Nero's Downward Spiral - The Pax Romana Podcast 019

Nero was finally free of his mother’s influence. Agrippina had been stabbed to death over and over again by Nero’s soldiers in her belly—the place from which her treacherous son had sprung. Nero was 19 and without parents, but he had plenty of help. Many senators believed that this was finally their moment. If the pro-senatorial policies that had characterized the early years of Nero’s reign were a sign of what could be expected in the decades to come, the age of Nero would become a golden age for Rome’s nobility. But the Roman senator Tacitus sees Agrippina’s death as the beginning of the end. After murdering his own mother, Tacitus says, ‘[Nero] approached the Capitol with pride, as victor over a servile people, and gave his thanks—and then let himself loose on all the forms of depravity which, though repressed with difficulty, respect for his mother (such as it was) had managed to check’ (Tacitus 14.13). The beginning of Nero’s slow and painful downfall, on this episode of the Pax Romana Podcast.

Primary Sources Referenced:

Tacitus, Annales 14.13, 15.38, 15.44)

Calpurnius Siculus, Ecologues 1