The Roman Emperor Nero

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

An unexpected choice for Great Lives, the Roman Emperor Nero has a reputation for debauchery and murder. He was also surprisingly popular, at least during the early years of his reign, and the writer Conn Iggulden argues he may be a victim of bad press. The Christians decided he was the anti-christ some three centuries after he died, and the three main sources are no more positive about his achievements and life. But a recent exhibition at the British Museum - entitled the man behind the myth - worked hard to soften Nero's terrible reputation. So is there more to Nero than we think?

Joining Conn Iggulden in studio is Dr Shushma Malik of Cambridge University. Matthew Parris presents. Conn Iggulden is co-author of The Dangerous Book for Boys and the best-selling historical fiction about Nero with the strapline, "Rome wasn't burned in a day."

The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde

Transcript

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0:00.0	How did the richest people on the planet make their fortunes?
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0:34.0	Today's subject is one of those characters, like Benito Mussolini or even Genghis Khan, that you don't expect someone to pick and yet here we are Nero fifth Emperor of Rome a man
0:48.0	notorious for cruelty debauchery and those perhaps dubious allegations about setting fire to Rome, then fiddling while it burned.
0:57.0	Peter Usternoff captured him brilliantly in the epic Quo-Vardis, the film of 1951, Christopher Biggins also enjoyed dressing up in the imperial
1:07.2	to hammy acclaim. But a great life, perhaps there's more to nearer than we think. Nominating him in the studio today
1:15.8	is the British writer, Con Igaldon, author with his brother of the Dangerous Book for Boys,
1:21.6	as well as the Falcon of Sparta and more recently a bestseller on
1:25.9	Nero himself first question con why did you decide to write about this man I came across
1:32.4	Nero first of all when I was researching
1:34.4	Julius Caesar over 20 years ago and of course I read Suitonius is the 12
1:38.0	Caesars and lumped in Nero with Caligula and Tiberius, a monster. And that was as simple as that. And then it was the fact that I went to the British Museum Nero exhibition and I was walking around that seeing how popular he was. I mean Caligula for example terrified Rome.
1:55.0	Nero was quite different. He was beloved of the people and you could say he bribed them
1:59.0	I mean he's famously threw tokens to them at public events and you could win a chicken with one of the tokens or you could win a public estate.
2:05.7	So yes, there was an element of vast generosity and bribing them, but they loved him to the point that even after he died,
2:11.1	three different people turned up claiming to be
	...

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