Nero

Edward Champlin

Nero has remained notorious for two millennia because of a series of extravagant public gestures, usually outrageous, often repellent, always riveting: murdering the mother with whom he may have slept, killing his pregnant wife in a rage, castrating and marrying a young freedman, mounting a public stage to act a hero driven mad or a woman giving birth, racing a ten-horse chariot at the Olympic Games, fiddling while Rome burned, burning Christians to light up the night, building the vast Golden House, and so forth. My purpose in this book has been restricted: to explain what Nero might have meant by the deeds and misdeeds that that have made him so notorious for so long. I have not tried to justify his actions or to rehabilitate his character, and I have not attempted to discern any large program, political or artistic. I have assumed that his actions were rational--that is, he was not crazy--and that much of what he did resonated far more with contemporary social attitudes than our hostile sources would have us believe. The Nero who has emerged in the preceding pages, whatever his many faults as an emperor and a human being may have been, was a man of considerable talent, great ingenuity, and boundless energy. He was an artist who believed in his own abilities and vision, and an aesthete committed to life as a work of art. He was a historian with a keen sense of the sharp reality of the past (real, legendary, mythical) in daily life at Rome, and a public relations man ahead of his time with a shrewd understanding of what the people wanted, often before they knew it themselves.

The center of the triumphal spectacle was of course the triumphator. He entered the city riding in a high, two-wheeled chariot, the currus triumphalis, drawn by four horses and decorated with laurel branches. All of Augustus' successors in fact used the first emperor's own, elaborately decorated chariot. Beneath it, for the purpose of warding off evil, was slung a large phallus, which might be adorned with bells and whips. The general himself was a blaze of color in his triumphal garb, the vestis triumphalis. Normally he wore a purple tunic embroidered with gold palm branches, the tunica palmata, and over this a purple toga embroidered with gold stars, the toga picta. On his head he might wear a laurel wreath, the corona laurea, as did some of his suite, or a public slave might hold a heavy gold wreath, the corona triumphalis, over him. In his right hand, he would carry a laurel branch; in his left, an ivory scepter topped by an eagle. Around his neck he wore a bulla, a protective amulet, and, in the old days at least, he would have his face painted red. 
There is no question that the triumphator, the successor of the kings of old, was meant to represent Jupiter. Riding with him in the chariot, the slave would periodically remind him who he was: Respice post te, hominem te esse memento, Look behind you, and remember that you are a man. 

In publishing Nero, Champlin was still publishing for academics. Nero is more concerned with sources than the actual subject. More than two-thirds of the book is devoted to discussing the merits of various sources, leaving you with precious little that addresses the content of the these sources. Perhaps I came to Nero hoping for a biography of Nero and so was disappointed when I read a very good primer on the epistemology of history.

Champlin demonstrates the unreliability of most historical sources and the bias the riddles the body of work known as 'history'. He makes you doubt whether any history can be trusted. The service Champlin provides of reminding you that every source has a reason for saying what it says, and that every history is also an objective, a goal, a tool, would be pleasing in moderation, but this biography leaves you wondering if anything can be known about Nero at all. Maybe he wasn't even Roman.