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Was Nero really a goodie?
The British Museum is recovering from the covid lockdown in grand style, with two major exhibitions opening one after the other: the first on Thomas Beckett for the Medievalists and then for the Romanists — Nero (AD 54 – 68). In this opinion piece, Editor-in-Chief Andrew Selkirk offers his perspective on the 'bad' emperor.
Nero is usually considered to be one of the bad Roman Emperors – ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burnt’. But Nero has been undergoing a gentle rehabilitation among classicists and underlying the exhibition is the question: was Nero not so bad after all? It is not the major thesis of the exhibition – bad emperors make better copy than good emperors – and there is plenty of wonderful art on display in the exhibition. But let us try and extract from the exhibition the case that Nero has been much maligned and was not that wicked after all.
Statue of Nero as a boy, aged 12 or 13. Note the boyish hair style without any elaboration. On his chest is a bulla, showing that he was
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