Who was emperor Nero?
He was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and has a pretty bad reputation in history. When he first became emperor, succeeding his uncle, Claudius, he was still largely influenced by Seneca, his tutor. However, he did eventually go to the bad. He came from a family who practically invented the term dysfunctional. Incest, murder, and almost any perversion you can think of was practiced with great regularity over the generations that preceded him, so he had a lot to overcome to start with. His crimes include the murder of his mother (although she was no prize herself, and there is evidence that she regularly had sex with Nero as a way of maintaining her control of him), an almost Stalinesque purge of the intelligentsia, and kicking his pregnant wife to death. Real prince of a guy, don’t you think? His name is linked with the fire of Rome in about the year 60 AD, although he couldn’t have been responsible because he was out of town when it occurred. To his credit (I try to be fair e
