Rome had several tyrannical and corrupt emperors but Nero was the worst. He was immoral, vicious, selfish and despotically cruel. He came to the throne in A.D. 54 and ruled for fourteen years. He incurred the animosity of all, including the Senate who publicly condemned him. In disappointment and self-pity he took his own life. He will go down in history as one of the most despicable men ever to rule over a people. He was "a man who in a bad world had attained the eminence of being the very worst and meanest being in it -- a man stained with every crime, the murderer of his own mother, of his wives and of his best benefactors; a man whose whole being was so steeped in every namable and unnamable vice that body and soul of him were, as some one said at the time, nothing but a compound of mud and blood."