EXPERT BIO
HARETH AL BUSTANI
Hareth Al Bustani is a journalist, historian and author of the Amazon bestseller Nero: The Art of Tyranny.
For many, the Roman Emperor Nero is the quintessential mad tyrant: a talentless musician who played the fiddle while Rome burned, killed his mother and two wives, and defiled a Vestal Virgin. But the real Nero was far more interesting than that.
He was born in 37 CE, the son of a psychopathic general Gnaeus and Agrippina the Younger, whose mother was a granddaughter of Augustus and father was the legendary general Germanicus, descended from Augustus’ sister and Mark Anthony. Despite the baby’s pedigree, Nero’s father scowled: “Nothing born of myself and Agrippina can be other than odious and a public disaster, ” and his uncle Caligula joked that he should be named after Claudius – the butt of every family joke.
Keen to discover what the gods had in store for her young boy, Agrippina consulted an astrologer, who predicted that he would one day rule, but only after killing his own mother. She supposedly spat back: “Let him kill me, only let him rule!”
Agrippina’s upbringing was marked by turmoil. Under the reign of Tiberius, her father, who was set to inherit the empire, was assassinated and her mother and two brothers died in captivity. Soon after the birth of Nero she fell out of favour yet again when her
