He was a perverse cross-dressing exhibitionist who had an incestuous relationship with his mother and married his step sister. He murdered members of his own family in fits of jealous rage. His cruelty, violence, and grotesque appetite for self-indulgence brought the Roman empire to the brink of financial and political ruin. And he viscously persecuted the christians. They would remember him as the ultimate embodiment of evil … the anti-christ.
Nero was born on the 15th of December 37 AD in Antiem. His father Gneaus was from an old Roman aristocratic family. He was a cruel, hard drinking man who once ran over a child in his chariot for pleasure. Gneaus died when Nero was three years old. For the first twenty years of his life Nero would be dominated by his mother Agrippina. She was a sister of the emperor Caligula. She was ambitious, amoral, and a born survivor.
When the emperor Claudius was widowed, Agrippina embarked on a campaign of seduction. Within a short time she had married him and began to work relentlessly on the advancement of her son. When Nero was thirteen, she persuaded Claudius to adopt him, and when he was sixteen, she engineered his marriage to the emperor’s daughter Octavia, Nero’s step-sister. While Nero’s fortunes rose, the position of Claudius’s natural son Britanicus was becoming increasingly difficult.
Nero was four years older, which meant he took official precedence over his step-brother. As Nero took more and more duties Britanicus was sidelined. In 54 AD, Agrippina decided the time was right to make a bid to put Nero into power. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, only one obstacle remained.. the aging emperor Claudius.
