Given the lack of eyewitnesses, there is no way of knowing if or how this happened. Agrippina allegedly told them to stab her in the womb that bore Nero, her last words clearly borrowed from stage plays. It is entirely possible, as claimed by Nero himself, that Agrippina chose or was more likely forced to take her own life after her plot against her son was discovered.
Early in his rule, Nero had to contend with a rebellion in the newly conquered province of Britain. In AD 60—61, Queen Boudica of the Iceni tribe led a revolt against the Romans, attacking and laying waste to important Roman settlements.
Boudica and the rebels destroyed Colchester, London and St Albans before being heavily defeated by Roman troops. After the uprising, the governor of Britain Suetonius Paulinus introduced harsher laws against the Britons, until Nero replaced him with the more conciliatory governor Publius Petronius Turpilianus.
Octavia was the daughter of the emperor Claudius from a previous marriage, so when Claudius married Agrippina and adopted her son Nero, Nero and Octavia became brother and sister. In order to arrange their marriage, Octavia had to be adopted into another family.
Their marriage was not a happy one. According to ancient writers, Nero had various affairs until his lover Poppaea Sabina convinced him to divorce his wife. Octavia was first exiled then executed in AD 62 on adultery charges. According to ancient writers, her banishment and death caused great unrest among the public, who sympathised with the dutiful Octavia. The flames soon encompassed the entire city of Rome and the fire raged for nine days. Only four of the 14 districts of the capital were spared, while three were completely destroyed.
Rome had already been razed by flames — and would be again in its long history — but this event was so severe it came to be known as the Great Fire of Rome. Later historians blamed Nero for the event, claiming that he set the capital ablaze in order to clear land for the construction of a vast new palace.
According to Suetonius and Cassius Dio, Nero took in the view of the burning city from the imperial residence while playing the lyre and singing about the fall of Troy. This story, however, is fictional. Tacitus, the only historian who was actually alive at the time of the Great Fire of Rome although only 8 years old , wrote that Nero was not even in Rome when the fire started, but returned to the capital and led the relief efforts.
Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio all describe Nero as being blinded by passion for his wife Poppaea, yet they accuse him of killing her, allegedly by kicking her in an outburst of rage while she was pregnant. Interestingly, pregnant women being kicked to death by enraged husbands is a recurring theme in ancient literature, used to explore the self destructive tendencies of autocrats.
The Greek writer Herodotus tells the story of how the Persian king Cambyses kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach, causing her death. A similar episode is told of Periander, tyrant of Corinth. She was given a lavish funeral and was deified.
Centred on greater Iran, the Parthian empire was a major political and cultural power and a long-standing enemy of Rome. The Parthian War started in AD 58 and, after initial victories and following set-backs, ended in AD 63 when a diplomatic solution was reached between Nero and the Parthian king Vologases I. According to this settlement Tiridates, brother of the Parthian king, would rule over Armenia, but only after having travelled all the way to Rome to be crowned by Nero.
The coronation ceremony took place in the summer of AD 66 and the day was celebrated with much pomp: all the people of Rome saw the new king of Armenia kneeling in front of Nero. None of these men were writing contemporary history — and all had their own reasons for sticking in the knife. Tacitus and Suetonius both began their careers during the dynasty that followed the Julio-Claudians, the Flavians, and were likely writing at some point in the reigns of Trajan 98— and Hadrian — respectively.
Tacitus trained his focus on the fields of politics and war. Suetonius, by contrast, was largely uninterested in the war in Armenia. This approach provides colourful anecdotes but it poses a problem for historians attempting to get somewhere near the truth. Suetonius must rely on hearsay and rumours for his evidence, some of which, he claims, were still circulating in his own time.
While senate affairs were officially recorded, what Nero got up to in the confines of his palace was not. Dio, in contrast to our other writers, does not see Nero as a lover of Greece, but rather as someone who tormented the province with his presence.
Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio all bring something different to our understanding of Nero. And, when viewed together, they are utterly damning. Some were extremely complimentary about the emperor. Sadly, these have been lost, and the only histories still available to us are overwhelmingly hostile. So if we are to accept the limitations of Roman histories of Nero, how else are we to paint an accurate picture of this most notorious of emperors?
One tactic adopted by historians — especially in recent years — is to examine his actions in the context of his times. Or was he an abominable outlier? The museum has just opened an exhibition that, if not quite aiming to rehabilitate Nero, challenges his grotesque reputation. Moreover, much of what was destroyed was slum housing constructed by exploitative landlords. Descriptions of Nero as unhinged and licentious belong to a rhetorical tradition of personal attack that flourished in the Roman courtroom.
You can really invent all manner of things just to malign that character. And that is exactly the kind of language and stereotypes we find in the source accounts. Some of the current revisionism can seem tendentious. Drinkwater addresses the even more heinous death of Poppaea.
In ancient Rome, pregnancy was a hazardous affair, and could prove fatal even without an assault. The British Museum seeks to build a less sensationalist account of Nero through the placement and elucidation of objects: statues, busts, coins, inscriptions, graffiti. A portrait emerges of a young, untested leader at the helm of an unwieldy empire that is under enormous stress.
The statue, on loan from the Louvre , depicts Nero on the cusp of manhood, his status indicated by what would at the time have been legible symbols: a bulla, an amulet worn like a locket, confirms that he is a freeborn boy who has not yet come of age. The statue would originally have been displayed on a high plinth, but at the museum it is presented at ground level, so that the viewer is eye to eye with a child.
The lighting design casts a long shadow: an imperial giant looms. By the time Nero became emperor, in 54 A. Material evidence in the exhibition indicates that when Nero ascended the throne he initially garnered the support of the Senate. Nero asserted his legitimacy by inscribing the coins made for his accession with images of an oak wreath, which was traditionally bestowed as an honor by the Senate.
In the year after his accession, a gold coin was minted depicting mother and son in parallel. Ancient sources say that Nero considered evacuating the island, but this proved unnecessary as the Roman commander on the island Gaius Suetonius Paulinus massed a force of 10, men and defeated Boudicca at the Battle of Watling Street.
In the east, Rome fought, and essentially lost, a war with Parthia, having to give up plans to annex the kingdom of Armenia, which served as a buffer between the two powers. Additionally a rebellion in Judea in A. One effect of this was the abandonment of Qumran , the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found stored in nearby caves.
Shotter writes that Nero took part in several Greek festivals, taking home 1, first prizes for his artistic presentations. The Greeks also agreed to postpone the Olympic Games by one year so that Nero could compete in them. He had killed his mother, first wife and, by some accounts, his second. This forced him to raise taxes wherever he could and even take religious treasures.
Although Vindex committed suicide after his forces were defeated by German legions in May, it was enough to undo Nero.
Not long afterward, the Praetorian Guard, the force charged with guarding the emperor himself, renounced their support for Nero and the now former emperor was declared an enemy of the people by the Senate on June 8. The following day, he committed suicide. After Nero's death, the Roman Empire plunged into chaos as a succession of short-lived emperors tried to gain control of the empire.
Champlin writes that people also refused to believe that Nero was actually dead. Live Science.
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