666 cannot be Nero

It frustrates me that is the one secular scholarship orthodoxy about Revelation only extreme Pre-Millennialists ever seem to question.  Even if I became a full on Atheist viewing Revelation as Prophecy written after the fact I would still reject 666 being Nero.

The name identified by the number 666 can’t be Nero because that’s based on Aramaic/Hebrew Gematria and Revelation is in Greek with this number clearly echoing 888 as the Isopsephy value of Iesous.  Nero in Greek has an Omega in it so Nero can never work, the same goes for trying to make Nero fit the 616 variant.  It is also verified by Chapter 39 of Suetonius Life of Nero that the Isopsephy associated with the name of Nero was 1005.

And Nero didn't persecute Christians.

If the 616 Variant is correct (which I consider unlikely) that probably points to Theos Caesar and/or Dios Caesar which were used for the Deified Roman Emperors in the Eastern Provinces, but in that context it doesn’t apply to only one.  

Revelation 13:1 and 17:3 do seem to imply the Blasphemous Name associated with this Beast is on each of the heads and not merely an individual name.

Some even question the practice of using Isopsephy/Gematria entirely and suggest like other symbols in Revelation the key is its Hebrew Bible precedent.  666 as a number has two notable appearances, being associated with Solomon in 1 Kings 10:14 and 2 Chronicles 9:13 but also with Nebuchadnezzar's Image in Daniel 3.  

I am no longer concerned with proving it can be applied to anyone's individual name, if it were that simple it wouldn't require "wisdom".

Iapetos was a Titan of Greek Mythology, but it's also documented that the name was viewed as a form of Japheth by Ancient Jews and Christians in the Greek speaking world by texts like the Sibylline Oracles..

The spelling has a Greek Isopsephy value of Six Hundred and Sixty Six.
Iota=10, Alpha=1, Pi=80, Epsilon=5, Tau=300, Omicron=70, Sigma=200.
10+1+80+5+300+70+200=666.

It being a seven latter word means there could be a letter on each of the Seven Heads.

Genesis 9 foretells Japheth to dwell in the Tents of Shem, symbolizing becoming religiously Semitic.  The most undisputed to identity sons and grandsons of Japheth in Genesis 10 were either in Turkey and/or the Classical Greek world, and each disputed one has been placed there by at least one theory.  The languages that can be traced back to Japheth are probably the Indo-Europeans and other languages connected to Europe but also the languages of Georgia who I identify with Meshech and Tubal.

The last three of the seven Pre-Republic Kings of Rome were Etruscans, a people who can be argued to descend from Tiras.  However the Romans proper through their claimed descent from Troy go back to Ashkenaz son of Gomer after whom Lake Ascanius was named, and the name Ascanius shows up a few times in the traditional genealogy of Aeneas.  Josephus mysteriously says the descendants of Ashkenaz were the Reginians, that could be a reference to Rhegium a location in Italy Aeneas was depicted as stopping at on the way to Rome, or maybe also the Regnii a Brythonic tribe in specifically the part of Brittan Josephus's patron Vespasian had been stationed, and the Britons would eventually claim to share Rome's descent from Aeneas.

The extent to which any of those claims of ancestry are true doesn't really matter, that the belief itself existed is enough for it to have symbolic value in interpreting a book like Revelation.

So an identification with Japheth works as an identification with Greco-Roman Empires.  And Religiously with Chalcedonian Christianity but perhaps the Eastern Orthodox in particular.