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Rome is burning, and the Emperor is on stage, singing. We all know the image. But what if Nero isn't history, what if Nero is now?

In this episode, historian Keith Hockton draws a line from Nero's Rome to Trump's America, through a single wrestling word that explains why facts don't work, why supporters cheer the wreckage, and why "bread and circuses" is a warning we never actually learned. Some parallels in history are vague. This one is standing right in front of us, waving.

And if you take the comparison seriously, you have to follow it all the way to the end, to what actually happened to Nero.

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An outcast boy with no right to anything took a cattle-clan of a few thousand souls and, inside a single lifetime, forged it into a nation, one strong enough, sixty years after his death, to hand the British Empire the worst defeat it had ever suffered on a battlefield.

In Part Two we go back to the beginning: to a fatherless child mocked with a name that meant beetle, cast out with his mother Nandi to live at the edge of someone else's fire, and to the cold rage that boy carried into the making of the most formidable fighting machine Africa had ever seen. But we tell it with our eyes open — because almost everything the world "knows" about Shaka reaches us through two English adventurers, one of whom advised the other to make him "as bloodthirsty as you can… it helps sell the work." So we hold the whole contradictory man in view at once: genius and butcher, founder and tyrant, and follow his spear all the way to the hill called Isandlwana.

A story of empire and invention, terror and grief, and, above all, of a boy and his mother, cast out together, a very long way from home.

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For books written and published by Keith Hocton

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On a single afternoon in January 1879, in a corner of southern Africa most of the men fighting there could not have found on a map, the British Empire suffered the worst defeat in its history, and, a few miles away, under the same sky, fought the most celebrated last stand it ever told stories about. One catastrophe and one miracle, side by side, beneath the same darkening sun.

This is the story of the Anglo-Zulu War: a war nobody in London had quite authorised, against a king who had done everything to avoid it, fought by an army the Empire had dismissed as savages and would never underestimate again. But it's also the story of a Welsh mother lying awake six thousand miles from the fighting, of a wall built from grain sacks and biscuit boxes, and of one young soldier who lived long enough to carry the whole vanished world into the age of the atom.

We'll separate the legend from what actually happened, the provoked invasion, the medals handed out partly to change the subject, the "Welshness" that came afterward — and we'll try, at the end, to tell it true. Come for the battles. Stay for the woman in Brecon.

Support the show

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com