Emperor Nero Born: Rome's Most Infamous Ruler

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born on December 15, 37 AD, in Antium, the same coastal town where his uncle Caligula had been born three years earlier. His mother, Agrippina the Younger, was one of the most politically calculating women in Roman history. After marrying Emperor Claudius, she convinced him to adopt Nero as his heir over his own biological son Britannicus, then almost certainly poisoned Claudius with mushrooms in 54 AD to put her teenage son on the throne. Nero was sixteen when he became emperor. He initially governed competently under the guidance of the Stoic philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Burrus, but as he matured he shed their restraining influence and pursued his own interests in poetry, music, chariot racing, and increasingly arbitrary cruelty. He had his mother murdered in 59 AD after a first attempt using a booby-trapped boat failed and he was forced to send soldiers to finish the job. He probably had his stepbrother Britannicus poisoned. The Great Fire of Rome burned for six days in July 64 AD while Nero, by most surviving historical accounts, was actually at his villa in Antium, not in Rome. The legend that he fiddled while Rome burned is almost certainly false, though he did blame the fire on the Christian community and executed them with theatrical brutality, including burning some alive as human torches. He used the cleared ground to build his extravagant Domus Aurea, the Golden House. When the Senate declared him a public enemy in 68 AD, he fled Rome and killed himself at age thirty. His reported last words were: "What an artist dies in me."