REIGN OF TERROR
Six of Nero’s most infamous crimes
Poisoning his brother
Nero’s earliest alleged crime was the poisoning of his step-brother, Britannicus.As the natural son of Claudius, the previous emperor, Britannicus may have been expected to assume power. Unfortunately for him, however, he was only 13 when his father died in AD 54. And so it was Nero, whom Claudius had adopted as his son in AD50, who became emperor.
Nero, we are told, was wary of his step-brother, fearing that he might go onto threaten his position. And so, at
a dinner in early AD 55, Nero took matters into his own hands, apparently poisoning Britannicus's drink. When the boy was taken ill, the emperor assured everyone that he had sufferd an epileptic fir and would recover. Britannicus died later that night.
Murdering his mother
The death of Nero’s mother, Agrippina, in AD 59 marked a sea change in Nero’s reign. From this point on, our sources tell us, the emperor could exercise his every depravity. Following a long power struggle that had led to her exile, Nero had resolved to have his mother killed. But doing so risked angering the Roman public: not only was Agrippina the mother of the current emperor, she was the widow of the previous one (Claudius) - and she was also a descendant of Rome's first emperor, Augustus, in her own right. Nero's solution was to try and make her death look like an accident - by arranging for the ship taking her home from a dinner at the Bay of Naples to collapse and sink. The vessel did indeed collapse, but Agrippina managed to swim toshore. In a panic, Nero had his mother stabbed, and used the spurious excuse that she had been conspiring against him.