54–68 AD, Rome · c. 180 minutes · Also released as Imperium: Nerone
Historical Accuracy ★★☆☆☆
Immersive Experience ★★★☆☆
WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO SEE
A boy is watching his father die.
That is how this film introduces the man Peter Ustinov played for laughs — as a child, in a room, being made to watch. And for the next hour you will find yourself doing something you may not have expected to do at a film about Nero.
You will feel sorry for him.
Hans Matheson plays him as a young romantic who wanted to be an actor and got an empire instead. Not a tyrant discovering his appetite. A gentle, frightened young man being steered by somebody far harder than he is.
That somebody is his mother.
THE MOTHER
Laura Morante’s Agrippina is the reason to watch this film.
She poisoned an emperor to put her son on the throne. She intends to rule through him and she is extremely good at it. Watch the scenes where she manages him — the switching between warmth and threat, sometimes inside a single line — and you are watching the most capable political operator in the Roman Empire work on the one person she cannot afford to lose.
She is also, historically, about to become the subject of the most extraordinary murder attempt in the ancient world.
This film does not show it. Hold that thought — it is the most interesting thing about the picture, and it is not in it.
THE ROLE MODEL
John Simm plays Caligula, and he is repeatedly named by viewers as the best thing in the film — which tells you something, because he is not the lead.
He arrives, he is horrifying, he shows the young Nero what an emperor is permitted to be, and he leaves.
Watch the handover. This film’s real argument is that Nero learned tyranny the way anyone learns anything: from watching someone else do it.
THE TEACHER
Matthias Habich plays Seneca — Stoic philosopher, tragedian, one of the richest men in Rome, and the tutor hired to turn Agrippina’s son into an emperor.
He half succeeds. For five years the empire is well run, and the historians who hated everything else about Nero admitted it.
Then it goes wrong, and Seneca is ordered to open his own veins.
There is a thread that starts in this room, in this film, and runs for a hundred and twenty years through two more men — one of them a slave in this palace, one of them an emperor. We’ll come back to it. It is a better story than the film knows it is telling.
THE LOOK
The production is Italian, made for television, and it looks it in the way television of the period looks. But the costumes and the atmosphere are strong, and the palace scenes have a claustrophobia the big-budget epics never manage.
Rome here is not a spectacle. It is a house full of people watching each other.
HISTORY DETECTIVE TIPS
Count the years. The film runs from Caligula’s murder in 41 to Nero’s death in 68 — twenty-seven years — and the second half of it goes past very fast indeed. Ask yourself, when the credits roll, how long you thought the bad years lasted.
Watch how the crowd turns. There is a moment when the people of Rome turn against their emperor. Note it, because the historical record says almost exactly the opposite, and the film has thrown away its own best argument to stage it.
And watch what is missing. This is a film about a man and his mother. Something happened between those two people that is one of the strangest episodes in Roman history, and it involves a boat. It is not here. When you have finished, come back and I’ll tell you what it was.
Watch Nero (2004) for Morante, for Simm, and for the strange experience of pitying a man you came prepared to enjoy hating.
WHAT IT GETS WRONG
THE COMPASSION IS THE PROBLEM, and this is the rare case where a film’s virtue and its central failure are the same decision.
A reviewer put it bluntly: having spent so long establishing the young Nero as Mr Nice Guy, the production then has to rush through the nine bad years of his reign.
That is not a complaint about pacing. Sympathy is expensive. It has to be paid for out of the same running time as everything else — so if you spend two hours humanising a man, the atrocities become a montage. Not because you are hiding them. Because you spent the film elsewhere.
THE BOAT IS MISSING. Nero tried to kill his mother, and kept failing.
Poison did not work — Agrippina had been taking antidotes for years, being the kind of woman who expected to be poisoned. So he had a boat built to collapse at sea.
It collapsed on schedule.
She swam ashore.
He eventually gave up on ingenuity and sent men with clubs.
It is grotesque, farcical, appalling and entirely documented, and it is the single most filmable sequence available to anyone making a film about Nero. Quo Vadis has no room for it either — but Quo Vadis is not about Nero’s mother. This film is. Agrippina is its engine. Morante is its best performance. And the most extraordinary thing that ever happened between those two characters is not in the picture.
It cannot be. The sympathetic reading does not survive the boat. A man who commissions a collapsing ship to drown his mother, waits, learns she has swum to safety, and then sends hired men to finish it – that is not a sensitive artist crushed by circumstance. That is something else – but the film has already committed to what he is.
So the boat goes.
Which is worth carrying into every historical film you ever watch: the most revealing thing about an adaptation is usually not what it invents. It is what it cannot afford to include.
THE PEOPLE TURN AGAINST HIM, AND THEY DIDN’T. This is the odd one, because the film has inverted the single fact that most supports its own case.
Nero was popular with ordinary Romans in a way he never was with the senatorial class who wrote the histories — and that popularity outlived him. Flowers appeared on his grave. Impostors claiming to be him surfaced in the eastern provinces for decades and found followers, which only works if people wanted him back.
A film arguing that Nero was more sympathetic than history allows had that sitting in the sources, and didn’t take it.
AND THE TIMELINE IS TIDIED throughout — dates moved, incidents reordered, the reign compressed. Sets, costumes and atmosphere are well captured; the accuracy suffers from cleaning up the facts.
WHAT IT GETS RIGHT
The sympathetic reading is not frivolous, and it deserves its strongest form.
HE REALLY WAS SIXTEEN. Nero inherited absolute power over the known world at an age when he would now be sitting exams — from a mother who had, in all probability, poisoned his predecessor to arrange it, and who intended to rule through him.
THE GOOD FIVE YEARS ARE REAL. Under Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Burrus, the early administration was genuinely well regarded, and remembered that way long afterwards. A film that starts here is not making excuses. It is starting from the record.
AGRIPPINA IS NOT EXAGGERATED. Nothing Morante does is invented for drama. If anything the film understates her: she was the daughter of a war hero, the sister of one emperor, the wife of another, and the mother of a third — the only woman in Roman history to have held all four positions.
SENECA IS ACCURATELY PLACED. Tutor, then advisor, then increasingly powerless, then dead by order. The film gets the shape of that decline right even where it compresses it.
AND THE SOURCES REALLY ARE HOSTILE. This is the film’s strongest argument and it makes it almost by accident. Everything we know about Nero was written by men who served the regime that replaced him — Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, all of them writing after he was safely dead and safely condemned.
Which is worth sitting with. Quo Vadis and this film worked from the same three historians, and one produced comedy and the other produced tragedy.
The evidence did not change. The reading did.
THE THREAD
Seneca taught Nero. Seven years after Seneca’s forced suicide, Nero could not bring himself to use the knife either, and his secretary Epaphroditus helped him. And in Epaphroditus’s household there was an enslaved boy who walked out of Nero’s Rome and became Epictetus — one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived, and a man whose surviving name is not a name at all but a Greek word meaning acquired. Epictetus formed Marcus Aurelius, who wrote the Meditations a century later, in Greek, on a frontier he would die on.
One continuous line of teaching about self-mastery, running from a tutor forced to open his veins, through a slave with no name, to an emperor. It begins in this film, in a room where a clever, frightened boy is being taught to be better than he turns out to be.
The film has no idea it is showing you that.
THE VERDICT
Nero (2004) is a compressed guide to a twenty-seven-year reign, a genuinely good argument about hostile sources, and a film with one outstanding performance in it.
Quo Vadis (1951) is not trying to be fair to Nero, and gets closer to him. This one is trying, and ends up further away — because fairness required leaving things out, and what it left out is who he was.
IF YOU LIKED THIS FILM
AGRIPPINA (1911) ★★★★☆ / ★☆☆☆☆
Watch this one next, and watch it because of what you have just read.
Eighteen minutes, silent, no budget worth mentioning, made by a painter
called Enrico Guazzoni two years before he invented the Roman epic —
and it stages the boat.
All of it. The ship built to collapse, the collapse, and a woman
swimming for the shore.
So the scene is not unfilmable, and it was never unfilmable. It is
missing from every later version because filming it forecloses an
interpretation those films wanted to keep open. In 1911 nobody had yet
decided that Nero needed defending, so nobody had a reason to look away.
The earliest version is the most honest one — and it is honest by not
yet being clever.
QUO VADIS (1951) ★★☆☆☆ / ★★★★☆
The same emperor, the same three historians, the same fire — played as comedy that keeps turning lethal. Peter Ustinov’s Nero is an insecure man-child with the power of a god, and he is funnier and more frightening for it. Watch both and you will see how far the same evidence can be stretched.
THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932) ★★☆☆☆ / ★★★★☆
Nero again, nineteen years before Quo Vadis, in a Hollywood that had not yet been told what it could not show.
The Books
LETTERS FROM A STOIC — SENECA
The man Matthias Habich plays, writing on how to live, while working for a man he could not control.
THE DISCOURSES — EPICTETUS
The slave in Nero’s palace who became the philosopher. Note which translation: Robin Hard made two, in 1995 and 2014, and they are different books.
MEDITATIONS — MARCUS AURELIUS
The far end of the thread. A private notebook, written in Greek, never meant to be read.
→ The full Rome & Judea timeline, 63 BC to 75 AD
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