“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it is an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor does not have a good press. With the help of an impressive documentation, Donatien Grau studies the image of the hated emperor, from the Ier century AD to the present day. Nero’s novel can be read as a history of the West.
Tracing the evolution of one of the most fascinating figures in Western culture; bringing together 2,000 years of history, art and literature; following step by step the development of one of the myths that has caused so much ink to flow that its ramifications have become innumerable, and the file impossible to master: this is the challenge that Donatien Grau takes up here, by deciphering the image of Nero from the Ier century AD to today.
His work realizes – heroically, one would be tempted to say – a project cherished by many specialists, but which until now remained a fantasy: the accomplishment of such an enterprise, certainly, commands respect. Because everything is examined by the author, from literature to cinema, from ancient coinage to the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance, from Spinoza to the novelists of XXe century. The documentation dissected is immense and examined with precision.
Fourteen years of reign
December 37 AD saw the birth of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the future Nero; he succeeded Claudius as head of the Roman Empire in 54; he died in 68. From these 14 years of reign, posterity will remember, rightly or wrongly, the parricides, the fire of Rome, the first persecution of Christians, the multiple debaucheries, the incest, the passion for theater and song, in other words all the ingredients of a good tyranny. The monstrosity of Nero is such that history seems to surpass fiction: historians have therefore endeavored to reconstruct the reality of what the last Julio-Claudian emperor was.
But it is not the history of Nero’s reign that interests Donatien Grau. It is his image, both the one he gave himself and the one that was imposed on him; these are the constituents of what he calls “a historical and rhetorical construction” (p. 17), analyzed from their ancient matrix to today. In doing so, the author seeks to answer not the question “Who is Nero?”, but “What is Nero?”; not “What do we know about him?”, but “What does he say about us?”.
The crystallization of the myth
The author begins his investigation with the image conveyed, at the time of Nero, by courtly literature and numismatics, that is to say courtesans and partisans: a Nero who was at once a new Augustus, a new Apollo, optimus princeps guarantor of world order and instigator of a new golden age. The sources consulted are numerous and of all kinds, their analysis precise and detailed – although one can regret the absence of illustrations and plates, which would have allowed the reader to visualize the numerous coins mentioned (pp. 51-60), as well as, subsequently, the canvases and frescoes commented on.
At the end of the Neronian era, the author identifies 4 layers of evolution of the figure of the Julio-Claudian “monster”. First, in the aftermath of Nero’s death, his rapid accession to the status of tyrant, and the crystallization of his legend: “The era is one of the development of a mythical rather than historical figure” (p. 104), by authors anxious to take the exact opposite view of everything that court literature had patiently built.
For, very quickly, Nero became the tyrant-type. Already, the tragedy-pretext Octavia, which is generally dated to the first Flavians, makes the emperor the archetype of the monster. According to Donatien Grau, the ancient figure of Nero is located “at the crossroads of two paths: that of power and that of tragedy” (p. 131). It would probably be necessary to qualify this a little: the Nero of ancient literature is often as much, or sometimes even more, farce than tragedy; to be convinced of this, one only has to read the pages that authors such as Philostratus or Suetonius devote to the last Julio-Claudian. The depiction of Neronian “weakness” that Donatien Grau evokes in relation to the baroque playwright Tristan the Hermit (p. 253) actually goes back to Tacitus.
The second stage is the Christian moment. The figure of the tyrant becomes clearer and more fleshed out. Promoted by the apologetic literature of the first centuries of our era, the first persecutor of the Christian sect, Nero is now linked to the figure of the Antichrist. Until the end of the Middle Ages, Nero’s novel received an almost exclusively religious reading, which nevertheless did not fail to be in line with the pagan condemnations of the character, which it perpetuated and renewed:
This Christian constitution of Nero does not position itself in the rejection of pagan traditions, but in integration and surpassing them. (p. 201)
A new configuration of Neronian imagery
From the Renaissance onwards, thanks to the rediscovery of the works of the Latin historian Tacitus, the myth of Nero entered a new phase. Reconnecting with ancient history and pagan authors, writers offered a profane and de-Christianized version of the tyrant and subjected him to the political reflections of the time, centered on the question of “the best government, of the monarchy, of its excesses and its limits, notably linked to the problem of tyranny” (p. 217). The figure of Nero, returning to his sources, became a mine of anecdotes and examples intended for the edification of the reader.
But the libertines, and after them the Enlightenment, are watching. Casting a critical eye on the sacrosanct Tacitus word and the clichés inherited from Antiquity, they begin an enterprise of rehabilitation of the character or, at least, strive to give a more complex and more nuanced image of him: in the spirit of revolution, they do not hesitate to question the vulgate and to give a more positive image of Nero.
There remains the last phase, which opens with the Romantics: the one in which the character of Nero is disconnected from political speculations and religious considerations, to become either no longer a figure of a hated tyrant, but an admired aesthete and the prefiguration of the artist at once sublime, iconoclastic and tortured, or, in the field of research, an object of investigation and a field of exercise for the nascent philology and historical science. The mythical and rhetorical Nero of literature and the arts has now given way to the “Nero of the textbooks” (p. 337). Psychology and the cult of the self have also passed through there: increasingly, it is the interiority of Nero, a Nero depicted in a more human way, which intrigues and fascinates.
Epistemology of Nero
It is therefore within the vast field of the history of ideas that Donatien Grau’s reflection is inscribed. Through and beyond the case of Nero, his essay opens the doors to Western culture, its fantasies, its concerns, the constitution of its knowledge. The author deciphers ancient imperial ideology, unveils the beginnings of archaic Christian thought, reveals the mysteries of medieval speculations, the functioning of humanist pedagogy, the rhetorical strategies of the Frontists, and even the scruples of current academics:
If we take the figures of the emperor in this perspective, we realize that he accompanies almost without exception the great Western movements: the rise of a theocracy in Rome, the crisis of Judaism, the emergence and institutionalization of Christianity, the end of paganism, the loss of a part of pagan knowledge, the continuity of a knowledge of the ancient worlds even though this memory was lost, eschatological fear in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the return of Antiquity in the framework of humanism, the appearance of the Reformation, the questioning of monarchical power, the constitution of the disciplines of knowledge, free thought, the development of aesthetic feeling and the figure of the artist, the scientific revolution, the totalitarianisms of XXe century, nuclear terror, to the rise of consumer society and the triumph of the subject who fantasizes about his own interiority, his own difference. (p. 372-373)
This certainly explains the fortune of the memory of Nero across the centuries and across the world: a figure from the past, the character of Nero is told in the present. Because, as soon as they approach the “Nero case”, the authors – historians as well as poets, researchers as well as painters, philosophers as well as filmmakers – say as much about themselves and their era as about the last Julio-Claudian and his own. More than ever, the novel of Nero can be read as a history of the West.