Latest / Nero: Mad Tyrant or Misunderstood Emperor? — Fexingo History / Nero's Assassination: The Death of a Dynasty
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've spent a lot of time on Nero's building projects, his diplomacy, his artistic ambitions. But we've danced around one thing — how it all ended. The last few days of Nero's life, in June of 68 AD, are some of the most dramatic in Roman history. And they're also deeply controversial, because almost everything we know comes from sources who hated him. Luna: Right — Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio. All writing after his death, all from the senatorial class he alienated. Lucas: Exactly. So let's walk through what we can piece together. By early 68, Nero had been emperor for nearly fourteen years. But his support was crumbling. The key trigger was the revolt in Gaul led by Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis. Vindex wasn't calling for a republic — he wanted someone else as emperor, specifically Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis. Luna: And Galba was an old-school senator, wasn't he? From a noble family, very traditional. Lucas: Yes. Galba was in his early seventies, a respected commander with a reputation for austerity. When Vindex's revolt was crushed by the governor of Upper Germany, Lucius Verginius Rufus, you'd think Nero's position would be secure. But instead, Galba declared himself emperor anyway, and more critically, the Praetorian Guard abandoned Nero. Luna: The Praetorians? They were his personal bodyguards. How did he lose them? Lucas: Through money and promises. The Praetorian prefect, Nymphidius Sabinus, had been a loyalist — he had a strange history, claiming to be the illegitimate son of the emperor Caligula. But when he saw the tide turning, he convinced the Praetorians to switch allegiance to Galba, promising them a huge donative — 30,000 sesterces per man. Nero hadn't paid them what they felt they were owed, so they were susceptible. Luna: So the Guard basically went to the highest bidder. Lucas: Exactly. And once that happened, the Senate quickly declared Nero a public enemy. When Nero heard that, he fled Rome in a panic. According to Suetonius, he woke up in the middle of the night, found the palace guards gone, and sent for his friends — but nobody came. So he took a few loyal freedmen — Spirus, Epaphroditus, and a few others — and they snuck out of the city disguised as a common citizen. Luna: Disguised? What did he wear? Lucas: Suetonius says he put on a dirty cloak and a hood, and rode on horseback with a handkerchief over his face. They headed east, toward the port of Ostia, but then turned north to a villa owned by his freedman Phaon, about four miles from Rome. It was a squalid little place, not at all what Nero was used to. Luna: The emperor who built the Golden House ends up in a run-down villa. There's a poetic irony there. Lucas: There is. And Nero himself was aware of it. According to Cassius Dio, as they approached the villa, Nero heard a soldier on the road say something like, 'Is this what Nero's running from?' and he nearly panicked. When they got inside, they had to crawl through a hole in the wall to get into the property without being seen. Luna: Wait — an emperor crawling through a hole in a wall? Lucas: Yes. And once inside, Nero lay down on a shabby bed with a thin mattress. He kept asking for water, and he kept repeating a line from Homer's Iliad — 'A sound of hooves, a noise of horses, strikes my ears.' That's from Hector's speech before his death. Nero clearly saw himself as a tragic figure. Luna: So he was quoting epic poetry while waiting to die. That's very Nero. Lucas: Absolutely. And then the freedmen started urging him to kill himself before the soldiers arrived. Nero kept putting it off, asking them to show him how. He tried to stab his own throat but couldn't do it. Finally, when they heard cavalry approaching — sent by the Senate to arrest him — he took a dagger and drove it into his throat, but he needed help from Epaphroditus to finish the job. Luna: So a freedman actually assisted his suicide. What about his famous last words? Lucas: Suetonius reports that he said, 'Qualis artifex pereo' — 'What an artist dies in me.' But there's a big debate about whether he actually said that, or if it was added later to make him seem more theatrical. Tacitus doesn't mention it, and Cassius Dio gives different versions. The phrase does capture Nero's self-image as a performer, though. Luna: It's almost too perfect. But it's also a very sad end — a man who wanted to be loved as an artist, dying alone in a shack. Lucas: It is. And then there's the aftermath. When the soldiers arrived, they found Nero dead. One of them tried to staunch the wound to save him, but it was too late. The Senate ordered a damnatio memoriae — his memory was condemned, his statues were pulled down, and his name was erased from inscriptions. But ironically, many common people mourned him. For years after his death, anonymous hands would place flowers on his tomb. Luna: So the elite hated him, but the plebs remembered his grain distributions and his games. Lucas: Exactly. And that's part of why his legacy is so contested. Was he a monster who fiddled while Rome burned? Or was he a populist emperor destroyed by the senatorial class? The truth is probably somewhere in between. But the way he died — fleeing, disguised, quoting poetry, needing a slave to help him — that image has stuck. Luna: And it set the stage for the Year of the Four Emperors, right? Lucas: Exactly. With Nero's death, the Julio-Claudian dynasty ended. The empire plunged into a civil war that would see Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian all claim the throne within a single year. Nero's assassination wasn't just his personal tragedy — it was the end of an era, and the beginning of a very unstable one. Luna: And that instability, in a way, was his final legacy. Lucas: Yes. So next time someone says Nero was just a madman, remember that his death was not the act of a deranged tyrant, but of a frightened, lonely man who had lost everything. It's a story about the fragility of power, and the gap between how we want to be remembered and how we actually are. Luna: Thanks for walking us through that. It's a lot more nuanced than I expected. Lucas: You're welcome. And that's what we try to do here — find the nuance in these old stories.