I apologize if my question is worded oddly, I tried typing it at least 10 times. From what little general history I am able to find Nero seems to be depicted as one the the "worst", or most despotic of the emperors. I am aware that many accounts such as him "playing a lyre" during the Great Fire are regarded as fiction. Yet I am curious if there were any positive, or at least widely considered positive, aspects of his reign. Did he introduce anything of cultural value to Rome or the empire as a whole? Or does history validate that he was indeed a madman?
There is actually a significant minority of scholars (perhaps the most active now is Eric Varner, whose publication on the topic is upcoming) in favor of a highly revisionist view of Nero, recasting him as a succesful populist who gained a genuine wide base of support, but is tarnished in the historiography because his actions were not favorable to the upper classes. This isn't as tinfoil hat as it sounds: he have a vanishingly small number of sources and what sources we ave tend to come from a fairly narrow class (broadly speaking, they are politically active and connected, moderately but not exceptionally wealthy, from the Italian hinterland or near Mediterranean, and from "new blood" in the political elite). And we know there was a lot of contestation of history during the Roman period that doesn't survive: for example, the rarely read Vellius Paterculus provides a much more favorable perspective on Tiberius than Suetonius, and there are even mentions of works that were favorable to Caligula that haven't survived at all.
One particular piece of evidence to exonerate Nero comes from internal evidence, however (that is, from reading events described in our sources against the grain, rather than getting new information). After Nero's death, there were several "imposters" who claimed to be Nero and lead rebellions during the Flavian period, and "king in the mountains" style beliefs persisted even to St. Augustine's day. I personally read this with a social bent: Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudians, the family of Augustus, who was genuinely and extremely popular across the empire. He could thus be used as a focus for those dissatisfied with the socio-political order after his deposition and death. So he himself, as a real person, is less important than the sort of subversive way in which his image could be used. That being said, it could also be argued that he was actually just really popular, and that memory persisted.
In general though, I tend to see the Roman empire as something of a machine that functioned very well no matter what the emperor decided to do--he would need to really screw up to make things substantially worse for the areas outside the city itself. Nero did not really screw up, so points to him.