Suetonius Life of Nero

When I first started reading Suetonius Life of Nero I was expecting something similar to what I had seen in the movie.  I was not expecting Nero to be so terrible, I don’t think there is a word that I can think of that can describe how terrible Nero was, according to Suetonius.  I knew, from the movie Quo Vadis, that Nero had killed his previous wife and mother, but I was not expecting to read about how he dressed himself in animal skin and raped other people.  I was aware that, in ancient Rome, having sex with your slaves was something that was not unheard of and I knew that it was something that I should not have been to surprise from.  But because, through the movie Quo Vadis, I had formed my own opinions of Nero and I kind of liked how evil the character of Nero was that to hear how Nero the person was, I did not even notice that I was separating the two. Once I was able to process that Nero from Quo Vadis and Nero from Suetonius were the same person just different interpretations of him I was able to piece all the information that I had of Nero and put them into one Nero and not have two different Nero’s in my mind.  It was after I came to terms that it was just one Nero that I started to hope that Nero would die soon in the movie Quo Vadis.  In the movie Quo Vadis the character of Nero does not really change he is evil from the very beginning of the movie but reading about Nero in Suetonius Life of Nero I was able to read how much Nero really changed.  In the beginning it seemed that Nero really loved his mother so when I read that he had killed his mother I was a little surprised but I think Nero was just a really crazy person that the life he had made him become the evil person that he was and he convinced himself that was he was doing was alright because he was an “artist” it almost seemed that he wanted bad things to happen to him so he made sure of that and I am glad that at the end I got the satisfaction of seeing the character Nero die in Quo Vadis.