Roman Emperors - Part 2

 Nero to Vespatian

Nero, the 5th Roman emperor, reigned from 54 to 68 AD.  Considered one of the worst emperors, he is famous for having "fiddled while Rome burned."  Technically that can't be true (the violin was not invented yet), but Nero did sing and play the lyre, giving public concerts that were said to be so bad that some people feigned death to avoid attending them.

Contemporary writings about Nero were far from impartial, so it's hard to separate fact from fiction, but their accounts of his sex life were lurid.  In addition to marrying three wives (not simultaneously), Nero married two men: first the youth Porus, whom he castrated and treated as his wife, and later the freed slave Doryphorus, in which case Nero played the part of the bride.  Marriage between men was not legal, but as emperor, he could do whatever he pleased.

(Statue of Nero in the Aphrodisias Museum in Turkey)

After the fire that destroyed Rome, Nero built a huge palace with a 100-foot-tall bronze statue of himself called the Colossus of Nero.  The statue is long gone, but this is a tiny picture of it carved into an amethyst gem.

A later emperor moved the statue, using 24 elephants, next to what we call the Colosseum, which is named after the Colossus statue.  This is an artist's conception of what it looked like.  The thing he's holding is supposed to be a rudder, not an umbrella.  The statue was altered to represent the Roman sun god Sol Invictus, hence the rays coming out of its head.  Does that remind you of the Statue of Liberty?  It should.  Both statues were modeled after the even more ancient Colossus of Rhodes, a representation of the Greek sun god Helios and one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

After Nero's death, men vied for power, resulting in the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 AD.  This is the 7th emperor, Otho, who reigned for 3 months before committing suicide after losing a battle to the 8th emperor, who reigned for 8 months before being murdered by ...

(Statue of Otho, Louvre museum)

Vespatian, the 9th emperor and final winner.  Sculptors generally tried to make the heads of these statues a realistic likeness, but the bodies were an idealized muscular form, as is obvious in this statue, where the head and the body clearly don't go together.

(Statue of Vespatian, Baia Archaeological Museum, Italy)