What does Daniel 11 have to say about the coming prince? “He shall regard neither the God of his fathers nor the desire of women, nor regard any god; for he shall exalt himself above them all.” (v.37) Nero, though a pagan by birth and upbringing, regarded no god but himself. Suetonius reports, “He despised all cults, and voided his bladder upon an image of the goddess whom he most respected, Cybele.” Cybele, or Rhea, was a permutation of the Babylonian Semiramis, depicted with a turreted crown as the goddess of fortresses. To finance his indulgences, Nero robbed many temples of their votive offerings and melted down their gold and silver idols. But by the age of twenty-five, Nero was himself being hailed as a god. Durant again: “When Tiridates came to receive the crown of Armenia he knelt and worshipped the Emperor as Mithras [the sun god, an incarnation of Babylon’s Tammuz]. When Nero built his golden house he prefaced it with a colossus 120 feet high, bearing the likeness of his head haloed with solar rays that identified him as Phoebus Apollo [ditto: it’s the sun-god Tammuz again].” This reminds us not only of Nebuchadnezzar’s big statue, but also of an image of the beast/Antichrist mentioned in Revelation—something we’ll get to later.
And what was that about not regarding the desire of women? It’s not like Nero was averse to the services they could render, but, well, let’s just say it wasn’t healthy to be a woman in Nero’s world. He ignored his wife, Octavia, in favor of an ex-slave, Claudia Acte, of whom he soon grew weary. Replacing her with the beautiful Poppaea Sabina was problematical, however, for they were both married, and Poppaea wouldn’t settle for merely being our boy’s mistress. Nero divorced Octavia on grounds of barrenness, forcing Poppaea’s husband to do the same. Meanwhile, Nero’s mother Agrippina came to the innocent Octavia’s defense, so the Emperor arranged for mommy to meet with a fatal accident—actually, it took poison, a contrived shipwreck, and finally the sword to “accidentally” kill her. Then the paranoid Poppaea imagined that the exiled twenty-two year old Octavia was plotting against her (that’s what she would have done in her shoes) so she goaded Nero into having her killed as well. Ironically, the pregnant Poppaea was herself done to death by a kick to the stomach, apparently administered by Nero in response to her nagging about his coming home late from the races. Suetonius reports that the grieving Emperor then found a young man named Sporus who closely resembled Poppaea, had him castrated, married him in a formal ceremony, and “used him in every way like a woman.” I think that’s about all that needs to be said about Nero’s lack of regard for “the desire of women.”