Holidays and commemorative dates:
International Day of Friends – the holiday was first celebrated in the USA in 1935, when Congress introduced the celebration of Friendship Day.
World Pet Remembrance Day – On June 9, people all over the world remember their pets who are no longer with them.
Events on this day:
68 — Nero, the Roman emperor, the fifth and last of the Julius-Claudian dynasty, died.
On June 9, the year 68, which is very far from us, the fifth Roman emperor Nero committed suicide. Hardly anyone was saddened by this death. Nero was cruel, narcissistic and licentious.
First, he ordered Octavia to kill his mother, then his wife, and in 64 he burned down most of Rome and, in order to divert suspicion, began to persecute the Christians who lived in the city. With repressions and confiscations, Nero turned various layers of Roman society against him.
During the Gallic uprising, the emperor, abandoned by his guards, fled from Rome to Ostia (the seaport closest to Rome) in the hope of gathering an army from the marines, or even sailing with the fleet to the eastern provinces, where he planned to gather loyal legions around him. Nero failed to do so. Then he hid in the small cell of the freedman Phaon. Sitting on a litter covered with an old cloak, he gave orders to dig his grave, collect pieces of marble and bring water and firewood. At each order, Nero, who considered himself an unsurpassed tragedian, sobbed and repeated his famous phrase: “What a great artist dies!”
Learning that the senate had declared him an enemy and wanted him to execute him, the emperor seized two daggers in horror, tried the point of each, but then hid it again, with the excuse that the fatal time had not yet arrived. At the same time, he scolded himself aloud for his indecision: “I live disgustingly, shamefully – it does not suit Nero, it does not suit – you need to be smart at such a time – well, be brave!”
It is said that from time to time he tried to stab himself, to find someone to stab him, to poison himself, to throw himself off a bridge, to drown himself in the Tiber. However, the emperor lacked the courage to do this. And only when the clatter of the horses of the riders who were tasked with capturing the emperor alive could already be clearly heard, Nero, with the help of his advisor, plunged the sword into his own throat.
It is interesting that Nero was the last emperor to come from the August family. If we count from 48 BC. e., when Julius Caesar destroyed Pompeii, the Julius-Claudius family ruled Rome for about a century and during this time gave it one dictator and five emperors.
1781 – George Stephenson, the inventor of the steam locomotive, the initiator of the construction of the world’s first railway, was born in Britain.
1786 – ice cream was sold for the first time. Trade in cold treats was started in New York.
1822 – an artificial jaw was patented in the USA.
1847 — Nicholas I signed the sentence according to which Taras Shevchenko was to become a soldier in the imperial army.
1870 – the English writer Charles Dickens passed away.
1898 — Great Britain leased the territory of Hong Kong from China. The lease term was to be 99 years.
1988 — Pole vaulter Serhiy Bubka set a world record in Bratislava — 6.05 m.
1995 — the presidents of Ukraine and Russia signed an agreement on the division of the Black Sea Fleet.
2022 — Roman Ratushny, a Ukrainian blogger, journalist, participant in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Revolution of Dignity, died in Kharkiv Oblast. He is known for opposing the development of the Protasiv Yar tract in Kyiv.
