Conn Iggulden: "We have got the wrong idea about Nero"

Just as happened with Richard III, he has been blackened by the people who wrote about him. “I'm not saying he was a saint,” says Conn, but it’s absolutely wrong to lump him in with tyrants and despots such as Tiberius and Caligula, Conn argues.

Conn will explain why for the Festival of Chichester when he addresses the Fishbourne Literary Festival’s summer event on his new epic NERO, the first in an enthralling new trilogy about a man wrongly regarded as the tyrant of Rome (June 16, 2.30pm, St Peter & St Mary Church, Fishbourne; tickets via the Festival of Chichester).

Conn admits that he too had regarded Nero as a villain: “But the thing that changed it for me was going to the British Museum exhibition on Nero. I was walking around and I sensed just how very popular he was during his lifetime. He was insanely generous, giving away coins and putting on vast entertainments, and after he died there were three fake Neros that turned up in Rome claiming to be him. Each one was greeted by cheering crowds. The people of Rome loved him. I had written on Julius Caesar back in the day and that was his superpower: that whatever happened in the Senate or elsewhere, the people of Rome really adored him. I just found it really interesting. Nero never lost the faith of the people but he lost the faith of the Senate. He wasn't a saint by any means but when you look at the sources you realise that they had reasons to ruin his reputation. Nero was ruined by the people that came after him. None of them had a real right to rule so they tried to rubbish Nero's reputation. The worse they made him seem the more they could claim to have saved Rome from him, trying to put him in with Caligula and Tiberius as part of that series of horror.

“Nero became emperor at 16 and his mother managed to put him on the throne thinking that she could rule through him. She was hugely wrong in that. He loved theatre and he loved acting and he loved music and poetry and he loved chariot racing but everything that Nero loved his tutors thought was either un-Roman or unmanly. He spent quite a lot of time away from Rome and his greatest achievements remained unremarked in Rome.

“I am deliberately attempting to revise history. I'm attempting to rehabilitate Nero. He had a rough go of it in history and I'm doing my best to point out the things that we actually knew about him are few and far between. He was successful by his own lights. He rewrote classical texts and he performed in public and all he really wanted to do was to perform and be loved. The Roman Senate and the Roman nobility hated that. He was not a military leader and also he managed to lose vast sums of money. He would just give it away. He would give away country estates. He would have a lottery where he would throw tokens to the crowd which were worth anything from a chicken to an estate in the country. He bankrupted the Roman state and any modern politician will know that if you bankrupt the country then that's not going to go well for you...”

But a tyrant and a despot? Conn would argue not.