The Nero Redivivus Phenomenon and Pseudo-Neros

Podcast Transcript

In the first century, Rome underwent a major political transition when the Emperor Nero died after being declared an enemy of Rome by the senate.

With his death, the Julio-Claudian dynasty came to an end, ushering in a period known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

For the common people, many of them simply didn’t believe that Nero was dead. In fact, many thought that he would one day return.

Learn more about the Nero redivivus phenomenon, Pseudo-Neros, and how the death of Nero was felt for centuries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Emperor Nero has earned a bad reputation over the past 2,000 years, and, in my opinion, it is well deserved.

He killed his mother, he kicked his wife to death and his unborn child, he killed many Senators, persecuted Christians, and generally behaved in a very un-emperor-like way.

For the elite in Rome they eventually had enough and turned on him, which resulted in him committing suicide while he was on the run.

However, for the average Roman, they probably didn’t even know about most of this, or they didn’t really care. Generally speaking, Nero was well-liked by lower-class Romans.

His decision to construct his massive Domus Aurea palace after Rome’s great fire didn’t go over well, but beyond that, most Romans didn’t have a problem with Nero. This was especially true as you got outside of Rome and didn’t have to deal with the fire and its aftermath.

Nero had invested heavily in a kind of mass politics that created emotional loyalty. He staged spectacles, sang and raced before crowds, and made himself visible not only as ruler but as performer.

His performing as an artist was the very thing that the Roman elite abhorred, but the ordinary people loved it.

Many urban plebs experienced him as the emperor who fed and entertained them, who kept grain moving, capped prices in emergencies, and opened the imperial gardens for fire victims.

In Greece, he toured the festivals and proclaimed the freedom of the Hellenes, remitted taxes, and scattered favors that created a perception of generosity.

Sure, he entered the Olympics and won every event, but no other emperor had taken the time to visit.

Even if the elites mocked these acts as vanity, they were well received by the populace.

When Nero died, no one alive could recall the Roman Republic. They had become accustomed to the pomp and pageantry that was the Empire.

With respect to Nero, his death was unlike that of all his predecessors. He didn’t die in Rome. He didn’t have a state funeral. His ashes weren’t interred in the mausoleum of Augustus.

Even Caligula, who was assassinated by his own guards and was no paragon of Roman virtue, was accorded this honor.

After Nero’s death, what began spreading almost immediately amongst the common people was what became known as “Nero redivivus.”

“Nero redivivus” was the idea that Emperor Nero did not truly perish but would return from the East to reclaim his power.

Lest you think this is a crazy idea, consider how many times similar stories have been shared in the modern world. Almost every time a celebrity dies unexpectedly and at a young age, there will eventually be rumors spread about how they are really still alive and that they faked their own death.

Elvis, Princess Diana, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Jim Morrison, John F. Kennedy Jr., and others have all had conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths. These rumors typically begin almost immediately after their deaths, and they all appear to be variations of the same story.

The Nero conspiracy was arguably the first of its kind. It may be the first known modern conspiracy theory in history.

The rumor soon fused with prophetic and apocalyptic traditions that already interpreted imperial history through the lens of divine fate. In the years following Nero’s death, Jewish Sibylline writers, primarily based in Egypt, portrayed Nero as a persecuting tyrant who had escaped beyond the Euphrates and would return with eastern allies, most commonly the Parthians.

The story’s pull was enhanced by the language of astrology and fate that circulated in the ancient world, which allowed soothsayers to place Nero’s expected return under the scheme of a heaven-ordained cycle of loss and recovery.

The early Christian movement inherited the rumor and reshaped it within its own apocalyptic world view. The Book of Revelation, usually dated to the last decade of the first century, depicts a Beast that has received a mortal wound and yet lives, “was, is not, and is to come,” and that returns from the abyss to persecute the saints.

Many early readers connected this to Nero’s reported death and rumored survival.

If you remember back to my episode on the Mark of the Beast, Nero played a major part in early interpretations.

The number of the Beast, 666, reinforced the link through numerology. If one transliterates “Neron Caesar” into Hebrew letters, the values add to 666.

A well-attested variant of Revelation reads the number 616, which fits “Nero Caesar”.

In other words, the text’s notorious number worked like a code that pointed to Nero for audiences who knew both rumor and Hebrew numerals, and it did so with a flexibility that matched manuscript variation.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that with all of the rumors of Nero returning, someone would eventually take advantage of it. Imposters came forward, claiming to be the returned Nero.

They were known as Pseudo-Neros.

The historian Tacitus provided the earliest and most detailed account of the first impostor. In the winter of 68-69, just months after the death of Nero, the Roman provinces of Achaia and Asia, now modern Turkey and Greece, were “terrified by a false rumor of Nero’s arrival.”

A man who was either a slave from Pontus or a freedman from Italy, and who could sing and play the cithara like Nero and looked the part, gathered deserters and took to sea, appealing to soldiers and merchants.

A storm drove him to the island of Kythnos, where he tried to recruit troops going home on leave and armed slaves captured from merchantmen.

This took place during the reign of Galba, the first emperor after Nero, during the Year of the Four Emperors.

Galba’s appointee Calpurnius Asprenas, reached the island with two triremes, tricked the pretender’s emissaries, stormed their ship, and had the impostor killed.

The body of the imposter, Tacitus says, was striking for its eyes, hair, and grim expression, and it was displayed in Asia and then in Rome to quash the rumor that Nero had returned.

While this was the first such Nero imposter, and it was handled rather easily, it would not be the last.

The second major impostor surfaced during the short reign of Titus about 10 years later.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio named him Terentius Maximus, an Asiatic who resembled Nero, played the lyre, and gathered followers as he moved toward the Euphrates.

He crossed into Parthia seeking help, claiming Rome owed him for the settlement of Armenia under Nero. Dio reports that the Parthian leader Artabanus received him and even prepared to restore him to Rome, before the deception was exposed and the pretender was executed.

Later scholarship has linked this episode to a brief Parthian civil conflict and to coins bearing the name of Artabanus, who ruled around 80 to 81, which helps explain how a Parthian ruler could support the impostor while Pacorus II also held power.

The story illustrates how geopolitical rivalry on Rome’s eastern frontier, combined with Nero’s earlier diplomacy in Armenia, created an opportunity where “Nero” could be beneficial.

A third impostor appeared roughly two decades after Nero’s death, during Domitian’s reign.

The historian Suetonius reports that a man of obscure origin announced himself as Nero and won such favor among the Parthians that they supported him vigorously. However, they eventually surrendered him to Rome, albeit with great reluctance.

Suetonius notes that the memory of Nero’s name still held such sway with the Parthians that they were willing to strain relations with Rome over a pretender. This episode almost provoked war before the claimant was handed over.

The details are sparse, but Suetonius’s dating and his emphasis on Parthian reluctance underscore how long Nero’s shadow fell across the eastern frontier.

At the same time, some Roman and Christian authors began to speak of Domitian himself as a kind of “Nero come again,” not literally resurrected but morally reanimated in a new tyrant.

This moral use of the legend let the idea survive even when literal pretenders were absent. The rumor that Nero lived somewhere in concealment became a common saying in Christian circles, and writers mention people who still expected his reappearance as part of the last trials of history.

From the second through the fourth centuries, the legend hardened into Christian. Commentators on Revelation debated the meaning of 666 but kept Nero in view.

Latin poets such as Commodian and Christians such as Victorinus pictured a final tyrant in Nero’s mold, while chroniclers like Sulpicius Severus and theologians like Augustine reported that many still believed Nero had not died at all and would emerge at the proper time as the great enemy.

The old geographical theme persisted, since the East, and especially the lands beyond the Euphrates, remained the imagined place of hiding and the source of the last invasion.

Even when authors rejected a literal return, they used Nero’s name as a cipher for the persecuting state in its final, demonic phase, which kept the association alive across multiple generations.

Medieval Christians continued to mention Nero in preaching and commentary. The figure of a tyrant who had once ruled, seemed to fall, and would return to deceive the world, proved durable because it served several needs at once.

Nero gave a concrete name to the abstract imagery of Revelation, explaining why evil rulers kept appearing by casting them as Nero’s second coming in spirit, and it kept alive the hope that the final crisis had a recognizable face.

The legend also speaks to a familiar human reflex in times of upheaval: the belief that a charismatic ruler cannot truly be gone and will return to redress grievances or wreak vengeance. That is why it found an audience among both those who admired Nero and those who feared him.

While the name and legend of Nero endured for centuries, the Pseudo-Nero phenomenon eventually faded as the Flavian dynasty consolidated its power and the memory of Nero’s actual reign grew dimmer.

By the time of Trajan’s reign in the early second century, no more significant Pseudo-Neros appeared. The phenomenon had run its course, but it left an important legacy in demonstrating how imperial legends could transcend the death of an individual emperor.

The Nero redivivus legend and the case of the Pseudo-Neros was a very odd one in history.

Some took the legend quite literally, believing that Nero would return in the flesh, while others interpreted it as just a metaphor.

Some thought that Nero’s return would be a good thing, bringing peace and prosperity to the empire, while others were terrified at the prospect.

Part of the early rumors were steeped in pagan mysticism, yet the legend was also co-opted by Christians when it benefited them.

When the Senate and Roman elites rose up against Nero, they could never have guessed that removing him from power would establish a legend that would last for centuries.