Nero (37–68 AD)

The most famous emperor Rome ever produced may also be the most misread. The fiddling while Rome burned - almost certainly invented. The great fire - almost certainly not his doing. The monster of popular imagination - largely the creation of writers working decades after his death, in a political climate that needed a villain.

What's harder to dismiss is what came after 64 AD. The persecution of Christians. The executions. The Domus Aurea - a palace of staggering scale and self-indulgence built across the ruins of a burned city. These are real. So is the fact that ordinary Romans and the entire Greek-speaking east maintained a fierce affection for him long after his death - with imposters claiming to be him appearing for decades, and at least one successor emperor renaming himself Nero in his honor.

He died at thirty, by his own hand, the last of the Julio-Claudians. The empire celebrated. The people mourned. Two thousand years later, the argument about who he actually was has not been settled.