate.

And that actually was a really good way to get them, all of them,

to say, OK, you know, this guy could be good for us.

Coming to power was a stark difference from Claudius.

Bringing energy, bringing life, bringing good looks,

to the role of emperor.

That actually must have been quite a nice change, perhaps,

for the people of Rome, and for the Senate.

The first five years of Nero's reign

are surprisingly successful.

We tend to think of Nero as a tyrant

because of the picture that's painted by our sources.

But actually, a later emperor, Trajan,

would refer to the "Quinquennium Neronis" -

the first five years of Nero - as being almost a golden age.

Nero was really popular with the people of Rome.

Nero made a big show of restoring power and authority

to the Senate itself

and restoring the constitutional rule of law.

I'm not surprised that once he actually became emperor,

we see a spell of enormous success.

We see Nero doing all sorts of constructive, wonderful things,

and being very popular, a very charismatic leader.

In becoming emperor,

he essentially has been, in some ways, freed

from the overbearing control of his mother.

I'm not surprised that we see this great honeymoon spell

of liberation and a successful activity.

Nero played his part perfectly.

He gave the people what they wanted.

He gave gifts to the people of Rome.

He gave games.

And so in that sense, there seems to be this period of time

where there is positivity around his reign.

Newly married, you know, the potential there for an heir.

So that then actually means, oh, there's succession there.

That means there's less likelihood for civil war, unrest,

which of course Rome has had its fair share of.

But the real business of empire didn't rest with Nero.

Day-to-day power was held by his mother, Agrippina,

his chief adviser, the philosopher, Seneca,

and Sextus Burrus head of the Praetorian Guard.

So, these three figures are essentially running Rome.

Nero has very little interest in ruling himself.

He's only interested in performing in the theatre.

He sees himself more as an artist, as a performer,

than as a politician and as a ruler.

And so early in his reign, when he's still very young,

he's allowed to kind of indulge in these pursuits a little bit

while his mother and his two advisers

essentially run the government in the background.

What we have here is somebody who lacks any sense of nobility

or honour or mission.

He's enjoying the position

but actually he doesn't have the basic psychological wherewithal

to really care.

However, as time goes on,

he increasingly seeks to escape from the influence of these advisers.

And that is when things take a turn for the worse

As he grows into his early 20s,

the young emperor is starting to dream of freedom.

We see sort of elements of tensions

coming into their relationship.

Agrippina sort of disappears from our sources.

As her son ascends the Imperial Throne,

Agrippina holds more power than any woman in Roman history.

She holds a really prestigious place in the imperial court,

and that continues into Nero's reign.

We're told that she observes

meetings of the Senate, hidden behind a curtain,

because women were not allowed in the Senate.

But she has an exception made where she hides behind a curtain

and kind of oversees proceedings.

And she advises her son on matters of policy

because she had been involved in creating imperial policy

under the reign of Claudius.

But as the boy emperor grows,

the power begins to shift.

There are problems afoot within the sort of family structures

because Nero doesn't like his wife, Octavia.

Theirs is not a marriage made in love.

There are no children on the horizon.

In fact, they seemingly, it would appear, live almost separate lives.

And Nero takes up with a freed woman called Acte.

And this is a big problem.

All this time he's spending with Acte,

he's not spending it with Octavia.

No eligible heirs are coming about.

And this is getting Agrippina nervous.

As time goes on, Nero seeks to remove himself

from his mother's influence.

Agrippina built the empire around her son.

Despite all her manoeuvring, her power still relies on Nero...

and she's losing her grip.

She's getting worried about this.

She's thinking, "Hm, what does this mean for the succession?"

And ultimately, "What does this mean for me as mother of the emperor?"

Whilst mothers do have something of a role of power,

they don't have nearly as strong a role as wives and mistresses

in terms of being able to bend the emperor's ear.

So, she threatens that she's going to withdraw her support of Nero

and support Britannicus.

Britannicus is still just a boy,

but as the natural-born son of the previous emperor,

he has, in many ways, a stronger claim than Nero to the throne.

Britannicus is 12 years old,

so not quite old enough to properly challenge Nero yet.

But Nero's mother is making noises

that she is potentially going to go over to Britannicus' side,

really as a threat to keep Nero under her thumb.

So, Nero decides that Britannicus needs to go.

Nero is desperately trying to think

of how to get rid of Britannicus.

Britannicus is a potential threat,

and he will be much more possible to become the next heir,

cos he, is after all, the biological son of Claudius.

We get a clear indicator

of the manipulative mind of Nero.

Nero, the boy emperor who craved the stage,

sets the scene for his first murder.

The assassination of Britannicus takes place at a dinner party.

Britannicus is 12, 13 years old. He's not used to dinner parties.

He's not used to drinking at dinner parties.

He gets a little bit tipsy

and Nero decides he's going to humiliate him in public.

And so what he does is he tells Britannicus

to stand up in front of everyone at the party and to sing a song.

Britannicus stands up and reads a poem,

a heartfelt poem, about the way that he feels

Nero has taken over his destiny.

And he garners a lot of sympathy

from the other guests at the dinner party.

And ultimately it ends up being Nero who is humiliated.

For Nero, humiliation is the worst thing that he could possibly suffer,

and here he is suffering humiliation

when he thought he was going to humiliate Britannicus.

So, at that point, I'm sure that Nero's decision

to ensure that Britannicus was eradicated.

So he decides he's going to poison his stepbrother.

And he has Britannicus seated at the table.

He has him given wine, hot wine.

And Britannicus obviously hands this to his taster

so that it's checked for poison, and then it's all fine.

He drinks the wine, and he says it's too hot.

And he calls for some water to cool it down.

And it's to the water that the poison is added.

Britannicus collapses and Nero immediately says,

"This is nothing to worry about. Don't worry, everyone.

Britannicus has suffered from epilepsy since he was a child.

This is just another epileptic fit."

However, certain members of the dinner congregation

are not able to hide the shock and the horror in their faces.

And particularly, Agrippina is absolutely mortified

at what her son has done she allows that horror to show on her face.

This isn't just a murder.

It's a warning that Nero is not to be trifled with,

and Agrippina has heard it loud and clear.

This is the first time that Agrippina realises

what her son is capable of.

And this is the point that Nero, seeing his mother's reaction,

realises that, ultimately,

this relationship is going to deteriorate more.

One of the key facets, I think, of Nero's personality

is a narcissistic theatrical aspect,

and it's something we often see with people

who have not been well-loved by their mothers.

It's a defensive mechanism.

They develop a strongly narcissistic trait to their personality.

And that yearning for applause, for appreciation, for attention,

is something that I think is very powerful within Nero.

Agrippina gave Nero power. She taught him how to rule.

But as he steps into the spotlight that she created,

her power fades into the shadows.

By the end of 55 AD,

these tensions are somewhat assuaged.

They seem, to an extent, to have made up.

Agrippina sort of disappears from our sources.

She comes back into the limelight by 58 AD

because of Nero's love affairs.

Can Agrippina somehow escape the vengeance

of the emperor that she raised?

About four years after the death of Britannicus

things have come to a head

and Agrippina has been interfering more and more in Nero's life.

At this point, he's also been having an affair with the noblewoman,

Poppaea Sabina, and she is pregnant with his child.

And Agrippina disapproves of this relationship.

Agrippina, once again,

is concerned about what this might mean

in terms of airs and succession.

This is where she makes almost her second,

and actually fatal, decision -

to try and bring Octavia back into the arms of Nero

and trying to get Nero to forget about Poppaea.

By 59 CE, Agrippina is back in Rome

and back in Nero's way.

She opposes his mistress,

tries to force him back into the arms of a wife he never cared for,

questions his succession.

And he begins to wonder, will she ever stop?

We have these wonderful

and horrendously awful stories

about how Nero plotted to kill his mother.

This is not a rage-driven moment of insanity,

an emotionally triggered violent episode.

This is a cold-blooded, systematic,

determined attempt to kill his own mother.

His first attempt: poison.

But Agrippina has become wise to her son.

And she's been secretly taking small doses of poison

as a prophylactic against poisoning.

So she's immune to the poison and it doesn't work.

Attempt number 2.

So then Nero changes course

and he decides that the best way to kill Agrippina

is to rig up a device in her bedroom

so that when she's asleep in the middle of the night,

he can set off this device and the ceiling will collapse and crush her,

and it will look like an accident.

However, this plan gets out, it gets leaked to Agrippina,

and Agrippina changes bedrooms.

So then Nero decides he's going to...

he's going to have to find another way

of getting his mother off the scene.

We are told that he developed a collapsible boat.

The idea being that as it collapsed,

she would fall into the water and drown.

He invited her down to Baiae, on the Bay of Naples, for a party.

She dines with Nero, and they have a very pleasant evening together.

Nero is very apologetic.

There's a reconciliation. They're getting on again.

And as he sent her away back on this boat

that was specially developed, it didn't quite work.

So she's on the boat and the collapsible rig

goes off mid voyage and the boat starts to sink.

But it doesn't fully work.

This is really something quite distinct,

quite psychologically remarkable,

and it speaks very much

to not only the evil of Nero himself

but also the profoundly distorted nature

of the relationship between mother and son.

Attempt number 3 becomes a horrific comedy of errors.

There's enough time for Agrippina to swim ashore

and on the shore are some of Nero's assassins waiting for any survivors.

She was apparently beaten up.

And she escapes and goes back to her home.

In the end, Nero gives up on theatre.

This cloak and dagger is not working,

and he goes the old-fashioned way, and sends two assassins to kill her.

They arrive at the house of Agrippina.

She is ready for them. She's expecting them.

She invites them in... and she tells them,

"If you're going to kill me, strike here.

Strike at my womb, the place where that monster came from."

And they do. And Agrippina dies.

This removes Nero's mother's influence from his life

and gives him the freedom to fully pursue

all of his extracurricular activities.

The mother who made him emperor,

who crowned him in bronze and blood, is gone.

And with her the last restraint.

However much he may have hated her -

and he did - she was the source of his strength.

Perhaps that will have made him hate her all the more,

but she was the driving force,

the source of his strength and power.

So, once she's gone, his success diminishes very rapidly.

Without her shadow, Nero steps into the light...

and the horror begins.

We are left with an individual who had almost limitless power

and no fear of repercussions.

At first, Rome carries on.

But behind the scenes,

the cracks in the smooth running of government begin to show.

The popularity of Nero with the Senate

diminished quite significantly.

It became very clear very early on that Nero had very little interest

in the business of government.

The success of his early reign is ultimately down to his mother,

Burrus, the commander of his bodyguard,

and his tutor, Seneca.

Burrus, the Praetorian prefect,

is now out of picture - he's been got rid of -

and Seneca is sort of in partial retirement as well.

As these three individuals are gradually removed

from their influence over Nero's life,

the Senate become more and more concerned

about the direction that Nero is taking.

So his extravagance, his interest in public spectacle and performance,

this is something that is seen as beneath the dignity of an emperor.

Nero, still only 25, retreats from rule

and chases the only kind of love he understands -

applause and public acclaim.

A lot of historians talk about Nero the actor, Nero, the showman.

We know that he put on a lot games.

He instituted the Neronia. It was a festival.

In 66 to 67 AD,

he went to Greece and put on games

in which he took part as a charioteer,

as in the theatrical elements.

But the applause never lasts.

Nero's need for devotion, for submission,

spirals into absurdity.

We have stories of him on stage,

that he would actually shut the doors

and not allow anyone to leave.

People would feign death, apparently,

so that they would be taken out of the theatres when he was on stage.

All in all, I think that we really can see Nero

as a showman, as an actor.

An actor certainly, but with a murderous streak,

who would brook no opposition

and who would kill anyone who dared defy him.

As ever with Nero, his downfall begins in his bedroom.

Octavia, daughter of the previous emperor Claudius,

along with Agrippina, had been his path to power.

Octavia's fall from grace is actually relatively quick.

Octavia seems to have been

a very different personality to Nero.

She seems to have been quite reserved, quite virtuous,

and so it's pretty, pretty much a loveless marriage from the start.

It's a union for political purposes only.

He referred to her as his wife in name only.

No children come from it.

There are even possible suggestions that it wasn't even consummated,

that, you know, they lived apart,

their lives were just completely separate.

Octavia, daughter of Claudius,

was beloved by the Roman people.

Octavia's popularity with the Roman people

will have severely irked Nero.

Ultimately, she is divorced by Nero

under the pretence that she was sterile,

that she was not able to have children,

and so therefore he needed to remarry.

12 days later, he then gets married to Poppaea Sabina,

this love of his life.

The people are not happy that Nero has divorced her.

They're even more unhappy when Nero, seeing the unrest that is stirring,

decides that he's going to exile her on the charge of adultery.

Here he is trying to get rid of Octavia

because he's jealous of her popularity

and in so doing he makes himself even more unpopular.

There is significant civil unrest in the city of Rome

because of how Nero has treated his wife.

Nero decides that Octavia needs to be killed

to avoid any further unrest...

...and so assassins are dispatched to the small island

on which Octavia is exiled.

And they slit her wrists to make it appear

that she's committed suicide. That doesn't really work.

And so they end up suffocating her.

It's a cowardly way of going about things.

Then to add final insult to injury, they decapitate her

and her severed head is brought to be viewed by Nero and Poppaea.

We've got this psychological sadism,

this triumphalism of her decapitated head being presented to him.

His fundamental personality is emerging

in the way that he goes about murdering Octavia.

By 62 CE,

Nero finally has the woman he wants by his side.

Elegant, clever, and carrying his child,

Poppaea could have secured his dynasty,

but she didn't calm his violence.

She sharpened it.

She has the same cruel streak.

She has a much stronger presence in his life.

And she is blamed by several sources for his murder of Octavia.

And he apparently adores her,

absolutely besotted.

But that is not enough to save her.

The young emperor cannot control his temper.

Nero had been out at the chariot races all day.

He returns home a little bit tipsy

and very late in the evening,

and he is told off for this by Poppaea.

You know, she's at home pregnant with Nero's second child

and she basically gives him a telling off

for coming home late and drunk from the public games.

Nero doesn't take this very well.

This is one of few incidents

of him acting out of furious,

emotionally triggered rage,

rather than simply cruelty and psychological sadism.

In a fit of rage, he lashes out and he kicks Poppaea to death

while she's pregnant with his child.

Poppaea is murdered by Nero, if we believe the sources.

He had huge remorse, that he really grieved her death.

He gave her all sorts of honours.

He apparently bought a year's worth of incense

to sort of use to commemorate her death.

Not only that, he didn't bury her.

He had her embalmed.

Now this is really not the done thing.

So, the suggestion there is that grief to him,

that the death of Poppaea

was a really big event in his life.

Poppaea's death shatters what little balance Nero had left.

Untethered, grieving, and all-powerful

he begins to invent reality.

In the aftermath of Poppaea's death,

to try and reduce the suffering that he is clearly feeling,

the narcissistic Nero engineers a new Poppaea.

He comes across a young man who looks a bit like Poppaea.

Sporus had a remarkable resemblance to Poppaea.

Sporus is a slave in the imperial household

who Nero has a fixation with.

And so in kind of a sham of marriage ceremony,

according to our sources, Nero has Sporus castrated,

and he marries him as a replacement for Poppaea.

Grief twisted into theatre.

Love turned into possession.

And the emperor who killed his mother,

his wife, and his unborn child

now plays house with a ghost.

He uses and abuses his power when he identifies Sporus

and believes he can just turn Sporus into a version of Poppaea.

The narcissism involved in this,

of using Sporus to try and quell the suffering that he's feeling,

is quite incredible.

Nero has killed his mother,

his wife, and his unborn child.

He has abandoned rule for performance.

The crowd still cheers but the cracks are widening.

These displays tell us again

about his theatrical side,

how nothing really is real for him in many senses.

It's all about how things look

and setting up a stage in order to gain popularity.

And then, in July, 64 CE, Rome burns.

This is the moment emperors are made.

Nero sees it as a stage.

The Great Fire of Rome is one of the most renowned...

events of the Emperor Nero's reign.

A fire breaks out in Rome

and ten of the 14 districts of Rome are severely damaged.

Rome burned initially for six days.

Nero is actually not in Rome at the time.

He's actually 35 miles outside the city at his villa in Antium.

And he kind of sees... watches

the flames envelop the city from a distance.

Our sources really emphasise to us

the torment for the people of Rome,

The shrieking, the terror, the fear as people left

and fled from their houses.

It was all in all an absolutely disastrous event.

From the ashes of disaster,

Nero takes centre stage to play the role of the hero.

So when the great fire affords him

a potentially easy opportunity to become popular, he jumps on it.

Nero is actually recorded as acting quite responsibly

in the aftermath of the Great Fire.

So Nero actually opened up various public buildings, monuments,

temples and the Campus Martius - and indeed his own gardens -

to house people who had been displaced by the fire.

He also made sure

that new regulations for buildings were passed

so that buildings were not so close together.

He tried to make sure that there were broader streets

so that again, fires, flames wouldn't spread so quickly.

He also dramatically reduces the price of grain.

He issues an edict that says

that grain has been reduced to an affordable level

so that all these people who have lost their homes

and who have no way of surviving can have easy access to food.

Although initially, this does increase his popularity,

people start to become suspicious.

Soon, a new fire takes hold -

rumour that Nero lit the match to watch Rome burn like Troy,

to clear land for his new golden palace.

The rumour that Nero started the Great Fire

is not without problems,

but fundamentally once that rumour starts it's difficult to drop.

Maybe he started the fire himself

as a way to clear the ground for his golden house.

Public opinion turned against Nero.

His people began to whisper,

"What was the emperor doing as Rome burned?"

This is where we get the myth of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

We're told of the sounds of people shrieking, the sight of it.

Given Nero's theatrical nature, his love of performance,

perhaps one could imagine that he might have sort of

sung a little bit about the burning of Troy.

This will have produced in Nero, I think,

a petulant, furious response

because he cannot, whatever he does, be liked.

And he doesn't understand why.

But even this will have unleashed

a new level of vindictive tyranny from Nero.

Like countless tyrants before and after,

Nero seeks an enemy to blame for Rome's destruction -

a scapegoat to distract, a target to destroy.

Nero decides that he's going to take the blame

and pin it on the Christians.

The Christians are an easy scapegoat for Nero.

And the problem is the Christians were perceived to be odd.

They were very close within themselves.

They didn't act according to custom.

Christians will have been an ideal target

for his petulant fury.

Typically, Nero turns cruelty into spectacle.

So, he rounds up Christians who confess to being Christians

and they then name other practising Christians in the city of Rome.

Nero would have them covered in the skins of animals

and torn apart in the arena,

and come the evening time,

he would have them set up as human torches

and burnt to provide light

for the spectacle entertainments that he was putting on.

They are displayed, burning alive in Nero's gardens,

as night-time illuminations for his entertainment

and the entertainment of the people of Rome.

Even the people of Rome,

who fully accepted that the Christians

were a hated group of people

who deserved the worst kind of punishment,

even they started to sympathise with Nero's victims

because they saw these executions

as catering far less to the safety of the state.

They saw them as having far more to do

with the cruelty of an individual

and kind of Nero's lust for violence and cruelty.

Fear wears thin and the Senate loses faith

in the puerile, sadistic Emperor.

And at the edge of empire, rebellion ignites.

Nero faced a couple of revolts.

Not from countries outside of the empire.

They were actually revolts from governors within the empire.

A rebellion led by the Governor of Gaul, Julius Vindex.

After a short time joined by the governor of Spain,

a guy called Salpicius Galba.

As governors, they have access to armies as well.

They have access to military might.

And Nero is really panicked by this.

He's very, very scared.

Nero is informed of the Senate's change in allegiance.

Nero is declared a public enemy of the state.

When Nero hears this message,

brought to him by a messenger from Rome,

he asks the messenger, "What does that entail?"

And the messenger tells him that were he to be captured and found,

he would be executed in public

by being stripped naked and beaten to death.

And he doesn't know what to do.

We're told that he calls out for support and help, and no one comes.

So he's deserted. He seemingly is abandoned.

So everyone who has supported him has scuttled,

and he is terrified.

In June 68 CE,

as power slips from his grasp,

Nero flees Rome, dressed not as an emperor

but disguised as a slave.

The one thing that terrifies Nero above all else is humiliation.

He cannot suffer the humiliation that he suffered

at the hands of his mother again.

He decides that the time has come and he has to end things.

For Nero, even death is a performance,

as he strives to end his life on his own terms.

He initially calls for one of his attendants

to come in and execute him,

but he can't find anyone who's willing to do the job.

So it's an enforced suicide, in a sense.

He's driven to ending his life

because he is finally deserted.

His final words were, "Oh, what an artist dies with me."

This theatrical scene again feeds into

the theatrical and the narcissistic qualities

that we know are fundamental to Nero.

Nero is gone.

But his legend - twisted, theatrical, and cruel - burns on.

Nero is held up to be a monster, a tyrant.

Sources present him as abhorrent, as a man who is violent,

uncontrollable, murderous, sexually depraved.

But they also present other emperors like that too.

So, Nero is almost in good company.

A tyrant. A performer.

A man with blood on his hands and no one left to applaud.

How will the sands of time remember the emperor

who fiddled while Rome burned?

He's accused of a lot of quite shocking crimes.

Nero is the worst of the worst,

and he is kind of regarded as, you know,

the archetypal bad emperor.

He's everything you do not want to be as an emperor.

There is no doubt that Nero fits the definition of "bad"

about as closely as it's possible to do so.

He definitely cultivated an atmosphere of fear.

For the emperor remembered for singing while his city burned,

is there any defence?

Yes, he was brought up by a most destructive

and disturbing maternal figure.

But it's possible for Nero to have responded

by being the complete opposite.

Whilst the written sources do hate him,

we do have suggestions of him being absolutely loved

by other groups of society.

Some people really grieved at his death.

So he's not quite as one-sided as we might be led to believe.

So was he mad, bad or something worse?

The numbers of people that Nero killed

may not compare with some of the worst kings in history.

There's no doubt Nero is a psychopath.

But what's more, Nero is one of the rare examples of psychopaths

who is actually remarkably intelligent.

Now, that's a lethal, lethal combination.

And we see it in the forensic attention to detail,

the ability to strategically see through

what might unfold in given scenarios.

This all combines to make Nero one of the most evil of all time.

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