Anthony Everitt - Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome

The people love Nero. He inspires in them both affection and respect.One can discern the reason for this popular feeling: Nero oppressed the great and never burdened the ordinary people.

Napoleon Bonaparte

When Nero perished by the justest doom

Which ever the destroyer yet destroyed

Amidst the roar of liberated Rome,

Of nations freed, and the world overjoyed,

Some hands unseen strewed flowers upon his tomb

Perhaps the weakness of a heart not void

Of feeling for some kindness done when power

Had left the wretch an uncorrupted hour.

Lord Byron

Everybody has heard of the Roman emperor Nero.

He is the image of the bad ruler, cruel, vain, and incompetent. He was sexually voracious and the breaker of the most sacred taboos. He committed incest with his mother and murdered her.

He set fire to Rome, his own capital. Then from a convenient vantage point he fiddled while the city burned and sang an aria about the Sack of Troy. He cleared the charred ruins of the city center and in their place built a vast palace, the Golden House. He blamed the fire on a new religious sect, the Christians, some of whom he turned into human torches to illuminate an evening at the races.

He believed he was a great musician and singer but in fact had no talent, the Florence Foster Jenkins of his day.

These are some of the stories about Nero that have come down to us. But there is a mystery. For a long time after his deposition and suicide, anonymous hands laid flowers on his grave. In the eastern half of the Roman empire, a succession of men claiming to be Nero appeared and caused trouble for the authorities. There was a widespread belief that the dead emperor would return to his people and confer peace and harmony. Rex quondam, rexque futurus, the once and future monarch.

The monster was loved.

This biography will explore the contradiction. Nero did some terrible things, but the empire was well managed under his rule. He presided over a diplomatic triumph when he ended an on-and-off cold war and established a long-standing entente with Romes rival superpower, the Parthian empire, which lay beyond the river Euphrates. He managed well a surprise insurrection in the new province of Britannia. While not a man for administrative detail, he kept the imperial show on the road. That was to his credit, but the bloodstained collapse of his relations with the ruling class gave him an indelible name for despotism.

As a matter of fact, he was quite a good singer and musician. The secret of Neros personality lay in his commitment to art. He was no dilettante and took music and drama extremely seriously. Audiences loved him. He was the prototype of a pop star.

As emperor, he placed culture at the heart of his politics. Arts festivals, the enormously popular sport of chariot racing, and to a lesser extent gladiatorial shows and athletic games were aspects of a strategy of spectacle. They allowed the emperor to convey political messages to his subjects and to mark important events with celebrations. They were evidence of his affection for the ordinary citizen. Nero appears to have promoted a union of Greek and Roman culture.

Neros story cannot be told without evoking the world from which he sprang. Without understanding his times, we cannot understand his life. So I touch on the imperial system that his great-great-grandfather Augustus created, the personality of his predecessor in the purple, his great-uncle Claudius, and above all the career of his hypercompetent mother, Agrippina, who tried to form him as a sculptor carves a block of stone. She deserves her own book, and I give her my opening chapters.

Nero became emperor at her behest. The fact is that he did not really want the job. Given the choice, he would much rather have been a poet and professional musician. But thanks to her he was doomed to power.

His life was wasted. We remember him as a failed despot and as an entertainer. Had he lived today he might have scraped a living as a mediocre rock musicianand been happy.

The ancient sources make much of the exotic sex lives of the emperors, and modern scholars tend to discount their stories as incredible or at least exaggerated. In fact, much is very probably true. With a few horrific exceptions (the castration of Neros favorite slave boy, Sporus, is a case in point), the antics of ancient Romans are not greatly out of step with the variety of sexual attitudes and practices today. What the Victorians considered the overheated product of filthy minds and Edward Gibbon (perhaps with some reluctance) left in the decent obscurity of a learned language is now a matter of general report.

In this book all licentious passages are left in.

Wivenhoe, England