Everything we know about Nero comes from his enemies.
The Roman emperor Nero ranks among the most infamous rulers of the Roman Empire for supposedly fiddling while Rome burned. But did that really happen? And does Nero really deserve his bad reputation?Born on Dec. 15, A.D. 37, Nero became the fifth emperor of Rome and the last of the Julio-Claudians, the dynasty that founded the empire, according to archaeologist Francesca Bologna, who curated the Nero Project at the British Museum in London.
In July A.D. 64, Nero was vacationing in Antium when he learned about what later became known as the Great Fire of Rome, Drake said. Before the conflagration burned itself out a week later, 10 of Rome's 14 districts had burned to the ground and thousands in a city of 500,000 to 1 million people had lost everything.
Nero fancied himself a musician. At some point during the relief efforts, a rumor said he consoled himself by singing about another great fire — the fall of Troy, the Homeric tale that's the focus of the Roman poet Virgil's epic poem"The Aeneid," Drake said. There was precedent for Romans acting in such a manner. For example, the historian Polybius wrote that as the Roman general Scipio Aemelianus watched Carthage being destroyed, he quoted Homer's"The Iliad," saying,"'And a time will come when holy Ilium shall fall, and Priam, and Priam's folk of the good ashen spear,'" Drake said."He was not thinking of Carthage but expressing fear that a like fate awaited the Romans.
"In general, senators loved to indulge their fantasy of a restored republic, sometimes by engaging in assassination plots, and then being outraged when the emperor reacted with hostility," Drake said. "I see no reason to doubt that Christians suffered from popular resentment," Drake said."But did Nero simply capitalize on this to deflect blame from himself, or was he giving in to popular pressure?"
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