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Oop- ruh roh Rhaggy, it appears I've hit 666 watchers. Well that's probably not the most celebratory number, but thank you all nonetheless for stickin’ around!

Yeah okay, by the time I'm posting this, I'm actually up to 668, so I kinda missed the mark there, but I had to get dental work done a few days ago, and getting needles in your mouth kinda sucks the creative energy out of ya. Still, I saw this occasion coming, and I figured there's only one appropriate design to draw: the man, the myth, the asshole: Emperor Nero. Okay, maybe the Devil would've been equally appropriate, but I've already done a blurb on that clockwork loose cannon, so instead we're going with the whole reason “666” has such a wicked reputation in our modern culture in the first place. More on that later, but suffice to say, before the scary German mustache man came along to take the throne of humanity's greatest cancer, Nero was the man everyone pointed to as the top tier example of disturbed and tyrannical rulers. What did he do to earn himself such a disreputable legacy? Well there's probably better sources of educational information out there than some nerd on DeviantArt who thinks she's funny, but at least 668 of you are here anyways, so let's explore together.

I suppose we should start with the fact that most of the Julio-Claudian Emperors of Rome were already famous for bouts of raving lunacy and taking extreme measures to secure their power. Caligula, for one, took the initiative of making war on Man's oldest enemy: the Sea. Fuck you, Sea. Okay, that's likely an exaggeration (story for another day) but it goes to show how the critics of his day assessed his mental state, at least. Caligula, incidentally, was the brother of Nero's mother Agrippina the Younger, who popped Nero out in a splendidly wealthy villa somewhere along the shores of Antium on December 15, 37 CE. He wasn't yet called “Nero”, he was called Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but no amount of Mr. Perkins’ Latin class will make me comfortable pronouncing that more than once. I'm sure you can imagine all of the absolutely wonderful perks of being Caligula's sister, such as being the subject of the madman's conspiratorial ravings. Accordingly, around the same time that her husband died (when Nero was only three years old), Caligula saw fit to disinherit his sister and exile her as far away from himself as possible.

Nero was left in the care of his aunt, Domitia Lepida, who was the mother of Messalina, a girl who had gotten married to Claudius. That's the soon-to-be-Emperor Claudius who donned the purple in 41 CE when the Praetorian Guard decided they'd had enough of Caligula's bullshit and took him down a dark alleyway to shiv him until he stopped breathing. Claudius conveniently also happened to be Agrippina's uncle, and he quite liked his niece, so he brought her back from exile. As we'll soon see, apparently Caligula was right to worry about her ambitions, because conspiracy evidently runs in the family. Agrippina set her sights on becoming the most powerful woman in Rome, and she certainly wasn't going to be able to do that with the man Claudius found for her. So first, she poisoned that poor bastard, then after Messalina was executed for… let's call it “salacious behavior”... Agrippina pulled right up to her uncle and said “heyyy let's get hitched”. Claudius evidently saw nothing wrong with this, as he married his niece in 48 CE, and had to put up with her constant nagging to adopt Nero as his heir ever since. Now, Claudius already had a son, Britannicus, so when he did eventually cave in to her demands in 51 CE, he did so with the stipulation that Nero would share the throne equally with him. Agrippina presumably followed this up with a “yeah yeah totally man absolutely”, as she not-so-subtly slipped a dollop of poison into her uncle's wine. When Claudius keeled over in 54 CE, Agrippina presented Nero to the Praetorians as their new Emperor. Nevermind that Britannicus kid, losers weepers.

Nero by this point was only sixteen years old and sitting in the world's most powerful chair. Unfortunately, he'd already earned himself a reputation as a bratty rich teenager who cared more about pumping out bangers on his lyre than he did about governing. In short, he was a frat boy, but that's okay actually, because let's be honest, the entirety of Rome was basically one big frat house, so they looked at this debaucherous little shit and said… fuck yeah! Nero was happy to oblige, too, cutting taxes, hosting lavish parties, and generally spreading the attitude of “fuck the Man!” In fact, in Nero's world, “the Man” was his mother, his scheming, overbearing mother who saw him more as her puppet to marry off to her allies and harass her enemies. I know how that feels, and I also know how it feels to finally have full legal rights to cut your mother off once she takes a step too far. As Nero was literally the most powerful man on Earth now, that's exactly what he did, banning Agrippina from more and more events until she was effectively shunned out of life in the Roman court. Her plan completely backfiring on her, Agrippina attempted to form an alliance with that Britannicus loser, but Nero was like “ohhh no no no bitch”, and had Britannicus poisoned in 55 CE. This began the long struggle of mother and son trying to out-Caligula one another, until 59 CE, when Nero came up with the most Wile E. Coyote assassination plot I think I've discussed so far: he had a mechanical ceiling invented that would collapse over his mother's bed at Nero's command. When this tragically failed to turn her into an accordion, Nero set her up on this Acme-ass boat which was designed to sink and drown her. When she survived the swim back, Nero finally just said “oh fuck it”, and just had her stabbed to death the good old fashioned way.

Nero proclaimed the assassination a suicide, which absolutely no one believed, but damned if any of them would be the first to call Nero out on it. They had more important things to waste oxygen on, and so did Nero, like this Iceni queen who scorched a significant chunk of Roman Britain in 60 CE. More importantly though, Nero was preoccupied with dumping his wife, Claudia Octavia. Octavia was Claudius's daughter and their marriage was really just another one of Agrippina's unwelcome schemes. His true love was Poppaea Sabina… who was already married but ahhh it's okay, Nero was the Emperor, he could arrange however many divorces suited his fancy! In fact, why not just off Octavia for good measure while we're at it? No loose threads.

But okay, while murdering your family is obviously pretty bad, it's hardly the most scandalous thing a ruler can be known for. What really sent Nero's reputation into a nosedive was the Great Fire of July 64 CE. No one is quite sure what started it, but this blazing inferno first sparked somewhere in the markets near the Circus Maximus, and spread to engulf nearly three-fourths of the Eternal City. The destruction and death toll was horrible, unimaginable, and all the while Nero watched with a big old Joker smile, fiddling while Rome burned… except… no, no he didn't actually. Yes, while this is arguably the most famous idiom regarding Nero in modern vernacular, this factoid is actually completely bunk. This myth stems from contemporary rumors that circulated after the Great Fire, when Nero took advantage of the freshly cleared property to construct his famous Golden Palace. This was an extravagant eyesore that included a 100-foot tall statue of himself, and people began to whisper that Nero started the fire himself just to have the space to build it. This is certainly the way biographers Suetonius and Cassius Dio wrote it. These men lived well after Nero's time, however, and clearly had no love for the Julio-Claudians. Tacitus, meanwhile, was actually alive during the Great Fire, and he reports that Nero was nowhere near Rome at the time. The Emperor was in fact chilling at his villa in Antium, over 30 miles away, and when reports of what happened reached him, he was heartbroken, and mounted relief efforts for the victims of the Fire, even letting the homeless crash in his Palace.

It seems then that, at least in this instance, Nero was just the victim of optics. So, in an effort to deflect the blame, Nero pulled out that big ass book of excuses that every single politician owns and right there on page 1 he found the solution to all his problems: blame the Jews, of course! Specifically, Nero singled out a radical new sect of Judaism which believed that some crucified homeless guy was the son of God. The result was a massive pogrom which saw early Christians rounded up and subjected to unspeakable torments, including the usual getting fed to lions, and the more extravagant being tarred and lit on fire to serve as living candles during Nero's dinner parties. Yikes. One such man who managed to survive this reign of terror was called John, whom you may know best as the author of a little known tome called Revelation. Which finally brings us back around to the 666 thing. I honestly find this trope really funny, because it's always treated as some big cosmic mystery that can only be solved through elaborate demonology. When, really, it's just code. Gematria was a form of numerology common in the Hebrew world which involved assigning numerical values to each letter of the alphabet and just adding them up to produce a given word's “number”. You can look up a chart of the values yourself to check the math, but when you add up the values of the Hebrew spelling of “Neron Caesar” (the proper Greek spelling of the man's name), the number you get is 666. I guess you could chalk that up to coincidence, except there's a common variant of the Book of Revelation which purports the Number of the Beast instead to be 616 (Papyrus 115 being the oldest example). All you'd need to do to get this number is to drop the final “n” (which has a value of 50) from “Neron” to make “Nero Caesar”, and with that I think the nature of “the Beast” is pretty obvious. It was a quick and dirty bit of cipher that allowed the author to bitch about the Man without getting his head lopped off. I just find it really funny how it really only became such a big mystery because once the Romans all finally came around to this hot new Christian fad, they looked at all this wacky stuff in the Book of Revelation designed as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Roman Empire and the metaphor just went completely over their heads, because oh well surely we're not the problem. And our modern culture has just been stuck thinking the metaphor is actually some big demonic conspiracy ever since.

But okay, back to Nero. While he's probably not guilty of the crime he's most accused of, the years following the Great Fire are considered a turning point in his cruelty. There was the torture of Christians, obviously, but Nero had also started distancing himself from his old tutors, Burrus and Seneca, who were largely responsible for keeping Nero’s debaucherous habits in check. Burrus had died back in 62 CE, and Seneca was quickly losing his hold. In 65 CE, Nero suspected his old mentor of being involved with Gaius Calpurnius Piso's attempt to assassinate him, and so ordered him to take his own life. With the last of his babysitters quite literally cut from his life, there was nothing to stop the world's most powerful man from drowning in that power. The final nail in the coffin came that same year, when he got into some sort of argument with his beloved Poppaea. Words were said, tensions rose, and Nero got so angry that he lashed out, beating Poppaea to death… and kicking her in her very pregnant belly. When Nero's blood finally cooled and he realized what he'd done, he fell into the same spiral that many a rock star does when they cross a line they can't come back from. Nero went completely insane, and concocted all manner of sick rituals to pretend his wife was still alive. During his tour in Greece (where he was still pretty popular as king frat boy) the next year, he caught a glimpse of a kid named Sporus, who had the unfortunate quality of being the spitting image of Poppaea. Nero had Sporus abducted, castrated, dressed up like his empress, and proceeded to… um… let's be really PG and say he “performed his marital duties” to him for the rest of his courtly life. Hoooooly shit dude, that is so many levels of fucked.

By this point, it was obvious that someone had to put a stop to this. In 68 CE, that task had been taken on by the governor of Gaul, Vindex, in partnership with Galba, a popular soldier and statesman whom the Senate declared to be the new Emperor in conjunction with labeling Nero an enemy of the state. Nero's entire staff, including the Praetorian Guard, abandoned him, and he fled to a villa a few miles just outside of Rome. He found himself besieged by a popular uprising, alone and condemned. When he searched the villa for someone to help him, lamenting “what an artist dies in me” to himself over and over, he found no one left who cared about his well being. Deciding it was better than being strung up on a cross like a common slave, Nero fetched a dagger and plunged it into his own throat. When the mob broke down the doors and found him bleeding out, he used his last neckbearded breath to mock them: “It is too late. This is fidelity.” So says Suetonius, at least.

Design notes, this one was honestly pretty straightforward. Like my fondness for James Tissot, I found a reference I liked and ran with it. In this case, it was Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki's 1897 piece “The Christian Dirce”. I say I liked it, and I do, the overall composition at least. What threw me for a loop however is trying to visualize what the hell is going on with Nero's robes here. Like, I'll be honest, togas are already a pain in the ass to draw as is, but Siemiradzki has it draped around in such an odd fashion that it made it hard to determine how it would look when unclutched. I spent like ten minutes standing in front of the mirror trying to match the pose with my blanket folded at different angles just to dissect what exactly is happening here. I think I figured it out, but then of course putting it on paper was a whole different beast. I'm not 100% sure I got it right, but I eventually got the layers to a satisfactory position, and I wasn't about to touch it while I was happy with it. It's done, it's fine, moving on.

Description
Oop- ruh roh Rhaggy, it appears I've hit 666 watchers. Well that's probably not the most celebratory number, but thank you all nonetheless for stickin’ around!

Yeah okay, by the time I'm posting this, I'm actually up to 668, so I kinda missed the mark there, but I had to get dental work done a few days ago, and getting needles in your mouth kinda sucks the creative energy out of ya. Still, I saw this occasion coming, and I figured there's only one appropriate design to draw: the man, the myth, the asshole: Emperor Nero. Okay, maybe the Devil would've been equally appropriate, but I've already done a blurb on that clockwork loose cannon, so instead we're going with the whole reason “666” has such a wicked reputation in our modern culture in the first place. More on that later, but suffice to say, before the scary German mustache man came along to take the throne of humanity's greatest cancer, Nero was the man everyone pointed to as the top tier example of disturbed and tyrannical rulers. What did he do to earn himself such a disreputable legacy? Well there's probably better sources of educational information out there than some nerd on DeviantArt who thinks she's funny, but at least 668 of you are here anyways, so let's explore together.

I suppose we should start with the fact that most of the Julio-Claudian Emperors of Rome were already famous for bouts of raving lunacy and taking extreme measures to secure their power. Caligula, for one, took the initiative of making war on Man's oldest enemy: the Sea. Fuck you, Sea. Okay, that's likely an exaggeration (story for another day) but it goes to show how the critics of his day assessed his mental state, at least. Caligula, incidentally, was the brother of Nero's mother Agrippina the Younger, who popped Nero out in a splendidly wealthy villa somewhere along the shores of Antium on December 15, 37 CE. He wasn't yet called “Nero”, he was called Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but no amount of Mr. Perkins’ Latin class will make me comfortable pronouncing that more than once. I'm sure you can imagine all of the absolutely wonderful perks of being Caligula's sister, such as being the subject of the madman's conspiratorial ravings. Accordingly, around the same time that her husband died (when Nero was only three years old), Caligula saw fit to disinherit his sister and exile her as far away from himself as possible.

Nero was left in the care of his aunt, Domitia Lepida, who was the mother of Messalina, a girl who had gotten married to Claudius. That's the soon-to-be-Emperor Claudius who donned the purple in 41 CE when the Praetorian Guard decided they'd had enough of Caligula's bullshit and took him down a dark alleyway to shiv him until he stopped breathing. Claudius conveniently also happened to be Agrippina's uncle, and he quite liked his niece, so he brought her back from exile. As we'll soon see, apparently Caligula was right to worry about her ambitions, because conspiracy evidently runs in the family. Agrippina set her sights on becoming the most powerful woman in Rome, and she certainly wasn't going to be able to do that with the man Claudius found for her. So first, she poisoned that poor bastard, then after Messalina was executed for… let's call it “salacious behavior”... Agrippina pulled right up to her uncle and said “heyyy let's get hitched”. Claudius evidently saw nothing wrong with this, as he married his niece in 48 CE, and had to put up with her constant nagging to adopt Nero as his heir ever since. Now, Claudius already had a son, Britannicus, so when he did eventually cave in to her demands in 51 CE, he did so with the stipulation that Nero would share the throne equally with him. Agrippina presumably followed this up with a “yeah yeah totally man absolutely”, as she not-so-subtly slipped a dollop of poison into her uncle's wine. When Claudius keeled over in 54 CE, Agrippina presented Nero to the Praetorians as their new Emperor. Nevermind that Britannicus kid, losers weepers.

Nero by this point was only sixteen years old and sitting in the world's most powerful chair. Unfortunately, he'd already earned himself a reputation as a bratty rich teenager who cared more about pumping out bangers on his lyre than he did about governing. In short, he was a frat boy, but that's okay actually, because let's be honest, the entirety of Rome was basically one big frat house, so they looked at this debaucherous little shit and said… fuck yeah! Nero was happy to oblige, too, cutting taxes, hosting lavish parties, and generally spreading the attitude of “fuck the Man!” In fact, in Nero's world, “the Man” was his mother, his scheming, overbearing mother who saw him more as her puppet to marry off to her allies and harass her enemies. I know how that feels, and I also know how it feels to finally have full legal rights to cut your mother off once she takes a step too far. As Nero was literally the most powerful man on Earth now, that's exactly what he did, banning Agrippina from more and more events until she was effectively shunned out of life in the Roman court. Her plan completely backfiring on her, Agrippina attempted to form an alliance with that Britannicus loser, but Nero was like “ohhh no no no bitch”, and had Britannicus poisoned in 55 CE. This began the long struggle of mother and son trying to out-Caligula one another, until 59 CE, when Nero came up with the most Wile E. Coyote assassination plot I think I've discussed so far: he had a mechanical ceiling invented that would collapse over his mother's bed at Nero's command. When this tragically failed to turn her into an accordion, Nero set her up on this Acme-ass boat which was designed to sink and drown her. When she survived the swim back, Nero finally just said “oh fuck it”, and just had her stabbed to death the good old fashioned way.

Nero proclaimed the assassination a suicide, which absolutely no one believed, but damned if any of them would be the first to call Nero out on it. They had more important things to waste oxygen on, and so did Nero, like this Iceni queen who scorched a significant chunk of Roman Britain in 60 CE. More importantly though, Nero was preoccupied with dumping his wife, Claudia Octavia. Octavia was Claudius's daughter and their marriage was really just another one of Agrippina's unwelcome schemes. His true love was Poppaea Sabina… who was already married but ahhh it's okay, Nero was the Emperor, he could arrange however many divorces suited his fancy! In fact, why not just off Octavia for good measure while we're at it? No loose threads.

But okay, while murdering your family is obviously pretty bad, it's hardly the most scandalous thing a ruler can be known for. What really sent Nero's reputation into a nosedive was the Great Fire of July 64 CE. No one is quite sure what started it, but this blazing inferno first sparked somewhere in the markets near the Circus Maximus, and spread to engulf nearly three-fourths of the Eternal City. The destruction and death toll was horrible, unimaginable, and all the while Nero watched with a big old Joker smile, fiddling while Rome burned… except… no, no he didn't actually. Yes, while this is arguably the most famous idiom regarding Nero in modern vernacular, this factoid is actually completely bunk. This myth stems from contemporary rumors that circulated after the Great Fire, when Nero took advantage of the freshly cleared property to construct his famous Golden Palace. This was an extravagant eyesore that included a 100-foot tall statue of himself, and people began to whisper that Nero started the fire himself just to have the space to build it. This is certainly the way biographers Suetonius and Cassius Dio wrote it. These men lived well after Nero's time, however, and clearly had no love for the Julio-Claudians. Tacitus, meanwhile, was actually alive during the Great Fire, and he reports that Nero was nowhere near Rome at the time. The Emperor was in fact chilling at his villa in Antium, over 30 miles away, and when reports of what happened reached him, he was heartbroken, and mounted relief efforts for the victims of the Fire, even letting the homeless crash in his Palace.

It seems then that, at least in this instance, Nero was just the victim of optics. So, in an effort to deflect the blame, Nero pulled out that big ass book of excuses that every single politician owns and right there on page 1 he found the solution to all his problems: blame the Jews, of course! Specifically, Nero singled out a radical new sect of Judaism which believed that some crucified homeless guy was the son of God. The result was a massive pogrom which saw early Christians rounded up and subjected to unspeakable torments, including the usual getting fed to lions, and the more extravagant being tarred and lit on fire to serve as living candles during Nero's dinner parties. Yikes. One such man who managed to survive this reign of terror was called John, whom you may know best as the author of a little known tome called Revelation. Which finally brings us back around to the 666 thing. I honestly find this trope really funny, because it's always treated as some big cosmic mystery that can only be solved through elaborate demonology. When, really, it's just code. Gematria was a form of numerology common in the Hebrew world which involved assigning numerical values to each letter of the alphabet and just adding them up to produce a given word's “number”. You can look up a chart of the values yourself to check the math, but when you add up the values of the Hebrew spelling of “Neron Caesar” (the proper Greek spelling of the man's name), the number you get is 666. I guess you could chalk that up to coincidence, except there's a common variant of the Book of Revelation which purports the Number of the Beast instead to be 616 (Papyrus 115 being the oldest example). All you'd need to do to get this number is to drop the final “n” (which has a value of 50) from “Neron” to make “Nero Caesar”, and with that I think the nature of “the Beast” is pretty obvious. It was a quick and dirty bit of cipher that allowed the author to bitch about the Man without getting his head lopped off. I just find it really funny how it really only became such a big mystery because once the Romans all finally came around to this hot new Christian fad, they looked at all this wacky stuff in the Book of Revelation designed as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Roman Empire and the metaphor just went completely over their heads, because oh well surely we're not the problem. And our modern culture has just been stuck thinking the metaphor is actually some big demonic conspiracy ever since.

But okay, back to Nero. While he's probably not guilty of the crime he's most accused of, the years following the Great Fire are considered a turning point in his cruelty. There was the torture of Christians, obviously, but Nero had also started distancing himself from his old tutors, Burrus and Seneca, who were largely responsible for keeping Nero’s debaucherous habits in check. Burrus had died back in 62 CE, and Seneca was quickly losing his hold. In 65 CE, Nero suspected his old mentor of being involved with Gaius Calpurnius Piso's attempt to assassinate him, and so ordered him to take his own life. With the last of his babysitters quite literally cut from his life, there was nothing to stop the world's most powerful man from drowning in that power. The final nail in the coffin came that same year, when he got into some sort of argument with his beloved Poppaea. Words were said, tensions rose, and Nero got so angry that he lashed out, beating Poppaea to death… and kicking her in her very pregnant belly. When Nero's blood finally cooled and he realized what he'd done, he fell into the same spiral that many a rock star does when they cross a line they can't come back from. Nero went completely insane, and concocted all manner of sick rituals to pretend his wife was still alive. During his tour in Greece (where he was still pretty popular as king frat boy) the next year, he caught a glimpse of a kid named Sporus, who had the unfortunate quality of being the spitting image of Poppaea. Nero had Sporus abducted, castrated, dressed up like his empress, and proceeded to… um… let's be really PG and say he “performed his marital duties” to him for the rest of his courtly life. Hoooooly shit dude, that is so many levels of fucked.

By this point, it was obvious that someone had to put a stop to this. In 68 CE, that task had been taken on by the governor of Gaul, Vindex, in partnership with Galba, a popular soldier and statesman whom the Senate declared to be the new Emperor in conjunction with labeling Nero an enemy of the state. Nero's entire staff, including the Praetorian Guard, abandoned him, and he fled to a villa a few miles just outside of Rome. He found himself besieged by a popular uprising, alone and condemned. When he searched the villa for someone to help him, lamenting “what an artist dies in me” to himself over and over, he found no one left who cared about his well being. Deciding it was better than being strung up on a cross like a common slave, Nero fetched a dagger and plunged it into his own throat. When the mob broke down the doors and found him bleeding out, he used his last neckbearded breath to mock them: “It is too late. This is fidelity.” So says Suetonius, at least.

Design notes, this one was honestly pretty straightforward. Like my fondness for James Tissot, I found a reference I liked and ran with it. In this case, it was Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki's 1897 piece “The Christian Dirce”. I say I liked it, and I do, the overall composition at least. What threw me for a loop however is trying to visualize what the hell is going on with Nero's robes here. Like, I'll be honest, togas are already a pain in the ass to draw as is, but Siemiradzki has it draped around in such an odd fashion that it made it hard to determine how it would look when unclutched. I spent like ten minutes standing in front of the mirror trying to match the pose with my blanket folded at different angles just to dissect what exactly is happening here. I think I figured it out, but then of course putting it on paper was a whole different beast. I'm not 100% sure I got it right, but I eventually got the layers to a satisfactory position, and I wasn't about to touch it while I was happy with it. It's done, it's fine, moving on.