“In some respects, Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back in. He renamed the month of April after himself, calling it Neroneus, but the idea never caught on because April is not Neroneus and there is no use pretending that it is. During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away.”

— Will Cuppy

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Nero

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Will Cuppy 119

American writer 1884–1949

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