The Roman Emperor Nero

Of all the Roman emperors, very few are better known today than Nero. Perhaps none is more familiar as a popular image and personality. Even Augustus is a colorless figure to most people, hardly more than a name, lost in the shadow of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. In contrast, Nero endures in the popular culture as the symbol of Roman decadence: hedonism in food, drink, and above all sex; lurid spectacles; persecution of Christians. Everything that Hollywood loves about Rome is exemplified in the popular image of Nero, and though the Roman Empire did not actually fall till four hundred years after Nero's death, it is the Neronian image that most people have in mind when they imagine the Fall of Rome.

A variety of factors have led to Nero's special prominence as the human symbol of Roman decadence. Petronius Arbiter, whose Satyricon, and especially the Dinner of Trimalchio, form a large part of the popular image, belonged to the literary circle that gathered around Nero. Nero's reign was, moreover, marked by numerous executions of prominent Romans, and--more colorfully--by his murder of his mother and of two wives.

But above all, Nero is remembered as the Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. As catch-phrase and image, this picture is irresistable; the emperor amusing himself amid the Fall of Rome in a literal sense, even if not in the political sense. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Great Fire of AD 64--and evidently in large measure to divert suspicion fro

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the Great Fire itself, but he gives a more expansive account of this incident: "Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, enraptured by what he called 'the beauty of the flames'; then put on his tragedian's costume and sang The Fall of Ilium from beginning to end." Did Nero really fiddle while Rome burned? Or, at any rate, sing, presumably accompanying himself on a lyre? Even a twentieth-century writer sympathetic to Nero suspects that he did. Nero was so moved by the distant spectacle of the burning city that, in the manner of a professional mourner at a funeral, or one of the bards of old, he took his harp and began to sing a sort of dirge, a lament for Rome, likening the disaster to the burning of Troy. It would have been entirely in keeping with Nero's character if he did just this. Many another Roman may have been moved to awed reflection by the enormity of the spectacle, and have thought of lines of poetry--one is reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as he watched the first atomic explosion, quoting Hindu poetry: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Nero, who regarded himself as an artist, might well have expressed himself in the face of a vast calamity by taking his lyre

Category: History - T