Nero Trivia
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69 free Nero trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Nero trivia quiz covers the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, from his birth at Antium and adoption by Claudius to a fire that burned for nine days, a palace with a thirty-metre statue, a bribed Olympic Games and a suicide in a freedman's villa. The easy questions cover the famous outline: his tutor, his mother, the fire, the instrument of legend, the queen who rose in Britain and the chaos that followed his death. The harder half is for readers of Tacitus and Suetonius: the shipwreck that failed to kill Agrippina, the poison-maker Locusta, the freedman he married at the Saturnalia, the song he supposedly sang while Rome burned, the tribute imposed to rebuild it, the expedition to find Dido's gold, the ten-horse chariot he fell out of and still won with, the Talmudic tale of his conversion, the pope who scattered his ashes, and the impostors who claimed to be Nero returned. Every answer was checked against Nero's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our Augustus, Roman Empire and Cleopatra quizzes next.
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Q 01Nero sent a party of soldiers upriver to search for the source of which great river?
The Nile
The Nile: the soldiers followed it south of Egypt as far as Meroë and beyond. Pliny, writing soon afterwards, thought the real purpose was to scout a war against Ethiopia that Nero never fought.
Q 02Who was Nero's mother?
Agrippina the Younger
Agrippina the Younger. When friends congratulated Nero's father on the birth, he is said to have replied that any child of his and Agrippina's was bound to be abominable and a public danger.
Q 03Nero's maternal uncle was which reigning emperor?
Caligula
Caligula, his mother's brother. He banished his sister for plotting against him, and when Nero's father died he seized the inheritance left to the three-year-old.
Q 04Which emperor married Nero's mother and adopted Nero as his heir in AD 50?
Claudius
Claudius was the bride's own uncle, and such a union counted as incest until he had the Senate pass a decree allowing it. A year later he adopted her son, putting him ahead of his own boy.
Q 05What job did Nero give the corps of some 5,000 young men known as the Augustiani?
Applauding his performances
Applauding his performances: drilled in rhythmic styles of clapping nicknamed 'the bees', 'the roof-tiles' and 'the bricks', they led the cheering whenever he sang, and the rest of the audience had to join in.
Q 06Which Stoic philosopher was Nero's tutor and early adviser?
Seneca
Seneca wrote the speeches the young emperor delivered, including his first address to the Senate, and old hands remarked that Nero was the first ruler of Rome to need borrowed eloquence.
Q 07Which praetorian prefect guided Nero alongside his tutor in the early reign?
Burrus
Burrus owed his command of the Guard to Nero's mother, yet he and the young emperor's tutor soon worked together to restrain her and to keep Nero's worst impulses in check.
Q 08According to Tacitus, which poison-maker prepared the toxin that killed Nero's adoptive father in AD 54?
Locusta
Locusta had lately been convicted of poisoning but, Tacitus says, was kept on as a useful tool of the regime. Nero later hired her himself and rewarded her with a pardon and country estates.
Q 09Which stepbrother of Nero was poisoned in AD 55 after Nero's mother threatened to side with him?
Britannicus
Britannicus, the late emperor's own son. Ancient writers say he collapsed at a palace dinner in front of the court, and that Nero, without stirring, told the guests it was only one of the boy's epileptic fits.
Q 10Pliny the Elder wrote that Nero used which gemstone to watch gladiators fight?
Emerald
Emerald, though perhaps not as a lens: Pliny had just noted that a flat emerald reflects like a mirror, so Nero may have watched the reflection. Pliny's word, smaragdus, covered other green stones too.
Q 11According to Tacitus, what kind of accident did Nero stage in AD 59 to kill his mother?
A shipwreck
A shipwreck, on a boat built to come apart at sea: its lead-weighted canopy fell, a couch took the blow and she swam to safety, so Nero sent soldiers to finish her at her villa.
Q 12According to Tacitus, Nero's affair with which woman led to the conflict that ended in his mother's murder?
Poppaea Sabina
Poppaea Sabina, in Tacitus's telling, mocked Nero as a ward still under his mother's orders until he acted; yet he did not marry her until AD 62, three years after the murder.
Q 13Which emperor, ruling a generation after Nero, is said to have ranked Nero's first five years above every other reign?
Trajan
Q 21Suetonius and Cassius Dio claim Nero sang which piece, in stage costume, while Rome burned?
The Sack of Ilium
The Sack of Ilium told of the fall of Troy; Tacitus calls the performance only a rumour, but one that cancelled out the goodwill Nero had earned with his relief work.
Q 22Nero is said to have 'fiddled while Rome burned', but which instrument did he really perform on?
The lyre
The lyre, in its concert form the cithara, was Nero's instrument; the fiddle did not exist in his day, and Tacitus puts him outside Rome when the fire began.
Q 23Hadrian used 24 of which animals to move Nero's giant bronze statue to a new site?
Elephants
Trajan's praise, recorded by fourth-century writers, gave the period its Latin name, the Quinquennium Neronis; modern historians credit those years to the young emperor's advisers rather than to him.
Q 14According to Tacitus, what did Nero propose in AD 58 until advisers warned it would break up the empire?
Abolishing indirect taxes
Abolishing indirect taxes, the customs dues whose private collectors were hated, was to be his gift to mankind; told the state could not survive it, he made the collectors publish their rates instead.
Q 15Nero dammed a river to make three pleasure lakes at his villa in which hill town east of Rome?
Subiaco
Subiaco was where, Tacitus says, lightning struck Nero's table in mid-banquet; Romans took it as marking out a rival for the throne, and Nero soon ordered that man away to Asia.
Q 16In AD 64, Nero is said to have played the bride in a wedding to which of his freedmen?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras was the groom and Nero the bride: Tacitus lists the witnesses, wedding torches and marriage bed, all on show a few days after a banquet held on a raft.
Q 17According to Tacitus, the Great Fire of Rome began on the anniversary of the city's burning by which invaders?
The Gauls
The Gauls had sacked Rome some 450 years before, the one disaster Romans thought comparable; this fire broke out on 19 July AD 64, burned for six days, then flared up again for three more.
Q 18The Great Fire probably started in merchant shops beside which structure?
The Circus Maximus
The Circus Maximus was ringed by shops full of flammable goods; with no walled mansions or stone temples in the way, the wind drove the fire the full length of the racetrack.
Q 19The Great Fire of Rome consumed Nero's own residence on which of the city's hills?
Palatine
Palatine Hill burned, palace and all: Nero had come back to Rome only when the flames neared it. Of the city's 14 districts, three were levelled, seven left in ruins and four escaped.
Q 20According to Suetonius, Nero set fire to Rome while claiming to be disgusted by what?
Its ugly buildings and narrow streets
Its ugly buildings and narrow streets were only his pretext, Suetonius says; Tacitus leaves the fire's cause open, and Nero's rebuilding did bring wider streets and lower houses.
Elephants, 24 of them, moved the statue upright to clear the ground for Hadrian's new temple; rededicated to the sun god, it no longer wore Nero's face.
Q 24A giant bronze statue of Nero is thought to have given its name to which famous Roman building?
The Colosseum
The Colosseum rose where Nero's private lake had been, handing his pleasure park back to the public; the nickname, thought to come from the colossal statue beside it, caught on only in the Middle Ages.
Q 25According to Tacitus, Nero deflected suspicion for the fire onto which group?
Christians
Christians, then a small sect in Rome, were torn by dogs, crucified or burned as lamps after dark; Tacitus says the cruelty was so plain that the crowd began to pity them.
Q 26According to Tacitus, what did Nero do with people left homeless by Rome's Great Fire?
Opened his own gardens to them
Opened his own gardens to them, with the Campus Martius and Agrippa's public buildings, and cut the price of grain: even the hostile Tacitus calls the measures popular.
Q 27What was the name of the vast palace complex Nero built on land cleared by the Great Fire of Rome?
The Domus Aurea
The Domus Aurea, or Golden House, had its own lake, vineyards and woods in the middle of Rome; when it was finished, Nero remarked only that he could at last live like a human being.
Q 28After the Great Fire of Rome, Nero did what to the currency?
Devalued it
Devalued it to help pay for the rebuilding: a pound of silver now made 96 denarii, up from 84, while the provinces were squeezed for tribute until, Suetonius says, they were nearly bankrupt.
Q 29Which senator did the conspirators of AD 65 mean to make emperor in Nero's place?
Gaius Calpurnius Piso
Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a well-liked noble, was the figurehead of a plot Tacitus says he did not start; a freedman's tip-off exposed it, and Piso cut his own arteries as the soldiers arrived.
Q 30Which poet died for his part in the AD 65 conspiracy against Nero?
Lucan
Lucan had been a favourite until, in Tacitus's telling, a jealous Nero banned him from publishing; condemned at 25, he recited his own lines about a dying soldier as he bled.