History's Most Notorious

He was the mule breeder made good. General, sleepy audience member, wit, spendthrift, miser, tax collector, urine hoarder, invader, liberator and, ultimately, Emperor. The man who inspired the phrase 'Emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome' the founder of the Flavian Dynasty and instigator of a big old arena in Rome you might have heard of, it's my favourite, Vespasian!

We all know or think we know who Nero was. He was the archetypal mad Emperor, right? Driven to murder everyone around him by his own paranoia. But was his paranoia driven purely by his own mania, or was it also fuelled by a political system that was fundamentally flawed? Nero's actions were his own and his responsibility, but was he doomed to failure from the start?