AI Summary
5 min readIn August 2022, a Swedish Instagram influencer asked the men in her life how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The answer came back: often, sometimes every three or four days, sometimes daily. The internet ran with it, and "my Roman Empire" became slang for any topic that occupies your mind with surprising frequency. For the host of this episode, that topic is the death of Emperor Nero—not just the standard story of a tyrant who died by suicide, but the possibility that everything we think we know about Nero is a 2,000-year-old cover-up.
The Standard Story of Nero
The familiar account is brutal. Nero ruled Rome from 54 to 68 AD, and the charges against him are staggering. In 64 AD, a fire tore through Rome for six days, then reignited for three more. According to the historian Tacitus, a gang prevented anyone from fighting the flames. Nero, watching from a tower, allegedly played the fiddle and sang, delighted by the destruction. He then blamed the Christians, having them tortured, crucified, and lit on fire as garden lamps. The Catholic Church holds that Saint Peter was among those killed, crucified upside down.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:05) **The "Roman Empire" Meme & Nero's Pop-Culture Image** - The episode opens with the 2022 Instagram trend asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire, framing Nero as the archetypal "monstrous tyrant" who fiddled while Rome burned and died by suicide.
- 2 (04:32) **The Great Fire of Rome (64 AD)** - Detailed account of the six-day fire, the mob that prevented firefighters, and Nero's alleged role as the arsonist.
- 3 (07:49) **Nero's Reign of Tyranny** - A catalog of Nero's alleged crimes: murder of his mother, wives (Octavia, Poppaea), castration of Sporus, and his artistic obsessions.
- 4 (10:19) **The Fall of Nero (68 AD)** - The political coup led by Governor Galba, the Senate declaring Nero an enemy of the state, and Nero's flight from the Praetorian Guard.
- 5 (14:03) **The Conspiracy Theory Emerges** - The host introduces the core doubt: ancient accounts of Nero's death are contradictory, and a Christian historian's text leaves his death uncertain.
- 6 (17:05) **The Piso Conspiracy (65 AD)** - A deep dive into the failed assassination plot led by the freedwoman Epicarus and the senator Piso.
- 7 (27:26) **Suspects in Nero's Death** - Analysis of who had the motive and opportunity to kill Nero.
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Show Notes
They say Roman Emperor Nero played his fiddle while watching his own empire burn. He neglected all leadership duties, and killed his own family. Then, he died by suicide. But some historians believe this is all the product of a two-thousand-year-old smear campaign, invented to cover up the fact that Nero was actually murdered.
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