ROMAN EMPEROR NERO (37 - 68 AD) WAS THE FIFTH ROMAN,BRUTAL EMPEROR .HE HAD HIS MOTHER AGRIPPINA EXECUTED. NERO HAD THREE WIVES,HIS FIRST WIFE WAS CLAUDIO OCTAVIA,HIS STEPSISTER.THE ROMAN ECONOMY SUFFERED DUE TO NERO'S GRAND RECONSTRUCTION OF ROME. 

Agrippina the Elder was a distinguished and prominent Roman woman of the first century AD. She was the wife of the general and statesman Germanicus and was granddaughter of Augustus, Rome's first emperor.The scene shows the widowed Agrippina returning to Rome carrying the ashes of her assassinated husband, Germanicus. She is accompanied by her two young children, Caligula, the future emperor, and Agrippina the Younger, who was to be the mother of the Emperor Nero.

Nero was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus on 15th December 37 AD in Antium, near Rome. He was the only son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul of Rome, and his wife Agrippina the Younger, sister of another infamous emperor Caligula. When Nero’s father was congratulated on having a son, he reportedly said that nothing “produced by me and Agrippina could possibly be good for the state or the people”. After a failed plot by Agrippina to murder Caligula, she was exiled by her brother in 39 AD. Nero’s father Domitius died in 40 AD. Caligula was murdered in January 41 making Claudius, Agrippina’s uncle, the Roman emperor. Claudius allowed Agrippina to return from exile.The Emperor Caligula had Nero's mother exiled from Rome and sent Nero to be raised by his aunt. Caligula also stole Nero's inheritance. A few years later, however, Caligula was killed and Claudius became emperor. Claudius was fond of Agrippina and allowed her to return to Rome.In 49 AD, when Nero was around twelve, Emperor Claudius married Agrippina. Nero now became the adopted son of the emperor. Claudius already had a son named Britannicus, but Agrippina wanted Nero to be the next emperor. She convinced Claudius to name Nero as the heir to the throne. Nero also married the emperor's daughter Octavia to further secure the throne.At the age of 14, Nero was appointed to the position of proconsul. He began working alongside Claudius learning about the government of Rome. He even addressed the Roman Senate at a young age.In 54 AD, Emperor Claudius died. Many historians believe that Nero's mother poisoned Claudius so her son could be emperor. Nero was crowned Emperor of Rome at the age of 17.Nero's mother wanted to rule Rome through her son. She tried to influence his policies and gain power for herself. Eventually, Nero got tired of his mother's influence and refused to listen to her. Agrippina became angry and began to plot against Nero. In response, Nero had his mother murdered. After poisoning her second husband, Agrippina married her uncle, Emperor Claudius, in 49 AD. It was the fourth marriage of Claudius and he had had his previous wife Messalina executed in 48 AD. In 50 AD, at the age of 13, Nero was adopted by Emperor Claudius and took the name by which he is famous, Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. Being older than his stepbrother Britannicus, Nero became heir to the throne. In 53 AD, Nero married Claudia Octavia, his stepsister and daughter of Claudius with Messalina. Claudius died in 54 AD. Many ancient historians believe he was fed poisoned mushrooms by Agrippina. Claudius’s death made Nero Emperor of Rome in 54 AD, before he had turned 17. He was the youngest ever Roman emperor till that time.Nero was a Roman Emperor who is infamous for his insane acts and the horrible ways in which he carried out the persecution of Christians. He is also attributed for initiating the Great Fire of Rome and then playing the Lyre while the city burned but most probably didn’t carry out these acts. Know more about the life, family, reign, executions of his mother and others, and the ultimate demise and death of Nero, one of the most infamous emperors of ancient Rome.While Nero was still a young child, his father died. The initial reign of Nero was influenced by his mother Agrippina and advisors Seneca the Younger and Sextus Afranius Burrus. Nero was unsatisfied with his marriage to Octavia and began an affair with Poppaea Sabina, wife of his friend and future emperor Otho. Agrippina opposed this affair. Over time, Seneca and Burrus gained prominence over Nero’s mother and encouraged Nero to step out of her shadow. Agrippina responded by promoting her stepson Britannicus as the true heir to the throne. Britannicus died in February 55 under dubious circumstances. He was most probably poisoned by Nero. In 59 AD, Nero ordered the execution of his mother.Nero had three wives. His first was Claudio Octavia, his stepsister. He divorced her for barrenness and married his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, instead. Together they had a daughter, Claudia Augusta, but he supposedly killed her while she was pregnant with their second child. His third wife, Statilia Messalina actually survived her husband. He later had her executed in June 62 AD. Nero married Sabina in 62 AD. The couple had a daughter who died in infancy. Sabina died in 65 AD reportedly due to Nero kicking her in her belly during her second pregnancy. In early 66 AD, Nero married Statilia Messalina after forcing her husband to commit suicide. In 67 AD, Nero ordered the castration of Sporus, a former slave. He then married him, which noted historian Cassius Dio claims was, because Sporus bore an uncanny resemblance to Nero’s dead former wife Sabina. After Nero became emperor, Agrippina continued to exert influence behind the scenes. However, she met her match in her son’s lover, Poppaea Sabina.Poppaea wanted Nero to marry her, but he was already married to Octavia, daughter of Claudius and Messalina. Agrippina had worked hard to secure the match even framing Octavia’s first fiance for treason and refused to allow her son to get divorced. Meanwhile, Poppaea  hated Octavia and demanded that Nero stand up to his mother.Trapped between the women in his life, Nero chose Poppaea and gave his mother a boat designed to collapse and kill her. But Agrippina survived and swam to safety. Worse, she knew it was an assassination attempt because she had seen the crew of a “rescue” ship clubbing survivors to death with their oars. In a panic, Nero gave up on making it look like an accident and had his mother hacked to death. She supposedly went out bravely, telling the her son’s henchmen to strike the first blow at her womb.

Nero rebuilt much of Rome after it burned to the ground and contemporaries praised his efforts to bring the city back from the ashes. Much of the Roman city center was the result of Nero’s efforts.Nero was passionate about Greek culture. Greece had been under Roman rule for two centuries, and Nero visited Greece, participated in stage plays, musical performances, and athletic competitions, including the Olympics. He gave them their freedom, which meant tax exemption.The Greeks delayed the Olympics by a year just so Nero could compete in them. He won numerous events, including a chariot race where he fell out of the chariot and didn’t finish. He brought home 1,808 first prizes for his artistic presentations. 

Claudius rewrote Rome’s incest laws and married his niece, Agrippina, a hardened veteran of imperial intrigue. Her sister had been starved to death on Messalina’s orders. As before, Claudius was easily pushed around by his new wife, who quickly took control of the empire. Agrippina even signed government documents and officially dealt with foreign ambassadors.Agrippina had a son, Nero, from a previous marriage, and she was determined to make him emperor. She talked Claudius into adopting Nero and favoring him over his biological son, Britannicus. Anyone who opposed Nero was systematically eliminated.After Claudius granted Nero equal imperial power, Agrippina decided that she no longer needed Claudius and served him a tasty dish of poisonous mushrooms. Lucky to the end, Claudius suffered a massive bout of diarrhea, which saved him from the poison. But Agrippina’s allies were everywhere, and Claudius’s doctor pushed more poison down his throat with a feather. Nero became emperor, and Agrippina’s triumph was complete.Agrippina was from a powerful family. Caligula was her brother. Claudius was her uncle and her second husband. She had him killed with a plate of poisoned mushrooms. She was known as an incredibly cutthroat person. Agrippina’s first husband was named Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. When their son Lucius was born, Gnaeus just said, “I don’t think anything produced by me and Agrippina could possibly be good for the state or the people.”Lucius grew up to be Nero. He was seventeen when he became emperor, and for five years, Nero was fine with his mom in running things  and getting all the credit. She wasn’t puppeting from behind the scenes. She was calling herself Empress and putting her face on coins.She lost control over Nero, however, when she complained too much about his new girlfriend.Nero finally decided to have Agrippina killed. But she had been eating antidotes for so long.He built a death trap party boat and gave it to her as a gift.He planned for the party boat to smash her to death with a heavy lead weight positioned directly above her lavish boat throne. Agrippina went out on a night cruise, and someone triggered the giant lead weight  but her boat throne was too powerful! It had a high back and wings and they protected her.The boat rowers were in on it, and they had a plan B: run back and forth over the boat from side to side and tip it over to drown her and hide the evidence. But chaos erupted. Instead of running to the same side, half of them ran to one side and half ran to the other, so the boat did not to over It took them forever  to sink it.Meanwhile, Agrippina’s friends aren’t even sure if this is an accident. Agrippina’s servant-girl can’t swim, so she starts screaming, so the murderous boat rowers just smash her to death with their oars!Following the death of his mother, Nero became deeply involved in his artistic and aesthetic passions. At first, he sang and performed on the lyre in private events but later began performing in public to improve his popularity. He strived to assume every kind of role and trained as an athlete for public games which he ordered to be held every five years. As a competitor in the games, Nero raced a ten-horse chariot and nearly died after being thrown from it. He also competed as an actor and singer. Although he faltered in the competitions, being the emperor he won nevertheless and then he paraded in Rome the crowns he had won.One of the guiding voices behind Nero's ultimate decision to kill his mother was his mistress, Poppaea Sabina whose mother, interestingly enough, had met her demise via suicide at the behest of Claudius's wife, Messalina. Everyone's connected in Rome, who demanded that Nero step up to his mother by divorcing his wife, and stepsister, Octavia, who Agrippina kept around because of her political advantages, and marry her, instead. Poppaea ignored the fact that she herself was already married, as well, to future Roman Emperor Otho. Nero banished her from the city several times, though ultimately his decision to have her killed was prompted when word was brought to him that his mother plotted to overthrow him and instill her lover, Rubellius Plautus, as emperor. This appeared in the form of noblewoman Julia Silana, who accused Agrippina of, shockingly, plotting. Enraged that his mother was, once again, misbehaving, Nero was reminded by his chief advisors, Seneca the Younger and Burrus, both, at one time, rumored lovers of Agrippina, that he could not very well kill a woman for a crime without offering her the chance of a defense, especially if she happened to be the Empress of Rome. However, when given the chance, Agrippina refused to offer an explanation, instead lambasting the accusations, demanding to see her son, and arranging for her enemies to be exiled and her allies to be rewarded. All of these things she accomplished successfully.But it did not matter. The seed had been planted. Nero wanted his mother dead, and there was no stopping him. It is here that the accounts of what happened get a little mixed, though one thing remains clear: Nero tried many times to kill his mother, but, the fact-of-the-matter is, Agrippina the Younger was one incredibly challenging woman to kill.According to Suetonius, Nero and his advisors attempted three times to poison her, however, Agrippina had long since anticipated that one of her enemies would try just that, so for years she'd been building an immune system to the poisons by drinking antidotes. He then claims he tried to crush her by having the ceiling of the bedroom at her villa collapse while she slept below, but the attempt failed. Tacitus does not mention that, however, both are clear that Nero tried to drown her by putting her on a ship designed to sink while out at sea. The event was a dinner at Nero's villa in the popular seaside resort Baiae; Agrippina had been warned earlier that evening by one of her attendants that the entire night was a plot set by her son to kill her, though Nero played the part of a loving and devoted son that night so well, Agrippina convinced herself it couldn't be real, even when he presented her with a brand-new ship as a present that evening, which her attendant had told her earlier was part of the plot. Nevertheless Agrippina and her entourage boarded the vessel, leaving immediately after dinner, fully convinced there was no plot because, before she'd left, Nero had hugged and kissed her, a rare and surprising occurrence considering the rough patch they'd been going through. Supposedly the waters were particularly peaceful that night.Into the silent blackness of night the vessel sailed away, while onboard, in their suite, Agrippina and her entourage lounged about, with one woman, Acerronia, perhaps one of the empress's few friends, congratulating her on restored position within the emperor's favor. Suddenly, without warning, the roof fell in, crushing and killing the third woman in the room, Crepereius Gallus. Agrippina and Acerronia only survived because the canopy of the bed they were both sitting was strong enough to resist the pressure. The ceiling was made of lead and was intended to sink the boat, however it failed. What happened next the ancient writers differ on. According to Suetonius, a second ship, sent by Nero, rammed into the boat, finally sinking it, while Tacitus claims the crew members sank the boat themselves by capsizing it, though in the general confusion of things, not everyone seemed to be on the same page. While some sailors threw their weight on one side to tip the vessel over, others ran to the opposite side to balance it out, creating the perfect opportunity for Agrippina and Acerronia to slip gently into the water undetected.

As emperor, and despite his legacy, Nero enjoyed popular support. Even the killing of his mother was quickly forgiven and explained away by contemporary senators and philosophers. While contemporaries appreciated much of his work for Rome and the arts,they began to turn on him over treatment of his wives. His brutal and sadistic execution of Christians weren’t unpopular at the time, but as Christians rose to prominence in the empire, Nero’s actions were viewed in a much harsher light.

For the first five years of his reign, Nero was actually quite mild. He reduced taxes and gave the Senate additional authority. He even banned capital punishment.The problem was when he started to quarrel with his mother, Agrippina, who had murdered the previous emperor and tried to use Nero as a pawn.One of Nero’s lasting legacies is his persecution of Christians. After Rome burned, he needed someone to pin it on, so he went after the Christians, a smallish cult at the time who were already highly unpopular and technically treasonous. Of course despite the logic of blaming it on the Christians, Nero did go a bit overboard in his persecution of them, with some stories saying that he used them as human torches during one of his dinner parties. Sometimes he’d use them to reenact the deaths of Roman gods and heroes.He would be less than thrilled, however, when he saw what he was remembered for. In the popular mind, he is ludicrous, dangerous, decadent, unbalanced, even insane.The first five emperors  Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero – were all related in some way to the founder of the dynasty, Julius Caesar. With the death of Nero, that remarkable dynasty came to an end. Caesar was the family name of Julius, and although later came to be applied to all emperors as a title, it rightfully belonged only to those five. They have a mystique of their own, unmatched as a group by the later rulers.The stereotype of “fiddling while Rome burned” came from the rumor that he had performed his epic of the fall of Troy while Rome was on fire, watching the flames for inspiration. This is not true; he wasn’t even in Rome when the fire started, and his palace was on fire  hardly a place he could have performed, as the rumor had it, upon the roof.When he ascended the throne, he was a slim, blue-eyed, blond, good-looking teenager. As he got older, he put on weight, and astonishingly, recorded his changing looks on a series of coins that depicted him as he really looked, a shocking bit of full disclosure for an emperor.He was a keen competitor and took his training seriously. One of the earliest things he did in his reign was build a state-of-the-art gymnasium with an attached training yard, where he could be seen exercising. He was an especially good wrestler. He mastered chariot racing his grandfather was a noted charioteer, raced chariots in Rome, and competed in Greece at Olympia. However, this was considered déclassé for an emperor and earned him much ridicule back in Rome.Ever since Alexander the Great, men in the west were clean-shaven. Nero was the first emperor to grow a beard. First the now-fashionable stubble, then a chin beard, seen on his statues and coins.Whatever was the role of Nero in the Great Fire of Rome, many among the Roman populace did hold him responsible for initiating the fire. Nero responded by blaming members of the newly established Christian religion for the disaster, who were already blamed by people for engaging in many wicked practices. This led to Roman Empire’s first persecution of Christians;,the act for which Nero is most infamous. Nero was brutal in his persecutions. He condemned some to be dressed in animal skin and torn apart by dogs. It is also said that he had captured Christians dipped in oil and set on fire in his garden at night as a source of light.After that, other Roman emperors followed suit, most notably Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius.He had a lively intellectual curiosity about the world around him. He sent explorers to discover the source of the Nile. They penetrated some fifteen hundred miles south as far as the great marsh in Sudan. He sent others north to find new sources of amber, and when he was in Greece he attempted to measure the depth of the Alcyon lake near Lerna, which was reputed to be “bottomless.He was the first ruler of almost any country, and the only one of a country of real consequence, to see himself primarily as an artist. He had the true temperament of an artist and tried his hand at many things  dance, poetry, drama  but his true calling and talent was as a citharoede player. The cithara was a seven-stringed instrument similar to the lyre but much more difficult to play, it was the instrument Apollo played. Virtuoso cithara players were the music stars in the ancient world and went on tour, making vast amounts of money. A citharoede composed his own music and sang it while playing the instrument. Nero was an acknowledged master of it and his compositions were played after his death.Nero was descended from Marc Antony on both sides of his family, and seems to have inherited many of his traits – generosity to a fault, big spending, romantic notions of love, a desire to shuck duties and escape into another exotic world, popularity with the common man and the crowds, love of drama, and an identification with Hercules.The idea that Nero was insane arose because of his obsession with the arts, toward the end of his reign especially, when he failed to pay enough attention to his duties as emperor. He was not insane, but his priorities were definitely out of order and were the ultimate cause of his downfall as he ignored the military aspects of his government. The empire was in a quiet phase, but it could not run on its own.Nero was exceptionally tolerant and non-violent. He overlooked insulting jingles and graffiti about himself; he forbade killing at the gladiatorial games. In the first ten years of his reign there were no executions and only two sentences of banishment for treason. But, when a widespread conspiracy to assassinate him was discovered, including some of his most trusted friends, he did not hesitate to protect himself and punish them. Any other emperor would have done the same, and perhaps worse. The plot, however, destroyed his peace of mind and from then on he was suspicious of those around him. And those whose friends had been executed because of the plot naturally called Nero cruel and a tyrant.Although he was the grandson of the famous hero-general Germanicus he had little or no interest in the military, and never visited his legions. He preferred diplomatic solutions to military ones, and had no desire to expand the empire. At one point he thought of relinquishing the new province of Britain as not worth the expense of maintaining. In the end the legions elevated their own generals and declared them emperor. Ignoring the military was a mistake no Roman emperor ever made again, since they were the ones who controlled the process of choosing an emperor.Nero had a very short and intense life. Through the machinations of his ruthless and ambitious mother, Agrippina  who murdered two of her husbands  he was propelled onto the throne at the age of sixteen, the youngest emperor of Rome until Elagabalus in AD 204. He was a young man in a hurry and began his building programs right away, he had visionary architectural ideas and gifted architects, Severus and Celer, to carry them out. By the age of thirty his reign was over. He was forced to flee in fear of his life and had to commit suicide, where he uttered the famous last words. Nero died at the age of 30 thanks to assisted suicide. His popularity had dwindled to nothing and he was trying to escape the city of Nymphidus.The Roman economy suffered due to Nero’s grand reconstruction of Rome. The instability of the empire was furthered by revolts in Britain and Judea and conflicts with Parthia. In 65 AD, there was a plot to assassinate Nero but it was discovered and the conspirators executed. In March 68 AD, Gaius Julius Vindex, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rebelled against Nero’s tax policies. He recruited another governor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, and told him to declare himself emperor. As the rebellion spread, support for Galba increased. On a false report of the Senate planning to beat him to death, Nero decided to commit suicide. Unable to commit the act himself, Nero asked his private secretary, Epaphroditos, to end his life. He thus died on June 9, 68 AD after reigning over the Roman Empire for more than 13 years.