Prologue

PROLOGUE

“QUALIS ARTIFEX PEREO.”
What an artist dies in me.

The words don’t belong to a madman. Not in his mind, anyway.

As Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sat in the dirt, surrounded by a shrinking circle of allies and enemies and no one in between, he wasn’t thinking like a fallen emperor. He was thinking like a star whose audience had abandoned the theater. He wasn’t a tyrant dying in shame. He was a performer dying without applause.

And maybe that’s what makes Nero so dangerous — even now, almost two thousand years later. Because for all the blood on his hands, for all the fires and floggings and forced suicides, for all the betrayal and paranoia and madness, Nero never saw himself as a villain. He saw himself as the misunderstood protagonist of a story too beautiful for the world to appreciate.

He didn’t want to rule Rome. He wanted to be loved by it.

And when it didn’t love him back?

He burned it down.

This is the story of how that fire started — not just the literal one, though that comes too — but the one underneath. The slow smoldering collapse of a republic already on life support. The rot behind the marble. The performance behind the power.

Because Nero was never alone in his madness. He just took the stage when everyone else was too afraid to admit they’d already sold their souls for a front-row seat.

You’ll hear a lot about monsters in this book. But don’t let the spotlight fool you.

This isn’t just a story about him.

It’s a story about what happens when we clap for too long.