NERO: THE CELEBRITY EMPEROR
On June, 9th 68 AD, the most cruel of the Roman emperors died. Know your final moments:
Cruel, insane, depraved? It's too little. Nero was a monster. He went to bed with his mother and had her killed. He poisoned his half-brother, slashed his first wife, and kicked the second, pregnant, until she died. The Roman emperor also castrated a freedman, dressed him as a woman, and married him at a stupendous party. But the problem was that he loved to sing and perform in public, something unforgivable for anyone who had the title of princeps (First in the Senate).
In only 14 years of rule (between 54 and 68), Nero lost the support of the Senate, the magistrates, the third woman and even his preceptor, the philosopher Seneca. At the age of 30, faced with an imminent coup d'etat, he ended his life with a stab in the neck. Its the last words: Qualis artifex pereo! (Which artist dies with me!).
That is what Suetonius, Tacitus and Cassius Dio, the main sources on Nero, say. Detail: they all represented the interests of the Senate, resented by the concentration of power made by the emperor and his approximationto the plebs. And none of them was an eyewitness of the mentioned episodes.
He was capable of unimaginable cruelties and probably eliminated much of his family - which, incidentally, was a practice in the Julius-Claudian dynasty. But it was not the madman who painted us, but an emperor who dramatized his life to attract public attention. So much so that, after his suicide, there were rumors that he had not died - just like an Elvis Presley of ancient times.
The Emperor's Decline
In the year 67, Nero returned to Rome acclaimed by the crowd. He had spent a year and a half on "tour", not knowing the revolts that popped in their domains. "Nero's delay in facing the riots was seen by the Senate as a sign of weakness and loss of control," says archaeologist Darius Arya.
In 68, the Senate declared Nero "public enemy" and supported the coronation of the roman, Galba. From there, Suetonius and Cassius Dio give on the princeps’s biography an increasingly dramatic tone: isolated, Nero fled from Rome and ordered his men to dig a pit. Shouted: Qualis artifex pereo! - translated as "that artist dies with me!" - and committed suicide with a dagger.
"Modern readers often misinterpret this phrase of Nero." Artifex, in Dio's Greek, may mean 'artist' in the sense of interpreting. "But here the meaning is" craftsman, "says Princeton University professor Edward Champlin. He was coordinating the construction of his tomb - a simple pit with fragments of marble. And at that moment he pointed out the contrast between the great artist he had been and the wretched craftsman he had become. Nero did not say 'What artist dies with me!', But almost the opposite: 'What a craftsman I am in my agony!' "
He believed himself to be a follower of the glory of the Greeks and used Rome and his empire as a great stage for their exhibitions. Of course, he was, indeed, a tyrant-possibly the cruellest of his dynasty. But his need to interact with the people turned him into a rockstar tyrant, someone the people liked to hear, to know what he was doing.