'A piece of advice before we start. Don't believe those fools who preach that death is a friend, or worse, like Paullus and his crew of fanatics, the happy gateway to a better and fuller existence. It's nothing of the sort. Death, gentle reader, is nothing but a necessary bore, and you can tell it I said so. There, now. If I really have to die before my time (and needs must, ho hum, when the emperor drives, even when the emperor is poor loopy Lucius) then I intend to savour every minute of the process. Even if it kills me.' This is the Emperor Nero, seen through the not-wholly-unsympathetic eyes of his erstwhile friend and Arbiter of Taste, the author and aesthete Titus Petronius Niger, currently committing enforced (but comfortable and pleasantly prolonged) suicide at his villa in Cumae; the inside story, including the answer to the question of who did burn Rome, and why...