Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome Spiral-Bound | November 8, 2022

Anthony Everitt, Roddy Ashworth

★★★☆☆+ from 101 to 500 ratings

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A striking, nuanced biography of Nero--the controversial populist ruler and last of the Caesars--and a fascinating, street-level portrait of ancient Rome itself, from an acclaimed biographer and historian.

The Roman emperor Nero has long been the very image of a bad ruler--cruel, vain, and incompetent. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. He supposedly set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. Afterward he cleared the charred ruins of the city center and, in their place, built a vast palace. Historians of his day despised him, and it's their recollections that have been passed down through the ages.

But, in all of the horror, there is a mystery. For a long time after his deposition and suicide, anonymous hands laid flowers on his grave. The monster was loved. In this nuanced biography, Anthony Everitt, the celebrated biographer of classical Greece and Rome, reveals the contradictions inherent in the reign of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus and offers a reappraisal of his life. Everitt also brings ancient Rome to life, showing the crowded streets that made the city prone to fires, political intrigues that could turn deadly in an instant, and vast building projects that continuously remade the Roman landscape. In this teeming and politically unstable world, Nero did terrible things, but the larger empire was also well managed under his rule. He presided over a diplomatic triumph with the rival Parthian empire, and Everitt teams up with investigative journalist Roddy Ashworth to tell the epic story of Rome’s conquest of Britain and British queen Boudica’s doomed revolt against Nero’s legions. Nero was also a champion of arts and culture whose own great love was music, and he won the loyalty of the lower classes with great spectacles. In many ways he was ahead of his time, particularly in the way he looked to Greece and the eastern half of the empire as crucial to Rome's future. Nero had a vision for Rome, but, wracked by insecurity and guilt-ridden over assassinations he ordered, perhaps he never really had the stomach to rule it.

This is the bloodstained story of one of Rome's most notorious emperors. Nero's rule has become a byword for cruelty, decadence, and despotism, but in Everitt's hands, his life is a cautionary tale about the mettle it takes to rule. 

Story Locale:Ancient Rome
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 448 pages
ISBN-10: 059313320X
Item Weight: 1.6 lbs
Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
Customer Reviews: 3 out of 5 stars 101 to 500 ratings
“This exciting and provocative book grabs the reader while supporting its arguments with careful classical scholarship. The authors write with authority and elegance. Nero is a pleasure to read.”—Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium

“A nuanced biography of Roman emperor Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68 BCE . . . [Anthony Everitt and Roddy Ashworth] evoke the period with wit and precision. Ancient history buffs will be pleased.”Publishers Weekly

Praise for Anthony Everitt

Alexander the Great

“Reads as easily as a novel . . . [Anthony] Everitt has a wealth of anecdotes and two millennia of histories to work with, and he delivers and interprets them flawlessly. Nearly unparalleled insight into the period and the man make this a story for everyone.”Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The Rise of Rome


“Fascinating history and a great read.”Chicago Sun-Times

“Everitt writes for the informed and the uninformed general reader alike, in a brisk, conversational style, with a modern attitude of skepticism and realism.”The Dallas Morning News

“Elegant, swift and faultless.”The Spectator
Anthony Everitt, a former visiting professor in the visual and performing arts at Nottingham Trent University, has written extensively on European and classical culture. He is the author of Cicero, Augustus, Alexander the Great, Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, The Rise of Rome, and The Rise of Athens. He has served as secretary general of the Arts Council of Great Britain and lives near Colchester, England's first recorded town, founded by the Romans. Roddy Ashworth is an award-winning investigative journalist, former national news editor and visiting lecturer in media ethics at City University London.

Author Residence: Colchester, England