Nero was a Roman emperor who lived from 37 to 68 AD. He came to power as a young man and died at thirty. History remembers him as cruel: stories say he had his mother killed, and more than one wife, and many other people. After a great fire tore through Rome in the year 64, he blamed the Christians, and many were put to death. There is a famous picture of him “fiddling while Rome burned” — playing music while the city was on fire, as if he did not care. Though actually that picture is later storytelling. The violin (the fiddle) had not been invented yet. If he played anything, it would have been a kind of small harp, and even that may not be true. The saying is still useful in English: when someone “fiddled while Rome burned,” they played with small things while something big and bad was happening, and they should have been helping. He also liked to perform as an actor and a musician, which many Romans thought was not a proper thing for an emperor to do. So the stories mix real cruelty, a real love of the stage, and later legend.