Avey and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a podcast series about the rulers of the ancient world's most famous figures. I am your host, Matt Smith, and with me as always

is Dr. Rianen Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode X I X, Niro, the youngest emperor.

With Claudius now deceased, it falls to his adopted son to become the next emperor, and at the age of 17 he's the youngest and most

inexperienced emperor that Rome has seen yet. Here's Rianna Nevins.

Nero came from an incredibly grand background, all the Julia Claudians did, but he had really good

parentage on both sides. His mother is Agrippina and that's Agrippina the younger. So we've got two

agrippinas. We've got the one who's married to Germanicus and then we've got

Agrippina who's their daughter. So what this means is that

Nero is the son of Agrippina, which makes him the grandson of Germanicus,

which makes him the great-great-grandson of

Livia and also related to Augustus on the other side that's just through his mom His father is a man that you might not have heard of called

Agnius de Michius Ahenobabas, which is a great name which means red bearded and apparently the men of his family did tend to have

red beards bronze beards it actually means and although he might not be famous to most people, he is actually the grandson of Mark

Anthony and Octavia, and Octavia was the sister of Augustus. So he has got really blue blood on both sides and he's a true

Giulio Claudian. He's related to both sides of that family. So he's absolutely got a great claim

to being emperor.

Is that the best claim of any emperor yet?

Well, they're all Giulio Claudians,

They're all getting really kind of into bread and overlapped the name,

aren't they?

Yeah.

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