Professor Mary Beard
speaker
662 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 1 May
Professor Mary Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He built it.
Fast palace, fantastic.
But another historian, Cassius Dio, he doesn't have that argument so much as saying, look, he just wanted to kind of go down in a blaze, right?
He really wanted, as it were, to be like the king of Troy and...
see his city blaze around him and go down with his city, you know, because it was such a great way to go.
Again, there are things to be said in favour of him and against.
Well, OK, so in the against column, he blamed Christians.
He blamed the Christians.
And he punished... There was already a relatively small sect of Christians in Rome.
Roman pagan writers thought it was perfectly fine to trash the Christians, but...
But Nero is said to have gone too far.
That comes a bit later.
But in the Christian tradition, Nero is said to be the first persecutor of the Christians.
Nero is kind of the devil incarnate in Christian teaching.
And it goes back to this.
It goes back to him blaming them for the fire of Rome and punishing them horribly.
Yeah, it comes after the fires, the year after the fire.
And it's in 65 CE, and tens, 50-odd people are charged with being in a conspiracy to overthrow Rome.
overthrow Nero, not Rome.
Well, he is Rome.
Showing 141–160 of 662 · page 8 of 34
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