Latest / Nero: Mad Tyrant or Misunderstood Emperor? — Fexingo History / Nero's Last Recital: The Death of an Artist-Emperor
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've spent a lot of time on Nero's grand projects, his music, his gardens, even his secret police. But today I want to talk about the end. Not the fire, not the conspiracy—the actual final days, when the whole thing collapsed. Luna: The suicide, you mean? That's always the part everyone remembers. Lucas: Exactly. And it's one of the more bizarre death scenes in Roman history, partly because it's so staged, so theatrical. Even his last moments felt like a performance. Lucas: But the sources don't agree on the details, and the more you dig, the more you realize how much of what we think we know is actually a legend built later. Let's start with the trigger. Lucas: In March of 68, Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rose up against Nero. He wasn't a senator, he was an equestrian, and he didn't have a big army, but he had a cause—and he knew how to spin it. Luna: He was the one who called Nero a 'bad lyre player,' right? Lucas: Yes, that's from Cassius Dio—Vindex reportedly mocked Nero's artistic pretensions, which was a very effective insult in a world where Nero cared so much about his reputation as an artist. But Vindex also promised to restore the Republic, though he actually backed a rival emperor: Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis. Lucas: Galba was an old-school senator, well-born, and he had the legions of Spain behind him. When the news reached Rome, Nero panicked. He didn't just lose his nerve—he made a series of terrible decisions that undid him. Lucas: He dismissed his loyal German bodyguard, thinking they might be disloyal. He raised new legions, but they were untrained. He even considered sending the Praetorian Guard to Africa to fight a rebellion that didn't exist, because he thought the governor there, Clodius Macer, might be disloyal—which actually pushed Macer into rebelling. Luna: So he basically created enemies out of thin air. Lucas: Pretty much. And then came the real blow. In June, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis—that was Vindex—had already been crushed by the Rhine legions under Verginius Rufus, so that threat was gone. But then the legions in Germany and the Praetorian Guard themselves turned on him. Lucas: The Senate declared Galba emperor, which was essentially a death warrant for Nero. According to Suetonius, Nero didn't even know until he woke up one morning and found his guards gone, his palace empty, and the Praetorian prefect Nymphidius Sabinus had already switched sides. Luna: Wait, so he was just abandoned overnight? Lucas: Effectively, yes. And this is where the drama really picks up. Nero ran through the palace, looking for someone to help him. He had a plan to escape to the East, to Egypt, maybe to Parthia—remember, we talked about his unfinished campaign—but he couldn't go alone. He needed a loyal companion, and almost everyone had deserted him. Lucas: According to Suetonius, he tried to beg for help from the Praetorian tribunes, but they basically told him to go die. He even considered throwing himself into the Tiber, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Lucas: Then he slipped out of the palace with a few freedmen, including Epaphroditus, his private secretary, and a man named Phaon, who had a villa outside Rome, about four miles from the city, near the Servilian Gardens. They went on horseback, disguised as a common slave, with a scarf over his face to hide his identity. Luna: The Emperor of Rome, fleeing on a borrowed horse. Lucas: It's almost comic, isn't it? And when they reached Phaon's villa, the ground was too rough for the horse, so he had to walk through brambles and thickets, cutting his feet on the thorns—Suetonius says he was barefoot. He was so exhausted, he had to stop and drink from a puddle by the road. Lucas: Once inside the villa, he lay on a bed and tried to compose himself. But then the courier arrived with news that the Senate had declared him a public enemy, and that he was going to be punished, 'in the ancient manner'—that meant being stripped, beaten, and then thrown off the Tarpeian Rock. Luna: That was the standard for traitors, wasn't it? Lucas: Exactly. And Nero was terrified of that. He asked what the 'ancient manner' was, and when he heard, he wept. He didn't want to die a criminal's death. He wanted to die a tragic artist's death. Lucas: And that's when he uttered that famous line, 'Qualis artifex pereo'—'What an artist dies in me.' Suetonius and Cassius Dio both report it, though Tacitus doesn't mention it. It's the kind of self-dramatizing thing that perfectly captures everything we know about Nero, and it's probably true, or at least it's what people wanted to believe. Lucas: Then he tried to kill himself. He asked Epaphroditus for help—he'd never actually held a dagger before, and he was afraid to do it himself. He kept saying 'It's not becoming, it's not becoming,' and he delayed by rehearsing his lines, almost as if he were preparing for a performance. Luna: So he's literally staging his own death. Lucas: That's exactly how it reads. Suetonius says he heard the sound of the cavalry approaching—they were coming to arrest him—and he finally mustered the courage. He pressed the dagger to his throat, and with the help of Epaphroditus, he drove it in. He was 30 years old, and he'd been emperor for 13 years. Lucas: His last words, according to Suetonius, were 'Too late, this is fidelity,' spoken to the centurion who found him still alive and tried to stop the bleeding with his cloak. Or maybe he just said 'Qualis artifex pereo' again—the sources differ. But either way, his death was messy, not heroic, and that's how the legend began. Luna: It's strange—he was so obsessed with order and artistry, and his death was just chaos. Lucas: And that chaos gave birth to a whole mythology. Almost immediately, rumors started that Nero wasn't really dead. Some said he had escaped to Parthia, others that he had gone to Egypt. And for decades, impostors claiming to be Nero appeared across the East—we've touched on this before, the False Neros—and some of them actually got a following. Lucas: One of them, Terentius Maximus, appeared in Asia Minor during the reign of Titus and gathered a following before he was caught and executed. Another appeared in Parthia, and the king there was so taken by the idea that he almost went to war with Rome to restore him to the throne. Luna: So the legend of Nero outlived the man by decades. Lucas: By centuries, really. And that's the final irony—the man who spent his whole life trying to shape his image ended up having his death shaped by others. History remembers him as the mad emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, but the sources are much more complex, and his end was far more human and tragic than that caricature. Lucas: And that's the thing that strikes me about Nero's last hours: even at the end, he was thinking about art, about performance, about how it would look. He wasn't a monster in his own mind, he was an artist who had been misunderstood. And maybe that's the most tragic thing of all. Luna: It makes you wonder what would have happened if Vindex had succeeded—if Galba had never taken the throne. Lucas: That's the question that keeps historians up at night. But that's a story for another episode. For now, I think we've given Nero a proper send-off.