In Our Time: S21/32 Nero (April 25 2019)

this is the BBC hello in 54 ad Nero became the ruler of the Roman Empire age 16 he held power until he was 30 when the Senate declared him a public enemy and called for his death it was claimed that Nero murdered his mother his brother and his wives set fire to Rome singing as it burned and used Christians as human torches he squandered fortunes on a palace he married his eunuchs poorest and Pythagoras and he called himself an artist for early Christians he became the Antichrist and ever since he's been a byword for depravity in books and films yet during his lifetime he was surprisingly popular across the empire with me to discuss the life and reputation of Nero our Matthew Nichols fellow and Senior Tutor ascend John's College University of Oxford Sushma Malik a lecturer in classics at the University of Roehampton Maria Wieck professor of Latin at University College London Maria how stable was Rome in Nero's childhood well we're talking about the first century of the Christian era the 40s ad and from at that point the Roman Empire is fast it extends from the west and Spain up north into Britain across the Rhine and the Danube over around Greece down to Syria and confronting the path in Empire but the control of that Empire was highly volatile it was run by an autocrat in collaboration with the Senate Augustus when he set up the system called his role that of the princeps which means the first among equals and you can imagine that very much in quotation marks and from the point of view of Nero as a child he would have seen that the issue of the succession between those leaders was extremely disturbing and had a huge effect on him because the the role which we would now call that of an emperor the role in principle died with each emperor and after one died another one had to be selected so Augustus who set up the system wanted preferably to keep those those roles within the his family the Julie accordions and that meant power play and intrigues within that family it meant marriages and adoptions but it also meant divorces banishment exile and death alright so for Nero under the second emperor Tiberius his grandmother was put in prison his uncles were there with them with her and died under the third Emperor Caligula his mother was sent into exile for a while he was had he had to be brought up in Rome without his inheritance with a paternal aunt under Claudius his mother returned and she gradually managed to enter into that imperial family by marrying Claudius and by getting her son to be entitled Claudius's son and successor how did Nero come to power well you could say first of all mushrooms and second of all his mother yes look at the mushrooms out of the way because the story goes in the sources that Claudius died after eating a plate of mushrooms and that he had was poisoned by his wife Agri Pina Nero's mother now it's perfectly possible that Claudius was just eating poisonous mushrooms he was known to be a glutton he suffered a lot from stomachaches it becomes a regular insult a critique of the imperial family to say that an imperial woman poisoned one of the members because it's one of the unofficial ways that she can gain power in the family and so it is possible that Agra Pina poisoned her husband but how would we ever know that I think the interesting thing about it is this sense that the stories are exposing to us the way in which she was so involved in organizing Nero's rise to power so she got him to power really yes through marrying her uncle Claudius through pushing for Nero her son to become his heir despite the fact that Claudius already had a son and then for Claudius to arrange the marriage of Nero to his daughter so by now Nero was completely entrenched in the family and was able to there was no doubt that he should succeed when Claudius died prematurely so without being without being sillier there was very aggressive and painful family politics going on all the time and this is you've given us such just a taste of it because it gets worse super manic how did mirrors early days how did you compare to the previous rule Claudius so Nero started off and to some extent by showing that he was going to be more promising than Claudius had been in his later years and Claudius also ruled for quite a long time 41 to 54 so he had a number of years in as Emperor as well but he towards particularly towards the end of his reign was seen as relying a lot on his wives so the most recent one of those was Nero's mother but also his freedmen so these are members er yes wives and so before Agri Pina there was another very notorious woman in our literature named Messalina who is that were run rings to some extent around Claudius including having very public affairs with a senator in particular but also committing a number of sexual acts with people far beneath her so she was quite a notorious woman in her own right that someone that Claudius was unduly influenced by according to our sources so we've had Claudius there nero comes up he's a boy seventeen nine money catching in the saddle as it was an emperor how does he compare the Claudius what's what's good about him that was bad about Claudius of I suppose or what's going on Nero has some good people around him Seneca and petroleum prefect named Boris ticular so Seneca we know is a philosopher a letter writer a moral essayist and he was also Nero speech writer in those early years so what did he do near in those first few years we assured the Senate that he was going to rule in a proper way that he was going to you because Claudius had gone away from us in a free man his wife and brought the Senate back into the play yes he bought the Senate back into play and he also reassured the Praetorian Guard so the army in Rome that he was going to pay them properly and give them their due respect through through through wealth and he also left to some extent the Senate to run things in Rome for those first few years so he was able to demonstrate to them that he wasn't going to for example reinstate the trees and trials where senators would implicate each other and and be put on trial and possibly exile so he was making sure that the Senate in particular knew that he was going to be a good Emperor for them I needed things for the people didn't he set up new entertainments Chariot Racing and games a business only built a massive market so the people was it were in those few years for four or five years well there precisely there or near the beginning of his let's call it rain like him as well as the Senators feeling placated and onside yes precisely so in 59 ad for example he threw very spectacular games called the juvenilia which were to mark apparently the first shaping of his beard and so he threw spectacular games in the Greek style with lots of entertainment circus races and and events that the people loved so he started off very well and that's what we're talking about generally speaking it's B even being thought of later as a rather golden age a golden time would you agree with that Matthew Matthew Nichols there were sources a bit later on who told us that it was said to a Trajan for example in posterity I think regards as the best Roman Emperor is supposed to have said the nearest surpassed everybody for a queen Queenie I'm a period of five years and there's a lot lot to be said about that for all the reasons that Trish must he actually won and in fact retained throughout his life quite a lot of popular acclaim quite a lot of popular appeal to the lower orders at Rome he never quite lost that he took measures that were seen in retrospect as positive I think we have to say also though that all of our sources love the idea of decline from early promise and I think it's not just our Latin writers that do that I think we can think in modern terms of presidents and prime ministers who start off with honeymooning in modern terms well it's it's a temptation to see rule as early promise snuffed out and leading on to decline and I think our sources tend to do that so they'd like to build up the beginning in order to run down the end a little bit perhaps so what were the big challenges he did let's say let's give him those five years except Britannicus was murdered the the proper son of Claudius who could be seen as his rival just a few years younger and one or two other things were beginning to pester and go on that was unseemly put it mildly and what larger challenges were there to the emperor of Rome at that time nero came to power with a very full in-tray and there were circumstances particular to his own times that were a challenge he was the fifth and as it turned out the last of the Julia Claudia Emperor's so he inherited assistant we've heard about from Maria and Trishna that in some ways as a stable system for transmitting powers but in other ways has these huge tensions around the succession around court dynamics and family politics he had a lot of constituencies he had to appeal to implicate simultaneously so the senatorial aristocracy who maybe didn't want him there thought they could do a better job from them the provincial governors were there dangerous armies who his eventual undoing the common citizenry of Rome with their their appetite for game wasn't for spectacle that we've heard about the preventional citizens he had to balance all of these interests out but those who we've had in the beginning aid him in the end and oh yes people have said in other contexts it's like holding a wolf by the ears it's very difficult to do forever and his appeal to the Commons in the end undid him of the aristocracy but by and large to put this in context the Empire that he inherited wasn't very different from the Empire he left that being the Boudica in Britain easily put down and remember right in Judea wanted to other things but there wasn't any disturbance it was consolidation that expansion but it wasn't decline as an yes that that's right but that is a challenge because the ideology and the logic of the empire early on was founded on on endless expansion Imperium CNF na and there's no longer conquest there's no longer booty pouring in to enrich the coffers at Rome so the consolidation is a challenge of its own sort so this is a big strain where's the money coming from now yes and he has buffer States on his eastern frontier that he has to deal with as well the Parthia that we talked about briefly is she any good at dealing with the lack of money no well he's he takes proactive steps that later come back and bite him I would say I I think a lot of the criticism after the fire about the palace is because of misguided reconstruction and this is a great trial room after which she built this enormous enormous palace on two Hills so I never finished but and so on and he also tried to rebuild Rome and the economic damage of that fire would have been enormous we can tell for example that the coinage gets to base there are real economic stresses in the system and in trying to tackle those with limited means at his disposal he incurred a lot of unpopularity but by and large the ship the ship of empire was was reasonably steady and at the outer fur they went away from Rome the more he was liked as far as one can make out people I suppose it's just those people in a room behaving as they always did let them get on with it yes this is this to clipless summary well if you went east from Rome people tended to like him he was Phil Haley and he liked the Greeks and their games and their their culture and their myths the Romans in the north didn't like the Buddakan revolt but generally yes their provincials he did appeal to morena can we marry why can we talk about his mother Agra peda the younger who got him there who supported him there we gave him good advice there and whom he had killed yes I think nowadays there's a tendency or a desire to psychoanalyze this particular episode in 59 when he kills he has his mother killed and what we look at is a psychopath who finally needs to get rid of his domineering mother supposed to have been so domineering that she even offered herself for sex with her son no soundly rumored or well I think it just fits neatly as the sort of climactic moment of the difficulties in in the relationship and the story goes that he hypocritically invited her to a party by the sea and then even more hypocritically said a fond goodbye to her when she sailed back to Rome on a ship that had been designed to fall apart in order to kill her and that when she survived he then had to publicly accuse her of treason so that he could then arrange for an executioner to stab her to death and she was said to have pointed at her belly and say stab me there where the monster had been not me in the room yes and so that is the story of the of the you know of the birth of a monster who kills the the home that he was made in if you like but clearly there was a political dimension to the the death of his mother and it may well be that he had been advised by others and by her political enemies to to have her killed why was she dangerous for him why did he think she was dangerous for him well it's there's there's plenty of really clear evidence that she had the most extraordinary political role at the beginning of his reign not just in getting him there but even after the very beginning of his power so that we see the most extreme she is presented as facing him mother and son celebrating the beginning of his reign never nothing like that had ever been done before we're told that the the watchword that he used with the Praetorian Guard when he first became emperor was up to a martyr the best of mothers and so you get a sense that she did have what was then a hugely transgressive of the ambition to exercise political power in Rome in ways that were unofficially so we then sense that Nero may well have been happy to let others rule on his behalf first his mother than his other advisors but there were respects in which he wanted as he was getting older control over himself and that meant when he fell in love with a freed woman act he wanted to have a relationship with her when he later fell in love with a noble Roman Roman Papa he wanted to have that relationship and get rid of his wife whereas iguana would assume that is unacceptable in order seen that as as destroying the dynasty that she was trying to establish why we done among the women those Octavia his first wife who was very well connected whom he caused to as it were caused to be murdered by assassins or she took her own life as assassins were approaching her that's what is yes she was banished first yes and then the person he wanted agreed over for papaya winter and then he's supposed to have kicked her to this what do we do what do we say about that well I think it's very interesting that some of the the writers who now are looking to I suppose whitewash Nero to a degree say there were political reasons for getting rid of his mother but it's nonetheless the case or at least you know the sources tell us that he kicked his pregnant wife to death and and killed therefore his unborn child so he may not have been a psychopathic tyrant but he was certainly a murderous wife abuser I think we can have both of those sushma Nero was blamed for what you did to the Christians after the great fire in a64 in 64 AD say and he and he was accused starting the fire so can you unravel that please yes so um in our sources we have three main sources for Nero's life that are historical the historical evidence so Tacitus writing late first century early second century AD and Suetonius around the same sort of time early second century AD and then them Casius die Oh who's writing sort of more towards the late second century perhaps early third century and in Suetonius and Kassius do they are certain that Nero set the fire this wasn't just a rumor but he actually set fire to Rome because he had designs on redesigning the city he wanted to build his famous golden house and he wanted to reform Rome in his own way Rome that time was sort of almost a conglomeration of shacks wasn't it Versailles rebuild award yes exactly and the artist didn't want to do to rebuild the whole thing precisely but Tacitus who is the source who says it was a rumour that Nero set fire to Rome that it seems ridiculous that he would actually have done it says that that in rebuilding it he made Rome much much better so he used better materials wider streets so that the fire can spread as easily so one thing is there is it rumour that he set fire to Rome is up and we're on because there's a lot of a lot of anecdotes rumour Suetonius like a good story breezed through it's on so it's a rumor that he said fired room yes nobody nobody knows if the matter was lit well I mean Nero himself is at an tiem at the time so no matter what he did not like the match himself but whether or not he sent the guard or some representatives know to get other people to do the dirty work all the time really yes that's what Maria said with his mother and others were perhaps Papa is the exception there but there was that that aspect to it but um Tacitus who you know to some extent is one of our more reliable ancient sources does say these are rumors and in order to avoid the rumors that's where the Christians come in why did you turn on the Christian Tacitus says that they were a group in Rome a small group in Rome who were disliked generally by the mass population so the people in Rome didn't really understand what Christian worship or Christianity as a group was and they because they were superstitious according to tests as he calls them a pernicious superstition they made an easy target one that the people would accept and so they were good to blame and he blamed them can you talk can you give the list of some of the details of how he took revenge on these people who may or may not have been had anything to do with the fire it's really not just me yeah I would have thought not his his revenge was flamboyant and theatrical and spectacularly horrid as many of his deeds were and we're told that he rusev eyed them he had wild beasts attack them he he lit them up as flaming torches to light up his Gardens in the night he invited people to come and look at this as a spectacle now there's some precedent for this in arena games and the punishment of criminals it's not totally an invention of mirrors if this is what he did but toss toss toss toss that even though in his Tacitus is view the Christians were an awful sect he deserved to be persecuted nonetheless there was sympathy for them because Nero when he overstepped the mark he went too far with it yes and he seemed to enjoyed we're told yes and he enjoyed a lot of other I mean enjoy seeing people burn taking a variety look at that one taking long yes he took a fish's delight in it is yes yes do we have any knowledge of any real information about what other people in Rome thought about the Christians being thus abused this state this is one of the very earliest testimonies we have for persecution of Christians just a little bit later we have letters from a baffled provincial governor to a later Emperor saying what's liddie with the Christians and they have a little exchange of Correspondence about you have to punish them if they really really won't give up their faith but this is very early in the story of Rome's interactions with the Christians said they're more used to persecuting Jews at the state to come back to the sort of mad fringe of his behavior is there any evidence that he did sing while Rome burned or fiddled or sang or something well fiddled is probably a 17th century invention they fiddles an ancient Rome what he would have done if he performed was to play the lyre and we know that he did do that this is one of his great passions in life was putting on Catherine's costume a lyre singers costume and singing tales from myth he was reasonably good at it he took his training very seriously so it fits with his character two of our sources are to that Shermer mentioned who said he set fire to Rome also tell us as a matter of fact he put on this costume and performed his Rome was in flames it does fit with this character I think he might have quoted a bit of Homer maybe other Romans did that Scipio did doubt the great Roman at the sack of Carthage quoted Homer in pity about a city in flames so perhaps he made a remark that was interpreted as in poor taste at the time and later turned into this and myth of him performing and singing rather than and taking action but we know he did take action as we were told a minute ago his anti fire measures and his reconstruction measures were actually quite positive and it's later on that the story of him setting the fire and reveling in it came to be told let's attack those sources let's take the two main ones or Suetonius and Tacitus and those two may near the time therefore very available to gossip and chat at the time and proper stories handed on and to monuments of the time coin is nora so you will Suetonius and Tacitus now will you just think of you treating them and tell them and tell the listeners which one you rely on more there we go well I think there's very different styles of telling accounts about romance we Tony's is much more interested in sort of morality anecdotes events in the life of the Emperor that's our kind of biography whereas Tacitus is interested more in the sort of systematic history of the government of Rome and the consequences to the damage that was done to the original Republican system by the efforts of the various Emperor's one more depraved than the next and these sorts of stories I think you mentioned them right at the start these stories of parricide fratricide matricide killing of several wives sexual to parrot depravity spendthrift nurse i think the couple of things that we miss there were particularly for example in this concern Tacitus is that he did not seem nero did not seem so interested in government and did not seem interested in the army now those are crucial ways of of having authority and exercising control in the roman state and instead he was interested in theater now that is to completely behave against the way that a leader of the Roman state should behave and so those anecdotes become a way of criticizing the direction of travel of Roman history the sense that not just Nero's reign is declining but the whole of Rome is heading for disaster because of these kinds of behaviors and sorry and you took a year off to go to Greece to act in plays with his company talked in these competitions surprisingly one every one of them um tell he did yes and you can see that I mean some of the most interesting information about I suppose the more pleasurable and creative side is about the extent to which he turned out to be rather a good charioteer and could ride ten horses at a time which is apparently quite a difficult thing to do that his voice was actually quite reasonable that his poetry was not too bad but of course yes he did one win every victory in Greece and and the point partly of those stories in writers like sweet Tony's and Tacitus is to say these are activities of an artist not the activities of an emperor when he came back from his Greek tour he engaged in a sort of pretend triumph so a perversion of this military heroic return which is maybe the third time he'd done there there's another one after the death of his mother so this inversion of great public norms is something that he seems to revel inand later authors really detest him for but we can also see some of the things that he did do with material things this enormous Palace built on two Hills this golden room with revolving tables and perfumes coming in from the walls and all that sort of thing as being obvious given that that things were a bit difficult economically ridiculous extravagance well maybe it was not be predictive development you tell me camp can we redeem the golden house it's too big it's too extravagant it's it's made at the wrong time and Rome is reeling from the after-effects of fire and near it gets too greedy for resorts to complete it and that I think contributes to his downfall but can we recover any kind of practical purpose in this I don't think it was necessarily a canister to shut the rest of Rome out I mean there was some reaction at the time there's a famous Pasqua not the sort Aeneas quotes about run away fairly citizens today because that the palace is gobbling up the whole city so some resentment at the time but I think it was also perhaps an intention to make this the equivalent of a rich man's country villa in the heart of the city and maybe for quite a share of Rome's population to partake in in the banquets and the sports and the kind of blends and and and lakes and pleasure grounds of it all Maria um I've talked your mention or you have put some popular support still particularly on the eastern side of empire can you just just say a bit more about that it seems to me that Willie's obviously do when you all seem to be really agree that he did most of the monstrous things he's accused of doing or asking other people to do them for him no dissent okay we can move on so but the popular support seems to be quite steady I'm alright well I think this this clearly particular areas of which there is support for him despite the fact that it is in the end of his reign senators are saying that with his removal there's a return to Liberty so one key area of support is what the senatorial sources would describe the pleasure of the plebs auditor the squalid masses who in the course of his reign gained a great deal from the entertainments that he provided in some of those entertainments they were supposed to have been showered with vouchers to obtain luxury gifts afterwards that included jewelry and horses so he provided for the people of Rome but that is not something that is regarded as a positive step within the context of the sources I think the other area understand that remark why is it not a positive secular in the context of a well because the sources would say this is about entertainment it's about theater wasn't a drama not positive because it's about a lack of order and control over the rest of the state it's about the fact that as time goes by Nero actually finally performs himself on the stage in Rome and this is catastrophic for the senatorial perspective because to act on the stage is to debase yourself supergirl into being a prostitute isn't it yes exactly but but going back to your question about popular support you can see another whole area region where he was supported was in the east you mentioned that his travels in Greece he declares that Greece has been liberated in this case it would seem from having to pay taxes to Rome and there is coinage that celebrates him as a new sun shining on the Greeks and the extent of which you can see there there is some support for him petit in the in in parts of Roman in the east is that after he dies flowers are still placed on his grave there are cult statues carried around of him and particularly I think what interests people is the fact that a number of forced Nero's emerge in the East who are described as coming back garnering support which suggests that his name was something that could be used to attract people to you what's the in Greece that he married his two eunuchs sporos and Pythagoras one is the husband the others the wife is that right did it happen well his ceremony was Sporus was definitely Greek and style and that particular story about his the two stories of his marriages to his freedmen one in which he played the husband and the other in which he played the wife are clearly stories that can be can be used by the sources to demonstrate quite how pulling an emperor he was because if we take the case of Suarez for example we're told that he comes across a young Freedman who looks a lot like his his beloved wife prepare that he had your killer kicked to death and he cast rates the young man and ceremoniously marries him he then organizes for the the eunuch to travel round Greece with him dressed in the clothes of an empress now that story tells us that that near is not a proper man because he is playing at marriage the ceremony was supposed to included prayers for children he's he's completely subverting the whole need for reproduction in the Roman values of marriage and perhaps the worst thing of all is it's also Greek because from the Roman perspective that is not a good thing and it's theater it's all a drama it's all dressing up it's not the real behavior of a proper man its performative and flamboyant and whenever he's playing at rhetoric carry on on the stage is massacres and massacres prepare it's all very strange and seems connected to guilt and grief over his wife's death but also performing it and reminding people about it Sushma um what brought him down I mean not to bring anybody down was there any particular any particular piece of straw that broke the Senate's back so there were a few events I think that that we've kind of pulled together to make a few different stores the first would be 65 ad when so three years before his eventual downfall but when there was a conspiracy in Rome to bring him down this is known as the Pizzo conspiracy and this wasn't a conspiracy to restore the republic or anything like that in fact it's named for Pizzo because he was envisaged to be the successor to Nero there was talk that he would marry Claudius's eldest daughter Antonia to give him some legitimacy in a Julia Claudian context but this was a conspiracy throughout Tacitus tells us all sections of society so it did include senators but also freedmen there's a woman involved at least one he tells us about if if not more and they all had their different reasons so one of the conspirators was given away by his freedmen so freedmen gave who would have been working in his house heard about the conspiracy and told Nero's between guard and so he got away with that as well yes that didn't right okay so after after the conspiracy started to show weaknesses I think in in in the rain and as you said he went off to Greece in 66 and returned in 68 and then in in 68 when shortly before he returned to Rome there was a revolt in Gaul so the person in charge of the army there of index was put his his troops wanted him to beat their successor so the vendek revolt was the beginning of the end that was the beginning of it in what way what was the end did the Senate say you this it you have to go now and you must go into the arena and be beaten to death was that the idea and not quite so oh the the thing the thing always was is there needed to be a credible alternative I think and when the downfall eventually did happen the credible alternative was the governor in Spain named Galba so that's when the Senate felt that they had the authority of the army behind them in order to declare Nero a public enemy to be a public enemy meant that he could be killed in what was called the old style which meant he could be stripped naked and beaten with rods if he were if he were found so Nero fled never heard Matthew can you tell us about his end again was that performative as wrong yes and also the accounts we have a Vitter on this self-consciously theatrical I I feel they're almost like film noir kind of he wakes up in the deserted palace he flees to a suburban villa he has to tunnel his way in it's dark is his horse is startled by corpse in the road there are shouts and cries in the background it's really gripping stage rewriting if you step back from it for just a moment and you realize he's fled with full low-ranking attendance to this deserted villa where's the story come from actually how reliable can it be Suetonius and I both tell it they probably got it from a contemporary source called clueless reefers but he's lost so a little pinch of salt but if we enjoy relish that story a bit further he makes these mordant stagey remarks as he's dying this is nearest distilled water he says he drinks from a stagnant pool and famously Qualis Artifex Perry oh what an artist I am in my death of what an artist dies who as may or may be undying like a tradesman in lots of different ways of of passing that that phrase but it's the sort of thing even if he didn't say it he should have said it I think it sums up his performative staged a drama obsessed self dramatizing approach to the last years of his reign and he quotes homer also you know he's he literally death of Nero was by Nero yes he he asks for help from his freedom and he eventually someone's up the courage and runs a blade into himself and then a military officer turns up just as he's dying you know says you're late so it's a kind of little bit of sarcasm as he dies as well but yes he manages to contrive his own and in this rather ignominious way as the hoofbeats Thunder outside how did his reputation become so negative so soon after his death well because you find that at the end of 69 we're starting a completely new dynasty a completely new approach to the government of Empire and the new dynasty the Flavians they have nothing to do with the Julia Claudia pnes and every reason to present their authority their justification for having taken over as a contrast to what has gone before so again you're suggesting that Nero his name is blacken in order to keep their reputation white absolutely yes and that that happened some enormous religion sure how much do you go along with that that he was blackened well I think that you know from what we've been discussing today it's quite clear that he wasn't exactly a pure angel and that there are all sorts of respects in which he was a deeply disturbing deeply disturbed figure and therefore they had plenty of material to work with I think that's the best but the best way of putting it Sushma how did you become such a defining character for the Christians such an antichrist in the book of Revelation is ruthless so the thing that we've not mentioned so far is that during Nero's reign we also had of course that generation after the crucifixion of Christ which would have happened in the thirties ad so sin Peter and Saint Paul were thought to have been in Rome II in Rome at some point both of them dying during the Neronian period so the Christian stories go that Peter was crucified during that persecution after the fire Paul because he was a Roman citizen was beheaded perhaps a few years later and for an unrelated reason but for causing disturbances so that became a very powerful part of the Christian story of course because these are two extremely important apostolic figures but also during this period it was thought in antiquity that John was writing revelation so this period or perhaps shortly after maybe in the decades following Nero's reign so when we get to the start of Christians writing extremely prolifically in about the third century AD and the first texts of the commentaries on what the Apostles have wrote they say well when John talks of the first beast in Revelation clearly that's Nero when st. Paul talks about the man of lawlessness in his letter to the Thessalonians clearly that's Nero so Nero then gets cast onto this idea of an antichrist figure recently Matthew of those men recently in the last 20 or so years there's been strong attempts to revise this general viewer that's been put out on this program so far about Nero one of the main points of it and what do you make of it I think reading our sources with care reading against the grain as we might say looking to escape from the kind of biographical prison that all of these sources want us to look at nearer through and to look instead structurally and systematically at the geopolitics of the Roman Empire bad dynastic politics the economy of the Roman Empire if we zoom out from Nero a bit we start to see that perhaps he was a prisoner of his times in some way a prisoner of circumstance and he was very very young I mean you came to power in his teens really excuse if the monstrosities are correct doesn't excuse of course not but what it means is that all of his achievements were cut short - and we can't say we can't put much positive in the balance against the crimes and the outrages because he didn't he didn't achieve much and in the years that he had I I don't know that we need to rehabilitate him fully I didn't know we need to claim he was a good man or a good thing for Rome but I think we can do what we've been doing in this program and look critically and carefully how our sources are shaping our picture of Nero at least and try and find in him some some rationale actually some some choice some positive choice the way he behaved and he chose a flamboyant stage a popular style of rule that later was very deeply out of fashion but at the time did have some favor it found some some fans in his lifetime and straight after his death two of the four successors that rocket for power and the after his death styled themselves very closely after Nero presumably trying to appeal to somebody Maria would you make of the arguments in his favor or or to mitigate the damaging reputation he has those arguments over the last 25 years I think one just has to be careful about how one approaches them because you can find writers as I was mentioning earlier talking about how he was no megalomaniac he was no tyrant but then trying systematically to diminish some of the clearly disturbing things that he did burning Christians kicking his wife to death these are not things that one should just wash away so I think we need to be careful about the kind of balancing of those of those issues and stepping back and looking at Emperor's within the broader context of what was going on in that world makes it a little bit perhaps a little fairer judgment on what actually happened Sushma what's your view of the of the attempt to restore or to change or to whitewash or cleanse Nero I think when you pick out some of the things that that Nero did they sound horrific and yes - they were but they have to be understood in the context of the games in terms of how he decided to punish Christians or in terms of his his golden house there are precedents for bigger and better palaces coming up under the Judeo Claudine's anyway and one of the things that the Emperor's would have thought a lot about and Empress did afterwards as well as how to outdo your predecessor and to some extent some of the more flamboyant things that Nero did that we perhaps sometimes the cat out of context do you need to be understood in this context well thank you all very much thank you Sushma Malik Mario Wieck and Matthew Nichols next week you'd see anti-catholic Gordon riots of 1780 said to be the closest Britain came to a revolution and an inspiration to the French well thanks for listening and the inner Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests so what did we miss out that you'd like to spoken there's something I'd like to mention I think because I think we can't really avoid Peter Ustinov at least I can't avoid Peter yeah and this is because one of the aspects of you know one of the key things that has influenced our view of Nero over the years till we've started to try and revisit him is that he was turned into a kind of satanic demonic figure by the early church that story of Nero is Antichrist was picked up in a hugely successful 19th century novel by the the Polish Nobel laureate Henry Schenk events and he constructs Nero as a kind of Antichrist figure Peter is leaving Rome he has a visitation from Christ on the basis of that he turns around and goes back to Rome to protect the flock from the Antichrist now for me that that novel has been hugely important you can go now to the Via Appia you can stand in front of the church built where Christ visited Peter I'm an ex-catholic you know these things are big issues you can go to the Vatican this is supposed to be where Peters buried even though there's no historical evidence for his martyrdom there but it's a short step from that story that used to be a book given to Catholic children on their confirmation throughout the 20th century it's a short step from that to the Hollywood called Cold War blockbuster in which you find Peter Ustinov playing his lyre singing o lambent flame when a kind of glass model version of Rome is is being burnt and I think that kind of dissemination of that kind of Christian version of Nero has been so strong but partly the scholarly approach now is a reaction to that there's such vivid and powerful images aren't - it's quite hard to step back from the more or unthink them if we're thinking about portrayals of Nero another thing that we might mention is his coin portraiture I find that very interesting so all the statues were pulled down memory was condemned after his death but we do have coins with them on but if very broadly the story of mirrors is an arc of decline from promising young prints to to corrupt and dissipate a tyrant his coin portraits also show him kind of young and angular and promising and getting fat and jailed and kind of Elvis like as his reign declines and it's very tempting just to read these biographically and say well the money was making a portrays in Nero's getting fat anticipated so his Cointreau and fat and dissipated but that can't be quite right that can't be the whole story because of course Nehru controlled his Imperial image very closely there must be some sort of Henry the eighth's like Appeals for solidity and royal splendor getting on there that to us just looks a misplaced but he must have thought he was doing something positive and that's quite a nice analog for his whole self presentation I think it just it strikes for us the wrong note for his immediate successors it strikes the wrong note he thought he was doing something clever there Quo Vadis for the first film I saw which had an interval in the middle as well could I just say that at the time that the film was originally released it was possible to go to the department stores and buy versions of Nero shorts in eight fiery colors yes but I can't imagine him controlling ten horses from Acharya yeah for all these many skills what did we leave out Vadis and that's a the pts enough character is is I mean it's just such a perfect representation to some extent of Nero for that time but I always found it quite different from the Nero of the novel in which the Polish were also used the words beasts frequently Antichrist and beasts frequently referring back to Revelation and using very close imagery to to that book I mean in the film it's you know it's a wonderful film but he's a different sort of Nero I think in Peterson offs version of Nero - the one that - the one that is in the novel which draws actually very closely on a predecessor called darkness and dawn or scenes from the days of Nero which was written in 1891 by Frederick William Farah who was very high up in the Anglican Church so just you know Maria's point about the the Christian reception is a really really good one and but one thing I wanted to bring up was again with Matthews material evidence there's a wonderful graffito in Pompeii from the Neronian period when we're talking about whether Nero really was a matricide or really did do all of these things there's clearly people during his own time thought he did do these things because there's a graffito that says mr. poison is Nero's financial secretary so when he's running where did he get his money from when he's running out of money he will use poison to kill particular Senatorial we think families or that sort of thing to claim their money for the imperial treasury and that the fact that that's you know Remora lies in the capito i think demonstrates that the rumors may be not spread through the empire a bit certainly the majority of naples yes we're not dealing with generations after Nero yep I'd like to explore the Christian thing a bit more I mean how could he save how recognizably Christian did he did he burn because they were Christians or because there were community creating that there could easily be picked on I suppose one way of thinking about it is that the church wants to present him in the early period as the first persecutor of the faith but the impression you get was that they were chosen as a community suspect for Romans themselves as an opportunity to find a way out of the problem of the you know who had burned Rome and of course they're they're tortured they're torched because that is the punishment you give to arsonists so they all rather bizarrely and horribly you know fits together but I think the mistake is to think that there's this large community that they are martyred for faith that it happens in the Coliseum I mean none of that is the case I mean the Colosseum wasn't built at the time is near his Lake say there's some attempt made sometimes to link the sites of the martyrdoms to kind of particular temples or gods who had been effaced in the fire and to make it a very kind of programmatic so what you wonder would you three we think about the fire finally do you think he did it he set fire to Rome his own palace the domus transitoria burned down the immediate stuff he did in the aftermath was really positive and it's a bit a bit later on that the rumors of him starting it seemed to ossify and become taken as fact and there are lots of fires frequently in Rome that what's different about this one is that it's more destructive lasts longer and that that's that's the problem middle of the summer it's three nights after the full moon so it's a bad night for arson anyway I'd be creeping about in the streets they'd be 20 people would see you but there's also a strand of questioning literature that takes ownership for the Christian setting the fire that says yes the crisps the small community of Christians in Rome did do it because this was an apocalyptic time because this is when the period when st. Paul said the apocalypse had come about so this is an apocalyptic event this is what they were starting to trying to start by assessing the fire that's a small strand of literature I'd be clear but there is one there my producer is aching at the in the slips

Channel: In Our Time

Views: 989

Rating: 4.4285712 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Radio, Four

Id: SIg0qekW1cM

Length: 50min 11sec (3011 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019