Nero, the last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, died in 68 C.E., reportedly of a suicide that was assisted by his secretary, Epaphroditus. I have a rather fixed idea about this emperor, formed in my teen years by reading Tacitus and Seutonius, and later on by reading Robert Graves’ Claudius the God. I’ve since come to understand that these sources aren’t necessarily reliable, but I don’t want to give up on my conception of Nero.  In some sense, I’ve found in him an edifying character- a kind of paradigm of the cruel, vain, and narcissistic leader who can serve as a warning for all eras and generations.

He was accused of many things. He reportedly emptied the Empire’s coffers on extravagant construction projects of dubious value. It was said that he “lost all sense of right and wrong and listened to flattery with total credulity.” He cheated at sports:

In 67 AD Nero participated in the Olympics. He had bribed organizers to postpone the games for a year so he could participate, and artistic competitions were added to the athletic events. Nero won every contest in which he was a competitor. During the games Nero sang and played his lyre on stage, acted in tragedies and raced chariots. He won a 10-horse chariot race, despite being thrown from the chariot and leaving the race. He was crowned on the basis that he would have won if he had completed the race. After he died a year later, his name was removed from the list of winners. Champlin writes that though Nero’s participation “effectively stifled true competition, [Nero] seems to have been oblivious of reality.”

For centuries he has stood accused of setting a fire in Rome so he could take possession of some coveted real estate and build a monumental structure to himself. He is accused of worse things, too, like kicking his wife to death and having his mother killed. Much of this history is contentious, and the sources we have were written decades or even centuries after his reign.  Perhaps his reputation for overall wickedness has survived for two millennia because we need his example as a warning.

In other words, if the Nero of Tacitus and Seutonius didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.

Take the story of Nero being tossed from his chariot at the Olympics only to be declared the winner anyway because “he would have won if he had completed the race.” Remember how Nero was crowned and his name was entered on the list of champions? Here’s a comparable story about how our president won a golf tournament:

[Sportswriter Rick] Reilly recounts a time when Trump was declared the senior club champion at Trump National Bedminster, in New Jersey, even though he was in Pennsylvania on the day that the event was played. “He’d declared that the club should start having senior club championships for those 50 and up, but he forgot that one of the best players at the club had just turned 50,” Reilly writes. “Having zero chance of beating the guy, he went up to his Trump Philadelphia course on the day of the tournament and played with a friend there. Afterward, according to a source inside the Bedminster club, he called the Bedminster pro shop and announced he’d shot 73 and should be declared the winner. The pro, wanting to stay employed, agreed. His name went up on the plaque.”

As for emptying the country’s coffers on “extravagant construction projects of dubious value,” we have this reporting in the Washington Post:

The barrier that President Trump wants to build along the Mexico border will be a steel bollard fence, not a concrete wall as he long promised, and the president is fine with that. He has a few other things he would like to change, though.

The bollards, or “slats,” as he prefers to call them, should be painted “flat black,” a dark hue that would absorb heat in the summer, making the metal too hot for climbers to scale, Trump has recently told White House aides, Homeland Security officials and military engineers.

And the tips of the bollards should be pointed, not round, the president insists, describing in graphic terms the potential injuries that border crossers might receive. Trump has said the wall’s current blueprints include too many gates — placed at periodic intervals to allow vehicles and people through — and he wants the openings to be smaller.

At a moment when the White House is diverting billions of dollars in military funds to fast-track construction, the president is micromanaging the project down to the smallest design details. But Trump’s frequently shifting instructions and suggestions have left engineers and aides confused, according to current and former administration officials.

The story goes on to detail how painting his wall black will make it prohibitively expensive to maintain. And there’s also a familiar sadistic cruelty involved here as the president contemplates the potential injuries his wall will cause to any who dare to scale it.

Anyone who has followed the trajectory of Trump’s career and character should have no difficulty characterizing him as someone who had “lost all sense of right and wrong and listen[s] to flattery with total credulity.” Nor would it be untrue to say that Trump has used unethical means to obtain coveted real estate for the purpose of building monuments to himself.

In many ways, the story of Trump is the same as the story of Nero. Even some of the revisionism of Nero’s story would fit. It has been noted by recent historians that Nero was actually quite popular in the remote eastern parts of the empire and among the lower classes. This has led to a reevaluation of his rule. Perhaps his patrician critics were biased against him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad leader after all.

But if you want to be really concerned, consider this:

After Nero’s suicide in 68, there was a widespread belief, especially in the eastern provinces, that he was not dead and somehow would return. This belief came to be known as the Nero Redivivus Legend. The legend of Nero’s return lasted for hundreds of years after Nero’s death. Augustine of Hippo wrote of the legend as a popular belief in 422.

Imagine the possibility that 350 years from now, there will be people who believe that Trump has not died and will return as either a savior or an antichrist!

The Sibylline Oracles, Book 5 and 8, written in the 2nd century, speak of Nero returning and bringing destruction. Within Christian communities, these writings, along with others, fueled the belief that Nero would return as the Antichrist. In 310, Lactantius wrote that Nero “suddenly disappeared, and even the burial place of that noxious wild beast was nowhere to be seen. This has led some persons of extravagant imagination to suppose that, having been conveyed to a distant region, he is still reserved alive; and to him they apply the Sibylline verses”. Lactantius maintains that it is not right to believe this.

In 422, Augustine of Hippo wrote about 2 Thessalonians 2:1–11, where he believed Paul mentioned the coming of the Antichrist. Although he rejects the theory, Augustine mentions that many Christians believed Nero was the Antichrist or would return as the Antichrist. He wrote, “so that in saying, ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work,’ he alluded to Nero, whose deeds already seemed to be as the deeds of Antichrist.”

Some modern biblical scholars such as Delbert Hillers (Johns Hopkins University) of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the editors of the Oxford Study Bible and Harper Collins Study Bible, contend that the number 666 in the Book of Revelation is a code for Nero, a view that is also supported in Roman Catholic Biblical commentaries.

I could despair thinking of such a future. My hope is that we can be done with Trump after 2020. If people are still obsessing about him three centuries from now, well, that’s just something I’m not going to let myself believe.