Was Nero Mad?

Another letter wings its way to Potentially Interesting Towers, gripped tightly in the talons of a great, black raven. Or shoved under the privy door late one night, I don’t remember. It asks a simple but intriguing question:

Was Nero Mad?

It's a fascinating question because the obvious temptation is just to say yes, he was nuttier than a box full of squirrels, but in doing so, that raises a few points of his own. Firstly, who am I to say whether Nero was 'mad' or suffered from some sort of mental condition? I ain't no psychiatrist, I ain't no doctor with a degree, and it doesn't take no IQ to see that stomping your wife to death and building elaborate traps to kill your own mother meant that Nero was at least not able to think. Think. Think. Clearly.

Obviously, there are tests that one can apply that will, I believe, remotely diagnose someone with some sort of mental disorder, but I'm a humble historian, and I certainly don't feel particularly comfortable trying to diagnose the health condition of a man from 2,000 years ago, the clearest descriptions of whom we tend to get from people who hated him. And therein lies the second problem. Do we just believe the words of his biographers, the majority of whom were, of course, rich elites who had to put up with his obvious character flaws and were only too happy to ruin him after he died? Was Nero mad just because they made him out to be?

Thirdly, was he any 'madder' than any of the others? Vespasian, who ultimately replaced him in the long run, is seen as something of a curmudgeonly, gruff, but overtly sensible and rational leader, but by our standards, he too was a total fruit loop who gloried in the death and destruction that seemed ingrained into the Roman psyche. The Temple to Gore that Vespasian started, the Colosseum, was a central part not only of the city's architecture but of the very fabric of Roman identity. The arena dominated its surroundings like the great Gothic medieval cathedrals of the Middle Ages, or like the overbearing loom of medieval castles like Caernarfon or Windsor, or, come to that, the teetering skyscrapers of the central parts of modern cities. No Roman temple ever matched the sheer domineering presence of the arena. Public slaughter was clearly a fundamental part of social life and a quasi-religious ritual which needed a venue to match its scale and importance. It seemed that society was prepared to devote unlimited resources and attention to this formalised massacre. Vespasian knew this and devoted much of his early effort and attempts to win over society by glorying in it. We'd consider him a psychopath today, but in general terms, he was the most sensible and down-to-earth emperor the Romans had seen since Augustus.

So what I'm going to try and avoid here too much is simply going over the sources and seeing what they say and then trying to extrapolate an answer from there because then we'd have to go into why those sources might be leading us astray and I'd be 25% of the way to writing another book by midnight. Instead, let's look at the basics.

Nero was popular among the people, if not the Senate, for much of his reign and even after it, too. For years after he died, the Cult of Nero flourished, and several people came forward claiming to be the resurrected emperor, wanting to claim back his throne. For the first part of his period in office, things went relatively smoothly and even after the infamous Great Fire of 64 AD, he acted promptly and wisely in organising relief efforts, getting people back to work, rebuilding the city and restoring order. I mean, sure, he went a bit mad at the Christians in the aftermath, but they weren't very important in the great scheme of things, and so they were a convenient scapegoat.

Things started to go awry when he took the opportunity of all that suddenly available prime real estate to build his monstrous Domus Aurea, a golden-roofed personal Neverland Disney World, that old grumpy chops Vespasian did away with and built Slaughter Walmart on top of.

And then, obviously, he begins what appears to be an increasingly speedy descent into madness, spotting plotters around every pillar, having friends, lovers, wives and mothers executed and then when some relatively minor provincial troublemakers started making noises, he acted so rashly and with such acceptance that his number was up that he almost gave up even trying and ended up having to get his freedman to help him commit suicide. A wiser, more sensible, calmer head could surely have ridden out the minor threats that people like Galba posed to his reign, but he seemed almost keen to die the dramatic actor's death that he'd always wanted. One last spin around the stage before collapsing like a giant Felicia and proclaiming he was too good for this world. It was a hell of a way to go, and in a way, he was right because we're still talking about him now.

But what caused all this if we can't use remote diagnosis or the sources to give us a clue? Can we use something else?

Nero was 16 when he became emperor after his mother, Agrippina, fed his adoptive father, Claudius, a particularly tasty plate of the poisoner's favourite meal to cook - mushrooms. Mushrooms were a great vehicle for poison because if the poison stuck, it didn't matter, and if it didn't and the target just got sick, you could blame it on bad mushrooms.

So, he was young and probably never a good choice to be emperor. Therein lies a problem because, constitutionally and legally, Rome never had the need for an emperor at all. Ever. The only reason they ever had an emperor was because the Senate, who were nothing more than an old boys talking shop, could be easily persuaded to accept one by having a few of them strangled and thrown in the Tiber and then turning up somewhere north of the Rubicon with a massive army. The law had no say in who the emperor was, but military power did.

Subsequently, when Augustus introduced the rather barmy, monarch-like idea of passing the power down to an heir, it then became a problem that nobody could choose who the next emperor would be either. Not even the predecessor could nominate someone at such and such an age, only to discover that the funny little boy in the marching sandals turned out to be, in his 20s, Caligula and was an absolute monster.

There were no rules for who could be emperor. Just the man with the biggest army who took power if it needed taking or inherited it from someone else. Likewise, there were no rules for who could qualify as a good heir. The only system in place was that one bloke nominated the next.

The Senate must have been acutely aware of this failing, particularly as it sat there and watched people who didn't give a shit, like Tiberius, swan off to Capri to lie the life of leisure, followed by a swivel-eyed loon like Claudius. They vacillated, in the hours following Caligula's murder, over whether to simply return to a Republican model because Caligula had left no heir, and so they had no candidate to follow him and no way of determining what a candidate even was. Nobody dared stand up and point out these failings because they were the idea of the Divine Augustus and how he could possibly have got it wrong.

So a lot of Nero's failings might not solely have been down to his own inability to do the job, but also in the fact that, unless you had some kind of special talent, the job was essentially too much for someone like him. He should never have been put in that position in the first place and the job failed him as much as he failed it.

In addition to all this, the problem was that the only way they had to get new emperors was through inheritance. Augustus had shown that not only could you pass down power through your bloodline, but if they died in mysterious circumstances, you could pass down inheritance via someone else's bloodline by the act of adoption. All you had to be to qualify as an heir was to be a favourite and have some vague connection to the Augustan family.

Add to the mix that marriage among the elite in society was a largely closed shop. Aristocrats were forbidden from marrying below the ranks, and so the only people they could marry were other nobles. Ultimately, those nobles were somehow connected to Augustus. Following Augustus' own imperatives to have more children, these nobles generated more nobles who generated more nobles, all of them descended from royalty.

By the time of Nero, Rome was awash with rich young men who had power and, potentially, military backing and were every bit as qualified, in ancestral terms, to be emperor as Nero was. Because there were no other criteria apart from Senatorial approval, for who could be the boss, Nero must have looked around him in the Senate and the Royal court and seen hundreds and hundreds of potential rivals. For a man who seemed perpetually paranoid, this must have gone some considerable way to unsettling what was seemingly a pretty unstable and fragile mental state.

A better-equipped and more bloody-minded ruler would have dealt with the situation with more haste, moving people out of harm's way, executing a few to remind everyone who wore the big boy toga and then marching off on a campaign to smash a few barbarians and get the military fully on side.

Nero didn't have that talent. He wanted to rule via the medium of the arts and through culture. What he forgot was that Romans were a bloodthirsty lot that wanted a massive building where they could watch people getting eaten by leopards. They wanted Vespasian. And they got him.

But we never call Vespasian or Titus mad because the sources were relatively kind to them. Domitian wasn't particularly worse than his father, but he also lacked the ability to be the ruler Rome needed, just like Nero did.

Whilst I cannot say for sure whether Nero was 'mad' or not, I can probably surmise that he was a bad emperor, at least in the way he was unable to carry out the job into which he was thrust as a young man. But the problem might not have been all of his own making. The system was mad, too.


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