Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, more commonly known by his adopted name, Nero Caesar, was an eccentric ruler of Rome who delighted in perversity and evil. He is well-known for his involvement in persecution of Christians, known in his time as "Followers of The Way." Nero Caesar was the last of the Julio-Claudian Caesars. His reign was a veritable rule of terror for those who failed to comply with a tyrant's wishes, no matter how absurd, brutal, or revolting.
In approximately AD 47, Claudius Caesar gained power of Rome. After three failed marriages, he married his niece, Agrippina. (This incestuous marriage would prove fatal to Claudius.) Agrippina had a son from a previous marriage, called Domitius, and she persuaded Claudius to adopt the boy, giving him the name people centuries later would remember with horror and repulsion...Nero. In spite of Nero's adoption and the four-year age difference between Nero and Britannicus, Claudius' son from his previous marriage, Claudius had no intention of making Nero his heir. Agrippina, together with her paramour Pallas and the Greek palace physician Xenophon, whom she bullied into submission, poisoned Claudius; a very short time later, after talking to his mother, a frightened Nero had his stepbrother Britannicus also poisoned. Nero was now the heir, and the fifth Caesar of Rome.
At a young age, Nero was impish and mischievous. From the times he antagonized women at the Roman baths at the age of twelve to the times he made fun of his stepbrother Britannicus to "maturity," Nero possessed a cruelty and vanity that would carry him into adulthood and remain with him all of his life. Nero was a nymphomaniac and it has been recorded that he had many marriages, was a bigamist and had trysts with members of both genders. As a young man of seventeen he was so crazed that he would wear a mask and terrorize the people of Rome, namely unsuspecting women--victims whom he violated and shamed. He had openly incestuous relations with his mother Agrippina, but when he feared that she would assassinate him, he had her murdered. She was so shamed by her son that when the assassin came, she begged for him to stab her in the "womb that bore Nero." Nero's tastes and habits were so lurid that after his mother's murder, he thoroughly and intimately examined her body, praising its beauty.
Nero considered himself a brilliant artist, skilled in music, theater, and playing the lyre. He was so vain that when he committed suicide in AD 68 he stabbed himself, careful to miss his voice box. His last words were "Qualis artifex pereo," which means, "What an artist dies in me!" Probably the most famous incident involving Nero was during the Great Fire of Rome, ironically revolving around his self-proclaimed "brilliance" in music. Watching as Rome burned from his Esqiline Terrace, he played his lyre, tears streaming down his face as his beloved palace and his valuables, such as his collections of art, his wardrobe, and lyres, burned. This is quite obviously from where the statement, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," is derived.
After the Great Fire in AD 64 destroyed a major portion of Rome, to deflect blame from himself Nero used Rome's Christians as a scapegoat. In his gardens and chariot-racing center, called the hippodrome, almost a thousand people were brutally murdered. Death alone was not punishment enough for Christians, Nero felt; the victims must endure torture beforehand. Horrible, cruel, barbaric agonies were administered to these people. One example of the truly sadistic nature of Nero is gleaned from his reported reaction to the torture of the people. Christians were chained to posts, each wearing shirts heavily saturated in nitrates, sulfur, and pitch. The posts themselves had been seeped in resin and oil. The posts were lit on fire; the people choked on the smoke, the heat mercifully rendering them unconscious with pain, and it is reported that some spent their last breaths praying to God. Nero was so impressed with the spectacle that he began to weep, saying, "Such art! Such beautiful, beautiful candles!" This was far from the extent of Nero's wicked plans for "The Way's" followers. Women suffered indignities that whetted the Caesar's thirst for perverse pleasure. Crucifixion, being impaled on spikes, being dropped from great heights, being gored, being eaten alive by wild animals that had been starved and tortured, and being burned alive on poles, pyres, or spits are only some of the repulsive ways that Nero devised to inflict slow, painful deaths upon the "arsonists," in reality guilty innocents who were ruthlessly murdered in cold blood. An estimated 977 people were massacred in two days.
Maier, Paul L. The Flames of Rome. 2nd ed. Garden City: Kregel Publications, 1995.