Nero, British Museum, review: a provocative, revisionist take on Rome’s viper-in-chief

While other institutions cower in fear of being “cancelled”, what does the British Museum do? It makes a notorious Roman emperor – the matricidal megalomaniac Nero, who died, aged 30, in AD 68, having reigned for nearly 14 years – the star of its latest show. Then, like a spokesman from the Ministry of Information, it tries to change the narrative. Apparently, this appalling tyrant, a debauched monster guilty of a thousand egregious crimes, wasn’t as bad as all that. Whatever next: Henry VIII: The Good Husband?

With more than 200 objects, including jewellery and ivory figurines, as well as monumental marbles and bronzes, the show is a provocative, brilliant polemic, synthesising recent scholarship that has, if not cleared Nero’s name, then washed away many of the more lurid stains upon it. Its argument is ingenious and forensic, calling into question those well-thumbed ancient sources which every generation, until now, has accepted as gospel. After Nero’s death, the exhibition suggests, hostile Roman historians (chiefly Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio) propagated his infamy, because they were writing for imperial regimes that sought to shore up their own legitimacy by denigrating what had come before.

In other words, Nero, poor dear, the last of his line, was the victim of a hatchet job – just as his predecessor, Claudius, who’d married his widowed mother, was posthumously mocked by his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, for uttering these spurious last words: “Oh dear, I think I s--t myself.”

In the foyer, a much-reproduced marble bust of Nero, from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, demonstrates how problematic the historical record can be. Only a tiny fragment is ancient: the rest is a suave 17th-century restoration. Behind, a still from the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis presents Peter Ustinov, as Nero, “fiddling while Rome burns”. Is our perception of Nero based on reality – or fantasy?

So, what about that legend: did Nero, the first emperor to appear on stage (he’d have relished the limelight here), prance about playing a lyre while Rome went up in smoke? There were rumours he started the Great Fire of AD 64, represented in the show by a warped iron window grating, to make room for his “Golden House”, an opulent new palace decorated with gemstones and gold. Yet, hang on, say the curators, like Keir Starmer trying to build a case at PMQs: Nero wasn’t in the city when the conflagration broke out. Probably, then, fake news.

Okay, but how about another notorious example of his wickedness: that he kicked to death his pregnant second wife, Poppaea Sabina, because, according to Suetonius, “she dared complain that he came home late from the races”? In a scintillating section, we learn about Nero’s passion for chariot racing: like an Italian leader supporting, say, AS Roma today, he roared on a popular team known as the Greens, and even raced himself.

The curators shake their heads: a tyrant attacking his expecting spouse is such a hackneyed trope that the scene can’t be true. More likely, Poppaea suffered a fatal miscarriage. And Nero was beside himself with grief.

In fact, Nero’s soppy side is emphasised at several points, in a bid, perhaps, to win sympathy for our leading man. A simple funerary inscription at the end, for instance, commemorates his faithful wet-nurse. Given that his mother, Agrippina, was one of the most wily and powerful operators in ancient Rome – a dark-green basanite statue renders her as formidable as Jupiter – it’s no surprise that Nero had a soft spot for Nanny. Ignore that jug-eared, sneering bronze head of him over there, recovered from a Suffolk river: deep down, this despot was a lamb.

Rome’s fifth emperor wasn’t half bad as a leader, either. Consider everything he built in the city: a massive shopping arcade, an amphitheatre, public baths. An evocative section about Boudica’s rebellion of AD 60 or 61 suggests that, in its aftermath, Nero sought to ease tensions, not enact revenge. Even his decision to reduce the weight and metal of gold and silver coins – which his critics denounced – was sensible policy, because it harmonised imperial and provincial coinage, facilitating currency exchange.

Sure, by siding with the people, he clashed with the Senate – but that bastion of vested interests was on the wrong side of history, opposed to inevitable social change, as commoners and freedmen chafed to improve their lot. For the exhibition’s makers, Nero’s popularity is crucial evidence in his favour. Graffiti from Pompeii indicates that Nero and Poppaea were a celebrity couple with their own superfans. Mirror cases incorporating Nero’s image demonstrate private devotion to him, too: perhaps their owners used them while wielding curling irons to imitate his coiffure. After his suicide, Nero imposters started popping up in the eastern parts of the Empire, attracting mass followings. If the plebs loved him that much, he can’t have been all bad. Right?

Well, tell that to the members of a Jewish sect, later known as Christians, whom Nero scapegoated for the Great Fire. Or his first wife, Claudia Octavia, executed in AD 62. Or even his hard-as-nails mother, who’d died in mysterious circumstances three years earlier, at his behest. The exhibition’s revisionist zeal is exciting. Sometimes, though, the desire to prosecute a clever-clever case goes too far. There’s a lot of deft rhetoric, but little hard-and-fast evidence. The “man behind the myth”, promised by the subtitle, was hardly spotless.

A telling exhibit comes early on, among a “meet-the-family” display of statues introducing us to key players in the Julio-Claudian dynasty to which Nero, a descendant of Augustus, belonged. A gold bracelet, from Pompeii, terminates in the head of a snake. Fangs ready, poised to strike: nothing could be more eloquent of the venomous in-fighting among Rome’s first-century elite. And Nero, who wore a bracelet encasing a snakeskin found in his bedroom, was as much of a viper as the rest of them. Which is, of course, what makes this show so hypnotic.

From Thursday until October 24. Info: britishmuseum.org