Nero, who was a Roman emperor from 54 to 68 A. D., was said to have
been one of the most disagreeable monarchs to meet that Rome ever
had. He was a nephew of Caligula, the Emperor, on his mother’s side,
and a son of Dominitius Ahenobarbust, of St. Lawrence county. The
above was really Nero’s name, but in the year 50 A. D. his mother
married Claudius and her son adopted the name of Nero Claudius Cæsar
Drusus Germanicus. This name he was in the habit of wearing during
the cold weather, buttoned up in front. During the hot weather, Nero
was all the name he wore. In 53, Nero married Octavia, daughter of
Claudius, and went right to housekeeping. Nero and Octavia did not get
along first-rate. Nero soon wearied of his young wife and finally
transferred her to the New Jerusalem.
In 54, Nero’s mother, by concealing the rightful heir to the throne
for several weeks and doctoring the returns, succeeded in getting the
steady job of Emperor for Nero at a good salary.
His reign was quite stormy and several long, bloody wars were carried
on during that period. He was a good vicarious fighter and could
successfully hold a man’s coat all day, while the man went to the front
to get killed. He loved to go out riding over the battlefields, as soon
as it was safe, in his gorgeously bedizened band chariot and he didn’t
care if the wheels rolled in gore up to the hub, providing it was some
other man’s gore. It gave him great pleasure to drive about over the
field of carnage and gloat over the dead. Nero was not a great success
as an Emperor, but as a gloater he has no rival in history.
Nero’s reign was characterized, also, by the great conflagration and
Roman fireworks of July, 64, by which two-thirds of the city of Rome
was destroyed. The Emperor was charged with starting this fire in order
to get the insurance on a stock of dry goods on Main street.
Instead of taking off his crown, hanging it up in the hall, and helping
to put out the fire, as other Emperors have done time and again, Nero
took his violin upstairs and played, “I’ll Meet You When the Sun Goes
Down.” This occasioned a great deal of adverse criticism on the part
of those who opposed the administration. Several persons openly
criticized Nero’s policy and then died.
A man in those days would put on his overcoat in the morning and tell
his wife not to keep dinner waiting. “I am going down town to criticize
the Emperor a few moments,” he would say. “If I do not get home in time
for dinner, meet me on the ‘evergreen shore.’”
Nero, after the death of Octavia, married Poppea Sabina. She died
afterwards at her husband’s earnest solicitation. Nero did not care so
much about being a bridegroom, but the excitement of being a widower
always gratified and pleased him.
He was a very zealous monarch and kept Rome pretty well stirred
up during his reign. If a man failed to show up anywhere on time,
his friends would look sadly at each other and say, “Alas, he has
criticized Nero.”
A man could wrestle with the yellow fever, or the small-pox, or the
Asiatic cholera and stand a chance of recovery, but when he spoke
sarcastically of Nero, it was good-bye John.
When Nero decided that a man was an offensive partisan, that man would
generally put up the following notice on his office door:
“Gone to see the Emperor in relation to charge of offensive
partisanship. Meet me at the cemetery at 2 o’clock.”
Finally, Nero overdid this thing and ran it into the ground. He did not
want to be disliked and so those who disliked him were killed. This
made people timid and muzzled the press a good deal.
The Roman papers in those days were all on one side. They did not
dare to be fearless and outspoken, for fear that Nero would take out
his ad. So they would confine themselves to the statement that: “The
genial and urbane Afranius Burrhus painted his new and recherche
picket fence last week,” or “Our enterprising fellow townsman, Cæsar
Kersikes, will remove the tail of his favorite bulldog next week, if
the weather should be auspicious,” or “Miss Agrippina Bangoline, eldest
daughter of Romulus Bangoline, the great Roman rinkist, will teach the
school at Eupatorium, Trifoliatum Holler, this summer. She is a highly
accomplished young lady, and a good speller.”
Nero got more and more fatal as he grew older, and finally the Romans
began to wonder whether he would not wipe out the Empire before he
died. His back yard was full all the time of people who had dropped in
to be killed, so that they could have it off their minds.
Finally, Nero himself yielded to the great strain that had been placed
upon him and, in the midst of an insurrection in Gaul, Spain and Rome
itself, he fled and killed himself.
The Romans were very grateful for Nero’s great crowning act in the
killing line, but they were dissatisfied because he delayed it so long,
and therefore they refused to erect a tall monument over his remains.
While they admired the royal suicide and regarded it as a success, they
censured Nero’s negligence and poor judgment in suiciding at the wrong
end of his reign.
I have often wondered what Nero would have done if he had been Emperor
of the United States for a few weeks and felt as sensitive to
newspaper criticism as he seems to have been. Wouldn’t it be a picnic
to see Nero cross the Jersey ferry to kill off a few journalists who
had adversely criticized his course? The great violin virtuoso and
lightweight Roman tyrant would probably go home by return mail, wrapped
in tinfoil, accompanied by a note of regret from each journalist in
New York, closing with the remark that “in the midst of life we are in
death, therefore now is the time to subscribe.”