The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Incest! Murder! Philanthropy!
Can a new exhibition make us think differently about Nero, the tyrant who killed his own mother and ‘fiddled while Rome burned’?
A star item in the new British Museum Nero exhibition is a simple Roman tombstone, bearing no more than the name of the dead woman: Claudia Ecloge. This is the kind of object that most of us would walk straight past in an ordinary museum gallery, but Ecloge had a special connection with the emperor Nero, who ruled Rome from 54AD to 68AD. She was a slave, later freed, who had been the emperor’s wet-nurse and, according to Nero’s Roman biographer, she had stayed with him right up to the moment when he took his own life, in the face of an army rebellion. Ecloge was one of three women who finally buried him in his family tomb.
Nero is not now best known for the devotion of his nurse. He was the tyrant who murdered his mother, after breaking off their incestuous affair. He killed his second wife, with a blow to her stomach when she was pregnant (domestic abuse, we would call it). And in perhaps his most popular claim to infamy, he “fiddled while Rome burned”. That is, in 64 AD he played his lyre, watching from a safe distance while much of the city went up in flames – later deflecting suspicion that he might actually have started the blaze himself, by trying to pin the blame on the small new sect of Christians, and putting the “culprits” to death with sadistic ingenuity. Those, at least, are the lurid stories told by Roman writers; and they have been ghoulishly retold ever since.
For centuries, Nero has been the favourite Roman villain of the modern world. Dozens of painters have re-imagined the scene where the emperor peers at the (naked) body of his mother, sometimes quaffing from a glass of wine. In the 1870s, the British painter J W Waterhouse, captured instead The Remorse of Nero After the Murder of His Mother, in which we see the young ruler lying on his bed, head in hands, looking for all the world like a moody teenager (which he almost was: he had come to the throne aged 16; he was barely 21 at the death of his mother). And, of course, there is hardly a political cartoonist who doesn’t occasionally dress up a modern leader with a toga, laurel wreath and lyre, against the background of smoking ruins, to make the point that he is not taking some contemporary crisis seriously. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Jair Bolsonaro (or “Bolsonero” as he was dubbed) are only three who have recently had the Nero treatment.
But are these stories true? I am relieved to say – at the risk of pouring cold water over some memorable anecdotes – that much of what was written by the Romans about Nero was the product of dark and hostile spin, by those with an axe to grind or who wanted to write history to their own advantage.
This is not to argue that, even bearing in mind the devotion of Ecloge, we can easily rehabilitate him. I suspect that in our terms every Roman emperor was a nasty piece of work, and any attempt simply to flip the image and turn Nero from monster to hero would be hopelessly naïve. That said, the standard account of his misrule goes back first to a small group of elite Roman writers, who judged Nero by how amenable he was to their own class rather than the people in general (as a convenient shorthand a “good” Roman emperor usually means “good to the uppercrust senators” and vice versa). Even more importantly, it also goes back to the propaganda campaign of the regime that replaced him.
After the year of civil war that followed Nero’s death, with rival armies battling to put their own candidate on the throne, in 69AD an entirely new dynasty, led by Vespasian, was established. Vespasian’s spin doctors devoted an enormous amount of energy to proving that (however dubiously he had come to power) he was a new broom; his mission was to save the world from the cruel excesses of his predecessor, whose vices they had every interest in exaggerating. And it is this spin that formed all the ancient accounts of Nero that survive: a classic case of history being written, and manipulated, by the winners.
It is next to impossible now to sort the facts about Nero from the fiction. Some of what we read is probably outlandish fantasy. (I have always had grave doubts about the story of his first scheme to get rid of his mother by putting her to sea in a collapsible boat: it is said to have failed because Mum turned out to be a strong swimmer!) Some is hostile innuendo. (Allegations of poisoning are easy to make in a world which could hardly tell the difference between the effects of arsenic and the effects of appendicitis.) Other parts are presumably based on a kernel of truth. It is difficult to imagine that all the deaths in Nero’s family were unfortunate accidents, but it is equally difficult to know when exactly to point a finger of blame, and at whom.
Just occasionally we can spot traces of a different view peeping through the hostile accounts of Roman writers. We read, for example, of the relief efforts he launched after the fire of 64AD, bringing in food supplies, opening some of his own properties to the homeless, and changing the planning regulations to make the spread of fires less likely in the future: Building Back Better, we might now say. There are also references to his grave being decorated with flowers for years after his death, and to the later appearance of “false Neros”, men pretending to be the emperor who, they claimed, had not actually died at all. But apart from hinting at a wider popularity (there is no mileage in impersonating someone universally hated), these little nuggets hardly add up to an alternative story of his reign.
The British Museum exhibition takes another approach. It is not an exercise in rehabilitation. But it uses the art, archaeology and material culture to offer different perspectives on Nero, and on the imperial context in which he operated – not only through the eyes or pens of the metropolitan Roman elite, but also through the slaves, the enemies of Rome, and the ordinary inhabitants of run-of-the-mill towns of Italy.
Sure, there is evidence of some jaw-dropping luxury on show. The fragments of decoration from the “Golden House”, the vast palace that Nero built for himself after the great fire, are stunning: exquisite paintings and gilded ornaments (as well as delicate marble inlays from an earlier residence). Nero’s last words were said to be “What an artist the world is losing in me”; and certainly the classy interior design of his palaces (including, in the Golden House, a revolving dining room) seems to have surpassed those of any other emperor before or after, even if the extravagance offended some ancient commentators.
But almost equally eye-catching – for better or worse – are the views we get of Nero from elsewhere. The city of Rome was not the only place to experience disaster during his reign. The area around Pompeii suffered a terrible earthquake (probably part of the geological preliminaries to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD). It destroyed much of the town, and again Nero seems to have helped with the relief effort, pouring money into the area and perhaps even making a royal visit. That at least is the implication of one set of graffiti, scrawled in plaster, and carefully brought over from Pompeii to London for the show. It mentions generous donaNERO
tions made by Nero and his wife Poppaea (later to be the victim of his abuse) to the temple of the goddess Venus in the town: she gave jewels and pearls; the emperor himself gave “a vast weight of gold”.
Many of the ancient accounts of Nero (like his own last words) stress his “artistic” side. In fact, one of the things that seems to have annoyed the Roman elite, even if it pleased the people, is that he took to the stage to give operatic performances, proud of what he is supposed to have called his “divine voice”.
Another perspective from outside Rome is very different. It is easy to forget that, like every Roman emperor, Nero was a soldier, and that Roman imperial power was far closer to a military dictatorship than to a constitutional monarchy. Some of the objects on display in the exhibition expose the rough end of that.
It was during Nero’s reign that Boudicca rebelled in Britain, destroying several Roman towns, before eventually being crushed by the Roman legions (with what we would call “atrocities” committed on both sides). In the British Museum exhibition, there is a chance to see one of the latest finds from Colchester, a town destroyed by the rebels. The “Fenwick hoard”, discovered only in 2014, is a collection of pricey jewellery, bric-à-brac and other valuables buried for safekeeping by a Roman family, who probably did not live to come and retrieve them. There is also a chance to understand the British rebels’ grievances. For also on display is a heavy chain, found in Anglesey, and very likely used to tether enslaved workers.
But, for me, the highlight of the show is still the tombstone of Ecloge. I realise that it is a cliché of the most dreadful tyrants and dictators that they have nannies who love them. And the devotion of Ecloge to her master offers a rather sanitised view of slavery (contrast the chain from Anglesey). Nonetheless, beyond the hype and the spin, we here come almost face to face with a real person who was closer to Nero than nearly anyone else in the world.
After the 64AD fire, he opened his houses to the homeless and brought in extra food
Nero: the Man Behind the Myth is at the British Museum, London WC1 (britishmuseum.org) from Thursday