Marble portrait, possibly of Claudia Octavia. However, this did not stop historians from fabricating dramatic stories of Agrippina's murder, asserting that Nero tried (and failed) to kill her with a boat engineered to sink, before sending his men to do the job.Īgrippina allegedly told them to stab her in the womb that bore Nero, her last words clearly borrowed from stage plays. Given the lack of eyewitnesses, there is no way of knowing if or how this happened. The Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio all claim that Nero, fed up with Agrippina's interference, decided to kill her. His mother Agrippina exerted a significant influence, especially at the beginning of his rule.

When Claudius died in AD 54, Nero became emperor just two months before turning 17.Īs he was supported by both the army and the senate, his rise to power was smooth. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. Marble relief with soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, who served as personal guards to the emperor. These accounts became the 'historical' sources used by later historians, therefore perpetuating a fabricated image of Nero, which has survived all the way to the present. Authors writing under the Flavians all had an interest in legitimising the new ruling family by portraying the last of the Julio-Claudians in the worst possible light, turning history into propaganda. Nero's demise brought forward a period of chaos and civil war – one that ended only when a new dynasty seized power, the Flavians.

However, far from being impartial narrators presenting objective accounts of past events, these authors and their sources wrote with a very clear agenda in mind. All written decades after Nero's death, their accounts have long shaped our understanding of this emperor's rule. Most of what we know about Nero comes from the surviving works of three historians – Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio. After Carl Theodor von Piloty.īut what do we really know about Nero? Can we separate the scandalous stories told by later authors from the reality of his rule? Nero after the burning of Rome from Le Monde Illustré.

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