It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History

by Jennifer Wright

We are never ever ever ever getting back together. Like, ever. —TAYLOR SWIFT

Hilarious yet befitting that this is the opening quote

We know there’s nothing better than love. Even a Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice-cream cookie, while a close second, is not as good. (I have, admittedly, never tried heroin.)

Loving someone who loves you back is perhaps the only time we feel completely safe and joyful and kinder. It’s like coming in from the rain, arriving someplace safe and warm.

Evolutionary biologists found that people experiencing heartbreak have brain scans that mirror those of cocaine addicts in withdrawal.

Awesome men and women who have left profound artistic legacies for the world have crumbled in the face of heartbreak. The notorious people of history—who have left so-so legacies—go even crazier. Think how Henry VIII just started lopping off heads. Anna Ivanovna locked people in an ice palace. Things got weird.

There’s no time in history where people have not experienced heartbreak. If anything, it used to happen more because there were no television distractions.

(TV is great. Don’t let anyone tell you different. It is the only thing stopping wealthy, idle people from forcing underlings to dress up as chickens and pretend to lay eggs in their foyers—another real thing that happened.)

As great as happiness is, knowing loss often helps us connect with and comfort others.

We appreciate love more the next time we find it. We are heroic survivors, stronger and wiser and better. Except for some of the people in these stories.

the idea of a high-ranking political figure getting into trouble because they had sex with another willing adult would be hilarious. That is because ancient Rome was a world full of nightmares, where every romance became a horror movie ending in poisoning, murder, suicide, and, in Nero’s case, what may be the most terrifying rebound in history.

Most people learn about relationships from their parents—how to keep love alive and overcome differences and all of those good things, but also in some cases how to break up without killing each other.

Nero has one of those busts that you immediately want to punch in the face.

Scholars from the period were more or less in agreement that it was a time when everyone who did anything deserved to die.

So I don’t know why history teachers try to make ancient Rome sound civilized. If the city-state had a motto, it would be ABSOLUTELY NO ONE HERE DIES OF NATURAL CAUSES.

There is a very bad movie called The Purge (2013), starring Ethan Hawke, whose illogical premise—and tagline!—is FOR ONE NIGHT OF THE YEAR, ALL CRIME IS LEGAL. That was seemingly the generally accepted operating system in 50 CE Rome—365 days a year.

He was killed, of course, but that was later, in 65 CE, by Nero. He was sixty-six years old, which is, I think, as long as anyone could ever hope to be alive in Rome.

His subjects didn’t take well to matricide. Shortly after the murder a baby was left in the Forum, with a tag bearing the note “I will not rear you up lest you slay your mother.” A real live baby, just abandoned in a public place to make a political point. It was a hell of a town.

He ultimately divorced her and, when the people continued to like her—presumably because I cannot find any indication that she ever murdered anyone, which seems to make her better than anyone else in that hellscape—banished her to an island. There was public outcry over that—groups marched down the streets shouting, “Bring back Octavia”—which disturbed Nero. So he had her suffocated in a vapor bath.

Besides, being unfaithful to anyone who turns people into human lanterns just seems like such a catastrophically bad idea.

You read that correctly. Nero rebounded in 67 CE by castrating an underage slave boy who looked like his ex-wife and using him as a stand-in for her.

Nero offered enormous sums of money to anyone who could surgically change Sporus from a man into a woman. I don’t want to spoil anything about medicine for you, but the technology to do that didn’t exist in 60-ish CE.

There are still Christians who think that Emperor Nero was the physical embodiment of the devil. I don’t believe that, because I think the devil would be a lot more likable,

We are all blessed with the ability to walk out of bad relationships. We are not Sporus. Thank God, we’re not Sporus. And no matter how badly you might have behaved, you’re certainly not Nero.

There’s a joke that, today, if you lose your shoe at a party dancing around midnight, we know it is because you are drunk. But if you lost your shoe at a party in 1100, there is a chance someone hacked your foot off and took your shoe, and maybe you are dead.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen to two kings and the mother of kings (not the mother of dragons—though if anyone could have been, it would have been her).

Eleanor decided if she was going to be chased by English nobles, she would rather be pursued by the one who would be king.

And, you know, if you want to keep the world and its rumors out, maybe don’t build a giant hedge maze around your mistress. That’s actually a colossal arrow pointing to her—an arrow made out of foliage.

Her gravestone reads, HERE IN THE TOMB LIES THE ROSE OF THE WORLD, NOT A PURE ROSE; SHE WHO USED TO SMELL SWEET, STILL SMELLS—BUT NOT SWEET. Reading this, I can’t believe that she was the sweet, gentle, timid flower that some historians describe. Anyone who inspired that tombstone inscription must have had a pretty dark sense of humor.