Nero (2004 film) recitals, and at one of these, accidentally kills his new pregnant wife, Poppaea Sabina. He kills several members of the senate and orders his mother to be stabbed, where she says: "Strike the womb, for that is what bore him." Nero's madness soon causes a riot, causing himself to flee the city in disguise, and slit his wrists under the saddened embrace of Claudia Acte, his once passionate lover. The movie in many ways tries to show Nero as a good soul gone mad, beginning as a brilliant young prince enduring injustice, then hailed enthusiastically at the beginning of his
Poppaea Sabina the Elder Poppaea Sabina the Elder Poppaea Sabina the Elder was an aristocratic woman who lived during the Principate. During her lifetime she was famed for her beauty, but as Ronald Syme writes, her "fame and follies have been all but extinguished by her homonymous daughter", Poppaea Sabina the Younger. She met her end as a victim of the empress Valeria Messalina, wife of Claudius. Poppaea Sabina was the daughter of Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, "homo novus" and consul of AD 9. She had been the wife of Titus Ollius, who was a friend of the prefect of the Praetorian Guard Sejanus and