Nero ruled the Roman Empire from 54 to 68 AD and is remembered in history as one of the most controversial Roman emperors. Stories about him range from killing his own mother to setting fire to Rome and playing the lyre while the city burned.
While making space for the Four Seasons hotel near the Vatican, archaeologists and construction workers recently stumbled upon the ruins of a 1st-century AD theater.
According to project leader Renato Sebastiani, “the richness of the materials used, including marble and stucco adorned with gold leaf,” suggests that this theater was built for none other than the notorious Roman Emperor Nero.
If we are to believe ancient sources, spending an evening in Nero’s theater would have been anything but fun. Mocking Roman traditions, the emperor not only watched plays but also performed in them. Considering himself a talented artist, he expected applause whenever he sang a song or recited poetry. In his “Lives of the Twelve Caesars,” the historian Suetonius writes that when Nero took the stage, no one was allowed to leave the theater, not even for the most urgent reasons.
“And so the story goes that some women gave birth there, while many, exhausted by listening and applauding, secretly jumped off the wall, as the doors at the entrance were closed, or pretended to be dead and were carried out as if for burial,” it describes.
Outside the theater, Nero was no less intolerable. Coming to the throne at the age of 16 after his mother Agrippina the Younger allegedly poisoned his predecessor Claudius, the paranoid Nero reportedly arranged the murder of his brother Britannicus and later that of Agrippina herself. He killed his first wife Octavia so he could marry his second wife Poppaea, whom he eventually beat to death in a quarrel.
Regretting this outburst, he castrated a boy who happened to resemble her, dressed him in her clothes, and addressed him as his “queen.” Nero also persecuted innocent Christians who refused to acknowledge his self-proclaimed divinity, nearly bankrupted the empire with lavish banquets, and, most famously, “played the lyre” during the fire that destroyed two-thirds of Rome.
Given such damning biographical details, some scholars wonder if Nero was truly as terrible a person and ruler as we are led to believe. This is an important question to ask, not only because Roman history primarily comes to us through the reports of writers like Suetonius, who was prone to exaggeration.
An Artist Who Wasn’t
“I don’t intend to rehabilitate Nero as a flawless man, but I have come to the conclusion that almost everything we think we know about him is wrong,” said Thorsten Opper, curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, in 2021.
At that time, Opper had just finished work on an exhibition titled “Nero: The Man Behind the Myth,” which invited visitors to take a more critical look at the emperor’s bad reputation.
While Suetonius and his contemporaries depict Nero as the embodiment of evil, archaeological evidence paints a different picture. In the city of Pompeii, buried under volcanic ash just a decade after Nero’s death, graffiti remains show that he was surprisingly popular among ordinary Roman citizens. “Hooray for the decisions of the emperor and empress,” reads one faded inscription, “with you two alive and well, we are happy forever.”
Archaeological evidence could also clear Nero’s name regarding his involvement in the Great Fire of Rome. The famous phrase “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” should not be taken literally, although it often is.
The violin was not invented until the 10th century AD, and although Nero enjoyed playing the lyre, a similar instrument, no source remembers him doing so while the city was ablaze.
Over time, “Nero fiddled” simply became a shorthand for the idea that the emperor did not do enough to stop the catastrophe, as well as for rumors that he participated in setting the fire. The latter likely arose when, after the smoke cleared, Nero announced plans to build his Domus Aurea or Golden House, an expensive and sprawling expansion of his palace complex that the Roman elite, according to art historian Eric Varner, considered “very inappropriate.”
While Nero did indeed build his Golden House, whose ruins can still be visited today, that does not mean his attitude toward the fire and its victims was necessarily indifferent. This is the belief of Virginia Closs, a classics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who published a paper in 2016 claiming that a group of neglected monuments scattered around Rome were actually fire prevention measures set up by Nero around 60 AD.
What Kind of Artist Dies with Me
If Nero’s shame is to some extent a product of slander, it should be noted that his detractors were motivated by different reasons, most of which were political. Despite existing for hundreds of years, the Roman Empire was highly unstable.
Almost half of all emperors were killed or overthrown, their supporters purged, and their legacy rewritten. As Livia Gershon points out in an article for Smithsonian Magazine, writers who recorded Nero’s misdeeds “idealized the oligarchic Roman Republic,” whose downfall was still fresh in their minds, “and disapproved of populist rule by one person.” Opper adds that Nero may have actively sought support from ordinary Romans to compensate for his unpopularity among the elite.
Apart from politics, it seems that this unpopularity was rooted in social norms. Nero may not have been a pagan like Julian, who sought to reintroduce paganism into a fully Christianized empire in which he grew up, or a transdresser like Elagabalus, who, in addition to identifying with a non-Roman Sun god, playfully referred to himself as “empress.” But Nero had something else that set him apart from the establishment: a love of acting.
Unlike, say, modern United States, where Ronald Reagan’s acting experience helped, not hurt, his presidential candidacy, the Roman Empire looked down upon entertainers, associating them with prostitutes.
Knowing this, it is possible that Nero’s performances could have spawned stories of sadism and sexual perversion with which we are currently familiar. Going a step further, his equally famous last words, “What kind of artist dies with me,” can be interpreted not as a demonstration of his irredeemable arrogance but as his longing for a profession society denied him.
Of course, even if Nero did not “fiddle while Rome burned” or massacre Christians en masse, a religion that Brent D. Shaw insists was not yet large enough for its followers to be slaughtered on the scale the medieval Church believed they were, historians agree that he probably did kill his mother and empty the imperial treasury for his private amusements, among other things.
The point here, returning to Opper, is not to “rehabilitate Nero as a flawless man,” but to show that Roman history, and indeed ancient history as a whole, is a highly contentious subject, that some people who present themselves as heroes might actually have been villains, and vice versa, as written by Bigthink.com.