Chapter Thirteen - Exit Stage Left

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Exit Stage Left

NERO WAS DEAD.
But nobody believed it.

At least — not at first.

Because how could a man who filled every corner of Rome with his face, his voice, his echo, just disappear?

He had burned cities, married ghosts, killed his mother, rewritten history — and now he was gone?

Too quiet.
Too fast.
Too unfinished.

It didn’t feel like the end.

It felt like an intermission.

The Senate declared it a new dawn.
The people threw coins with Galba’s face on them.
Statues of Nero were pulled down, names scratched from plaques, portraits dumped in rivers.

The stage was cleared.

But the air still smelled like smoke.

Some mourned.

Not senators. Not generals. But people.
The masses. The Greeks. The artists. The ones who remembered the free games, the subsidies, the gold falling from balconies during Nero’s festivals.

To them, Nero wasn’t a tyrant.

He was the only emperor who had ever paid attention to them.

He had sung for them.
Danced for them.
Smiled for them.
Pretended to care — and in Rome, pretending often passed for truth.

So when the curtain fell, something strange happened:

They wanted him back.

Rome had killed the man.

But it had accidentally created the myth.

And that myth — the idea that a fallen ruler could return, could be reborn, could rise again after disgrace — would live long past Nero.

Too long.

Because Nero didn’t just burn Rome.

He burned the idea that power needed to be righteous.

He taught the world a different lesson:

That if you perform well enough,
if you dazzle long enough,
if you make the people feel something —
they might forgive everything else.

Even you.