Nero Caesar

37 – 68 · Generation VI · Roman emperor (r. AD 54–68) · Julio-Claudian

Nero was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus at Antium, the modern Anzio, on 15 December AD 37, the son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, of an old noble house, and Agrippina the Younger. She was a daughter of the popular general Germanicus and a great-granddaughter of Augustus, and it was through her that he came to the throne. Her brother Caligula exiled her around 39, and the boy’s father died about a year later. In 49 Agrippina married her own uncle, the emperor Claudius. The philosopher Seneca was recalled from exile to be her son’s tutor, and in 50 Claudius adopted the boy, who took the name Nero and was advanced ahead of the emperor’s own younger son, Britannicus. He was then married to Claudius’s daughter Octavia.

Claudius died in October 54. Most ancient writers say that Agrippina poisoned him, a charge not every modern scholar accepts. The Praetorian Guard hailed Nero as emperor before he had turned seventeen. His first years, guided by Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Burrus, were later remembered as a model of good government. Britannicus died in 55, poisoned according to the ancient sources, after Agrippina had threatened to take his side. In 59 Nero had his mother killed. That he ordered it is not doubted, but the ancient accounts disagree about the details. Suetonius tells of a shipwreck arranged in the Bay of Naples by the freedman Anicetus, who was sent to finish the work when she swam ashore. When Burrus died in 62 Seneca withdrew into retirement. According to Tacitus, Nero then divorced and banished Octavia and had her put to death on a charge of adultery. He married Poppaea Sabina that same year.

Abroad, his general Suetonius Paulinus put down the great revolt of Boudica in Britain. In the East, Corbulo fought a long war with Parthia over Armenia that ended in a negotiated peace, and in 66 the Parthian prince Tiridates came to Rome to be crowned king of Armenia by Nero. That same year Judaea rose in revolt, and Nero sent Vespasian to suppress it.

What interested the emperor himself was performance. He sang, played the cithara, wrote poetry and drove chariots, and as the reign went on he did these things in public. To senators this was a disgrace, since the stage belonged to slaves and people of low repute, but the games and shows he provided were popular with ordinary Romans. In 66 he went to Greece to compete at the great festivals, including an Olympic Games postponed for his benefit. He is reported to have been awarded every prize, among them one for a chariot race in which he was thrown from his car.

On the night of 18 July 64 fire broke out near the Circus Maximus. It burned for more than a week and left much of the city in ruins. Tacitus, who reserves judgement on the emperor’s guilt, says that Nero was at Antium when it began, hurried back, opened his palaces to the homeless and brought in food. The rumour ran all the same that he had started it. Suetonius states outright that he wanted the land for his Golden House, and he and Cassius Dio both claim that Nero sang of the fall of Troy in stage costume while the city burned. That story lies behind the saying that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and modern scholars treat it as at least partly hostile invention. According to Tacitus, Nero turned the blame on to the Christians of the city and had many of them put to death with elaborate cruelty, and later Christian writers named him the first persecutor. A conspiracy to kill him, centred on the senator Piso, was betrayed in 65, and the executions and forced suicides that followed took Seneca and the poet Lucan.

In March 68 Vindex, a governor in Gaul, rebelled and called on Galba, governor in Spain, to claim the throne. Vindex was defeated, but support for Galba grew, the Praetorian prefect abandoned the emperor, and the Senate declared Nero a public enemy. He fled to a freedman’s villa outside the city and killed himself there on 9 June 68, aged thirty. Suetonius has him pacing the room beforehand, muttering “What an artist the world is losing!” With him the line of Augustus ended, and a year of civil war followed.

Nearly all that is known of Nero comes from Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, upper-class writers of later generations who agree in condemning him. Modern historians treat their more lurid stories with caution. The common people of Rome seem to have mourned him, two of his successors courted his memory, and in the eastern provinces the belief that he was alive and would return lasted long enough to produce at least three impostors.

Place in the family

Nero Caesar was a great-great-grandson of Augustus Caesar.

Images

Agrippina crowns the young Nero with laurel, relief from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias marking his accession in AD 54 (Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Marble portrait of Nero found on the Palatine Hill, first century AD (Jastrow, public domain)
Nero and Poppaea Sabina on a tetradrachm struck at Alexandria, AD 63/64 (Classical Numismatic Group, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nero’s Torches, 1876: a nineteenth-century vision of the burning of Christians described by Tacitus (Henryk Siemiradzki, public domain)

One of 17 people of Julio-Claudian (85 BC–68) in this archive. Rome’s first imperial family: the Julii and the Claudii joined by marriage and adoption, Augustus to Nero.

Line of descent: Tiberius Claudius Nero → Drusus the Elder → Claudius Caesar → Nero Caesar.

Parents

Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (2 BC – 41)
Agrippina the Younger (15 – 59)
Claudius Caesar (10 BC – 54)

Siblings

Claudia Octavia (39 – 62) (adopted)
Britannicus Caesar (41 – 55) (adopted)

Sources

Nero · Wikipedia
Nero (54–68 A.D.) · De Imperatoribus Romanis
Nero · Livius.org
Nero · World History Encyclopedia