Emperor Nero: ancient Rome’s most infamous ruler

Summary

You're Dead to Me – Emperor Nero: Ancient Rome’s Most Infamous Ruler

Podcast: You're Dead to Me, BBC Radio 4
Host: Greg Jenner
Guests: Professor Mary Beard (classicist, historian), Patton Oswalt (comedian, actor)
Date: January 30, 2026
Episode Theme: A lively, insightful, and comedic deep dive into the life, legacy, and myths surrounding Emperor Nero, Rome’s most notorious ruler. The show blends rigorous historical expertise with irreverent humour to reassess Nero's reputation, what’s true, what’s legend, and why his story still fascinates.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the dramatic and scandalous reign of Emperor Nero. Host Greg Jenner, together with Roman historian Professor Mary Beard and comedian Patton Oswalt, covers Nero’s infamous reputation—from matricide and theatrical excess to the burning of Rome—and investigates how much of it is fact or later invention. They discuss Roman sources, the real texture of life in Rome, Nero’s turbulent family, his love of spectacle, cruelty, and the enduring stories (and stereotypes) that remain. The show balances dark history with comedy, constantly questioning the truth behind the legends.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Sources: Nero’s Reputation and Historical Evidence

• Nero’s Sources: A rich legacy of poetry, philosophical essays (like Seneca's "On Mercy"), and hostile biographies; sources largely agree that “he wasn’t a good thing” ([04:44]).
• Unreliable Historians: Ancient accounts are gossipy, hostile, and full of “euphemistry”; it's hard to separate propaganda and political storytelling from literal fact ([04:44–05:30]).
• Quote: “The reviews are in and they are not good ones.” – Professor Mary Beard ([05:27])

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What Did Ancient Rome Look and Feel Like?

• Busting Myths: Rome wasn’t gleaming white marble—city was colourful, bustling, chaotic, and smelly, with opulence and slums side-by-side ([05:39–07:37]).
• Urban Mix: No zoning; tenements abutted grand temples. The Colosseum was built after Nero’s reign but sits near the site of the colossal statue of Nero ([06:05–07:37]).

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Nero’s Family: Dysfunction, Dynasty, and Death

• Birth & Upbringing: Born as Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (“bronze beard”) in 37 CE, to a brutal father (who died when Nero was 3) and a very ambitious mother, Agrippina ([08:19–10:29]).
• Imperial Connections: Agrippina, a direct descendent of Augustus, marries her uncle Emperor Claudius. Claudius adopts young Nero, putting him in line for the throne, though Claudius already has a biological son, Britannicus—a dangerous rivalry ([10:29–12:19]).
• Quote: “His dad was a pretty despicable character…. ran over a child deliberately in the street… killed one of his staff when they refused to drink as much as he told them…” – Mary Beard ([08:51])

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Education, Stoicism, and Seneca

• Elite Schooling: Nero is tutored by Seneca, the celebrity Stoic philosopher who’s also fabulously wealthy—a potential hypocrite ([12:19–14:00]).
• Stoicism’s Lessons: Keep passions in check; restraint is ideal—but Seneca may not have lived up to his own values ([12:34–14:00]).

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The ‘Pube Party’ and Social Rituals

• First Shave Rituals: At ~20, elite Romans celebrated their first shave with a public ceremony—Nero took it to extremes: gold box for beard clippings dedicated to Jupiter, and a city-wide games festival (Juvenalia) with forced public performances ([14:41–16:57]).
• Memorable Moment: The running gag about “pube parties” and the ancient Roman custom, with Mary Beard gamely embracing the term ([16:57], [56:55]).

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Family Power Struggles: Britannicus & the Path to the Throne

• Britannicus Marginalized: Agrippina engineers the marginalization and likely murder of Claudius’s son, Britannicus, to cement Nero’s claim. The classic poison-at-dinner story: “the funeral pyre had already been prepared” ([17:27–20:16]).
• Becoming Emperor: Nero ascends at age 16. Agrippina acts as stage-mom and power behind the throne—rumours of incest and control swirl ([20:46–22:19]).
• Quote: “Teenage emperors don't tend to do too well, which is why Mum tends to run the show.” – Greg Jenner ([21:02])

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Nero’s Murderous Ambitions: Matricide and Theatrics

• Attempts on Agrippina: Theatrical, farcical stories of failed poisoning, collapsing ceilings, and, most famously, a collapsible boat scheme—she survives, swims to safety, but is ultimately murdered ([22:19–27:10]).

• Blurring Fact and Trope: The guests examine whether these over-the-top stories are literal truth or trope-laden Roman mythmaking ([24:14, 25:31]).

• Quote: “It's a Roadrunner cartoon…she’d been tipped off. Now, you look at both those stories and say, they are both absolutely untestable, right?” – Mary Beard ([24:14])

• Dark Tragedy Hidden in Comedy: The misidentified servant killed while pleading “I’m Agrippina, save me!” ([26:21])

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Nero: The Thespian Emperor

• Redefining Power: Prefers spectacle over war, wants to be “theatre kid” instead of conqueror ([27:28–28:12]).
• Performance Obsessions: Locks theatre doors, forcing audiences to stay; people fake deaths/births to escape; forced flattery and starring in roles about matricide and incest (Orestes, Oedipus, etc.) ([30:09–32:55]).
• Greek Tour: Takes his show on tour to Greece, competes in and rewrites the Olympics, “wins” everything—even with a crash ([33:11–34:29]).
• Alternative Triumph: Instead of parading as conqueror, Nero parades as a musical/cultural winner ([34:34–35:12]).
• Quote: “Most emperors try to have a triumph for killing people…Nero…comes home and he has a slightly different sort of triumph entering up at the temple of the God of music, Apollo, celebrating his sporting and cultural victories.” – Mary Beard ([34:34])

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Nero’s Brutality and Domestic Violence

• Personal Life & Wives: Married three times; first wife Octavia exiled and killed, her head reportedly sent to his new love. Second wife Poppaea, said to be pregnant when he killed her in a fit of rage ([36:09–38:26]).
• Sporus: Enslaved and castrated lookalike of Poppaea, made into lover ([39:13–39:39]).
• Content Warning: Segment on romance/domestic violence introduced with special care ([36:09]).

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Britain & Boudicca’s Rebellion

• Roman Cruelty & Resistance: Boudicca leads uprising after Roman legal abuse/sexual violence; destroys Colchester, London, St. Albans before being crushed. Not all Romans approve—Nero’s administration replaces overzealous governor after a whistleblower alerts Nero to excessive brutality ([39:46–43:07]).
• Quote: “To the credit of Nero's administration...they took notice of the whistleblower and they replaced the governor.” – Mary Beard ([43:07])

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The Great Fire of Rome: Fiddling While Rome Burns?

• Fact vs. Legend: Rome was a “tinderbox,” fires common, but ancient writers accuse Nero of arson to clear space for his “Golden House” palace ([43:13–45:17]).

• Cultural Spin: Other sources say Nero wasn't even in the city when the fire began; he watched from safety, played the lyre, sang of Troy ([46:19–46:42]).

• Quote: “If you got to seize the moment, that's such a great moment for the ‘gram, when you got the city burning behind you, you sing that song, man.” – Patton Oswalt ([46:45])

• Christian Persecution: After the fire, Nero scapegoats Christians, enforcing horrific reprisals—thus earning the eternal enmity of Christian tradition ([47:00–48:02]).

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Conspiracies, Downfall, and Death

• Conspiracies Multiply: Pisonian conspiracy of 65 CE—Seneca implicated, forced to suicide. Second coup, this time military, ousts Nero ([48:07–49:27]).
• Death and Infamy: Abandoned by his Praetorian Guard, Nero flees and commits suicide at 30; last words (per legend): “What an artist dies in me” ([50:25–51:00]).
• Life at 30: “God, I'm so lazy. I gotta do more with my life.” – Patton Oswalt ([51:35])

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The Nuance Window: Truth and Storytelling

• Prof. Beard’s Two Nuances ([52:16–54:22]):

  1. On Truth: Many Nero stories are literary inventions, a way for Romans to process autocracy and their own fears. The persistence and forms of these stories matter as much as their factual accuracy.
  2. On Knowledge: Despite the gaps, we know much about Nero—through coins, ruins, and texts. His golden palace still stands and can be visited, a tangible connection to a notorious life.

• Quote: “It was their way…of getting their head around what the power of autocrats was, what you might fear about them…these stories…they are our way of getting inside the head of the Romans.” – Mary Beard ([52:37])

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Quickfire Quiz: “So What Do You Know Now?”

• Patton Oswalt quizzes impressively, scoring 10 out of 11 on facts about Nero, e.g. his mother Agrippina, poisoned relatives, Stoic tutor Seneca, the first-shave ceremony (“pube party”), Boudicca, his Olympic charioteering, infamous last words ([55:31–58:59]).
  • Quote: “I’m so glad that I got Dame Mary Beard…to say pube party. That is going to be on the top of some of my…” – Patton Oswalt ([56:55])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------| | 05:27 | "The reviews are in and they are not good ones." | Prof. Mary Beard | | 14:41 | “Seneca was quite a famous Stoic and tutor to Nero...he was absolutely loaded...might have been a bit of a hypocrite.” | Prof. Mary Beard | | 16:57 | “I never had a pube party. I did not realize that was a void in my life.” | Patton Oswalt | | 24:14 | "This is like a Roadrunner cartoon...She had been tipped off...they are both absolutely untestable, right?" | Prof. Mary Beard | | 34:34 | “Most emperors try to have a triumph for killing people...Nero…has a slightly different sort of triumph.” | Prof. Mary Beard | | 46:45 | “If you got to seize the moment...you sing that song, man.” | Patton Oswalt | | 52:37 | “It was their way...of getting their head around what the power of autocrats was, what you might fear...” | Prof. Mary Beard | | 56:55 | “I'm so glad that I got Dame Mary Beard...to say pube party.” | Patton Oswalt |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:44] – Nero’s sources and reputation
• [06:05] – What ancient Rome looked/was like
• [08:19] – Nero’s childhood and family dysfunction
• [12:19] – Nero’s education, stoicism, and Seneca
• [14:41] – First shave ceremonies and Juvenalia (“pube party”)
• [17:27] – Claudius, Britannicus, and power struggles
• [20:46] – Nero’s ascension and Agrippina’s influence
• [22:19] – Multiple murder attempts on Agrippina, theatrical stories
• [27:28] – Nero’s turn to theater and culture
• [33:11] – Nero’s Greek “cultural tour” and “winning” in Olympics
• [36:09] – Segment on Nero’s wives, cruelty, domestic violence (content warning)
• [39:46] – Boudicca’s rebellion & Roman whistleblowers
• [43:13] – The Great Fire of Rome & “fiddling while Rome burns”
• [47:00] – Persecution of Christians after the fire
• [48:07] – Pisonian conspiracy; Seneca’s forced suicide
• [50:25] – Nero’s last days and infamous dying words
• [52:16] – Nuance window: how myths matter, and what survives of Nero’s life
• [55:31] – Quickfire quiz (“So What Do You Know Now?”)

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

• Tone: Witty, irreverent but deeply informed; balances the horror of Nero’s actions with the absurdity and theatricality of Roman gossip and legend-making.
• Key Takeaways:
  • Much of what "everyone knows" about Nero is shaped by gossipy, politically-motivated ancient sources.
  • Nero tried to (re)invent power—through theatre and public spectacle rather than war—shocking both contemporaries and later commentators.
  • The stories about Nero—whether true or not—tell us more about Roman anxieties, society, and the dangers of concentrated power.
  • The mythos of Nero persists because it’s a lens both for Roman attitudes and for our own curiosity about tyranny and celebrity.
  • Visiting Nero’s sites in Rome (his “Golden House”) connects us directly to these stories two millennia later.

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Final Thought

As Professor Beard concludes, what we know and what we believe about Nero blend together—stories endure not only because of their truth, but because of what they let societies say about power, morality, and their own fears.

“Historians ought to be interested in things that aren’t true as well as things that are.” – Mary Beard ([55:11])

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Recommended for fans of Roman history, dark humour, and anyone curious about how notorious reputations are built, remembered, and repurposed.

Transcript

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[Greg Jenner]

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[Patton Oswalt]

I thought I was getting a better.

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[Professor Mary Beard]

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[Greg Jenner]

Hello and welcome to youo're Dead to me. The Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcast. And today we are flouncing back to the first century and fiddling while Rome burns as we learn all about Emperor Nero. And to help us tell apart our Julio Claudians from our Flavians, we have two very special guests in History Corner. She is a renowned classicist, author and broadcaster. Maybe you've read one of her best selling books including SBQR, Pompeii the Life of Roman Town, 12 Caesars Women in Power or her most recent Emperor of Rome. You'll know her from all kinds of BBC TV programs including Pompeii, New Secrets Revealed and she's the co host of the the acclaimed Instant Classics podcast, It's only Professor Mary Beard. Welcome Mary.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, it's great to be here and be with both of you and even in the company of the Emprenero.

[Greg Jenner]

We'll see, we'll see how we feel about him later. And in Comedy Corner, he's an Emmy and Grammy Award winning comedian and actor. He's appeared in many of my absolute favourite sitcoms including AP Bio, BoJack, Horseman, Veep. He starred in films including Ratatouille, Frozen Empire, and Secret Life of Pets 2. Or you've caught him on the celebrity edition of the American Great British Baking Show, I think it's called. I have not quite sure the title, but he's a culinary master. And you'll definitely remember and you'll definitely remember him from our episode on the American War of Independence making a triumphant return, it's Patton Oswald. Welcome back, Patton.

[Patton Oswalt]

Thank you so much for having me back. I can't wait to talk about Nero. I've seen all the Matrix films. He's one of my favorite movie characters.

[Greg Jenner]

Ah, okay. Right.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Nero.

[Patton Oswalt]

Hang on. I don't have spell check on my phone. That might explain a lot.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, sorry, that's all. Last time out, we did the American War of Independence, and you knew quite a lot.

[Patton Oswalt]

I actually did.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, you know, I was surprised.

[Patton Oswalt]

I didn't know I knew so much.

[Greg Jenner]

I wasn't surprised because you're a learned man. But we're now into ancient history. Ancient Roman history. How comfortable are you in the ancient Roman world?

[Patton Oswalt]

Not at all. Literally and figuratively, I'm not comfortable in that world.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Do you know the name Emperor Nero?

[Patton Oswalt]

I know I know the name Emperor Nero, and for some reason, I just picture him looking like Dom DeLuise, but that's just because of the Mel Brooks film.

[Greg Jenner]

That's fine. I don't mind that.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so what do you know? Well, that brings us to the first segment of the podcast. This is the so what do you know? It's where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, will know about today's subject. And you might know Emperor Nero as a bit of a naughty emperor in pop culture. He's in books, he's been plays. He's been played by a lot of famous actors on screen, from Peter Ustinov in Quo Vadis, Christopher Biggins in I, Claudius, to Craig Roberts, and as the big baddie in the Horrible Histories kids movie that I worked on. Eric Banner has even played a version of him, the evil Romulan. Romulan. Nero in the Star Trek film 2009 was.

[Patton Oswalt]

Wait a minute. Was that character supposed to be, like, based on Nero?

[Greg Jenner]

He's a Romulan.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, a Romulan. I'm gonna go. Is my car waiting downstairs?

[Greg Jenner]

We've lost Patton already. But do Hollywood depictions get it right? What does Nero's roguish reputation tell us about Rome? And why were Romans faking their deaths at the theater? Were the plays really find out. Right, Professor Mary Nero was born nearly 2,000 years ago. So this is a properly old story. And the first thing I have to ask is what are our sources here? Do we have trustworthy sources?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, there's quite a lot of sources around Nero. So there's loads of poetry we have which is dedicated to him. There's even a kind of little essay on how to be a good emperor. It was written by his tutor and it was called On Mercy. So perhaps he didn't take the lesson Clementia hard enough. Right. Where the thinner pickings are found is if you're looking for a standard ancient account of Nero, A to Z. Right. The life, the rain. We've got some. They agree on one thing, that he wasn't a good thing. Right. They are quite. We call euphemistry. They're a bit hostile.

[Greg Jenner]

The reviews are in.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The reviews are in and they are not good ones.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, pattern. How do you imagine the city of Rome, ancient Rome, in the time that Nero was born? In your head, what are you imagining in terms of the architecture and the scale?

[Patton Oswalt]

Well, okay, I do know enough to know that the Roman city of all white columns and white buildings is actually false because it was actually very brightly painted and it was that paint that of course chipped off over the centuries and that's where we have the white ruins. But it was actually a very colorful metropolis with kind of their version of Times Square signage everywhere and graffiti and all of that.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Patton Oswalt]

Am I right in thinking that?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Not far wrong.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. It's not the Rome of the holiday trip to Italy, is it? It's kind of like there's no Colosseum yet.

[Professor Mary Beard]

No, I mean it's the center of this vast empire. It's a million inhabitants. Probably it's the biggest city in the west until Victorian London. Right. So early 19th century London. But there are some bits that we might expect to see that, that we don't see. The Colosseum is one ob case you go to Rome now and you know, okay, it's in the middle of a roundabout, but it's, it's really, really impressive. The Colosseum was built after Nero's reign by the next dynasty. But interestingly, its name preserves a little memory of Nero because it was erected very close to the site of a colossus, a colossal statue of Nero, 30 something meters tall, it is said. And that's what gave this amphitheater its name. It was near Nero's colossus. What we tend to forget. I mean, you were Partly right. Patton, you know that it's. This is actually bright and there's graffiti everywhere and it probably stinks. Absolutely stinks. Right. But it is not all those great monuments, no matter what color they were. So it's a mixture of vast display buildings put up often bankrolled by emperors and terrible slums.

[Patton Oswalt]

And in the middle, like abutting each other almost.

[Professor Mary Beard]

What's interesting is, I think in modern cities, certainly in British modern cities, we're used to a kind of zoning in city architecture. We think there's the rich part, you know, and there's the poor part, and. And, you know, there's almost unseen boundaries between these two different levels of the city. What's really striking in Rome is there's a bit of that, but the slums are right there next to the grand staff. You know, you can walk past the great Capitoline Hill and at the bottom there's a slum tenement that you can still look at.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so Nero's childhood.

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[Greg Jenner]

Let's get to the. Let's get to the actual guy we're talking about. He's not called Nero at birth. That's not his name. What was he called? When was he born? What's his childhood like?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, he's in a dysfunctional family, I think would be the. Our way of putting it. He's born in 37 CE and his name is actually then Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, which means bronze beard. Right.

[Patton Oswalt]

And he had a bronze beard when he was a baby.

[Professor Mary Beard]

That was what we would call his surname. I've got a bit. Look, I'm called Beard and I don't have one.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, Nero's surname was Bronzebeard and his dad was a pretty despicable character called Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. And there's loads of stories, horrible stories told about him. Like how he once ran over a child deliberately in the street in his chariot. Even worse. No, not worse, but about as bad. He killed one of his staff when they refused to drink as much as he told them they should. Right. I mean, and these are recounted as.

[Patton Oswalt]

You know, in his defense, Friday night, his party night. Man, we. You knew that when you took this job.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah. Anyway, happily preps for Nero. He died when Nero was. Was about 3.

[Patton Oswalt]

Was his dad in politics or what.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Did his dad do? All Roman men are in politics.

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay, okay, never mind. Sorry.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The key to Nero's success, or one of the keys to Nero's success, though, was that his mom was about as well. Connected within the imperial family as you could possibly be. She was a direct descendant of the first Emperor Augustus, and her dad had been the most glamorous prince of the ruling house. So that gave Nero a good start in life. Even though, as I said, dad died when he was three. That was the same year as his uncle happened to be assassinated. That was Caligula. I mean. And new Emperor Claudius comes to the throne. And before too long we find that Mum.

[Greg Jenner]

Agrippina.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Agrippina. Oh, yes, sorry. And you've done a program.

[Greg Jenner]

We've got an episode on her so listeners can check back in.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You should go back and listen to the Agrippina program. Because Mum, Agrippina married the Emperor Claudius.

[Greg Jenner]

Who was her uncle.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Oh, oh, yes, yes.

[Patton Oswalt]

Boy. Okay.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And then Claudius adopted Nero. Right? And he got a new name, which is why we call him Nero. Because he's called Nero Claudius Kaisar Drusus Germanicus. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

So for short, for sure. In the show before, we've done husbands who are brothers. That's in ancient Egypt. That's a. We call those brusbans. But we now. But now we have uncle husbands. We're thinking maybe Hunkel. How do you feel about.

[Patton Oswalt]

Or usbands. Unbun.

[Greg Jenner]

Did.

[Patton Oswalt]

Wait, I'm sorry. Claudius was the one with the stutter.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You've been reading Robert Gr.

[Patton Oswalt]

No, I watched the Derek Jacoby series. But I know that Claudius the King is a great read. I will read it someday. But I've never read it.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I have to say that my early education in Roman history came from that. Watching television.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a classic, isn't it? So Claudius, you know him as sort of the TV character.

[Patton Oswalt]

Nice. Derek Jacoby.

[Greg Jenner]

You think maybe he was a little more sinister?

[Professor Mary Beard]

There are very nasty statistics about how many senators he had put to death. Let me just say that.

[Patton Oswalt]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

But again, a historian. So we can't. I'm not gonna judge a historian. Okay, so he's. He's the sort of father in law, stepdad to Nero. He's named Nero. He's given Nero his name. He already has a son.

[Professor Mary Beard]

But that's going to be a problem. That's going to be a problem in due course. There is a problem there.

[Greg Jenner]

And Nero is getting a royal education because he's now suddenly sort of in line for the throne maybe. So he's getting a fancy royal education. He's got the fanciest of tutors. Have you ever heard of Seneca?

[Patton Oswalt]

I have heard of Seneca. He's a big stoic. Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah. Stoicism. Has quite a good rep in the.

[Patton Oswalt]

Modern world, especially right now. There's all this rediscovery. Stoic.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Exactly. And we kind of think of it as a sort of stiff upper lip, rather, kind of rather positively admirable way of conducting yourself to be a Stoic.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius are still best selling authors 2,000 years on. Right.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah. I sometimes look at the best selling charts on the online bookstore that we all use and you can guarantee that Marcus Aurelius is still selling quite a lot more than I am, which I think is a tribute to him. But Seneca was quite a famous Stoic and tutor to Nero. One of the things the Stoicism suggests you should do is entirely keep your passions in. Right. Passions widely defined. So greed, lust, human wants should be kept in and, you know, it's fine so far as it goes. The other thing we know about Seneca is he was absolutely loaded.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. He's the richest man in Rome, really.

[Professor Mary Beard]

He's got some Ponzi deals, I think, and scam things on the, you know, the Roman stock exchange. Now somehow Seneca manages to make that align with historic philosophy, but quite a lot of people have thought he might have been a bit of a hypocrite.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So Seneca is teaching Nero. So we have a little. We've got a teenage boy who's learning from one of the great philosophers, but also one of the great political men of the Roman Empire. So it's a good, It's a good upbringing, it's a good education. Important question for you here, Patton. How did you celebrate your first shave?

[Patton Oswalt]

How did I celebrate? Oh, my gosh. I don't. I probably went and played some Galaga or something. I don't know. Are we leading up to a really creepy story right now?

[Greg Jenner]

Not creepy, but kind of interesting.

[Patton Oswalt]

Here we go.

[Greg Jenner]

But you didn't necessarily celebrate by, I don't know, inviting everyone, you know, and then having like a games night?

[Patton Oswalt]

No, weirdly, no.

[Professor Mary Beard]

What did you do with what you shaved off?

[Patton Oswalt]

I'm sure it went right down the sink.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. I think you've been missing out here because actually pattern. What you should have done, Mary, is throw an enormous.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah, well, first of all, you should have. You should have been a bit older than 13 because Nero and I think most Roman elite men usually didn't do their first shave till they were into their 20s.

[Patton Oswalt]

But so they grew big beards or they.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I think if you don't shave, it's. I mean, I'm not an expert, I'm not An expert in male facial hair.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, I'm sporting my own but you.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Know, but I think if you never shave it's a lot kind of softer and downier than you would imagine. So Nero did what a lot of young posh romans did. Early 20s. He shaved it off. He then put it all together in a nice little gold box and he dedicated the clippings to Jupiter. So that was the first thing. But he didn't stop there. Most Roman men I think did stop with something like that. Nero didn't. He had a fantastical, it was claimed to be fantastically lavish set of so called youth games, Juvenalia, full on public games in which lots of things happened that some people felt or reported to feel a bit uncomfortable about. He apparently pretty much forced people to act and sing and do performances. And there was, there's the story of one 80 year old lady and you know, as I, as I approach my eighth or ninth decade, I feel more sympathetic to this. Was kind of made to do a dance. And of course Nero also performed and you can see the biases creeping in here, can't you? It was said that he didn't really have a very strong voice, it was all a bit weedy. All the stories about how he forced people to do this. That's what gets. The old lady was made to dance. It's one of the cases where I often think, well maybe you could reverse this story. You know, you could tell it in a way that was a lot more favorable and you could say, look, there was one 80 year old lady, she was so excited and so enjoying herself that she got up and she did a dance too. Different impression.

[Patton Oswalt]

Sure. I'm just so depressed. I never had a pube party. I did not realize that was a void in my life.

[Greg Jenner]

You could have dedicated it to the gods.

[Patton Oswalt]

I could have dedicated so many people.

[Greg Jenner]

You could have had a granny come and dance for you. Okay, so meanwhile we should talk about Britannicus. This is the son of Claudius, who is the rightful heir to the throne in theory. But Agropina and Nero are starting to just make some moves and you know.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It all looks great for Nero in a way because he's the descendant of Augustus through his mum. He's the adopted son of the reigning emperor. Looks super. The problem is that the reigning emperor's already got his own son.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Britannicus.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And he's called Britannicus. Called that to celebrate Claudius's conquest of Britain. So names his son specially.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, it's all making sense now. How big was his Pew party.

[Greg Jenner]

What did he do?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, I think that's one of the sort. Lot of problems because what Agrop. The story is that Agrippina started to engineer Britannicus being marginalized, right. So I bet he didn't have a great pube party. And he was made to wear sort of childish clothes rather than posh grown up clothes. And there's one story about how she sacks his tutor and replaces the tutor. So he's got this nice old tutor that he's attached to and she gets rid of him.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Professor Mary Beard]

He's also said to have met a nasty end shortly after this. The tutor, not Britannicus.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, Britannicus.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, Britannicus comes to meet a nasty end.

[Patton Oswalt]

She booted his tutor.

[Greg Jenner]

She booted.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yes, that's right.

[Greg Jenner]

Shoot a Buddha.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yeah. Then shoot him.

[Professor Mary Beard]

But it all works.

[Patton Oswalt]

Shoot a Buddha, tutor.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It all works fine because Claudius does die.

[Greg Jenner]

Die in a very passive phrasing there. Does die.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I was using it slightly euphemistically. Claudius dies and the allegations are that he was poisoned by mush. Poison mushrooms. He's at dinner and he's eating his favourite mushroom omelette or whatever it is. The idea is that the mushrooms actually poison mushrooms, although Agrippina had put poison on the mushrooms.

[Greg Jenner]

And the doctor's in on it.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Supposedly in the story, everybody's in on it when they try, because you'd think that if somebody's looking a bit ill after eating something might make them sick, what the doctor does is put a feather down his throat so he can puke it up. But it's a poisoned feather. That is the story now.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The trouble is, as an old teacher of mine always used to say, it's very hard in the Roman world to tell a nasty case of poisoning from a nasty case of peritonitis.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. People die of stuff, right? People can die of ordinary things.

[Professor Mary Beard]

They could die of ordinary things, but everybody always wants them to be die of poison.

[Patton Oswalt]

But so, but when Claudius died was this at a moment that was opportune to move Nero into position, and also.

[Greg Jenner]

Britannicus, very soon after also dies of poison. Or of course, might have been epilepsy.

[Professor Mary Beard]

An epileptic fit might have been epilepsy. But people on that occasion had clear grounds for suspicion because it was said again, it was said that after he'd keeled over at dinner, they had a quick burial, but the funeral pyre had already been prepared.

[Patton Oswalt]

There are too many clues in this room.

[Greg Jenner]

Once Britannicus is out the way, of course, you know, Nero is now The Emperor. He's the Emperor of Rome, which is an incredible amount of power.

[Patton Oswalt]

How old is he when he becomes emperor?

[Professor Mary Beard]

16.

[Patton Oswalt]

There you. Oh, perfect. Great age to run an empire.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, your daughter's what, 16?

[Patton Oswalt]

I would not want my daughter having the remote control at this point, let alone an empire.

[Greg Jenner]

Fair enough.

[Patton Oswalt]

God.

[Greg Jenner]

Teenage emperors, they don't tend to do too well, which is why Mum tends to run the show from backstage.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, one story is, and it's not without some evidence, that the power behind the throne was Agrippina, Stage mom.

[Greg Jenner]

Stage mom.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And she indeed does appear on the coins with Nero. Now, I have to underline that this was not something entirely new. Roman women connected with the imperial family had appeared on the coins before, but there were also rumors of incest with Nero, that she was trying to control him. Again, how do we know? We don't know what happened between Agrippina and Nero, really. And incest is not impossible, but it absolutely fits the kind of the stereotype stories of Roman women who, when their sons are in position of power, or their husbands, they are trying to control things. Rather kind of classic quotes, female wilds. That is what is said. That's not a story which is restricted to the Romans.

[Patton Oswalt]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

We should say Nero soon gets tired of Mum running the show from behind, you know, back backstage, stage Mum, as he said, and starts to plot her death. Yeah, he starts to plot the. So. So Thordius has been murdered. Perhaps Britannicus has been murdered. Perhaps Mum is now going to be murdered. How do you think. How do you think he goes about that? Now, bear in mind, this is someone who threw a pub party involving, you know, thousands of people singing choral songs. Talk us through how you think he's gonna.

[Patton Oswalt]

He throws a poison party where he invites everyone to sing and dance, and then there's donkeys. And does he do it? Does he throw like a party or a big gala and then try to kill her then?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, you're not. So far.

[Patton Oswalt]

Does he do a murder Palooza.

[Professor Mary Beard]

What it shows is how easy it is to invent these stories.

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay. Oh, yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

All our three main historical sources are pretty clear that Nero tries to and eventually does kill her. Suetonius has the most possible attempts. Suetonius records that there were three attempts to poison her, but like many Romans, she took a daily dose of antidote in order to kind of. To protect her body against poison.

[Patton Oswalt]

There's like a Fish Called Wanda. He keeps trying to kill herself.

[Greg Jenner]

It's like a farce, isn't it? Yeah, it's Like a proper silly.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, the next attempt is even more farce. Good life. The idea is that he arranged for Tiles to crash from the roof where she was sleeping. But this is like a Roadrunner cartoon. She had been tipped off. Now, you look at both those stories and you say, they are both absolutely untestable, Right?

[Greg Jenner]

And they're ludicrous. They're so over the top, they're so theatrical. Collapsing ceiling poison.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And she wasn't killed by them. And they say, oh, yeah, he tried to do it, but she'd been tipped off. She was taking antidotes. So what, in the end happens? Which.

[Patton Oswalt]

What's the one that works well?

[Greg Jenner]

The one that works well, the one that fails is obviously most notable is the boat.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Right, well, yeah, yes, sorry, that's. But that half works. The boat half works.

[Patton Oswalt]

He got her to go on a cruise with Leonardo DiCaprio and the boat had an iceberg.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You're very close. That. He has a nice dinner with her down the coast off Italy by eye.

[Patton Oswalt]

How romantic.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And he has rigged up a collapsible boat, and when she's out, he sends her home by boat and the boat collapses. But I'm going to tell you off in a minute pattern, because I've got a sad end to this. Oh, sorry, hang on.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, that's horrible.

[Professor Mary Beard]

She's thrown into the water, but he's forgotten she could swim.

[Greg Jenner]

She's a champion swimmer, right?

[Professor Mary Beard]

So she swims. Nero didn't remember that Mum could swim. Now, what I think is very well puts us all in the spot here, is that these are ludicrous stories and they are hammed up.

[Greg Jenner]

They feel like tropes.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah, they're hammed up in the sources, you know, so that, you know, they're over the top and unbelievable. You know, I sometimes try to read these and to say, look, there is a temptation to think that this is all very funny, but this is Nero. This is a woman being killed by her son. This is matricide. And it's entered the Nero tradition as a kind of, oh, do you know how Nero tried to kill his mum story? And there is a terrible little bit of tragedy in the collapsible boat because one of Agrippina's servants is with her and she goes into the water too, and she thinks the best way to save herself, because she doesn't realize it's a trick, is to say, I'm Agrippina, save me.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, save me. I'm the Emperor's mum.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Save me, save me, save me. And, of course, that Gets her murdered. The crew come over and they kill her.

[Patton Oswalt]

I hear everything you're saying, but I'm sorry. A collapsible boat and mistaken identity is just inherently funny. And I'm sorry to be laughing at this. No, I'm not sorry it's funny.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The story is again that he. He invents the idea that she was trying to kill him and gets rid.

[Patton Oswalt]

Of her so he can go, oh, it's self defense.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I'm just trying to protect. Exactly, yeah, self defense.

[Greg Jenner]

And so she, yeah, she is stabbed by, you know, and.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And it is said that he then goes and looks at her body while drinking a glass of wine, which is.

[Greg Jenner]

A psychopathic thing to do. That's not funny. That's dark, isn't it?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah. Just occasionally I think we ought to. I like to remember Mum. I think that she was 100% not. She was murdered.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, she had murdered perhaps Claudius Britannicus.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Maybe she wasn't innocent.

[Greg Jenner]

There's no innocence here.

[Professor Mary Beard]

No, this is a dysfunctional family and nobody in it is innocent.

[Greg Jenner]

All right, let's move on then. So the interesting thing about Nero is he's not the great warrior. Julius Caesar was a great warrior. He was the man on horseback riding around the conqueror. The Conqueror. Claudius had invaded Britain and defeated Britain. So we have conqueror models, but Nero is the theatre kid. He's the show tunes guy.

[Professor Mary Beard]

This is another place, I think, where kind of modern readers and critics are a bit inconsistent because on the one hand we say Romans, they went and they massacred everybody. Look at Julius Caesar, he's genocidal maniac. And then we find a Roman emperor who actually likes culture and we start to laugh at them a bit.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And to say, well, he was a bit weedy really, and he was just a theatre kid. So we can't have it both ways.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, I think we can.

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[Patton Oswalt]

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[Professor Mary Beard]

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[Professor Mary Beard]

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[Greg Jenner]

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[Greg Jenner]

Let's talk about what he does, right?

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

He performs in plays.

[Professor Mary Beard]

There really are some funny things coming up here. It's a great age of culture. It is a huge literary renaissance. Not quite clear what Nero's role in that is, but it certainly is. And that he himself, as he tried at his beard games. He himself.

[Greg Jenner]

You should have beard games. We should. Where's the marketing here?

[Patton Oswalt]

Mary, your name is right, right on it. Boom. You own it.

[Professor Mary Beard]

No. So he himself performs and it is said that perhaps wasn't as brilliant as he liked to be told it was. And they're amazing stories.

[Greg Jenner]

It's like Florence Foster Jenkins, isn't it? It's sort hiring out the theater and getting all your friends to come. Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

But Nero does go, you know, a stage further. So he locks the theater doors so that once you've got in, so it is said. And that in order to get out, people used to fake their death so they could be carried about.

[Patton Oswalt]

I do that at my shows. People constantly pretend to think I lock the doors.

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[Patton Oswalt]

The performer doesn't do that.

[Greg Jenner]

Captain audience I and women gave.

[Patton Oswalt]

Is that with the expression, wow, you killed him, you killed him. Is that where that comes from? Like, man, how'd you do? I killed him.

[Greg Jenner]

I killed him.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Women gave birth because they couldn't get out. Once they got in and the baby came and they were forced to flatter him. It's said they were forced to say, blimey, brilliant, Nero. Now, there is something pretty ludicrous and pretty unpleasant about flattery, but again, I think it's a place where we need perhaps to stop and say, well, would we say to Prince William or President Trump or someone like that after seeing them perform? I think that was a really lousy show. We'd probably say, I can't imagine Donald.

[Greg Jenner]

Trump doing Hamlet personally, but I don't know, maybe.

[Patton Oswalt]

He is an amazing dancer, though, that.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The YMCA dance is fantastic, just brilliant.

[Patton Oswalt]

I think it's poetry. It's poetry. I'll say it, it's poetry.

[Professor Mary Beard]

So we tend not to notice our own flattery and to notice the flattery when it's done by others.

[Greg Jenner]

That's fair enough. In fairness. In supposedly he stars. He plays starring roles in the play Orestes in which the character murders his mother. He plays in Oedipus in which the character has incestuous relationships and he plays Hercules. And also, of course, he plays women roles, so he plays sort of drag roles. And also there's a play called Canasi, I think in Childbirth, which again, again, incest. So if he's a guy who's like trying to sort of say, I didn't have incestuous relations with my mum, it's quite, quite on the nose to then performing numerous plays about, wow, Hiding in.

[Patton Oswalt]

Plain sight, maybe I dare you to call me out, maybe.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Or after dinner, gossip, saying, do you know what roll Nero's going to play next? Ha ha, Orestes. Yeah, maybe, maybe. And it's. It's where the boundary is between the gossip and the hiding in plain sight. That's very hot.

[Greg Jenner]

The important thing here, pattern is that Nero took it on top tour. He didn't just play Rome.

[Patton Oswalt]

There you go.

[Greg Jenner]

He didn't just play Carnegie hall, he took it on tour. Do you know where he toured?

[Patton Oswalt]

I mean, did he tour through every land that they conquered or where would he tour?

[Greg Jenner]

He went to the most cultured place the Roman emperor could go to. The land of culture, the land of philosophy, Greece. He did?

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

He took it on tour to Greece.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And he went around.

[Patton Oswalt]

And what did they think?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Well, he went round all the major games, the Olympic Pit Games, the Isthmian Games and all the others.

[Patton Oswalt]

He was like a side stage at a music festival.

[Greg Jenner]

No, main stage.

[Patton Oswalt]

He was mainstream.

[Greg Jenner]

He changed all the events in the Olympics, the things that he liked, and he won everything.

[Patton Oswalt]

Wow, that. So he was a really good athlete.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Is what you're saying. Well, he is reported even to have won when he kind of fell out of his chariot and didn't finish the course. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

The story of his chariot race is that he has a ten horse team chariot. So he's got a chariot pulled by 10 horses, which is way too many chariots. That's way too many horses. You're gonna crash with that many horses. But no one said to him, that's a bad idea, sire. You know, there's no. There's no health and safety officer saying, four. Four horses is fine. So he crashes in that. But they declare him the winner. He comes home with all his garland prizes. He has a big triumph. Back in Rome.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Most emperors try to have a triumph for killing people.

[Greg Jenner]

People. Right, The Julius Caesar thing.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Right, Julius Caesar thing. Claudius has a big triumph for conquering Britain. Triumphs and great procession through Rome parading your captives and everything that goes with masochis, you know? Yeah, that's Roman masochis. Now what Nero does is come home and he has a slightly different sort of tribe entering up at the temple of the God of music, Apollo, celebrating his sporting and cultural victories.

[Greg Jenner]

He's the Simone Biles of the ancient world.

[Patton Oswalt]

Best lead in a comedic performance.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I tend to think that I'm on Nero's side here, possibly. All right, Maybe if the Romans had spent more time having triumphal processions and celebrating people who were good at arts and culture, the world might possibly have been a nicer place.

[Patton Oswalt]

So you're saying shows like the Voice and British Idol are keeping us from worldwide war and conquest?

[Professor Mary Beard]

You could take it up.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yes, you could take it. And that's why I did the Great American Baking Show.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Maybe he's trying to find another way of being an emperor, and we just have not got on that his wavelength.

[Greg Jenner]

It's interesting that he's trying to create a new model of what power looks like.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I mean, I think the jury's out, but that we have to keep that as a possibility. But.

[Greg Jenner]

And we're going to do this quickly because it's pretty horrible. And I'm actually going to give a trigger warning to listeners because the content warning, because this is horrible. The violence, the. We're gonna talk about enforced suicide. We're gonna talk about domestic violence.

[Patton Oswalt]

Patton, don't make any jokes. Patton, hang on. Patton, don't make any jokes right now. Turn it off.

[Greg Jenner]

You know what? Absolutely. Just like, this bit's just grim, right? So feel free to just, you know, just go, ugh, what a horrible man. But, like, he was brutal to his lovers. He had three wives and. Horrible man. Right?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah. I mean, Nero's first wife is Claudius's natural, as it were, an inverted commas daughter, Britannicus's sister, a woman called Octavia. And it was a Kind of a brilliant move in a way, for sewing up Nero's, you know, perfect right to rule.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And the picture we're given of her is that she was very virtuous and that what then happens, according to the standard story, is that Nero falls madly in love with somebody else, then in order to get rid of Octavia, accuses her of sterility because there was no children. Roman men didn't usually think that no children was their problem. It was the wife's problem. He divorced her, sent her into exile, and then had her killed. And it is then said that her head was sent to Nero's new lover.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You know, this is about as horrible. I mean, the story is horrible. Whatever the truth, I'm afraid what happens next to the new woman, the woman called Papaya. Right. Is not much better, honestly, because she's supposed to be a beauty. Nero nicked from her previous husband. She does get pregnant. He's wanting an heir. And it's when she gets pregnant that he finally divorces Octavia. Nero and Papa have a daughter, but she soon dies. She's made a God very quickly, but she dies. Papa gets pregnant again. And then in what is kind of one of Rome's also horriblest bits of domestic violence, if it's true, he comes back after an evening out and he hits her in the stomach while she's pregnant and she dies.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Sorry, Patton.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It is. It's truly. You know, Roman history is. Is full of stuff like this. And you have to.

[Patton Oswalt]

History is full of stuff like this.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And people. That's what it. And it's a cruel, cruel story. And. And of course, he does the big sort of tears and, you know, the.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Classic kind of remorse come hypocrisy line. And he says he's so upset, he wants to keep her, so he has her embalmed, not cremated. And then he conveniently gets remarried.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. To a third wife. Messalina.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. I mean, it's not. Not very nice.

[Patton Oswalt]

Did Messalina survive or.

[Professor Mary Beard]

She survived him.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, okay.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And she actually had more husbands than he'd had.

[Greg Jenner]

Fair play. Good, good. All right, thank you for hearing that. And he also had a lover who was called Sporus.

[Professor Mary Beard]

In some ways, this is even. It's even worse partly because it is probably not as untypical as we might imagine, because Nero has an enslaved boy who he thinks looks like Poppaya, looks very like Papaya. He has him castrated and then he makes him his lover.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, there's another person in his life who he Sort of, you know, is another enemy of his. Have you ever heard of Queen Buddha?

[Patton Oswalt]

I've heard Boudicca is. Is that with her breast bare, like, fighting the. She had. She had. She's topless at one point, isn't she? Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Might depend on the movie you've been watching. I'm not sure.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It depends on the statue or the movie.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly. She's Queen of the. She's queen of the Iceni tribe, or the Icene tribe who are in Britain. She leads a rebellion against Rome and it's a pretty interesting story. Have you ever heard of this story? Is this one new to you?

[Patton Oswalt]

Vaguely.

[Greg Jenner]

Vaguely. Okay. She's kind of. Kind of iconic.

[Patton Oswalt]

I know she had her boobs out sometimes.

[Greg Jenner]

Called Boadicea. You might know her by Boadicea. Different name.

[Patton Oswalt]

Anyway, yeah, vaguely.

[Greg Jenner]

We have an episode on Buddha, Kofi. There's one I've. Check it out. It's our first ever episode.

[Patton Oswalt]

You said that she was his lover.

[Greg Jenner]

No. Enemy. Enemy.

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

So she was the Queen of the Iceni in what, Essex? In East England.

[Professor Mary Beard]

East England. And she. I mean, she's an example of an appalling consequence of Roman cruelty, really. Her husband, the King Proseutagus, is like many of the tribal kings in Britain and is a collaborator with Roman. He would have called himself an ally, we might say. Collaborator. When he dies, he rather cannily makes his heir jointly, Nero and his two daughters, thinking that that would somehow kind of sew up the safety of his kingdom. What actually happens is the Romans in the province come in, they ransack the place, they trash it, and they rape the daughters. At that point, Boudicca says, according to the story, no, thanks. And she leads a rebellion and. And she's successful for a bit. She destroys London, she destroys St. Albans.

[Greg Jenner]

Colchester.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah, Colchester. But the governor of the province, a guy called Suetonius Paulinus, who's no relation of the historian, brutally squashes this. I mean, in the end, most rebellions are put down because the rebels just can't withstand the Roman legions. And he completely trashes them. He takes the most violent reprisal against the rebels. And it's the upshot. And it kind of is strange and slightly more optimistic because it shows you that. That not all Romans are as nasty as others. There's a whistleblower on the governor's staff.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And the whistleblower writes to Nero and says this, these reprises have got to stop. And Nero very soon replaces the governor, replaces Suetonius Paulinus with a guy who has a wonderful name. Called Petronius, which means lazy. Sod basically.

[Patton Oswalt]

Means what?

[Professor Mary Beard]

Lazy? No, lazy.

[Greg Jenner]

So and so lazy.

[Professor Mary Beard]

So lazy.

[Greg Jenner]

So and so.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You know, kind of. Turpilianus. It means kind of slow, lazy.

[Patton Oswalt]

Okay. Torpid.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Mr. Sluggish. Do nothing.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Mr. Sluggish. But it was a right move. There'd been this absolute monster of a governor, really wreaking havoc against, okay. The rebellious Britons. But. But horribly right. And to the credit of Nero's administration. Whether Nero really had anything to do with it or not, we don't know. They took notice of the whistleblower and they replaced the governor.

[Greg Jenner]

So what are you making of Nero so far? Obviously pretty monstrous in terms of his personal life.

[Patton Oswalt]

I'm torn because. God, I love the theater.

[Greg Jenner]

No, have you ever heard of the Grand Great Fire? Have you heard. Have you heard of Nero fiddling while Rome burns?

[Patton Oswalt]

I mean, I've heard that phrase.

[Greg Jenner]

In what context have you heard the phrase.

[Patton Oswalt]

In the context of Rome is burning to the ground and he is. I've always pictured it as him just alone, just amusing himself, playing the fiddle. Which. Did they have fiddles?

[Greg Jenner]

No, they didn't.

[Patton Oswalt]

So was he playing a liar? Lear. Liar. Or a lute or what was he doing?

[Professor Mary Beard]

People say it must. It's a liar. Yeah, it's a lie.

[Greg Jenner]

I like to imagine the truth is it's a liar. He's a liar. Yeah, it's a lie. Okay. The Great Fire of Rome happened.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, it did.

[Greg Jenner]

Did happen.

[Patton Oswalt]

What do they think started it?

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, this is a good question. What do you. Okay. Who do you think.

[Patton Oswalt]

I again, because of the phrase he fiddled while Rome burned. Doesn't it. To me, it feels like he set the fire. Almost like a gangster burning down a nightclub that he wants to get the insurance on.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You. You ought to have been an ancient Roman is. You just got the right mindset.

[Patton Oswalt]

So close.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. You're on the money all the time.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Because you know what? One thing we know about Rome is it was. It was a tinderbox that fires happened in the city.

[Greg Jenner]

It was always on fire.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Always.

[Greg Jenner]

Rome was always. At any point, Rome was always on fire.

[Patton Oswalt]

Really?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And they didn't have very good firefighting experience, equipment. And the most that they could do in. Is they did in this case was actually just knock down buildings so that to have a fire break.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And nevertheless, the story arose that Nero had started it. Suetonius thinks he started it in order to clear the ground so he could build himself a fantastic new palace, because that's exactly what he did.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. That's your mob boss argument?

[Patton Oswalt]

That's the mob boss thing?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

You know, the golden. It's called the Golden House. He built it fast palace. Fantastic.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

What a shame.

[Patton Oswalt]

This city just burned down. I guess I gotta buy a whole new palace here.

[Greg Jenner]

Hey, boss, did you just take out fire insurance?

[Patton Oswalt]

What are they. What are the odds? It's weird. All right. Anyway.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Another historian, Cassius Dio, he doesn't have that argument so much as saying look, but he just wanted to kind of go down in a blaze. Right. He really wanted, as it were, to be like the king of Troy and see his city blaze around him and go down with his city, you know, because it was such a great way to go.

[Greg Jenner]

So he wants to sort of cosplay as King Priam in the Iliad.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah.

[Patton Oswalt]

And the story is King Priam fantasy camp.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The story really is that he, Nero, was outside Rome when the fire started. But people said that they'd seen some of Nero's staff going around, you know, setting fire to things. You know, the kind of the. We'd say with a can of oil and some matches, but it was wearing the Nero merch.

[Greg Jenner]

Right. You know, with the kind of the football jackets that says, I'm with the king. Yeah, I'm with the emperor.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And he does come back, and it is repeatedly reported that he goes. And he does go and watch it from just a little bit, you know, from. Into safety. And while he does that, he. He plays his lyre and he sings a song about the destruction of Troy, the city of Troy.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, that's what. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, look, if.

[Patton Oswalt]

If you got to seize the moment, that's such a great moment for the. Graham, when you got the city burning behind you, you sing that song, man.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Again, there are things to be said in favor of him and against.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, okay, so in the against column. In the against column, he blames Christians.

[Professor Mary Beard]

He blamed the Christians and he punished that. There were. There was already a. A relatively small sect of Christians in Rome. Roman pagan writers thought it was perfectly fine to trash the Christians.

[Greg Jenner]

So they're fine with this. Suetonius, Tacitus. They're like, yeah, good. Blame the Christians.

[Professor Mary Beard]

The punishments that he meted out were so awful that it was said that there was even pity for the Christians because of the horrible ways in which he put them to death. So basically, Christians were. Were partly fair game in this kind of PR campaign. But Nero is said to have gone too far.

[Patton Oswalt]

Is this the, like, throwing Christians to the lions or.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It comes it comes, that comes a bit later but. But in the Christian tradition it's. Nero is said to be the first persecutor of the Christians. Nero is a kind of the devil incarnate in Christian teaching. And it goes back to this, it goes back to him blaming them for the fire of Rome and punishing them horribly.

[Greg Jenner]

There is a genuine conspiracy against him. There's a thing called the Pisonian conspiracy.

[Patton Oswalt]

This conspiracy of people hating me because I suck. That's terrible.

[Greg Jenner]

Arguably justified, right, this conspiracy.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah, it comes after the fire, the year after the fire, in 65 CE.

[Greg Jenner]

This one. Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And it's in 65 CE and tens 50 odd people are charged with being in a conspiracy to overthrow Rome. Overthrow Nero, not Rome.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, he is Rome. He is Rome.

[Professor Mary Beard]

What they want to do is they want to a new emperor. They got a guy called Piso as a potential candidate and replace Nero. Now why it's important in the Neronian story is that Seneca the tutor was said to be implicated in it. So Nero's tutor by this stage has turned against him and he is forced to suicide because that's a standard form of Roman execution.

[Greg Jenner]

So seneca is implicated, 19 people are executed, 13 are banished, 51 people are charged. Nero, Nero crushes the conspiracy. But three years later another one comes along because he has, he's alienated enough people now that people are like, well look, the first, I mean he tried five times to murder his mum. You know, if at first he don't.

[Patton Oswalt]

Succeed, they learn from him. You gotta keep showing up and trying.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly.

[Patton Oswalt]

Can't give up.

[Greg Jenner]

And they don't collapse the ceiling over his head and they don't send him an unsinkable boat.

[Professor Mary Beard]

No, this was a military. This was a military conspiracy. It was a military revolt.

[Greg Jenner]

This is a coup, right?

[Professor Mary Beard]

It's a coup. It's basically a coup. And it's not trying to kind of, it's not a few of the kind of not terribly effective elite like Seneca and his friends doing it in Rome. This starts in the provinces and Nero is sees the game is up, there's fighting. But in the end it's clear that, that people are turning away from Nero to the rebels. And what he does is he goes out to a suburban villa and he realizes he has to kill himself.

[Greg Jenner]

His Praetorian guard have deserted him right now his bodyguard have switched sides to this guy Galba who's coming in every.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Everybody is doing, everybody is deserting him and he goes out and there's a pathetic. They're very really Pathetic stories again. Believe it or not, I don't know about how he was hopeless even in when he came to try to die. And he has some very odd last words.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah? What do you think his last words are, Patton?

[Patton Oswalt]

Tell me his last wor. What his supposed last words were.

[Professor Mary Beard]

But he's got more than one lot, I'm afraid. But the famous one is qualis artifex pereo. What an artist. And artifacts. What an artist is dying when I die.

[Greg Jenner]

Some proper ego there path.

[Patton Oswalt]

Some confidence, my friend, isn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. With your last gesture to say the world is about to lose a great artist. Yeah.

[Patton Oswalt]

That is ridiculous. I gotta remember that for when I die. Hang on, let me write that down. I'll say that when I die. All right, go ahead.

[Greg Jenner]

So his famous last words are what an artist in me dies. He is assisted in his death and dies aged. How old do you think he is.

[Patton Oswalt]

Pattern in his 40s.

[Professor Mary Beard]

He's 30.

[Greg Jenner]

Whoa, what a life, eh?

[Patton Oswalt]

Well, all The Beatles were 30 when they broke up, so he did the same thing and he got it all in quick.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like Paul McCartney was slightly less monstrous than Nero.

[Patton Oswalt]

No. Yeah. If only Nero had said, the love you take is equal to the love you make. I don't know. I mean, Good Lord.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Patton Oswalt]

30.

[Greg Jenner]

He was 30 years old.

[Patton Oswalt]

He did all that in 30?

[Greg Jenner]

He did.

[Patton Oswalt]

God, I'm so lazy. I gotta do more with my life.

[Professor Mary Beard]

I wouldn't.

[Greg Jenner]

I wouldn't. I don't know. I personally, I wouldn't like, you know, mirror yourself against Nero. He's not one of the great emperors in terms of modeling. Yeah, yeah. But it's. It's a hell of a life. Right. So that's the end of Nero's life. He died in 68 CE. The Nuance Window. Time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Patton and I sit quietly for two minutes while Professor Mary takes to the stage and sings for us. Perhaps, I don't know. Unlike Nero, she is not locking us into the theatre. You wait. We're here winning late. So my stopwatch is ready, Mary. Take it away, Professor Beard.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Okay, I've got two mini nuances. And the first one picks up a theme that we've been. We've been playing with actually, quite often in our discussion. Tried to pull that together. And. And it's what I suppose I call the T word. And it's T for truth. Right. Are the kind of amazing, intriguing, memorable, brilliantly evocative stories that we read about Nero. Are they actually true? With a capital T Now we can't actually literally know that. A long time ago I used to really worry about that, but I've sort of become a post truth person now. Because what I think is really important about these stories, and they are important, is that the fact that the Romans told them about their emperors and they sometimes told the same stories about different emperors. And in a way, it was their way. I think telling these stories, thinking them up construction was their way of getting their head around what the power of autocrats was, what you might fear about them, what they might do to you. And so in a way, I think they're our way of getting inside the head of the Romans to think about how the Romans thought about emperors. My second nuance is that it's easier to complain about the gaps in our knowledge about emperors like this than to celebrate what we know about Nero. And, you know, I'm guilty of that. I'm complaining about what we don't know all the time. But really, we should be turning this on its head, I think, and we should. What is amazing is that 2,000 years on, we know so much about Nero, not just in the amazing writing that we've been looking at, but we can still hold the coins of Nero. We can still visit Nero's golden house, or at least part of it. We can walk through Nero's corridors and we can see where he sat down or lay down to dinner. So my message to people is, if you're in Rome, go and see Nero's golden house House. Because you still can.

[Greg Jenner]

You still can. Are you gonna go and see Nero's golden.

[Patton Oswalt]

I'm leaving right now. I'm going. I'm gonna go get a taxi.

[Greg Jenner]

It's interesting, isn't it, the idea of if these are scurrilous rumors, if these are kind of monstrous lies, they still tell us about the Romans.

[Patton Oswalt]

No, that. I love that aspect of it. You can tell what their daily lives and also what their. It's almost like you can tell the psychological scars that are left on a population by almost the nursery rhymes and myths that they tell later on. If those things are, you know, like how Dracula is really just about how terrified they were of foreigners coming in. They just couldn't handle it. Victorian England was so wound up. So, yeah, this is them. You know, the emperors were bad enough as they were, but it had such an emotional impact on them that all the stories got blown up even crazier.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Professor Mary Beard]

And historians ought to be interested in things that aren't true as well as things that are.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Patton Oswalt]

Yes, because the things that aren't true were still made up by somebody for a reason.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Yeah, exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know now? Time now for the so what do you know now. This is our quick fire quiz for.

[Patton Oswalt]

Hang on, let me look at my.

[Greg Jenner]

Notes to see how much he's learned. Patton, tell me about your notes. They are extensive. I can see.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, my gosh. I mean, it's just the. I've written them, so I took so many notes. That actually just looks like lines on a blank page. That's how small I had to write them down.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Your font is so beautifully accurate. It's actually imperceptible to the eye. Yeah. Okay, so no notes at all. Let's see if it's gone in. Okay. Ten questions for you. Question one. What was the name of Emperor Nero's mother?

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, Agrippina.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, very good. Well done. Agrippina the younger. Question 2. Through what method did Nero's uncle, Emperor Claudius, and stepbrother Britannicus both allegedly die?

[Patton Oswalt]

They were poisoned by different modes of poison.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good. Mushroom, or whatever it had been.

[Patton Oswalt]

Mushrooms. Every time. That would have been a little.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 3. Who was Nero's famously stoic tutor and advisor who he later turned against?

[Patton Oswalt]

That would be Seneca.

[Greg Jenner]

It would be Seneca. Very good. Question four. Name one of Nero's three wives.

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, dear God. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute. I can't remember.

[Greg Jenner]

The name.

[Patton Oswalt]

Begins with Olivia. I don't know. I'm so sorry. I'm telling you right now, I'm drawing a blank.

[Greg Jenner]

It's all right. Octavia popped up.

[Patton Oswalt]

Coming.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Most people forget the names of emperor's wives.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 5. What did Nero do after his first shave?

[Patton Oswalt]

Well, what didn't he do? He got an hour. He put all his shavings in a little gold box and dedicated it to Jupiter. And then he threw basically a raging kegger where there was singing and basically a pew party. And can I just say, I'm so glad that I got Dame Mary Beard, historian emeritus, to say pube party. That is going to be on the top of some of my. Next time I'm on this show, I want to be Grammy and Emmy award winning and maker of Mary Beard saying the term pube party. Pat noswalt.

[Greg Jenner]

Done. Question 6. Nero still won the Olympic chariot race despite falling out. How many horses were pulling?

[Patton Oswalt]

He had 10. That was a 10 horsepower chariot, baby.

[Greg Jenner]

Way too many horses. Yeah, yeah. He crashed out, but he still won. Question 7. Which queen led the British revolt of the Iceni against Nero in Britain.

[Patton Oswalt]

That would be Boudicca.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Boudicca or Boadicea.

[Patton Oswalt]

Boadicea.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Very good. Question 8. Name one cause given by classical authors for how the great fire of Rome allegedly started. Conspiracy theory, please.

[Patton Oswalt]

One of the alleged thing, and it's the third one, because it's the one I thought of, is it was started by Nero himself in order to a build his big new gold palace and also have someone to be able to persecute Christians.

[Greg Jenner]

Yep, that's two. Very good. Well done. Okay, question nine. What were Nero's last words?

[Patton Oswalt]

Oh, his last words were, it's better to burn out than no. His last words were, what? A great artist dies in me.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good. Well done. Very good. Question 10. Oh, how old was Nero when he died?

[Patton Oswalt]

Dude was 30.

[Greg Jenner]

He was very much 30.

[Patton Oswalt]

30.

[Greg Jenner]

30. Young at 30.

[Patton Oswalt]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, very good. And I'm gonna give you a bonus question to see if you can get 11 out. See if you can get 10 out of 11. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, bonus question. Which country did he tour?

[Patton Oswalt]

In the 60s, he did a tour much like Elton John. In the 80s, he did a tour of Greece.

[Greg Jenner]

I'm giving you 10 out of 11. There you go. Perfect spot. You earned it. You deserved it. Fantastic. Thank you, Patton. And thank you, of course, Professor Mary Beard. If you want more from Patton, of course, we have our episode on the American War of Independence, which was an absolute hoot. And for more Nero context, if you want to put him in context, we have, obviously, the episode on Agrippina, his mum. We have the episode on Boudicca, his mortal enemy. And we have an episode on the rise of Julius Caesar. In some ways a model, in other ways not. They're all very interesting episodes. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with friends. Subscribe to youo're Dead to me on BBC Sounds to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can [e-mail] or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the magnificent Professor Mary Beard. Thank you, Mary.

[Professor Mary Beard]

Total pleasure.

[Greg Jenner]

Yay. And in Comedy Corner, we had the outstanding Pube Games inventor, Patton Oswald.

[Patton Oswalt]

No pube party, sir.

[Greg Jenner]

Sorry.

[Patton Oswalt]

Pube games. We're not animals here, please.

[Greg Jenner]

We had Patton Oswald. Thank you, Patton.

[Patton Oswalt]

Thanks for having me on again. I really appreciate it.

[Greg Jenner]

And to you, lovely listener. Join me next time as we reassess another historical figure and possibly decide they're just as bad as we thought. But for now I'm off to go and launch my own podcast awards in Greece that only I can win. Bye. Your debt to me is a BBC studios production for BBC radio 4.

[Amanda Yannucci]

Political language can seem archaic.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died.

[Amanda Yannucci]

Sometimes bamboozly.

[Professor Mary Beard]

It's a theme park with a five foot log flume.

[Greg Jenner]

From one thought to another and very often beyond words. I don't know how to describe the language they use.

[Amanda Yannucci]

I'm Amanda Yannucci. I'm all reset and turbocharged to stress test, to destruction used and abused buzzwords and phrases from the world of politics. I come with a dazzling array of guest presenters and I'll be exploring the verbal tricks of the political trade, the intentions behind them and the effect they have on all of us. The new series of Strong Message Here with me, Amanda Yannucci from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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