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left Nero, in the form of a marble statue created within a few years of him becoming emperor in AD 54. His hairstyle differed from that of previous emperors, and according to the ancient authors so too did his general approach to the role. It is illuminating to compare and contrast their hostile accounts with objects created
Nero: monster or maligned?
It would be fair to say that Nero’s reputation survives him. But could it be that this notorious imperial bad boy has been unfairly condemned by history? While the charge sheet levelled against him by the ancient historians is truly horrifying, archaeology paints a more nuanced picture, as Thorsten Opper told Current World Archaeology's Matthew Symonds.
The ancient historian Suetonius does not pull any punches in his pen portrait of the emperor Nero. A sustained character assassination opens with the observation that although ‘many of Nero’s vices were inherited… he made a ghastly caricature of his ancestors’ virtues’. Suetonius goes on to summarise Nero’s ‘less atrocious acts’, before devoting generous coverage to the emperor’s ‘follies and crimes’. Some of those follies read like a satirist’s flight of fancy. The emperor, we are told, possessed a passion for performance, but was hampered by a ‘feeble’ voice. Rather than letting this deter him, Nero tutored portions of the audience in how best to applaud him, wh
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