December 13 was this year’s third Sunday of Advent, which traditionally focuses on the joy of Christmas. Joy and its variants are seen throughout the Bible but one of the best known passages is in St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians wherein he writes, “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, rejoice!” He wrote that as a prisoner in Rome awaiting an appearance before Nero, a man not known for his tender mercies. St. Paul made it clear that true joy is not dependent on circumstances or material goods but on the Person of Jesus Christ.
Thinking about this brought to mind a 2014 cover story in National Geographic: “Rome’s Bad Boy: Nero Rises From the Ashes.” The cover is a photo of the majestic statue erected in his home town, Anzio in 2010.
As a child in Venezuela, I’d hear adults say something along the lines of, “Más malo que Nerón,” [“More wicked than Nero”]. I never imagined I’d grow up to hear learned individuals defend Nero. But even that is nothing new under the sun. After all, the ancient prophet warns, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
What follows is a letter I wrote my family shortly after reading the article while away on a business trip in 2014.
Dear Family:
T.S. Eliot famously said that those who deny God will pay their respects to Hitler or Stalin. And as we put God farther from our thoughts, we will surely fall for attempts to rehabilitate monsters. Especially explicitly anti-Christian monsters.
The then-Mayor of Anzio, Luciano Bruschini, commissioned the statue [on the National Geographic cover]. He says, “As children, we were taught that he was evil – among the worst emperors of all. Doing a little research, I came to conclude that it’s not true. I consider Nero to be a good, even great emperor, and maybe the most beloved of the entire empire. He was a great reformer. The senators were rich, and they owned slaves. He took from them and gave to the poor. He was the first socialist!”
Of course, you will be shocked! shocked! to know that Mayor Bruschini is also a socialist.
As you might recall, Nero was considered by many in the apostolic and post apostolic era to be the Beast described in the book of Revelation. Such interpretation largely fell into disuse in succeeding centuries and some now even consider it to be heresy, because such a reading would deny the futuristic view of Revelation so prevalent today.
Without entering into an eschatological argument … we ought to at least consider why so many through the ages have thought Nero to have been that beast (recognizing that the epithet applies to an individual as well as to a kingdom, depending on the context).
What follows is not an analysis of the article; were it that, I’d begin with the wording of the title itself: Nero as “bad boy.” That sort of removes the sting of “beast” or “monster,” and conjures up some sort of Roman Dennis the Menace. My intent is not so much to analyze as it is to caution.
Since some of Nero’s most egregious acts are a matter of record, the article does note them: kicked his pregnant wife to death; murdered his mother after committing incest with her; murdered his brother; ordered his mentor, Seneca, to commit suicide; burned Christians alive, using their bodies to light his gardens, and blamed them for the great fire in Rome, which enabled him to embark on an enormous building program for himself. (Since Mayor Bruschini noted that the senators owned slaves, we will also helpfully note that one of Nero’s pastimes was dressing up as a lion, molesting slaves who were tied up, and then slaughtering them. That was not in the article.)
As horrible as that litany is, by placing it at the beginning of the cover story and then going on about the great things Nero did and his good intentions and his rich enemies in the Senate, and framing his reign within the tiresome class warfare Marxist doctrine (Nero was for the poor, you see) and quoting professors and mayors and sundry apologists, by the time you get to the end of the article, unless you are imbued with a Christian worldview, you’ll be sort of nodding in some agreement: he wasn’t so bad after all. Or as the author of a Nero biography put it, “…even today he would be avant-garde, ahead of his time.”
Not only that, although the article notes that other emperors were also bad, the only one contrasted with Nero is the Christian emperor, Constantine, sarcastically identified as “a saint”. And you’ll read that he had “his son, second wife, and father-in-law all murdered.” So typical of modernists; always seeking to cry, “Aha! Tu quoque!:” an effective red herring to the unaware. However, Constantine, unlike Nero, did not stomp his pregnant wife to death and the deaths noted above were executions, although there is considerable debate as to the reasons. Regardless, the whole tenor of the life of Constantine was poles opposite to Nero’s. But you’d have to look that up on your own.
Again, unless you are steeled with Scripture and a strong Christian weltanschauung, you’ll fall like the foolish moonstruck maiden for the smooth talking rake that alienates her affections from God and home. Likewise, these godless twits seek to alienate your affection from Christ and the historic faith.
A subversive technique cleverly employed in the article is to draw equivalence between its readers’ pleasures in life and the pleasures enjoyed by people-like-us in Nero’s Rome. So you’ll see photos of “Roman revelry” today: a couple about to start slobbering over each other; an 81-year old has-been actress showing off her leg; a crowd of partying, smug-faced (not one bright smile in the lot) high-society 70-year-olds doing their downright best to look like Burberry models. Life under Nero wasn’t all that different from today! And we all behave like that too, anyway. So what’s the big deal?
And you’ll read about Nero’s love of art and music and great building programs and how they began to be re-discovered in the Renaissance (so-called) and how such discoveries continue on today. Including documented evidence of a statue, almost as high as the Statue of Liberty, Nero erected to himself standing midst his palace grounds but which could be seen from all directions at great distances. Since he considered himself to be a god, the sculpture denoted the rays of the sun on his head, as do some extant coins from that era.
And you’ll read about how he just luuuved the people; and the people just luuuved him back.
Yes, boys and girls, it is lamentable that a “ruler of such baffling complexity was now simply a beast.” A “public relations man ahead of his time with a shrewd understanding of what the people wanted, often before they knew it themselves [emphasis mine]” is reduced to just being a monster. His reign was “warless.” He gave us “Neronia – Olympic-style poetry, music, and athletic contests.” He “created something no one had seen before: a light-flooded public place not just for hygiene [don’t you love that? ‘not just for hygiene’!] but also where there were statues and paintings and books, where you could hang out and listen to someone read poetry aloud. It meant an entirely new social situation.”
“In addition to the Gymnasium Neronis, the young emperor’s public building works included an amphitheater, a meat market, and a proposed canal that would connect Naples to Rome’s seaport at Ostia … to ensure safe passage of the city’s food supply….”
We are now privileged to discover “the full architectural greatness of Nero’s reign.” The inscription at the statue at Anzio says, “During his reign the empire enjoyed a period of peace, of great splendor, and of important reforms.”
I guess we plebes should have focused on all that, and not on the guy’s fruits which are seen in his deplorable actions and resultant lakes of innocent blood. Poor Nero; no one really understands him. My heart breaks.
The Bible warns us to beware of men whom every one praises, for example, the pharisees. Did not Herod die horribly for receiving praise that belongs only to God? The history of the world is littered with men and women, “loved by the people” but who played God. They had one thing in common: they hated Christianity. And they’re dead. And those today — high and low, known and unknown, famous and obscure — who hate likewise, will eventually be so too. And that, forever.
A funny thing about character is that it will out on what you do. Nero initiated a horrible persecution of Christians in November, AD 64. Vast numbers were murdered, most by horrible means. The numbers were so great, that even Roman chroniclers, who also despised Christians, nevertheless felt compelled to record the vastness of the slaughter. Of course, both Peter and Paul were put to death by Nero. At least one Roman historian specifically called Nero ‘a beast’.
But people kept bringing flowers to his tomb for months and years. He was greatly mourned and lamented. Many believed, and hoped, he would return from the dead. As the article puts it, “…the persistent belief that the boy king would one day return to the people who so loved him.”
The article documents his great power; his great glory; his “godlike” characteristics; his vast riches; his power to give or take life; the belief by many that he’d rise from the dead. And it also cannot help but mention or allude to his beastly cruelty; his hatred of Christ and Christians; and more. Clearly a host of his contemporaries thought very highly of the guy, and many, including him, thought him to be a god. And now we see that many today seem to think likewise!
Some things never change.
Your loving father,
Dad
