Messiah or Antichrist?

Nero’s sudden death triggered rumours that he would one day return, either as a saviour or harbinger of doom

Although Nero’s later years were marked by a steep slide into hedonism, frivolity and tyranny, with the only accounts of his life written by those who loathed him it is hard to gauge how fairly his wider reign has been assessed. While the upper-class chroniclers Seutonius and Cassius Dio were happy to fill their accounts the most wildly unsubstantiated rumours and conjecture, even the more diligent Tacitus made no effort to hide his disdain for the singing emperor.

In truth, Nero was beloved by the masses. They continued to model their private portraits on his for years and kept coins bearing his image in their personal mirror boxes. They also dressed his tomb with flowers and erected statues of him clad in magistrates’ togas, accompanied by edicts as if written by his own hand. At the end of the century, Dio Chrysostom wrote that “everybody” still wished that Nero would remain “emperor for all time.”

However, the Sibylline Oracles, a series of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic verses, painted a very different picture of the emperor. The oracles’ Jewish compiler predicted the return of “the matricidal fugitive” who had fled across the Euphrates to Parthia. After years of bloody civil war, “acting the athlete” and “driving chariots”, this figure would deliver retribution on behalf of the East and the oppressed.

The fifth oracle, written a century or so later, refers again to a “godlike man from Italy” who “playing at theatricals with honey-sweet songs rendered with melodious voice… will destroy many men, and his wretched mother. He will flee from Babylon, a terrible and shameless prince whom all mortals and noble men despise. For he destroyed many men.” Even in the 5th century, Augustine of Hippo asserted that many people still believed Nero would one day return, either as a saviour or the Antichrist.