Biblical Profile: Nero

Nero

Nero became emperor of Rome in AD 54 at the age of 17 after his mother poisoned her husband, the emperor Claudius. Nero enjoyed performing in the limelight and was a sexually depraved and profligate man. Yet the early years of Nero’s reign were stable and competently administered by his advisers, the prefect Burrus and the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Nero’s debauched character would have been well known when Paul wrote to the Romans around AD 57 to “submit to governing authorities” as having been “placed there by God” (Rom 13:1).

Nero’s worst actions came after he arranged his mother’s murder in AD 59 (the same year in which Paul appealed to Caesar, Acts 25:11). In AD 62 he banished and then executed his wife, married his lover, and forced Burrus and Seneca into retirement. In AD 64 a fire devastated a large area of Rome. At the time, Nero was away from the city, but many people believed the rumor that Nero had set the fire himself. Nero found a scapegoat in Christians, whom he charged with the crime. Christians were widely seen as hostile to civil society and thus deserving of punishment, even if few believed that they had started the fire; they were “convicted not so much of arson as of hatred of the human race” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). The ensuing persecution of Christians in Rome was intense; it is likely that Peter and Paul were executed in Rome at this time.

In AD 66 a Jewish revolt broke out in Caesarea. Nero dispatched his general Vespasian to squelch the revolt, taking no interest in the affairs of state. He spent the next two years doing performances in Greece, leaving the responsibility of governing to a Roman prefect. Because of the opposition he encountered from leading governors in France, Spain, and Africa on his return to Rome, Nero committed suicide in AD 68, exclaiming at his death, “What an artist dies with me!” He was the last and worst emperor of the line of Julius Caesar. (See also the study notes on Rev 13:3, 11, 18; 17:8, 10-11.)

Passages for Further Study

Rom 13:1-7