Jonathan Yardley reviews Edward Champlin’s Nero and quotes this “dossier” of the emperor:
“Nero murdered his mother, and Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Nero also slept with his mother. Nero married and executed one stepsister, executed his other stepsister, raped and murdered his stepbrother. In fact, he executed or murdered most of his close relatives. He kicked his pregnant wife to death. He castrated and then married a freedman. He married another freedman, this time himself playing the bride. He raped a Vestal Virgin. He melted down the household gods of Rome for their cash value. After incinerating the city in 64, he built over much of downtown Rome with his own vast Xanadu, the Golden House. He fixed the blame for the Great Fire on the Christians, some of whom he hung up as human torches to light his gardens at night. He competed as a poet, a singer, an actor, a herald and a charioteer, and he won every contest, even when he fell out of his chariot at the Olympic Games. He alienated and persecuted much of the elite, neglected the army, and drained the treasury. And he committed suicide at the age of 30, one step ahead of the executioner. His last words were, ‘What an artist dies in me!’”So at least the Neronian legend tells us.
It seems that no one explained to Nero that Christmas wouldn’t be special if it came every day:
What are usually scornfully referred to as bread and circuses were in fact immensely important to the Roman people. December’s Saturnalia, in which the people recreated “for a brief time the happy Golden Age when Saturn had ruled Italy,” was enjoyed by all, and its “potential appeal to the leaders of society as a form of social control is clear: along with one or two other similar festivals in the Roman calendar it could offer a safety valve, a time when the normally unthinkable was possible, a time of leisure and amusement for everyone.” Nero, who loved the Saturnalia, enlarged it: “by freeing saturnalian behavior from its strict seasonal confines, by redefining it, by introducing it deliberately into other parts of Roman life, Nero not only amused himself, he drew emperor and people, ruler and ruled, closer together. Saturnalian behavior made him popular.”