ABSTRACT
With Nero, the Julio-Claudian dynasty came to an end. His reign is often seen as a culmination of tyranny, the final degeneration of the Julio-Claudians, and a period in which bad taste and immorality were in the ascendancy. Nero is portrayed as the undisciplined perpetrator and victim: a spoilt child given absolute power with predictable results, and thus a symbol of the weakness of absolute monarchy. Nero has been attacked across the ages: his responsibility (either directly or indirectly) for the deaths of his father, mother, two wives, his brother and sister (by adoption), his aunt, and numerous other more distant relatives has not endeared him to upholders of family values. His sexual promiscuity, his bisexuality, his reckless financial extravagance, and his showmanship have horrified those who admire Roman restraint and self-discipline. To add to this weight of censure, both the Jewish and Christian traditions remember Nero as a persecutor. His murders and the violence with which he treated his subjects add to his notoriety. While Gaius has been seen to be mad, Nero was just bad. In recent years, however, there have been attempts to re-evaluate Nero’s reign. We can make some attempt to understand why Nero went so completely wrong that, in the end, aided by only a few of his closest and lowest status associates, with the guards closing in, he completed a clumsy and rushed suicide. As with Gaius, there are times when our sources have a certain novelistic quality (see p. 57) and Nero the myth seems to overwhelm any historical veracity. Yet, when we gain some insight into the available source material, as with the Pisonian conspiracy (see pp. 133-5), it seems plentiful and trustworthy and it is highly likely that there was a considerable body of evidence available to our main sources. In the end, there seems little reason to dismiss the various and manifest immoralities of the reign or believe that Nero’s reputation has merely fallen victim to the hostility of his successors. His was an extraordinary reign in which extraordinary things happened. We need not accept all that is in the literary tradition, but much appears to rest on reasonable evidence.
