The Roman Chronicles - Titans - Nero

He didn't fiddle while Rome burned.

That story was written by his enemies. Most of what you know about Nero was.

The fifth and final Julio-Claudian emperor was thirty years old when he died in a borrowed house outside Rome on June 9th, 68 CE. In fourteen years as emperor he had governed with genuine brilliance, committed genuine atrocities, built a palace that took the breath away, and performed on public stages in a voice that Greek audiences stood for. He had killed his mother. He had buried a daughter who lived four months. He had been the student of the greatest philosopher of his age and the patron of a city he loved with the specific, frustrated love of a man who could see what it could be and could not quite make it be that.

The men who wrote his history needed him to be a monster. This book reads their accounts against the grain and asks a different question: not what was Nero guilty of, but who was he?

Nero: The Last of His Line tells the story from the inside — through seven voices, from the emperor himself to a fuller in the Subura who cleaned cloth for a living and assessed the reign the only way that mattered, which is to say practically.

The history you think you know. The people you don't.