Nero was born 15 December, A.D. 37. His father was Domitius Ahenobarbus, and his mother was Julia Agrippina, a niece of the emperor Claudius. When the first wife of Claudius (Valeria Messalina) died, he took as his next wife Julia, and adopted her son (his nephew). Later, he gave Nero to his own daughter, Octavia, in marriage.
Nero became emperor at the age of seventeen, after the sudden death of Claudius. It is said that his mother had been willing to commit any crime necessary to see her son ascend to the throne, and so it has not been beyond reason to suppose that Julia may have, in some way, effected the death of Claudius for her son’s gain.
No doubt, if that was how events transpired, she probably expected to have some hand in the government of Rome. Nero, apparently, disagreed, and placed the bulk of non-imperial power on his two close advisors, Seneca and Burrus. In the first five years of his reign, Rome was generally pleased with him, as he began either to lessen or to do away with completely the burden of direct taxation. Furthermore, he made progress in lessening the arbitrary nature of Roman legislation and the governance of provinces. Such was his reputation during the early years of his rule that Trajan referred to it as the best time in the imperial era.
Nero’s rule eventually fell into scandal, deceit, and betrayal, however. He undertook an affair with the wife of his friend Salvius Otho, Poppaea Sabina. She, however, was unwilling to be merely a concubine, and aspired to be an empress. Now with two women in his life expecting to derive imperial power from him, Nero knew that he must rid himself either of his mother or his lover. He first ordered that a transport ship she was using be sunk, but, when that failed, he simply had her clubbed to death in her country home.
Easily the most reputed event for which Nero is remembered, however, was the burning of the city of Rome. The fire completely destroyed three and partly destroyed another seven of the city’s fourteen districts. It has been a well-accepted theory that, as reported by Tacitus and Suetonius, it was Nero himself who gave the order for the city to be burned. The circumstances, namely his having been in Antium at the time, also lend themselves to this conclusion, as well as the ease with which Nero planned, after the fire, to build a new city, to be name Neronia.
As a scapegoat for the disaster, Nero chose the Christians, and thereafter began a fierce persecution, in which the Christian community was, through robbery and governmental confiscation, forced to pay a large portion of the material cost of the building of a new Rome. This was the persecution that effected the martyrdoms of Ss. Peter and Paul, in Rome, in 67 A.D.
Nero’s corruption and tyranny soon became unpopular, however, and revolts began to crop up across the empire, even in Rome itself. The proconsuls of the provinces of Spain, the Rhine, and Gallia Lugdunensis agreed to lead a military revolt to overthrow him. Before that plan could be carried out to its ed, however, the senate condemned him to the death of a common murderer, and he committed suicide in June, 68.
