What Nero's life tells us about the origins of CY's integrity crisis

Few figures have been more vilified and loathed throughout history than the Roman Emperor Nero, whose 14-year reign, almost 2000 years ago, has been portrayed as the epitome of tyranny and immorality.

It is from the historians of the period - Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius - that we get most of what we know about him. They presented him as a bloody and sleazy pervert, a fool, a sodomite, a dreamer, a vain and hopeless artist. Down the centuries, he had been accused - and condemned without appeal - of having murdered his mother, Agrippina; of killing his pregnant wife, Poppaea, by kicking her; of poisoning his adopted father and brother; of the senseless execution of Octavia, his adopted sister and first wife; and of having ordered his teacher, the philosopher Seneca, to commit suicide.

To top it off, he had Rome burned down in the year AD64, fiddling while looking at the flames engulfing the city, just to prove an able architect in rebuilding it, which he did. He then accused Christians of causing the fire and had them tortured and killed.

He ordered the construction of illegal structures (at least they were declared illegal later and taken care of): roads, tunnels and his magnificent palace, the Domus Aurea, later buried under rubble by Emperor Trajan, with an artificial lake in front of it, right where the Colosseum today stands.

It's a good story, so good that it has been made into plays and films and represented in paintings. The trouble is that a great deal of it just isn't true. It isn't credible that Nero set fire to Rome or that he sent thousands of Christians to their death: there were few Christians in Rome at the time. Current historical thinking is that he didn't kill his adopted father and brother; nor did he mortally wound his wife, Poppaea. Nero wasn't perfect, but then neither were those around him: Seneca was a ruthless loan shark and Nero's mother, Agrippina, was a power-hungry serial killer.

How did we end up with this compelling narrative, convenient and useful to many through the ages, but one which is ultimately fallacious? As George Orwell put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Nero aspired to be a populist and an artist, helping the poor, curtailing the power of the oligarchy that controlled the empire. He did not start new wars, and limited gladiatorial games. By doing so, he stepped on some very powerful toes. The owners of these toes reacted angrily, spreading rumours that were picked up by historians like Tacitus and Suetonius who were serving new emperors. The rich set to work to unseat him on moral grounds, their only option. Nero had the blood of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Mark Antony, Agrippa and Germanicus, and that made him a living treasure in the eyes of the people, who worshipped him for that.