How nasty was Nero, really?

In the case of Nero he was not loved by the élites of his times and the rumors about him started long before he died and became legends.

The senatorial and arostocratic casts didn't love Nero, as he often ruled in favour of the productive classes and the common people (the P in S.P.Q.R.)

Of course all the historians and the writers in general where part of the upper class, to be educated at the time you had to be part of the wealthy people, and almost all of them wrote anti-Nero propaganda.

The most famous of them all is the great fire of Rome when they depicted Nero burning the city while playing his lira, because he thought that Rome had spiraled towards decadence and wanted to burn it to the ground and bring back its former beauty.

That's what almost every ancient historical source says about it, in reality modern historians have discovered that it was probably accidental and they also found in the books of Tacito proof that he did actually tried to stop the fire, but whatever he did only reinforced the idea of his nastiness.

For example he demolished the buildings on the Esquilino hill to try'n stop the fire, but was seen as his thirst for more destruction, he paid for the removal of the debris and the burial of the victims, but was interpreted as looting.

Last but not least, people were seen starting new fires and were classified as Nero's agents, but in reality they were looters trying to take advantage of the situation and when asked answered that they were following the Emperor's orders to cover themselves up and were believed, it matched the propaganda.

There's a lot more like the rumors that he killed his wife kicking her belly while she was pregnant and many other false stories about Nero.

So Nero is one of those rare characters that suffered of bad publicity long before he died and became a legendary Villain for something he didn't do.

fun fact: we owe the name Colosseum to Nero. The giant statue that depicted him was in front of the Flavian amphitheatre.

Long time after Nero times, during the middle age, the statue was found and it was so colossal that people thought it was the Sun God and called it the Colossus and the amphitheater the Colosseum.

When the statue was destroyed the name stayed and it became the most iconic ancient monument in existence.

So this exhibition, this essay, and your comment are way more subversive then you suggest. To use bathroom graffiti as evidence against Tacitus is like using a 4chan post as evidence against something written by an establishment journalist or historian.

Obviously Nero was a very nasty piece of work, but then most Roman emperors _were_. Nero's public image is essentially cartoonishly evil; it's probably not really justified.

Probability(Emperor Nero | New Yorker) = 1

We often have multiple meanings for words. Computers would really excel at not confusing the meaning in this case.

Doesn’t matter in this case, of course, but I wish writing and developer tools were better at predicting/assisting/correcting my writing.

Thanks for the memories Monaro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger#Death

Mentioned in the article; this was a trope that Roman historians (who weren't historians in the modern sense) routinely used about people they didn't like, and the accounts are inconsistent. Like, it's certainly _possible_ he did, but there isn't great evidence for it.