I just can't believe that Nero was actually that bad. I'm convinced that later Roman histories obedient to other rulers made him look a lot worse than he actually was.
It's pretty much a hard and fast rule for the first two centuries of the Imperial era that, because historians came out of the Senatorial aristocracy, if an Emperor played nice with the Senate, they get praised by the historians, and if they didn't play nice with the Senate, their names were cursed in the sources.
See also: Domitian, who tried to recruit a professionalized administration out of the equestrian class (the allegedly middle class but really people only one rung down from the Senatorial super-elite) and cut the Senate out of the lucrative jobs in the administration. The ancient historians thought Domitian was a dangerous, evil monster because his example threatened their social standing. Domitian is so vilified that his assassination gets a ton of positive press in Suetonius etc as a result.
