n the early summer of AD68, the emperor Nero committed suicide. A lineal descendant of the deified Augustus, founder of the imperial dynasty that for a century had ruled the Roman empire, he was the last of his line. It expired amid bloodshed and excess. Nero’s crimes were the scandal of the age. He had murdered his mother. He had beheaded one of his wives and kicked another to death. He had arranged for much of Rome to be incinerated, played the lyre as it burnt, and then, in the wake of the great fire, built himself a stupendous estate in the very heart of the city, with an ornamental lake and a colossal statue. These various stories, a mixture of fact and feverish supposition, had given to Nero a notoriety that only darkened in the wake of his death.
To the upstart Caesars who succeeded him — none of whom had so much as a drop of Augustus’s blood in their veins — his depravities provided a vital source of legitimisation. By Christians, whom Nero had fingered as culprits for the great fire of Rome and brutally tortured to death, he was remembered as a literally bestial figure. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” The number 666 has long since been decoded by those learned in Hebrew numerology. The beast is “Nero Caesar”.
