How did Nero die? Suicide in June AD 68 ended a dynasty

Nero, the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, killed himself on or about 9 June AD 68 at his freedman Phaon’s villa, four miles outside Rome, after the Senate declared him a public enemy. He was 30, and his death ended the family line that had held power since Octavian took the name Augustus in 27 BC.

How do we know he died on 9 June?

No ancient author states the date outright. Suetonius says Nero died “on the anniversary of the murder of Octavia”, the wife he had exiled and had killed in AD 62. Cassius Dio recorded his exact age, but the number is garbled in the surviving manuscripts, and the Byzantine summariser Zonaras even placed the death in July. Working back from Nero’s birth on 15 December AD 37, the Loeb editors of Dio conclude that he “perished apparently on the 9th of June”. The traditional date is a scholarly reconstruction, not a recorded fact.

Suetonius supplies the scene. Nero ordered a grave dug to his own measurements, repeated “What an artist the world is losing!”, and finally drove a dagger into his throat with help from his secretary Epaphroditus. He had begged that nobody take his head; he was cremated whole and laid in the family tomb of the Domitii on the Pincian Hill.

Did Romans believe he was really dead?

Many did not. Within months, Tacitus writes, Achaia and Asia Minor were “terrified by a false report that Nero was at hand”. The impostor was a harp-playing look-alike, a slave or freedman, who gathered deserters on the island of Cythnus before he was killed. Suetonius recalls another “Nero” appearing 20 years later, whom the Parthians backed and handed over “with great reluctance”. Others kept laying flowers on his tomb.

Rome had lost an emperor violently before, when Caligula was murdered by his own guards, but never the whole dynasty. Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian ruled in turn between June 68 and December 69, and only Vespasian’s Flavian dynasty ended the civil war.