Nero dies by suicide after quoting Vergil's Aeneid, thus ending the Julio-Claudian dynasty and starting the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

AD 68 (LXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Silius Italicus and Trachalus, or the start of the Year of the Four Emperors. The denomination AD 68 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. These are now used throughout the world.

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was a Roman emperor and the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from AD 54 until his death in AD 68.

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. Some minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars regard these as spurious, with the possible exception of some short pieces.

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. Written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, the Aeneid comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.