Articles nero

I admire her intelligence, her perspicacity. She was one of the few people who knew how the system worked. For example, Claudius is often reproached for killing a lot of senators, and he did, but when Agrippina comes along, you get very little of that. The modern thinking is that she worked well with the senate. If she had been given more time, she might have been able to establish a precedent of an active executive woman in Roman politics.

Claudius died in A. We know very little about the teenager who found himself absolute ruler of a sprawling, multiethnic empire. He had been educated by the great Stoic philosopher Seneca, but Nero was clearly no stoic. We do know, however, that the Roman people welcomed their new emperor enthusiastically and held high expectations for his reign. Things started out well, mostly because Nero was more than happy to allow three highly capable people to steer the ship of state: Seneca, Burrus, the levelheaded commander of the Praetorian Guard, and, of course, Agrippina.

For his part, Nero gave himself over to the pursuits that mattered most to him—chariot-driving, singing, poetry and playing the cithara, a stringed instrument like a lyre but more complex and much harder to master. Nero was a thoroughgoing philhellene—a lover of Greece and its sophisticated culture. He had little of the Roman appetite for blood and conquest, which makes him look far more appealing to us than to the Romans.

The Nero meme leaves the impression of an effete dilettante, confident in his own genius only because nobody had the guts to tell him otherwise. This is wrong on several counts. Suetonius tells us that Nero worked very hard to get good at singing. Even the poetry Nero wrote himself was apparently pretty good; the Roman poet Martial tells us so. Nero cannot be dismissed as a mere dabbler: He took his hobbies seriously—too seriously, in fact, for a Roman establishment that liked its emperors to make war, not art.

Nero was an accomplished athlete as well. Suetonius is impressed that Nero can pilot a four-camel rig around the racetrack. In other references, we find Nero at the reins of a ten-horse chariot. That was the ancient Roman equivalent of a Formula One car. Nero won races in it. He is intelligent, he is fit. Those qualities made the young Nero very popular with the common man. He had an exuberant personality and enjoyed being out in public.

He was no snob and remembered the names and faces of people up and down the social ladder. All in all, he comes off as a fairly likable young fellow. OK, sure, there were casualties. Political murder was an accepted tool of governance and made few waves in first-century Rome, provided it was not overused. Everybody did it, not just Nero.

If you overstepped the mark, you paid the penalty, but most people knew where the boundaries were. Not with Octavia, his wife, alas. Instead, Nero fell hard for a lowborn freedwoman named Acte.

Before long, Nero strips Agrippina of her personal security detail and kicks her out of the palace. As in much ancient Roman history, the coinage tells the tale: first Agrippina and Nero stop appearing together on the heads side of Roman coins and she gets flipped to the tails side; then she disappears from coins altogether.

Things go downhill. When Nero falls in love again, this time with his adored future wife Poppaea, Agrippina again tries to come between them. Are these the real reasons Nero has his mother killed in A. The story of the murder verges on the burlesque. Nero invites his mother to a kind of reconciliation party at his country villa in Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

He graciously provides a galley to ferry Agrippina home after the party, but the boat is rigged to come apart at sea. Agrippina is meant to drown, but she is an unexpectedly strong swimmer and manages to make it safely back to shore.

After some comical dithering, a henchman is sent to dispatch Agrippina the old-fashioned way, with a sword. They stayed close even after the breakup over Acte and the squabble over Poppaea.

Down to her death, Agrippina is not stripped of her imperial titles. Balderdash, says Drinkwater. He had to survive in quite a difficult world, so he could write one thing and do another. One thing that recent biographers have made of him is that, when push comes to shove, he lacks moral courage. OK, you might say, perhaps we can give Nero a pass on his brother and even his mother.

But what of the fire and what of the fiddling? They are the building blocks of the Nero legend. They are also among the least solid historically. On July 18, A. The fire burned for nine days, destroying the better part of the city as it spread.

But when news of the fire reached him, he hurried straight back to Rome and took charge—effectively—of firefighting efforts. He moved quickly to aid the victims. Food was brought from Ostia and neighboring towns, and the price of corn was cut to one-quarter sesterce a pound. Yet these measures, for all their popular character, earned no gratitude. For a rumor had spread that, while the city was burning, Nero had gone on his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy.

The evidence is murky. Drinkwater believes that it was true, however, and that Nero sang his head off. But if we accept that he did that, he leaves himself open to the charge of arson. Barrett largely agrees with Drinkwater about the singing. Robert Oppenheimer recited the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first explosion of the atom bomb.

Scipio Africanus quoted Homer on seeing the destruction of Carthage. These are very human reactions to tragedy. Only in Nero is it seen as evil. The Domus Aurea project was also a mistake, criticized in its day as a lot more house than any absolute monarch would ever need. But it may be that Nero never meant for this city-within-a-city to be his purely private playground. The implication of this appears to be that Nero intended that his new house and the rebuilt city of Rome should be one—the home of the people and of himself, their Emperor, Protector and Entertainer.

In the Greek language the first syllable, cata , implies a descent, a going downward and inward. It is a descent with a purpose. Strophe is a suffix that relates to the early technology of weaving, such as making a rope ladder. So, the fullest meaning of the word, he says, is that catastrophe is a descent with a path that has been woven before you were aware of it and that you didn't seek. Catastrophe is, therefore, both an opportunity and an obligation to descend beneath what the culture is comfortable with - into the depths of one's own being and the actual nature of our world.

We may be stretched to the max in this descent, but the fact is that other people before us, in other desperate times, have taken this path. It is important to remember that initiation planetary as well as individual is always a brush with death, and there is no guarantee that the initiate will physically survive. Yet, as indigenous tribes know, it is essential for maturity. While New Age memes insist that all will be well - and soon - we can remember that no enlightenment is possible without the endarkenment that comes with the visceral experience of the shadow and the dreadful ordeals that accompany the death of the ego.

The second factor is the presence of extra-terrestrial beings who have mastered energy sources that could greatly contribute to solving our "world problematique:" e. My understanding is that this is far from a wish-fulfilling fantasy. It is our present reality. The ET matter has been one of the most highly classified matters for decades. The strategies for deflecting attention away from it have included mocking, peripheralizing and ridiculing citizen researchers outwardly, while the military-industrial complex has remained "obsessed" with this issue.

Many of us have internalized this strategy, telling ourselves that only "tin-foil-hat-wearing" crazy people would give this phenomenon any credence. Paul Hellyer, Canada's former minister of defence, has blasted governments' secrecy, and more than 65 years of alleged lies, compartmentalization and disinformation. He demands full disclosure of what is known about visitors from other realms, their technology and the extent of their collaboration with governments, including any treaties that may have been signed by them.

Reporting on his conversation with a general, he stated that the general had said that "there have been face-to-face meetings between U. Given the divisions in America, there is the real possibility that Donald Trump will gain a second term. It is clear that he and his loyalists are essentially neofascists. Given his psychopathic personality and his innate desire to abuse his power, many wise and intelligent people from various disciplines are suggesting that if Trump or Trump-like characters win the and elections, the American experiment in democracy may well be damaged beyond repair.

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In his first five years as emperor, Nero gained a reputation for political generosity, promoting power-sharing with the Senate and ending closed-door political trials, though he generally pursued his own passions and left the ruling up to three key advisers—the Stoic philosopher Seneca, the prefect Burrus and ultimately Agrippina.

The empress Octavia was exiled and executed, and in 62 Nero and Poppaea were married. At private events beginning in 59, he sang and performed on the lyre and encouraged members of the upper classes to take dancing lessons. He ordered public games to be held every five years in Rome and trained as an athlete himself, competing as a charioteer. His most lasting artistic legacy, though, was his re-creation of Rome following the fire that destroyed most of the city. Early in the morning of June 19, 64 a blaze broke out in the shops around the Circus Maximus and quickly spread throughout the city.

Whatever responsibility he actually bore for the disaster, Nero deflected attention by blaming members of the fledgling Christian religion for the fire. At its center he commissioned a foot-tall bronze statue of himself, the Colossus Neronis. Reconstruction costs in Rome, revolts in Britain and Judea, conflicts with Parthia and rebuilding expenses in the capital forced him to devalue the imperial currency, lowering the silver content of the denarius by 10 percent.

In 65 a high-level conspiracy to assassinate the emperor emerged, leading Nero to order the deaths of a prefect and several senators and officers.

With things falling apart at home, Nero took an extended tour of Greece, where he gave himself to music and theatrical performance, drove a chariot in the Olympic games, announced pro-Hellenic political reforms and launched an expensive and futile project to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth.

Upon his return to Rome in 68, Nero failed to respond decisively to a revolt in Gaul, prompting further unrest in Africa and in Spain, where the governor Galba declared himself legate of the Senate and Roman People.

Soon the Praetorian Guard declared allegiance to Galba, and the Senate followed suit, declaring Nero an enemy of the people. Nero attempted to flee, but upon learning that his arrest and execution were imminent, he took his own life.

In the centuries followed his reign, the name Nero would become a byword for debauchery, misrule and anti-Christian persecution. In the short term, his demise marked the end of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, which had ruled Rome since 27 B. It would be 30 years before Rome had another emperor, Trajan, who would rule as long as Nero had.