Arveh, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from La Trobe University.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me today is Zachary Heurz.

Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

This is episode CCXLV, False Nero.

When Nero took his own life in 68C, C,E, it was the end of an era for Rome.

The Giulio Claudians had ruled for close to 100 years, and with the end of the dynasty,

there was confusion, civil war, and an outpouring of grief.

Some would exploit this confusion and claim to be the still-alive Emperor Nero,

with the intention of retaking his empire.

Here's Zachary Hearst.

One of the reasons why I love the false Nero is that it illustrates a way that people engaged with Roman political culture

that was clearly a big part of Roman life that is just very, very hard to find in the fancy

historians who generally get to tell our story of how rum worked.

The false Nero is different and confusing and a little dirty and a little tacky in ways that

I suspect are very familiar to us and kind of makes history make more sense.

Okay, so if we could pull it back to the start then and set the scene for us,

tell me about Nero and the death of Nero and the circumstances that came together at that time at the end of the Giulio Claudians.

Of course.

Conventionally, when we talk about the Roman Empire, we divide it into dynasties. It's not necessarily the case that everyone in the dynasty is going to be related. There's literally an adoptive dynasty. But generally, dynasties are periods that are interrupted by brief civil war. The Giulio Claudians is the first dynastic period of the Roman Empire. It starts with

Augustus, sort of when you think Roman emperor good, he's usually who you're going to think of, right?

He's cultured. He's a patron of the arts. He oversees sort of a great moral revival.

You could tell how seriously I take all of this.

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