Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?

He’s reviled as a cruel tyrant who killed his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned. But was Nero’s descent into madness triggered by his failed romance with a former slave? Edward J Watts tells a story of murder, incest and political intrigue

Published: December 29, 2025 at 4:00 PM

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It is difficult to feel empathy for the emperor Nero, a man who did such unquestionably terrible things that he has become a prototype for the monstrous Roman ruler. During his lifetime he was labelled a matricide, an arsonist and a persecutor of Christians who also killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. After his death, these stories grew into terrifying legends about his cruel madness.

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By the Middle Ages, chroniclers even detailed a tale in which Nero commanded doctors to make him give birth. Fearing for their lives, the terrified doctors “made up a potion in which they put a frog and gave it to the emperor to drink”, while prescribing him a special diet that would cause his stomach to expand. When Nero vomited the animal out, he “commanded that the foetus be fed and kept in a domed chamber” as his imperial heir. Some manuscripts even featured an image of Nero on a birthing chair beside his frog-child to illustrate his “evil madness”.

And yet it is not hard to imagine a different life for Nero. This is because, before Nero became a monster, he was a heartbroken boy prohibited from marrying Acte – his one true love.

Family trauma

The tragic history of Nero’s family made it all the more surprising that he found such a romantic partner. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – the man whom Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, hoped would assume imperial power following his planned retirement. When Germanicus predeceased Tiberius, however, his wife and children became potential rivals and were ultimately arrested. Agrippina’s mother starved to death in captivity, while her brother took his own life by eating the mattress in his cell. Their fates taught the princess that real financial and political security came only from a strong connection to some devoted, powerful male figure. She married thrice, each time to a rich and powerful suitor.

Her first marriage, which was celebrated in AD 28 when she was just 13 years old, joined Agrippina to her 30-year-old cousin, Domitius Ahenobarbus. Nero was born to the couple in AD 37, and the child not only inherited his father’s fortune when Ahenobarbus died in AD 41, but also that of Agrippina’s second husband, Passienus Crispus, who died six years later.

In AD 49, Agrippina wed her uncle, the elderly emperor Claudius. She persuaded Claudius to name Nero as his heir and to marry his natural-born daughter Octavia to Nero in AD 53. Between her husband and her son, Agrippina finally seemed to have the security she had long craved.

As Claudius’s natural-born son Britannicus entered adolescence, however, the emperor began to reconsider Nero’s appointment as successor designate. But Claudius suddenly died on 13 October AD 54, poisoned by a mushroom that Agrippina may or may not have arranged for him to eat. The 16-year-old Nero was now Roman emperor. Britannicus would be dead within a year.

A marble statue showing a woman crowning a man. Both are dressed in Roman clothes

A relief shows Agrippina crowning Nero with a laurel wreath. The 16-year-old boy became emperor following the death of his mother's third husband (and uncle), Claudius (Image by Wiki Commons)

Acte enters the scene

Everyone in Rome, except perhaps for Nero himself, understood that Nero’s status as Claudius’s legitimate heir derived in large part from his marriage to Octavia. It was then essential for the young couple to remain together. Nero, however, found his wife physically repulsive, and began searching for more attractive and interesting sexual partners. This is how Acte entered his life.

The girl, who had been bought as a slave in the Roman province of Asia, was seen by the men around Nero as someone who “could fulfil his desires without harm to anyone” since, as the historian wrote, “it was feared that he might rush into scandalous behaviour with noble ladies, if he were not permitted this indulgence”.

Nero found Octavia physically repulsive, and began searching for more attractive and interesting sexual partners

Tacitus’s words reflect the Roman idea that enslaved people like Acte were, in a sense, disposable commodities whose bodies could be used by noble men to fulfil the urges their wives could not. When the men tired of “the debaucheries… that vice made overwhelmingly attractive”, they were supposed to dispose of the slaves who had serviced them. This is how elite men often behaved, but no one anticipated that, instead of using and dismissing the girl, Nero would fall in love with Acte. Not only had she quickly won Nero’s affections, but their intense connection would lead to her emancipation and talk of Nero’s desire to marry her.

Agrippina was incensed when she learned that this sexual dalliance had evolved into a genuine romance. Tacitus says that she “raved with a woman’s fury about having… a slave girl for a daughter-in-law”, but that “the fouler her reproaches, the fiercer the passion Nero felt”.

Finally, Agrippina snapped and yelled at her son: “It was I who made you emperor!” This entirely true but extremely unwise outburst was too much for the headstrong teenage emperor to bear. It was at that point, writes Tacitus, that Nero “threw off all respect for his mother”.

Rise of the sycophants

Sensing an opportunity, men like the future emperor Otho and the senator Seneca stepped forward to exploit the emperor’s hurt feelings and growing estrangement from Agrippina. Otho, a fashionable party boy from an aristocratic family, offered emotional support to Nero during wild drinking sessions, in which the emperor confessed to Otho far more than was wise.

Meanwhile, Seneca offered more practical aid by enlisting an associate who was willing to pretend to be in love with Acte, so he could “serve as the ostensible giver of the presents secretly sent by the emperor to the girl”. The appreciative emperor was too naïve to realise that these men encouraged his love affair precisely because it weakened his bond with Agrippina and made him more likely to reward them in the future.

Agrippina was not so foolish. “Changing her tactics,” Tacitus writes, she went to her son and “pleaded guilty to an ill-timed strictness”. She even “offered the seclusion of her chamber” for Nero and Acte to use so that their activities did not further embarrass Octavia. This shift in Agrippina’s attitude was sensible politics and good parenting, but Nero’s “most intimate friends… begged him to beware of the arts of a woman” who, they claimed, “was always daring and was now lying”.

A painting showing a group of Roman

An 1881 book illustration imagines Nero participating in a bacchanal. The young emperor indulged in marathon drinking sessions, in which he told acquaintances of his desires for Acte (Image by Getty Images)

As Agrippina’s views softened, Nero’s sycophants became even more strident in their support of Nero’s relationship with Acte. According to the historian Suetonius, one group of senators even “perjured themselves by swearing that she [Acte] was of royal birth”, so she would quickly become a suitable imperial spouse. The senators were rewarded by Nero, even though it is not clear if anyone besides Nero expected their claim to be persuasive.

Murder, intrigue and incest

Not long after the predictable failure of this gambit, Nero realised that despite his love for Acte, the gulf between their social statuses was too great for them to ever wed. The affair then ended and both people moved on. Inscriptions from Italy reveal that Acte had a good, productive life, in which she used the profits from some of Nero’s gifts to become a wealthy patron of several towns.

Nero’s story, of course, has a much sadder ending. As the years passed, the emperor grew ever more estranged from his mother and became enmeshed in the intrigues of sycophants like Otho, who enticed the emperor into a scandalous love affair with his wife, Poppaea. Tacitus reports that Otho embarked on the scheme “to inflame Nero's passion, in the hope of adding to his own influence by the further tie which would arise out of possession of the same woman”.

The affair led Nero to divorce Octavia and force the dissolution of Otho’s marriage so that he could marry Poppaea – the wife he is later rumoured to have killed while she was pregnant with his child. This chapter in the emperor’s romantic life was, of course, much more shocking and tragic than his relationship with Acte.

As the years passed, Nero grew ever more estranged from his mother and became enmeshed in the intrigues of sycophants like Otho

Meanwhile, the senator and Neronian associate Cluvius Rufus reports an even more appalling sexual incident that Nero only just escaped. He tells of how Agrippina tried seducing Nero “in her eagerness to retain her influence”. Seneca then hurried in Acte, who told Nero that the incest was “notorious” and that the soldiers would never endure the rule of an “impious sovereign”.

While Rufus’s unreliability as a narrator ought to make one suspect whether Agrippina’s seduction really happened, his description of Acte as the one person who could be counted on to restrain Nero’s worst impulses rings true. She seemed capable of getting Nero to accept uncomfortable truths, because the emperor knew that she alone was genuinely concerned about his best interests.

Descent into madness

Despite Nero’s increasingly poor decisions and unrestrained behaviour over the last decade of his life, it seems that Acte was never again summoned to the palace to check his worst impulses.

She was not there when Nero arranged for Agrippina to be killed in AD 59, or when he burned Christians alive following a fire that devastated Rome in AD 64. She was not consulted before he went to Greece in AD 67 to compete in rigged Olympic competitions while popular anger boiled over at home. She seems not to have been involved as Nero bungled his response to the rebellion of the future emperor Galba, when he spent more time figuring out how to transport his water organ to the front than he did planning military strategy. Most heartbreaking of all, she was absent when Nero took his own life, virtually alone, after the senate stripped him of his imperial power in AD 68.

A painting of

An 1888 painting by Vasily Smirnov depicts Nero's body being removed by Acte and his childhood nurses. According to Suetonius, the disgraced emperor stabbed himself with a dagger (Image by Getty Images)

And yet Acte clearly still loved Nero until the very end of his short life. After his death and public condemnation, Acte joined with the two nursemaids who had raised Nero as a baby to ensure that he had a proper burial. According to Suetonius, the ceremony cost “two hundred thousand sesterces”, an immense sum equal to the annual salary of more than 220 Roman soldiers. Nero was “laid out in white robes embroidered with gold” and, after his cremation, Acte and the two other women “deposited his ashes… in the family tomb of [his father’s family] the Domitii” in a “sarcophagus of porphyry, with an altar of Luna marble standing above it, and enclosed by a balustrade of Thasian stone.”

We cannot know whether Acte’s affection, forthrightness and intelligence would have been enough to save Nero from infamy had the pair been permitted to marry. The emperor is fully deserving of the cruel reputation for which he is now remembered. What is certain, though, is that Nero’s descent into madness began when his relationship with Acte ended: the first woman he ever loved, and perhaps the only woman who ever loved him back.

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Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the book The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)

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