NERO (Gr. Νέρων, G3746). Nero Claudius Caesar was the fifth emperor of Rome, from a.d. 54 to 68. He was a son of the first marriage of Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus, and Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus who was consul in a.d. 32. Nero was born in a.d. 37.

By her third marriage, in a.d. 49, Agrippina became the wife of her uncle, the emperor Claudius. She was thirty-four, and he fifty-nine at the time, but the difference in age was not without its influence in Agrippina’s unscrupulous planning, for Claudius, in many ways an able and intelligent man, was a ready dupe for women and the ambitious freedmen with whom he surrounded himself. He was also a lifelong victim of some form of cerebral palsy, a fact which accounts for many of his strange personal characteristics listed with gusto by ancient authorities. To contemporary observers his life-expectation would not seem to be long; hence the promptitude of Agrippina’s plotting.

With the aid of the freedman Pallas, the tutor of her son the philosopher Seneca, and of Burrus the powerful commander of the praetorian guard, Agrippina promoted her son Nero in the imperial household. Claudius had a son by his disgraced wife Messalina, Britannicus, four years Nero’s junior, and Agrippina’s first move was to establish Nero, youth though he was, as Britannicus’ guardian. When Claudius died in a.d. 54, presumably poisoned, Agrippina, with the same allies, succeeded in advancing the young Nero to the succession. In his inaugural address, doubtless written by Seneca, he promised to rule with the principles of Augustus, who had covered autocracy with the cloak of republican and constitutional rule.

For the first five years of his principate, Nero was content to allow the able Seneca and Burrus to run the empire, and the “quinquennium Neronis”—Nero’s Five Years—became, in the provinces, a legend for sound administration and good order. In the capital itself, and this is the major theme in Tacitus’ Rome-centered and vivid story of the time, there was a devil’s brew of murder and intrigue. Agrippina, thinking to function as coregent with her youthful son, was rapidly disillusioned. Marcus Salvius Otho, who was to be emperor briefly in a.d. 69 (“the year of the four emperors”), encouraged Nero to break free from the imperious dominance of his mother. Agrippina retorted by bringing Britannicus forward. The unfortunate prince was promptly poisoned (a.d. 55), and Agrippina went into retirement. Poppaea, Otho’s wife, with eyes on Nero, plotted the successful elimination of both Octavia, Nero’s wife, and Agrippina. Nero had his mother murdered in a.d. 59.

Meanwhile, there were able men, doubtless appointees of Seneca and Burrus in the provinces, Galba in Spain and Vespasian in Syria, both destined to hold the imperial position among the four emperors of a.d. 69, and Vespasian to survive and found the Flavian dynasty. In Britain, Suetonius Paulinus put down Boudicca’s fierce revolt, and Corbulo did sterling work on the unstable Parthian frontier, Rome’s long and insoluble problem of defense.

Nero, meanwhile, was getting his footing. His domineering mother was dead. Burrus, the able prefect of the guard, died, a natural death apparently, in a.d. 62. Seneca, long appalled by the compromising role he had been called upon to play, retired when his one stable colleague was thus removed. Octavia was divorced, and promptly murdered. Poppaea, married now to Nero, bore him a brief-lived daughter in a.d. 63. Nero, who fancied himself an artist, and may indeed have had some talent, gave his time to poetry, singing even on the public stage, and to sport. He sought to supersede the gladiatorial games, Rome’s proletarian preoccupation, by racing and Gr. athletic contests, a project in which he failed.

With those who had in some fashion restrained him, dead or deposed, the worst emerged in the young emperor. Ofonius Tigellinus, the new prefect of the praetorian guard, was an evil influence, and Nero had his own full share of vanity, cruelty and love of power. He thought of the principate as a tyranny. None of his predecessors, he said, had realized what they could do (Suetonius, Nero, 37). Like Claudius, he began to surround himself with freedmen, greedy and arrogant. A serious and deliberate depreciation of the coinage followed the expensive wars in Britain and Armenia. The hated law of treason (maiestas) was revived, and was used to decimate the ranks of the senate and aristocracy.

In July a.d. 64, a fire broke out in a slum area near the Capena Gate and destroyed half of Rome. It proved to be a measure of Nero’s growing desperation and unpopularity. He found it necessary to discover scapegoats, for a dangerous rumor was circulating that Nero himself had put his capital in flames in a spirit of wanton vandalism, and to free space for his own megalomaniac building plans. He did seize the opportunity afforded by the devastation to begin planning and building his notorious Golden House. The scapegoats, however, were the Christians, whose withdrawal from the close knit framework of pagan society had won them the animosity of the Rom. mob. It was thus that the active persecution of the Christian Church began. It is not known whether the proscription of the Christians simply for bearing the name was actually written into law at this time, or sometime in Nero’s remaining five years, but it may certainly be said that it was in Nero’s principate that the suppression of the Church became State policy. It was to remain so, sporadically revived, for almost three centuries.

Rome at large read the portents aright. High and low were menaced by such a person in the imperial position, and a wide conspiracy was concocted in a.d. 65 by Caius Calpurnius Piso. It was an ill-ordered plot which was betrayed, and suppressed. Seneca and Lucan, the poet, were among the host of high estate who died during Nero’s panic-stricken measures to root out dissent and opposition. Nero, paranoid now in his suspicions, struck out again after Poppaea’s death, the result of his own fierce cruelty, in a.d. 66. In this second wave of executions, men of the caliber of Caius Petronius, Paetus Thrasea the Stoic, and Barea Soranus, perished.

It was in a.d. 66 that the fearful Jewish revolt broke out. Sending Mucianus to govern Syria, Nero detached Vespasian from that office and sent him S to suppress the great rebellion. Any prestige which Nero might have won at that time, from the establishment of Armenia as a buffer kingdom on the NE frontier, was more than cancelled by the dire threat in Pal. Nero marked his deepening irresponsibility by leaving Rome in control of his freedman Helius, and departing in a.d. 67 for an extended tour of Greece. His buffoonery reached new heights as he competed, of course victoriously, in the Gr. games. Simultaneously, Nero ordered his able eastern general Corbulo and two popular governors of Germany to commit suicide.

This folly was decisive. In the spring of a.d. 68, one of the Gallic governors, Caius Julius Vindex, rose in arms against Nero simultaneously with Servius Sulpicius Galba in Spain, and Clodius Macer in Africa. Vindex’ rising was put down by Verginius Rufus, the loyal governor of Germany, but the praetorian guard in Rome declared for Galba, and on 9 June a.d. 68 Nero committed suicide. The meaning of his last words: “Qualis artifex pereo” (“What an artist dies in me”?) has been the subject of much speculation.

There is no disputing the fact that Nero was a vicious and unbalanced man. More than forty years ago, Arthur Weigall, better known as an Egyptologist than as a classical historian, wrote a popular defense of the emperor (Nero, Emperor of Rome [1930]), but the consensus of expert opinion dubs him a villain. A corrupt ancestry, esp. on his father’s side, a bad woman in Agrippina, his mother, a repressed and perverted childhood and youth. followed by the temptations of absolute power in a context of sycophants and designing freedmen, would have tried the strength and integrity of the best and most stable characters. Apart from viciousness, there was also a strong element of mental instability in Nero’s constitution. His devotion to art was real, but accompanied, as such devotion can be, by a tendency to exhibitionism and self-glorification. A savage jealousy of all other eminence, be it of rank, or excellence in war, peace, lit., or wherever else humanity shows its worth, issued in persecution, suppression, and murder. Rome was shocked by the young emperor’s undignified self-display before the Greeks. And when soldiery, nobility, proletariat, philosophers, artists, and every other element in society, appeared to have united against Nero, there can be little doubt of universal detestation. The curious myth that Nero would return, on which Weigall bases his perverse verdict of lamented popularity, was a Gr. invention. The officer’s verdict quoted by Tacitus (Ann. 15.67) is final: “I began to hate you, when, after murdering mother and wife, you turned out to be a jockey, a mountebank, and an incendiary.”

Bibliography Ancient sources, which exist in many good trs., are Tacitus, Annals (Books 13 to 16); Suetonius’ “Nero,” in his Lives of the Caesars; and Dio Cassius (Books 61 to 63).