As Nero grew up, he was raised in an environment of a family at war. If we include Agrippina as regent-empress in a brief intermittent period after Claudius’s murder, her own scheming and politicking isn’t exactly the high watermark of pristine politics. Conflicts with the Senate and assassinations, not to mention poor family relations, led to his murder (poisoning) by Agrippina who paved the way for the eventual rise of Nero. Claudius, who ascended the purple after being discovering cowering in the palace after Caligula’s murder, was someone who pushed Caesaric rule toward greater autocracy. Caligula was the mad emperor after Tiberius. Nero wasn’t the first of Rome’s notorious emperors cascading into a period of decline in the mid-first century CE. But how bad was Nero? That’s the question that Anthony Everitt and Roddy Ashworth try to address in their new book, Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome. “Everybody has heard of the Roman emperor Nero…He is the image of the bad ruler, cruel, vain, and incompetent.” In our cultural imagination, Nero is wholly bad, the worst example of many bad examples of Rome’s emperors. Nero the persecutor of Christians Nero the brutal tyrant who embodied the worst aspects of Roman imperial despotism Nero the wannabe artist playing the fiddle as Rome burned. When the name Nero is heard, a few things are conjured up in our imagination.
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