Nero

[Dimentio]

How could this guy be in power for 14 long years?

Nero part 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUEMJtUyn3w)
Nero part 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq3Yx6ghAnM)
Nero part 3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW89c7oFGPE)
Nero part 4
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia6BS0Dm2dQ)Nero part 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKicmqL-yR8)
Nero part 6 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqrerynfAfY)
Nero part 7 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lIEhBmkQYU)
Nero part 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgciMmI81UM)
Nero part 9 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDV8WSsgPcs)

[Yehuda Stern]

How could Bush have been president of the USA for 8 years? Decaying empires produce decadent leaders.

[Dimentio]

Bush did not both alienate the people, the wealthy and the army. Bush simply alienated the first group.

Nero alienated everyone, especially the wealthy.

[Revy]

Well, sorry I don't want to watch all those videos. I know who Nero was though. That was almost 2000 years ago. Absolute monarchy was a given in many societies. He wasn't a politician, he was a ruler, thus he didn't care about what people thought.

[RedStarOverChina]

Ah, Chinese subtitles.

By the way, although there is little dispute that Nero was an incompetent madman, many of the stories attributed to him (such as setting Rome on fire) might have been lies told by Christians who hated him more then anyone else.

[Dimentio]

Well, sorry I don't want to watch all those videos. I know who Nero was though. That was almost 2000 years ago. Absolute monarchy was a given in many societies. He wasn't a politician, he was a ruler, thus he didn't care about what people thought.

Well, even absolute monarchs have to think about what at least the army, the bureaucracy, the nobility or simply the wealthy are thinking.

[Dimentio]

Here's a summary of the episode.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNW5WWmduk

[Gleb]

Ah, Chinese subtitles.

By the way, although there is little dispute that Nero was an incompetent madman, many of the stories attributed to him (such as setting Rome on fire) might have been lies told by Christians who hated him more then anyone else.

Not only by the Christians but also the Roman senate itself; Nero is known as one of the worst enemies of Senators of the Empire and the most important historians of the era, e.g. Suetonius and Tacitus, were Senators and thus had a very good reasons to hate Nero.

Also, during the first century it really wasn't a merit for a historian to be objective; historians during the antiquities were there to tell great stories and tales about the mighty years of their fatherlands and if something lacked, it was ok to just pull rest of the tale from one's arse. Nobody wanted a boring story. Thus, senatorial historians didn't really even have any kind of reasons to even try to write about years of Nero from an objective viewpoint.

So, meh, I'd rather even read "Das Schwarze Korps" than Tacitus if I was willing to find some neutral viewpoints. History of ancient politics is just too shabby, it really can't be analyzed without massive amounts of pure speculation.

[Dimentio]

It stands quite clear that he bankcrupted the Empire.

[Gleb]

It stands quite clear that he bankcrupted the Empire.

That really isn't something I wouldn't expect from a Roman emperor, knowing what kind of economical masterminds used to run and eventually destroy the whole empire.

[Dimentio]

Well, but he managed to deplete its treasury so much that he was forced to institute proscriptions in some form. That is clear.

The senators, or at least the conservative party (optimates) in the senate, hated all the Julio-Claudian emperors, because they were members of the populist party (populares). Suetonius and Tacitus were both conservatives.

[ComradeOm]

It stands quite clear that he bankcrupted the Empire.Meh, it wouldn't be the first or the last time the Empire tottered on the brink of bankruptcy. And when considering the historians who wrote about Nero there are two central facts - 1) we have no surviving contemporary records (IIRC Tacitus was writing half a century after his death) and 2) those historians that have survived we, as you note, almost uniformly hostile to Nero and his line. So there's really very little evidence that the more lurid tales of tyranny and excess actually happened