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.
Perhaps the major case for a reassessment is that after his death Nero remained surprisingly popular in the East. He put on many popular displays for which the ordinary people in the Eastern Empire remembered him with affection. The trouble is that the historians on whom we rely – the magisterial Tacitus, the gossip writer Suetonius, and the summary written by Cassius Dio a century later, were all members of the upper class and the upper classes all thought that Nero was terribly vulgar. It just was not the right thing for emperors to sing in public, and they all implied that he had a terrible voice. But was this true? Did he perhaps have quite a good voice, so that the ‘people’ thought that he was really rather a hoot?
But let us rethink Nero. One of his major passions was to be a great builder: he was an aesthete who wanted to make Rome more beautiful. According to the Exhibition Highlights handbook, ‘During Nero’s rule, the city of Rome underwent changes on a scale not seen since Augustus. He had a lifelong interest in engineering works and innovative architectural projects. In the Campus Martius he ordered the construction of a splendid amphitheatre and a great thermae which became the model for later imperial bathhouses.’ One of his major projects was the Macellum Magnum, the central food market which was praised long after his death and was illustrated on a coin.
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