When reading Cassius Dio’s account of Nero’s reign, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer, unrelenting criminality of the emperor. In fact, Dio’s Nero is not as much a man as a representation of a rhetorical tyrant. While he is not unique in portraying Nero as a disastrous ruler, Dio is extraordinary in his denial of the emperor’s philhellenism. In doing this, Dio not only contradicts Tacitus and Suetonius, but also discounts the praise of Nero given by other Greek writers, such as Philostratus, Dio Chrysostom, and Pausanias, when they highlight the emperor’s liberation of Greece as a redeeming feature of his principate. With this in mind, this chapter explores the distinctive features of Dio’s narrative when compared to other accounts of the emperor’s reign, and considers the motives behind and the effects of Dio’s portrayal of Nero as a hater, and not a lover, of Greece.

This chapter examines the notable revival of the Nero-Antichrist in the nineteenth century and tracks the resurgence and dissemination of the paradigm beyond late antiquity. Why the idea of the Nero-Antichrist regained its potency in this period has to do with the wider context of a nineteenth-century fascination with antiquity, with religious upheaval, with the fin de siècle anxieties about the end times, and with fin de siècle notions of decadence and decline. As case studies, the authors Ernest Renan, F. W. Farrar, and Oscar Wilde allow us to explore how late nineteenth-century thinkers in England and France worked with and reacted to prevailing conceptions of Nero, and negotiated his identification as the Antichrist. All three were finding a place for Christianity in an era intent upon positivist historiography; Wilde in particular shows that the scientific method was not the only option for interpreting the emperor’s role in Christian history.

This chapter introduces the ‘myths’ about Nero that have circulated since his death in AD 68. One of the most potent of these in the Nero-Antichrist. While the study of the association between Nero and the Antichrist has mainly been confined to New Testament scholarship, this introduction demonstrates why it is so important, following the linguistic turn, to conduct an investigation underpinned by theories of historiography and reception studies.

Christian writers, keen to interpret the apocalyptic scripture that had since become canonical, recognised the intrinsic importance of Nero’s role as first persecutor to the history of Christianity. According to tradition, Nero created the first martyrs, including the apostles Peter and Paul. Millennialists from the third century established the importance of a relationship between the first and last persecutors, affording Nero an apocalyptic role. To add detail to the paradigm, late-antique writers turned ted to non-biblical traditions – mostly classical historiography, but also the apocryphal Sibylline Oracles and Ascension of Isaiah. Here, they could find characteristics to populate their paradigm, be those the traits of the arch-destroyers of apocrypha, or those of the tyrannical Nero of classical texts.

The Epilogue explores the Nero-Antichrist paradigm in TV and film. Directors and the actors they cast made their own, often personal, decisions about how to portray Nero. It would have been impossible for any one actor to relate every aspect of Nero’s character from literature: cruel, theatrical, violent, militarily inept, destructive, decadent, paranoid, volatile, sexually promiscuous with women and men, and supernatural in his role as the Antichrist. Like those creating Neronian paradigms, they picked, chose, and emphasised the bits they found useful. However, one thing that players of Nero such as Alberto Sordi, Christopher Biggins, and Michael Sheen all had in common was their debt to Peter Ustinov’s portrayal of the emperor in the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis. This film was based on Sienkiewicz’s 1895 novel, and this novel in turn drew heavily from Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn. As such, Nero’s position in Christian history continued to underpin the idea of the emperor in TV and film into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Past studies of the Nero-Antichrist paradigm have tended to focus on whether or not Nero is a plausible Antichrist figure by looking at the characteristics of the Antichrist and deciding whether the Nero we know from classical historiography does or does not fit the role. In doing so, some assume that the biblical writers themselves were thinking primarily of Nero, the same Nero with whom we are now familiar through the historiographical tradition, when composing their works. Left unexplored is the possibility that the Nero link was phase of the reception of biblical texts in late antiquity and not programmed into the texts themselves. This chapter investigates the problem of whether the historical Nero is in the Bible at all, and argues that the Bible’s Antichrist figures do not bear enough of a similarity to the historical Nero to warrant the assumption of intent on the part of its authors.

Decadence was not a word used by the historians of ancient Rome during classical antiquity, but the concepts, anxieties, and fears encapsulated by it are without question present in their works. Ancient historians such as Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Appian describe an idealized past in order to draw a contrast with an immoral, inferior present. Spurred on by literary accounts from antiquity, Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu, a political theorist, and Edward Gibbon, a historian and Member of Parliament, were particularly interested in studying Rome to learn the symptoms of imperial decline. Thus, this chapter explores the language of decadence in the early histories of the Roman Empire, up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including why later historians such as Niebuhr and Mommsen wished to challenge this language (present from antiquity) and disentwine decadence from Roman imperial history for good.